A Multiple Measures Model for Documenting Teacher and Program Effectiveness

One of the most difficult challenges facing teacher educators is evaluating the knowledge, skills, and attributes necessary for professional growth and responsibility for teaching. Currently two viewpoints for preparing highly qualified teachers seem to be influencing policy. One view represented by Darling-Hammond’s research (1999), suggests that regulation of teacher education, state licensing, professional accountability, and compensation are important factors for strengthening teacher quality. A second view, offered by Chester Finn from research completed by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (cited in Berry, Hoke, and Hirsch, 2004), emphasizes less prescriptive paths such as alternative certification practices and aptitude testing to attract more qualified candidates to the profession. What seems to be established is that competent teachers are essential to the learning process. Sanders and Rivers (1998) found that effective teachers directly and positively impact the quality of teaching and, more importantly, student learning in classrooms. As a result, the stakes are high for students; their learning may be directly enhanced or damaged by the quality and effectiveness of their teachers’ practices. [excerpt

Understanding the complex needs of automotive training at final assembly lines

Automobile final assembly operators must be highly skilled to succeed in a low automation environment where multiple variants must be assembled in quick succession. This paper presents formal user studies conducted at OPEL and VOLVO Group to identify assembly training needs and a subset of requirements; and to explore potential features of a hypothetical game-based virtual training system. Stakeholder analysis, timeline analysis, link analysis, Hierarchical Task Analysis and thematic content analysis were used to analyse the results of interviews with various stakeholders (17 and 28 participants at OPEL and VOLVO, respectively). The results show that there is a strong case for the implementation of virtual training for assembly tasks. However, it was also revealed that stakeholders would prefer to use a virtual training to complement, rather than replace, training on pre-series vehicles

Adenovirus-5-Vectored P. falciparum Vaccine Expressing CSP and AMA1. Part B: Safety, Immunogenicity and Protective Efficacy of the CSP Component

Background: A protective malaria vaccine will likely need to elicit both cell-mediated and antibody responses. As adenovirus vaccine vectors induce both these responses in humans, a Phase 1/2a clinical trial was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of an adenovirus serotype 5-vectored malaria vaccine against sporozoite challenge.\ud \ud Methodology/Principal Findings: NMRC-MV-Ad-PfC is an adenovirus vector encoding the Plasmodium falciparum 3D7 circumsporozoite protein (CSP). It is one component of a two-component vaccine NMRC-M3V-Ad-PfCA consisting of one adenovector encoding CSP and one encoding apical membrane antigen-1 (AMA1) that was evaluated for safety and immunogenicity in an earlier study (see companion paper, Sedegah et al). Fourteen Ad5 seropositive or negative adults received two doses of NMRC-MV-Ad-PfC sixteen weeks apart, at 1x1010 particle units per dose. The vaccine was safe and well tolerated. All volunteers developed positive ELISpot responses by 28 days after the first immunization (geometric mean 272 spot forming cells/million[sfc/m]) that declined during the following 16 weeks and increased after the second dose to levels that in most cases were less than the initial peak (geometric mean 119 sfc/m). CD8+ predominated over CD4+ responses, as in the first clinical trial. Antibody responses were poor and like ELISpot responses increased after the second immunization but did not exceed the initial peak. Pre-existing neutralizing antibodies (NAb) to Ad5 did not affect the immunogenicity of the first dose, but the fold increase in NAb induced by the first dose was significantly associated with poorer antibody responses after the second dose, while ELISpot responses remained unaffected. When challenged by the bite of P. falciparum-infected mosquitoes, two of 11 volunteers showed a delay in the time to patency compared to infectivity controls, but no volunteers were sterilely protected.\ud \ud Significance: The NMRC-MV-Ad-PfC vaccine expressing CSP was safe and well tolerated given as two doses, but did not provide sterile protection

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

Building Effective Collaborative Leadership: Some Practicalities

The article, aimed at principals of middle level schools, presents practical strategies for developing a culture of collaborative leadership, one of the hallmarks of effective educational practices

Teach Me-I Dare You!

