How do Early Years Educators sustain and define their professionalism? A methodological approach to eliciting early years educators’ thinking

This research has been concerned with eliciting the voices and thinking of a group of early years’ educators across three Local Education Authorities in West Yorkshire. The early years of education require a reflective, articulate and highly qualified workforce. The ability to reflect on and evaluate practice, prescription and one’s own thoughts about it must be the key to professionalism in the early years. The objective of this research was to extrapolate the thinking of a small group of EYEs across three local education authorities (LEAs) in West Yorkshire. The methodology of eliciting teacher thinking was employed to gain access to their voices and discover what were their critical issues and interests, their professional and practical knowledge. Rather than directing the participants to responding to specific aspects, the research was conducted to enable them to demonstrate any areas of interest and critical issues arising from their professional roles.Teacher thinking’ is an effective methodology to determine the thinking and knowledge of experienced and complex professionals working in a variety of settings. This empirical research was undertaken to elicit educators' perspectives to determine their own understandings, with accounts in their own terms through in-depth open-ended interviews, questionnaires, personal/professional time-lines, video-reflective interviews on practice and focus group interviews. These varied different data collection strategies are key to the research as they elicited holistic and varied perspectives on the early years educators professionalism. The aim was to give early years educators a voice, promote recognition of the complexity of the phenomena to be studied and determine the most effective method of eliciting their thinking. This article presents the methodology and findings from this research

A PASport to Service Quality

Part 1 of this article discussed the current service quality environment in which academic libraries find themselves operating, and the challenge for staff performance assessment as an integral element of maintaining and improving effective service quality levels. As referenced in Part 1, Millson-Martula and Menon in a 1999 article in College and Research Libraries suggest that no effort to enhance customer satisfaction will succeed unless students and faculty are convinced that library staff, as service providers, care about the quality of service they provide and the manner in which they do it. However, library staff will not demonstrate a high degree of commitment and caring unless they believe that library management cares about the staff as well. Simply put, customer satisfaction equals employee satisfaction. [Millson-Martula and Menon, p.46]. It is difficult to separate employee satisfaction from appropriate performance assessment. But this performance appraisal must be found in the context of a larger effort which includes staff interpersonal understanding (connection), service evaluation, personal and professional development opportunities, and appropriate recognition. Without those, performance assessment alone could appear to be punitive. It is in this broader context that the performance assessment system, PASport, was developed at the Centennial Library

Regulating nonlinear environmental systems under Knightian uncertainty

uncertainty;environment;regulations

Valuing biodiversity from an economic perspective : a unified economic, ecological and genetic approach

biodiversionoptimization;ecology

Why can't every year be a National Year of Reading? An evaluation of the NYR in Yorkshire

An evaluation of the National Year of Reading in Yorkshire was conducted by Leeds Metropolitan University in response to a brief from Museums, Libraries and Archives, Yorkshire. This paper outlines the development and planning of phase one of this small scale qualitative research project and the analysis of the initial results which looks at the impact of NYR on the organisations that delivered the campaign and their work with target groups. The Generic Social Outcomes and the National Indicators were used to develop a theoretical framework. Data were gathered via in depth interviews and focus groups with NYR steering group partners in Calderdale and North Lincolnshire, selected as the two case study authorities. The use of MAXQDA computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) enabled data and coding structures to be stored and will facilitate comparison in this longitudinal study. This evaluation will provide material that local library authorities can use for advocacy with a range of audiences including local and central government

Growth Economics and Reality

This paper questions current empirical practice in the study of growth. We argue that much of the modern empirical growth literature is based on assumptions concerning regressors, residuals, and parameters which are implausible both from the perspective of economic theory as well as from the perspective of the historical experiences of the countries under study. A number of these problems are argued to be forms of violations of an exchangeability assumption which underlies standard growth exercises. We show that relaxation of these implausible assumptions can be done by allowing for uncertainty in model specification. Model uncertainty consists of two types: theory uncertainty, which relates to which growth determinants should be included in a model, and heterogeneity uncertainty, which relates to which observations in a data set comprise draws from the same statistical model. We propose ways to account for both theory and heterogeneity uncertainty. Finally, using an explicit decision-theoretic framework, we describe how one can engage in policy-relevant empirical analysis.

On isoperimetric inequalities with respect to infinite measures

We study isoperimetric problems with respect to infinite measures on $R ^n$. In the case of the measure $\mu$ defined by $d\mu = e^{c|x|^2} dx$, $c\geq 0$, we prove that, among all sets with given $\mu-$measure, the ball centered at the origin has the smallest (weighted) $\mu-$perimeter. Our results are then applied to obtain Polya-Szego-type inequalities, Sobolev embeddings theorems and a comparison result for elliptic boundary value problems.Comment: 25 page