Teachers' values: An international study of what sustains a fulfilling life in education

The recruitment and retention ‘crises’ in US and UK teaching have major and negative implications for the future of education. This pilot study uses extended conversations with Asian and African teaching staff to examine the role of values in helping teachers sustain positive contributions to children’s lives and world. In five elementary schools, the researcher asked: What is the role of personal values in recruiting, retaining, sustaining and building the creative capacity of teachers? The study found that a close alignment of institutional and individual values generated strong positive impacts on teacher fulfillment and resilience. It further suggests that by using their own autobiographical ‘values-stories’, teachers could advance personal values and build their capacity to contribute. The article proposes implications for all education departments, universities and schools seeking to address declining rates of teacher recruitment and retention. Recommendations include greater attention to the values that bring individuals to education, a steer towards using values-stories across the curriculum and a focus on ‘Big Issues’ in Initial Teacher Education

Why do MBA Students Delay Completing Their Thesis?

This academic paper investigates one problem universities offering MBA programs encounter with students who choose Plan B (thesis option) as they often delay completing their thesis. Its purpose is to identify the nature of the problem and its impacts on the several parties involved and propose an educational management solution. The delay in students completing their MBA theses has been found to cause difficulties for the students, their advisers and for the Graduate Schools of Business. Managerial approaches for each party to minimize if not mitigate the problem caused by late completion of the thesis are proposed, including a proposed eight-step solutions. A subsequent paper will investigate this problem more deeply from a research perspective

REFLECTIONS ON THE DEATH PENALTY AND CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING

Catholic social teaching has a great deal to guide us on the topic of the death penalty. especially with respect to the inherent dignity of the human person. The death penalty remains a staple of the American criminal justice system.for a majority ofthefifiy slates and.federal government, hut public sentiment is becoming increasingly skeptical about its ultimate effectiveness. In thefollmrinx I revinv that part of Catholic social teaching that speaks to the death penalty and I reflect on the struggle to abolish the death penalty

More on Co-Occurrence of COMT and BRCA1/2 Variants in a Population

Movassagh et al. (May 25 issue) report an association between a synonymous variant (rs165631) in COMT and a reduced risk of cancer among female carriers of the mutation BRCA1 or BRCA2. The result was based on an analysis involving 25 patients with breast cancer who had germline BRCA1/2 alterations in the Cancer Genome Atlas and 15 presumably cancer-free women with BRCA1/2 nonsense and frameshift alterations in the Exome Sequencing Project of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). Given the potential for misinterpretation of the results, we feel obliged to correct the impression that rs165631 protects carriers of the BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation from cancer

An Innovative Partnership between National and Regional Partnerships: STARS Meets McPIE

The Students & Technology in Academia, Research, and Service (STARS) Computing Corps is a nationally-connected system of regional partnerships among higher education, K-12 schools, industry and the community, with a mission to broaden the participation of women, under-represented minorities and persons with disabilities in computing (BPC). With support from National Science Foundation funding, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte founded the STARS Alliance (now the STARS Computing Corps) which includes 44 universities, each with its own “constellation” of local and regional partnerships. McClintock Partners in Education (McPIE) is a partnership between a middle school, a church, and their surrounding community. This paper describes how a STARS-McPIE “partnership between partnerships” has impacted both the middle school students and their college student mentors

Accounting Academic Workloads: Balancing Workload Creep to Avoid Depreciation in the Higher Education Sector

Accounting Academics are subject to external influences such as preparing graduates for future workplaces, bridging the gap between industry and academia and development of pathways to becoming professional accountants. Add to this the internal influences of delivery methods for student engagement, work integrated learning and casualisation of the workforce, the accounting academic is at capacity in terms of how these influences impact on workload. Using the “lived experience”, this research delves into the academic themselves to find that they categorize their workload into four themes of Teaching, Research, Accounting academic workload and development of Curricula, deemed the TRAC Framework for this study. Using this workload TRAC framework, accounting academics identified five factors they believe will influence their future roles. These include growth in international students that student success will be a shared responsibility that student engagement will be critical, that curricula design will involve stakeholder input and that expectations around research will change. These additional impact factors when added to the already at capacity workload model for accounting academics, will create a type of workload creep. This workload creep can be described as an increase in academic wear and tear, almost like depreciation on capital assets

Magnetotransport in p-type Ge quantum well narrow wire arrays

We report magnetotransport measurements of a SiGe heterostructure containing a 20 nm p-Ge quantum well with a mobility of 800 000 cm2 V−1 s−1. By dry etching arrays of wires with widths between 1.0 μm and 3.0 μm, we were able to measure the lateral depletion thickness, built-in potential, and the phase coherence length of the quantum well. Fourier analysis does not show any Rashba related spin-splitting despite clearly defined Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations being observed up to a filling factor of ν = 22. Exchange-enhanced spin-splitting is observed for filling factors below ν = 9. An analysis of boundary scattering effects indicates lateral depletion of the hole gas by 0.5 ± 0.1 μm from the etched germanium surface. The built-in potential is found to be 0.25 ± 0.04 V, presenting an energy barrier for lateral transport greater than the hole confinement energy. A large phase coherence length of 3.5 ± 0.5 μm is obtained in these wires at 1.7 K.This work was supported by the EPSRC funded “Spintronic device physics in Si/Ge heterostructures” EP/J003263/1 and EP/J003638/1 projects and a Platform Grant No. EP/J001074/1.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from AIP via http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4919053

Ages for exoplanet host stars

Age is an important characteristic of a planetary system, but also one that is difficult to determine. Assuming that the host star and the planets are formed at the same time, the challenge is to determine the stellar age. Asteroseismology provides precise age determination, but in many cases the required detailed pulsation observations are not available. Here we concentrate on other techniques, which may have broader applicability but also serious limitations. Further development of this area requires improvements in our understanding of the evolution of stars and their age-dependent characteristics, combined with observations that allow reliable calibration of the various techniques.Comment: To appear in "Handbook of Exoplanets", eds. Deeg, H.J. & Belmonte, J.A, Springer (2018