Technical Paper No. 2: Student Evaluation of Faculty Teaching Performance: Analysis of Four Years' Data

Student evaluation of faculty teaching performance has provided an important source of evidence in making faculty personnel decisions at Sangamon State University. Students have been asked to rate the competency and the teaching ability of their instructors; specifically, near the end of each term, students have rated faculty using the following two items: 1) Do you think this teacher is competent in the content or matter offered in this course? 2) Overall, do you consider this person a good teacher? The two items were administered from 1971 to 1975, and a record of the resultant data has been maintained. The research reported in this paper was motivated by a desire to look at the stability and reliability of the evaluations obtained from the two item evaluations over the four year period.The present paper reports on the amount of agreement between the ratings given on the teaching item and the ratings on the competency item. The effect of rewording the teaching item on the ratings is also reported.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

A Defined Agar Medium for Genetic Transformation of \u3cem\u3eNeisseria meningitidis\u3c/em\u3e

Catlin, B. Wesley (Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wis.) and Gertrude M. Schloer. A defined agar medium for genetic transformation of Neisseria meningitidis. J. Bacteriol. 83:470–474. 1962.—An agar medium was developed for use in quantitative genetic studies of Neisseria meningitidis strain 15. It contains eight inorganic salts, sodium citrate, sodium lactate, arginine, cysteine, glycine, sodium glutamate, and purified agar. Abundant surface growth in the absence of supplemental carbon dioxide was obtained during 50 serial subcultures. A close correspondence was found between numbers of parental type colonies developing on the defined medium and on a complex medium. Cells subcultured serially three or four times on defined agar medium and placed directly into a solution of transforming deoxyribonucleic acid in defined liquid medium were susceptible to transformation without additional supplements. Of the treated population, 0.1 to 0.3% of the cells were transformed to streptomycin resistance

International Partnerships: A Model for Educational Organizations

Opportunities exist for faculty and students within educational leadership preparation programs to participate in international initiatives within developing countries. One way to do this is through collaboration with organizations that already have an established presence in the country. Working within these organizations provides opportunities for learning and research for the educational leadership program. If done well, such work also helps host organizations meet their mission and goals. An understanding of effective behaviors in international partnerships may benefit educational leadership programs that develop these types of service opportunities. The behaviors mirror the scholar-practitioner philosophy, of which some prominent educational leadership programs adhere, through addressing pragmatic needs within a local context

Estimating spillovers using imprecisely measured networks

In many experimental contexts, whether and how network interactions impact the outcome of interest for both treated and untreated individuals are key concerns. Networks data is often assumed to perfectly represent these possible interactions. This paper considers the problem of estimating treatment effects when measured connections are, instead, a noisy representation of the true spillover pathways. We show that existing methods, using the potential outcomes framework, yield biased estimators in the presence of this mismeasurement. We develop a new method, using a class of mixture models, that can account for missing connections and discuss its estimation via the Expectation-Maximization algorithm. We check our method's performance by simulating experiments on real network data from 43 villages in India. Finally, we use data from a previously published study to show that estimates using our method are more robust to the choice of network measure