Reformatting the hard drive of South African education for the knowledge economy

South African education system needs reformatting in order to produce employable graduates. By introducing educational gaming into the formal learning programmes, the nature and quality of learning can be enhanced to create the innovative professionals need for the new knowledge economy.Economic education, educational gaming, interactive game., Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession, A2,

Stakeholders' Views on the Movement to Reduce Youth Incarceration

Youth incarceration rates have changed dramatically over the past 10 years . Following two decades of "tough-on-crime" policies and steep surges in juvenile incarceration during the 1980s and 1990s, the field is now seeing sharp reductions in youth confinement . The latest data from the US Justice Department showed that the rate of youth in confinement dropped 41% between 2001 and 2011 . Since 2001, 48 states have experienced such a decline . Several states cut their confinement rates by half or more . Juvenile facilities have closed in a dozen states, with more than 50 facilities closing in the past five years alone .The National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD) decided to seek the opinions of system stakeholders regarding these changes . These stakeholders included advocates who successfully pressured their local systems to adopt reforms; the majority of study participants work inside the system as judges, probation chiefs, probation officers, directors of child welfare agencies, elected officials, and district attorneys.Through interviews and listening sessions, these system stakeholders expressed their beliefs that declining youth crime and rising costs were key drivers of the current trend . Additionally, respondents said that many of these successes were driven by successful legislation, innovative incentives built into state budgets, decisions to place youth close to home, and supervision strategies that rely on positive relationships between youth and their families

The Influence of Multimedia Podcast-Aided Video-Analysis to Transfer Evidence-Based Practices and Alter Novice Special Education Teachers’ Schema Development

The Federal mandates established under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (2004) requires special education teachers to use evidence-based practices to support diverse student needs. With this legislation came an increase in research to identify practices that are effective with this population. While this work has identified a number of evidence-based practices, there is little evidence showing these practices are transferred to the classroom. Researchers and educators have long sought to understand how to reduce the gap between research findings and teacher practice. For special education, the federal mandate further emphasizes this need and puts closing the gap between research and practice at the forefront of special education research. This study examined the use of a podcast-aided video-based reflection intervention in an effort to bridge the gap between research and practice. Grounded in Korthagen and Lagerwerf’s Levels of Learning theory (1995), the intervention uses multimedia podcasts to deliver evidence-based practices and video-analysis to cement reflection of these practices in teachers’ own experiences. Combining the success of video-analyses to improve self-reflection with the growing evidence for enhanced podcasts to deliver content, this study sought to impact novice special education teachers’ schema development and implementation of evidence-based practices. Using a mixed method approach, 12 special education intern teachers provided a concept map describing their understanding of classroom management before and after the intervention. After completion of a three-part cycle of inquiry based intervention, additional data was gathered using semi-structured interviews and collecting individual self-reflections. The results of this data support the use of video as a superior tool to memory for the purpose of self-reflection, the use of enhanced podcast as a tool for in-field profession development, and the Levels of Learning theory to describe novice teacher development. The participants in this study not only demonstrated an increase in understanding of evidence-based practices and their implementation, but also described many benefits to learning from video-analysis and multimedia podcast

The Political Economy of Inefficient Trade Policy

While political scientists have often noted that trade protection is an inefficient way of redistributing income between parties, given that it destroys value relative to other redistributive mechanisms (such as domestic taxation), such scholars have not devoted much attention to grappling with the implications of this claim. This dissertation comprises three papers addressing the political implications of protection's inefficiency. Descriptions of these papers are as follows. Protection as a Commitment Problem: In this paper, I develop a dynamic model that demonstrates that commitment problems in the trade-lobbying process can account for the use of protection over more efficient means of redistribution. Many industries that are harmed by open trade have an incentive to lobby for protection over compensatory transfers because free trade has dynamic effects that reduce an industry's ability to lobby the government in the future. Thus, while both parties would prefer permanent transfers to protectionism, these transfers are subject to a commitment problem. I also explore the conditions under which efficient transfers may still be an important part of political bargains supporting freer trade. This paper therefore resolves an outstanding theoretical puzzle about the inefficiency of trade protection as a redistributive instrument, and provides a new interpretation of the compromise of "embedded liberalism". Screening for Losers: In this paper, I identify a new way in which trade institutions and their particular features can be valuable to governments: namely, that they can provide useful information about domestic political groups. While governments are responsible for the administration of most legal trade-related actions, the information that governments need to determine which actions to pursue is often the private information of the firms and interest groups that are lobbying for these actions, and there are significant incentives for such groups to misrepresent this information. This paper uses a formal model to demonstrate that governments can use the multitude of legal options available to them to screen between domestic groups for those with the strongest cases. This selection process can help to explain, amongst other things, why disputes pursued via the WTO have such a high rate of success (approximately 90%), and why trade remedies tend to be structured around meeting criteria instead of as "efficient breaches" requiring compensation. Taxability and Trade Policy: The political economy of trade literature tends to conceive of the relationship between fiscal capacity and trade policy fairly simply: states that have limited fiscal capacity will be more likely to use tariffs to raise revenues given the lack of other means of doing so. This paper presents a model that complicates this story; what matters is not just overall levels of fiscal capacity, but the relative taxability of different domestic groups. In particular, while greater ability to tax the winners of freer trade makes freer trade more likely, greater ability to tax the losers of freer trade may actually make protectionism more likely. This follows because governments can use taxation to redistribute the revenues generated by any policy to better respond to the distributive politics game they face, provided that the revenues accrue to a party that is taxable. This generates a number of empirical implications for patterns of trade policy: for instance, we would expect trade policy to be biased towards factors, industries, and firm sizes that are easier to tax.PHDPolitical ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145979/1/jasonsd_1.pd

