The Perceptions of Teacher Evaluation by Teachers and Campus Administrators in a Suburban Texas District

The purpose of this research is to examine the perceptions of campus administrators and teachers of the new Texas Teacher Evaluation and Support System (T-TESS) in a suburban Texas school district. Historically, teacher evaluation systems have failed to reach the intended outcome of serving as a tool to improve teaching practices. When campus administrators and teachers perceive teacher evaluation as primarily a tool to document poor performers, the growth aspect of the evaluation process is not maximized. This research seeks to identify the perceptions of both campus administrators and teachers on the evaluation system. District leaders will be able to determine if the perceptions of one or both groups is aligned with the intended outcomes of the evaluation process

NonQCD contributions to heavy quark masses and sensitivity to Higgs mass

We find that if the Higgs mass is close to its present experimental lower limit (100 GeV),Yukawa interactions in the quark-Higgs sector can make substantial contributions to the heavy quark MS masses.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure. Fixed a few typos (eqs (7),(34)

Peer review of teamwork for encouraging equal commitment to the group effort

An important graduate attribute is the ability to work in teams, so many university courses incorporate this as part of the learning experience. However, it is inevitable that in some teams there will be members who do not contribute as much to the overall effort as others, leading to frustration in those members who carry the majority of the burden. When there are students enrolled in distance-education mode, this can be exacerbated because many of the teams cannot meet face-to-face, so it can be difficult to exert sufficient influence to force problematic individuals to amend their behaviour. In an effort to mitigate against this problem, self and peer assessment was used for both team assignments in a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) course and the results of the peer assessment were used to scale the team mark for the corresponding assignment to obtain individual grades. After submitting their final assignment, a survey instrument was used to investigate the success of this process. The students overwhelmingly supported the idea of distributing marks based on the value of the individual’s contribution because in many teams it had the desired effect of motivating underperforming members to involve themselves more in the second assignment. There was some dissatisfaction about the process used to distribute marks, which the authors will attempt to address by providing better scaffolding in subsequent uses of the software tool. Regardless of these difficulties, we found that a transparent mechanism for distributing team marks to individual grades is beneficial for encouraging equal commitment to the team effort by all team members

Who’s Buried in Custer’s Grave?

On 10 October 1877, the year after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, General George A. Custer’s coffin was transported from a temporary grave in Poughkeepsie, NY, by steamer and cortege to permanent interment in the U.S. Military Academy’s Post Cemetery. The ceremony included the appropriate military and funerary rituals. There were, nevertheless, reasons to believe that Custer’s skeleton may not have been in the coffin—thus, he may have missed his own funeral. Custer’s remains, or part of them, may have been overlooked during the exhumation and left on the battlefield, only to be recovered around 1940. These bones, as well as those of another individual, were unceremoniously buried in a grave which is now marked “Two Unknown U.S. Soldiers” in the National Cemetery adjacent to the Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana. That cemetery, perhaps appropriately enough, is named the Custer National Cemetery. This paper presents information concerning Custer’s original interment on the Little Bighorn Battlefield, his supposed disinterment, and the osteological evidence that his remains, or at least part of them, were left on the Little Bighorn Battlefield

Who’s Buried in Custer’s Grave?

On 10 October 1877, the year after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, General George A. Custer’s coffin was transported from a temporary grave in Poughkeepsie, NY, by steamer and cortege to permanent interment in the U.S. Military Academy’s Post Cemetery. The ceremony included the appropriate military and funerary rituals. There were, nevertheless, reasons to believe that Custer’s skeleton may not have been in the coffin—thus, he may have missed his own funeral. Custer’s remains, or part of them, may have been overlooked during the exhumation and left on the battlefield, only to be recovered around 1940. These bones, as well as those of another individual, were unceremoniously buried in a grave which is now marked “Two Unknown U.S. Soldiers” in the National Cemetery adjacent to the Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana. That cemetery, perhaps appropriately enough, is named the Custer National Cemetery. This paper presents information concerning Custer’s original interment on the Little Bighorn Battlefield, his supposed disinterment, and the osteological evidence that his remains, or at least part of them, were left on the Little Bighorn Battlefield