Exploring A New Path For School Climate & Safety Assessment

The passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2001, ushered in a new era of federal oversight in state educational accountability systems. While the act may have succeeded in identifying schools in need of support and creating data systems to help inform parents and assist educators in establishing clear and consistent goals, the state accountability systems created under this law were widely criticized for their narrow academic focus and failure to include the holistic and multifaceted nature of school quality. In response, the federal government replaced NCLB in 2015 with The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The new law included a provision widely referred to as the “Fifth Indicator” of student success, which was to be non-academic in nature. To address this indicator in state accountability plans, the federal government specifically recommended several strategies, to include measures of school climate and safety. Despite this recommendation and despite decades of research to support its inclusion, only a handful of states have adopted such measures. As a result, schools and districts in most states are left to develop their own systems of school climate assessment and improvement. The primary purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the efforts of a single Florida school district in their quest to develop such a system. The Sunshine School District (SSD) had begun looking at innovative ways to assess and improve school climate as the ESSA was passed. An instrument had been developed that was loosely based on research and had not been tested in school settings. This instrumental case study provided an in-depth examination of the literature and an analysis of archival data to help refine the instrument and prepare it for a pilot test in nine district schools. Through this study, a follow-up focus group with pilot participants was conducted to determine whether the instrument held promise as a means to assess school climate and safety, as well as drive improvement. Analysis of the data revealed participants found the instrument to be flexible, useful, and effective – particularly as it pertains to the assessment of school climate and safety practices and establishing improvement goals. The analysis additionally revealed the instrument can be lengthy and may not be equally applicable to all schools and grade levels. Although the instrument needs further refinement, pilot participants reported it to still be effective and beneficial as an informal assessment and improvement tool

A Measurement of Readiness for Tennessee Hospitals to Implement “Meaningful Use” Criteria Resulting from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, 2009

In 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed into law. This legislation provided for monetary rewards for those acute-care hospitals that meet meaningful use computerization and reporting criteria. The study used a descriptive, nonexperimental design to answer three research questions (1) What is the level of readiness to meet meaningful use criteria in the Tennessee Hospital Association (THA) member hospitals; (2) What is the level of readiness to meet meaningful use criteria in the rural THA member hospitals; and (3) Is there a difference in the readiness to meet meaningful use criteria between rural and urban THA member hospitals?. A survey was sent to 115 THA member hospital, with a return rate of 83% (N=95). The inclusion criteria focused on acute-care hospitals, with rehabilitation, psychiatric and long-term care hospitals falling into the exclusion criteria. The Readiness Score was determined for the total survey respondents (N=95), as well as for the rural (N=41) hospitals and urban (N=54) hospitals in the Tennessee Hospital Association member hospitals meeting the inclusion criteria. Z-scores of the readiness score were examined and indicated that there was one outlier with z\u3e3.0. Therefore, that case was removed from the comparison in the t-test (N=94). The t-test comparison of rural and urban hospital found a significant difference at (p=.002), two tailed. To ensure that the slightly nonnormal distribution of the readiness scores did not explain the difference found with the t-test, an additional nonparametric test was also conducted. The Mann Whitney U-test showed that even with the assumption of a normal distribution is not made, the difference in readiness between urban and rural hospitals is still statistically significant at p=0.026

EVALUATION OF AND BEHAVIOR TOWARD THE VISUAL RETAIL ENVIRONMENT: FUNCTION OF CONSUMERS’ VISUAL AESTHETIC SENSITIVITY

The primary goal of retail environments is to stimulate positive behavior from consumers viewing the fulfilled plan of the designer or architect. This study explores the influence of the consumer trait, visual aesthetic sensitivity, upon the visual aesthetic design features of the store environment and consumer behavior. Treatment of the visual aesthetic design features of the retail environment as an integrated, holistic arrangement demonstrate the dynamic interrelation of the environment and perception as explained by Gestalt theory. Data was collected through traditional survey techniques. Statistical analyses using exploratory factor analysis, ANCOVA, and MANCOVA reveal distinct differences between consumers with high versus low visual aesthetic sensitivity in store environment evaluations and consumer behavior

Thermodynamic properties of compounds of biochemical interest in aqueous solution. A survey of thermodynamic properties of the compounds of the elements CHNOPS Progress report

Thermodynamic properties of compounds of biochemical interest in aqueous solutio

A normative subtest taxonomy developed from the universal nonverbal intellegence test : implications and applications

The purposes of this research were threefold. The first goal was to develop and apply a normative typology using multivariate profile analysis of subtest scores of the Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test (Bracken &McCallum, 1998; UNIT), taken from the national standardization sample; the second goal was to develop and apply a typology using multivariate subtestprofile analysis of a subsample of identified children with Learning Disabilities from the national standardization sample; and the third goal was to provide practitioners a description of user friendly strategies needed to compare meaningful subtest profiles of individual examinees with commonly occuring normative profiles, as identified in goal one above.To accomplish these goals, multistage cluster analyses were applied to the standardization sample for the UNIT Extended Battery, comprised of all six subtests; the UNIT Standard Battery, comprised of four subtests; and theUNIT Learning Disabled subsample, comprised of the four Standard Batterysubtests. The results of these analyses yielded a seven profile cluster solution for the Extended Battery, a six profile cluster solution for the Standard Battery,and a four profile cluster solution for the Learning Disabled subsample. The Psychometric properties of the respective analyses were impressive with extremely tight profile clusters that were separated extremely well from eachother.VDemographic prevalence trends of the resultant clusters are similar to other studies, but help to describe the cluster composition. Additionally, the results lend support to the UNIT\u27S underlying factor structure. To fulfill the third goal of this research, user-friendly methods of determining whether ornot clinical profiles are unique when compared to the profiles identified in the standardization sample are discussed

“Not Women’s Work”: Gendered Labor, Political Subjectivity and Motherhood

This article challenges broadly applied beliefs about the gendered nature of informality and the marginalization of single mothers to argue that many such women in Ayacucho, Peru routinely sought out formal-sector jobs and used these to exert authority over certain local processes of development. I argue that this situation, influenced in part by the male-dominated nature of the lucrative but completely informal coca economy, may also reflect Andean ideologies of maternal authority and the freedom afforded to single, rather than married, women. This article draws on over sixteen months of fieldwork in rural Ayacucho, during which time I observed women’s efforts to diversify and reconfigure their households and analyzed their income strategies in relation to political involvement and kinship networks. As I describe, my interlocutors were primarily landless, and sold food from home, engaged in hacienda ‘invasions’, and took available jobs with NGOs and municipalities. These jobs were often short-term, part-time, and low paying, and development and municipal projects sought women specifically for such positions, believing men were unlikely to take them. Countering the global pattern of women’s relegation to the informal sector, however, as well as the notion that single women are inevitably disproportionately marginalized, female heads-of-household in the Huanta region regularly sought formal, even government-sponsored jobs and used such positions to improve their own situations and direct community change

Beyond Demand Driven: Incorporating Multiple Tools in a Consortial Collection Strategy

OhioLINK has a long history of sharing print resources among its members. When e-books began to enter the market, OhioLINK was an early adopter of the new format. However, as e-books grew in importance and OhioLINK institutions began buying them individually in large numbers, we realized that our existing methods of acquiring e-books for the consortium were not completely meeting our needs. In April 2013, OhioLINK began a pilot project with Yankee Book Peddler (YBP), ebrary, Ashgate, Rowman and Littlefield, and Cambridge University Press to purchase e-books for our members. The pilot combines automatic purchase of titles that fit two separate profiles and a demand-driven component. It is our hope that this model will be sustainable for both our members and our publisher partners