¿Educación o desintegración? Parental Migration, Remittances and Left-behind Children's Education in Western Guatemala

Abstract Many Guatemalan parents migrate to the United States with the intention of returning earned income to improve the human capital prospects of their left-behind children. This laudable goal is achieved by many – arguably benefiting girls more than boys. However, negative international migration externalities including migration failure, familial abandonment, psychosocial harms and a culture of migration that disproportionally limits the educational prospects of boys need to be considered. Based on qualitative field interviews in western Guatemala with parents and educators, this article presents a nuanced view of economic migration and left-behind children's education, capturing both its remittance-related benefits and parental absence harms

Victim Arrest in Intimate Partner Violence Incidents: A Multilevel Test of Black’s Theory of Law

Mandatory and preferred arrest policies were heralded as major advances in protecting victim rights in cases of intimate partner violence. Soon after these policies were implemented, researchers began to document a disturbing rise in the number of victims arrested in these incidents. This paper applies Black’s theory of the behavior of law to victim arrest in intimate partner violence incidents in order to identify the structural and individual statuses that increase the likelihood of victim arrest. Data from the 2004 National Incident Based Reporting System, 2000 decennial Census, and 2000 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics report are analyzed using multilevel modeling to offer a multi-level test of Black’s theory. Findings suggest moderate support for Black’s theory. Measures of stratification, morphology, culture, organization, and respectability significantly influence the likelihood a victim will be arrested. Implications for policy and directions for future research are addressed

The Flow Approach to Labor Markets: New Data Sources and Micro-Macro Links

New data sources and products developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census highlight the fluid character of U.S. labor markets. Private-sector job creation and destruction rates average nearly 8% of employment per quarter. Worker flows in the form of hires and separations are more than twice as large. The data also underscore the lumpy nature of micro-level employment adjustments. More than two-thirds of job destruction occurs at establishments that shrink by more than 10% within the quarter, and more than one-fifth occurs at those that shut down. Our study also uncovers highly nonlinear relationships of worker flows to employment growth and job flows at the micro level. These micro relations interact with movements over time in the cross-sectional density of establishment growth rates to produce recurring cyclical patterns in aggregate labor market flows. Cyclical movements in the layoffs-separation ratio, for example, and the propensity of separated workers to become unemployed reflect distinct micro relations for quits and layoffs. A dominant role for the job-finding rate in accounting for unemployment movements in mild downturns and a bigger role for the job-loss rate in severe downturns reflect distinct micro relations for hires and layoffs.

Precision Weed Management Based on UAS Image Streams, Machine Learning, and PWM Sprayers

Weed populations in agricultural production fields are often scattered and unevenly distributed; however, herbicides are broadcast across fields evenly. Although effective, in the case of post-emergent herbicides, exceedingly more pesticides are used than necessary. A novel weed detection and control workflow was evaluated targeting Palmer amaranth in soybean (Glycine max) fields. High spatial resolution (0.4 cm) unmanned aircraft system (UAS) image streams were collected, annotated, and used to train 16 object detection convolutional neural networks (CNNs; RetinaNet, Faster R-CNN, Single Shot Detector, and YOLO v3) each trained on imagery with 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, and 1.2 cm spatial resolutions. Models were evaluated on imagery from four production fields containing approximately 7,800 weeds. The highest performing model was Faster R-CNN trained on 0.4 cm imagery (precision = 0.86, recall = 0.98, and F1-score = 0.91). A site-specific workflow leveraging the highest performing trained CNN models was evaluated in replicated field trials. Weed control (%) was compared between a broadcast treatment and the proposed site-specific workflow which was applied using a pulse-width modulated (PWM) sprayer. Results indicate no statistical (p \u3c .05) difference in weed control measured one (M = 96.22%, SD = 3.90 and M = 90.10%, SD = 9.96), two (M = 95.15%, SD = 5.34 and M = 89.64%, SD = 8.58), and three weeks (M = 88.55, SD = 11.07 and M = 81.78%, SD = 13.05) after application between broadcast and site-specific treatments, respectively. Furthermore, there was a significant (p \u3c 0.05) 48% mean reduction in applied area (m2) between broadcast and site-specific treatments across both years. Equivalent post application efficacy can be achieved with significant reductions in herbicides if weeds are targeted through site-specific applications. Site-specific weed maps can be generated and executed using accessible technologies like UAS, open-source CNNs, and PWM sprayers