The Market for Taxi-Cab Licences: An Experimental Analysis

industry; government; demand; efficiency; consumers

Innovative package for frontline maternal, newborn and child health workers in South Sudan

Improving maternal, newborn, and child health is a leading priority worldwide. It is a particularly urgent issue in South Sudan, which suffers from the world’s worst maternal mortality and among the worst newborn and child mortalities. A leading barrier to improving these health indices is limited frontline health worker capacity. In partnership with the Ministry of Health, the Division of Global Health and Human Rights (Department of Emergency Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA) has developed and is currently implementing its novel Maternal, Newborn, and Child Survival (MNCS) Initiative throughout much of South Sudan. The purpose of MNCS is to build frontline health worker capacity through a training package that includes:1. A participatory training course2. Pictorial checklists to guide prevention, care, and referral3. Re-useable medical equipment and commodities.Program implementation began in November 2010 utilizing a training-of-trainers model. To date, 72 local trainers and 632 frontline health workers have completed the training and received their MNCS checklists and commodities. Initial monitoring and evaluation results are encouraging as further evaluation continues. This innovative training package may also serve as a model for building capacity for maternal, newborn, and child health in other resource limited settings beyond South Sudan

Evaluating language assessments with members of the travelling community.

Background and objective: The Irish Travelling Community is a cultural group using a unique dialect ? Traveller English. It has been established that some standardized, norm-referenced language measures are biased against culturally and linguistically diverse populations. In this study, the achievement of Traveller children on standardized language measures and on processing-dependent measures is compared with achievement of children from the Settled community on the same measures. Method: Twenty children aged 6?10 years, 10 each from Travelling and Settled communities, were assessed using the CELF-3 UK, and two processing-dependent measures to assess aspects of language development. Results and conclusions: Results indicate that Traveller children scored significantly lower than Settled children on the standardized language measures. In contrast, the use of processing-dependent measures showed few inter-group differences. The recommendation is that processing-dependent measures be used in addition to standardized measures to increase the validity of language assessment of Traveller children

Case Studies of Good Practices in Assessment of Student Learning in Higher Education

Towards the end of their undergraduate careers, speech and language therapy stu- dents are expected to have developed an advanced level of clinical expertise, in the assessment, diagnosis and management of a wide range of communication disorders in children and adults. At the beginning of their final 30-day block placement, students have completed approximately 400 hours of supervised clinical work, and they are in the final stages of acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary to become practitioner scientists