Search, Effort, and Locus of Control

We test the hypothesis that locus of control – one's perception of control over events in life – influences search by affecting beliefs about the efficacy of search effort in a laboratory experiment. We find that reservation offers and effort are increasing in the belief that one's efforts influence outcomes when subjects exert effort without knowing how effort influences the generation of offers but are unrelated to locus of control beliefs when subjects are informed about the relationship between effort and offers. These effects cannot be explained by locus of control's correlation with unmeasured human capital, personality traits, and the costs of search – alternative explanations for the relationships between locus of control and search behavior that cannot be ruled out using survey data – as the search task does not vary across treatments, which leads us to conclude that locus of control influences search through beliefs about the efficacy of search effort. Our findings provide evidence that locus of control measures can be used to identify job seekers at risk of becoming "discouraged" and abandoning search.locus of control, reservation wages, labor market search, experiment

Enhancing school-university partnerships.

Preservice teachers are offered school-based experiences as a component of their undergraduate teacher education programmes. While there have been major shifts toward establishing new types of partnerships between schools and teacher education providers internationally, in New Zealand the relationship has generally gone unexamined. New Zealand teachers, therefore, have continued as supervisors of students' experiences rather than as collaborative partners in teacher education. This study makes particular reference to the professional development school (PDS) movement in the United States of America to seek innovative ideas that might enhance school-university partnerships in New Zealand. Broader issues, however, surface as challenges and complexities are identified. Despite various criticisms there are benefits in the collaborative efforts giving cause for optimism for new types of school-university partnerships

Introduction to the special section on curriculum.

An introduction to the section on curriculum and curriculum changes is presented

Modeling Commodity Flow as a Statistical Function of Lock Unavailability and Usage

The inland waterway system in the United States allows for the transportation of commodities, and interruptions to the system can have remarkable economic consequences. This research estimates statistical models of commodity flow as a function of lock usage and lock unavailability to discover relationships between system disruption and economic penalties. Findings specifically complement a portfolio of research conducted by the Maritime Transportation Research & Education Center (MarTREC) for the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to aid in decision making and resource planning for lock maintenance

Omissions, causation, and responsibility - A reply to McLachlan and Coggon

In this paper I discuss a recent exchange of articles between Hugh McLachlan and John Coggon on the relationship between omissions, causation and moral responsibility. My aim is to contribute to their debate by isolating a presupposition I believe they both share, and by questioning that presupposition. The presupposition is that, at any given moment, there are countless things that I am omitting to do. This leads them both to give a distorted account of the relationship between causation and moral or (as the case may be) legal responsibility, and, in the case of Coggon, to claim that the law’s conception of causation is a fiction based on policy. Once it is seen that this presupposition is faulty, we can attain a more accurate view of the logical relationship between causation and moral responsibility in the case of omissions. This is important because it will enable us, in turn, to understand why the law continues to regard omissions as different, both logically and morally, from acts, and why the law seeks to track that logical and moral difference in the legal distinction it draws between withholding life-sustaining measures and euthanasia

Ten years of the Waikato Journal of Education.

The article reports on the 10th volume of 2004 Waikato Journal of Education, a cause for celebration and special comment. The journal's origins are closely linked to the origins of the School of Education at the University of Waikato. The school was formed from amalgamation of a teachers' college and university education department in the early 1990s. A Department of Leisure Studies was added soon after. Together, over 100 hundred academic staff worked in the broad field of education, notably teacher education, the education disciplines' and sport and leisure studies. These tertiary teachers ranged in experience from those who had established research reputations to those who had little or no published work

Inside the classroom door: Perspective on curriculum, teaching and learning.

This paper is in two parts. First, I will survey some of the major international curriculum scholarship and influences upon New Zealand school curriculum. Second, having provided this broad survey, I will move closer to the classroom to consider contemporary developments in research on learning and teaching, which needs to be considered alongside recent curriculum scholarship, and zuhich may open the way for future research activity. Within the constraints of this paper I can touch on just a little of this vast field

Modeling Commodity Flow as a Statistical Function of Lock Unavailability and Usage

The inland waterway system in the United States allows for the transportation of commodities, and interruptions to the system can have remarkable economic consequences. This research estimates statistical models of commodity flow as a function of lock usage and lock unavailability to discover relationships between system disruption and economic penalties. Findings specifically complement a portfolio of research conducted by the Maritime Transportation Research & Education Center (MarTREC) for the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to aid in decision making and resource planning for lock maintenance