Digital Collaboration and Classroom Practice: Educator Use of ARIS Connect

A major focus of the booming education technology sector is on products that aim to help teachers improve classroom practice. For their part, districts must figure out which of these resources will be most useful to schools. In New York City, the Department of Education developed its own Achievement Reporting and Innovation System (ARIS), which was rolled out in 2008. ARIS was an early effort at a system-wide data and teacher collaboration platform, and a major undertaking for the nation's largest school district. In 2011, the Research Alliance received a grant from the Spencer Foundation to investigate how this ambitious initiative played out in schools. Our first report focused on overall use and perceptions of ARIS. In the current phase of our study, we honed our focus onto ARIS Connect -- a component designed specifically to help educators improve their practice by sharing resources, posting questions, and giving one another feedback, both within schools and across the district. Our investigation sought to understand what educators thought of Connect, and whether, as its designers intended, Connect supported their ability to communicate with other educators and improve classroom practice. The study is based on two years of "clickstream" data, which tracks user visits to and navigation through ARIS. We also visited nine middle schools that recorded higher-than-average use of Connect, where we interviewed administrators and held focus groups with teachers. This report presents our findings, including insights on why educators did or did not use Connect; what might have made Connect more useful; and what external tools educators use for similar purposes

Impact of Service Sector Loads on Renewable Resource Integration

Urban areas consist of a mix of households and services, such as offices, shops, schools, etc. Yet most urban energy models only consider household load profiles, omitting the service sector. Realistic assessment of the potential for renewable resource integration in cities requires models that include detailed demand and generation profiles. Detailed generation profiles are available for many resources. Detailed demand profiles, however, are currently only available for households and not for the service sector. This paper addresses this gap. The paper (1) proposes a novel approach to devise synthetic service sector demand profiles based on a combination of a large number of different data sources, and (2) uses these profiles to study the impact of the service sector on the potential for renewable resource integration in urban energy systems, using the Netherlands as a case study. The importance of the service sector is addressed in a broad range of solar and wind generation scenarios, and in specific time and weather conditions (in a single scenario). Results show that including the service sector leads to statistically significantly better estimations of the potential of renewable resource integration in urban areas. In specific time and weather conditions, including the service sector results in estimations that are up to 33% higher than if only households are considered. The results can be used by researchers to improve urban energy systems models, and by decision-makers and practitioners for grid planning, operation and management}.Comment: 32 pages, 7 figures, 4 table

Human capital and entrepreneurial success : a meta-analytical review

The study meta-analytically integrates results from three decades of human capital research in entrepreneurship. Based on 70 independent samples (N = 24,733), we found a significant but small relationship between human capital and success (r(c) = .098). We examined theoretically derived moderators of this relationship referring to conceptualizations of human capital, to context, and to measurement of success. The relationship was higher for outcomes of human capital investments (knowledge/skills) than for human capital investments (education/experience), for human capital with high task-relatedness compared to low task-relatedness, for young businesses compared to old businesses, and for the dependent variable size compared to growth or profitability. Findings are relevant for practitioners (lenders, policy makers, educators) and for future research. Our findings show that future research should pursue moderator approaches to study the effects of human capital on success. Further, human capital is most important if it is task-related and if it consists of outcomes of human capital investments rather than human capital investments; this suggests that research should overcome a static view of human capital and should rather investigate the processes of learning, knowledge acquisition, and the transfer of knowledge to entrepreneurial tasks