This book provides practical tools for educators who work with disenchanted and disengaged youths. It offers clear, research-based, and explicit strategies for motivating, connecting, and intervening with these students. The practical wisdom in this book demonstrates what you can do to connect these students to their schools and to a promising future

Valuing student and community voices in the university: Action Research as a Framework for Community Service-learning

The Community Service-learning Lab (the Lab) was initiated as a university-wide service-learning experience at an Australian university. The Lab engages students, academics, and key community organisations in interdisciplinary action research projects to support student learning and to explore complex and ongoing problems nominated by the community partners. The current study uses feedback from the first offering of the Lab and focuses on exploring student experiences of the service learning project using an action research framework. Student reflections on this experience have revealed some positive outcomes of the Lab such as an appreciation for positive and strengths-based change. These outcomes are corroborated by collected reflections from community partners and academics. The students also identified challenges balancing the requirements for assessment and their goals to serve the community partner’s needs. This feedback has provided vital information for the academic team, highlighting the difficulties in balancing the agenda of the academic framework and the desire to give students authentic experiences

Valuing student and community voices in the university : action research as a framework for community service-learning

The Community Service-learning Lab (the Lab) was initiated as a university-wide service-learning experience at an Australian university. The Lab engages students, academics, and key community organisations in interdisciplinary action research projects to support student learning and to explore complex and ongoing problems nominated by the community partners. The current study uses feedback from the first offering of the Lab and focuses on exploring student experiences of the service learning project using an action research framework. Student reflections on this experience have revealed some positive outcomes of the Lab such as an appreciation for positive and strengths-based change. These outcomes are corroborated by collected reflections from community partners and academics. The students also identified challenges balancing the requirements for assessment and their goals to serve the community partner’s needs. This feedback has provided vital information for the academic team, highlighting the difficulties in balancing the agenda of the academic framework and the desire to give students authentic experiences

The Impact of Discrete Bidding and Bidder Aggressiveness on Sellers' Strategies in Open English Auctions: Reserves and Covert Shilling

In practice, the rules in most open English auctions require participants to raise bids by a sizeable, discrete amount. Furthermore, some bidders are typically more aggressive in seeking to become the “current bidder” during competitive bidding. Most auction theory, however, has assumed bidders can place any tiny “continuous” bid increase, and recommend as optimal the tiniest possible increase. This article examines how incorporating discrete bidding and bidder aggressiveness affect optimal strategies for an important decision for auction sellers, which is setting the lowest acceptable bid at which to sell the property. We investigate two alternative methods sellers often use to enforce this decision. These are setting an irrevocable before the auction, and , where the seller or confederates pose as bona fide bidders and raise bona fide bids, unsuspected by bidders. These optimal strategies interest auction participants, especially sellers who must recognize the bidding rules and bidder aggressiveness they will encounter in actual auctions. We also examine how these strategies change with the auction context, such as the number of bidders, and how they differ from corresponding strategies already identified for continuous bidding. Our model examines open English auctions where bidders have independent, private valuations. We find that discrete bidding does affect these strategies, as does the aggressiveness of the bidder with the highest valuation, to the average aggressiveness of all other remaining bidders. We identify the seller's optimal discrete reserve, and show that if the highest valuator is relatively more (less) aggressive, this increases (decreases) from the optimal continuous reserve, and also increases (decreases) as the number of bidders increases. With continuous bidding, by contrast, this reserve is invariant to the number of bidders. As this bidder becomes relatively more aggressive, for a given number of bidders, the optimal discrete reserve increases, while as he or she becomes less aggressive, the seller's expected auction utility increases, which increases the set of auctions where discrete bidding generates higher seller welfare than continuous. We propose a covert shilling model that requires shilling sellers, and any confederates and auctioneers, to outwardly act no differently than with reserves, to avoid detection. We identify cases where the seller optimally shills once the bona fide bidding has stopped, and identify the corresponding optimal point to stop shilling and accept the next bona fide bid, if offered. This stopping point does not depend on where bona fide bidding stops, or aggressiveness, or the number of bidders, or on whether shill bids alternate with bona fide bids or are consecutively entered. We also find that the optimal lowest acceptable bid with shilling can be higher (lower) than that with reserves if the highest valuator is sufficiently unaggressive (aggressive). By comparison, in continuous bidding shilling and reserves yield identical lowest acceptable bids. Sometimes the seller using a shilling strategy optimally should not shill at all, and instead accept the bid where bona fide bidding stops. This can occur when that bid, or the number of bidders, is sufficiently high, or when the highest valuator is as, or less, aggressive than other bidders. Optimal shilling can be as practical to implement as reserves, because it does not require sellers to have any information beyond that needed in a reserve auction. If sellers shill optimally, they can never be worse off compared to using a reserve, and can be better off. Shilling can make bidders worse off, but can also make them better off when the seller using a shilling strategy optimally accepts bids below the optimal reserve. In these latter cases, shilling Pareto dominates reserves, ex ante. We provide numerical examples to illustrate these results. We discuss how our results might be affected if shilling is not covert, or bidders' valuations have a common value component rather than being independent, or by the rules used in many discrete bid Internet auctions.Auctions, Internet Auctions, Discrete Bidding, Pricing, Bidder Behavior