Selection and Rejection in Teacher Education: Qualities of Character Crucial in Selecting and Developing Teacher Education Students

Science.gov (United States)

McGraw, Amanda; Fish, Tim

2018-01-01

The focus of recent Australian political and media reports on the selection of candidates for initial teacher education programs has focused on the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) score as one of the key indicators of worth. This narrative study conducted in an Australian regional university focuses on the life stories of twelve…

An investigation into Nigerian teacher's attitude towards and extent ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The attitude of Biology teachers towards and their extent of improvisation, were investigated 80 teachers from 50 randomly selected secondary schools in Oyo state of Nigeria participated in the study. Analysis of the twenty item questionnaire administered to the teachers revealed that though many of them exhibited positive ...

Teachers' Competence and Students' Academic Performance in ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

This study investigated the influence of teacher's competence on students; academic performance in senior secondary chemistry. A random sampling technique was used to select 6 secondary schools out of 10 secondary schools in Tai Local Government Area of Rivers State. 200 students, 20 teachers and 6 principals ...

Influence of teachers' competence on students academic ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

This study investigated the influence of teachers' competence on students; academic performance in senior secondary school chemistry. A random sampling technique was used to select 6 secondary schools out of 12 secondary schools in Yala Local Government Area of Cross River State. 200 students, 20 teachers and 6 ...

influence of teachers' competence on students academic ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Admin

This study investigated the influence of teachers' competence on students; academic performance in senior secondary school chemistry. A random sampling technique was used to select 6 secondary schools out of 12 secondary schools in Yala Local Government Area of Cross River State. 200 students, 20 teachers and 6 ...

Classroom Noise and Teachers' Voice Production

Science.gov (United States)

Rantala, Leena M.; Hakala, Suvi; Holmqvist, Sofia; Sala, Eeva

2015-01-01

Purpose: The aim of this study was to research the associations between noise (ambient and activity noise) and objective metrics of teachers' voices in real working environments (i.e., classrooms). Method: Thirty-two female and 8 male teachers from 14 elementary schools were randomly selected for the study. Ambient noise was measured during breaks…

Inclusive Education in Government Primary Schools: Teacher Perceptions

OpenAIRE

Itfaq Khaliq Khan; Shujahat Haider Hashmi; Nabeela Khanum

2017-01-01

The perceptions of primary school teachers towards inclusive education was investigated in mainstream government schools of Islamabad capital territory where inclusive education was being supported by Sight savers and other international organizations. The study was carried out involving 54 teachers in six randomly selected primary schools. The sampled group comprised both, teachers trained in inclusive education and teachers working in same schools, but not trained in inclusive education. Pu...

Eliciting and Developing Teachers' Conceptions of Random Processes in a Probability and Statistics Course

Science.gov (United States)

Smith, Toni M.; Hjalmarson, Margret A.

2013-01-01

The purpose of this study is to examine prospective mathematics specialists' engagement in an instructional sequence designed to elicit and develop their understandings of random processes. The study was conducted with two different sections of a probability and statistics course for K-8 teachers. Thirty-two teachers participated. Video analyses…

Selecting, training and assessing new general practice community teachers in UK medical schools.

Science.gov (United States)

Hydes, Ciaran; Ajjawi, Rola

2015-09-01

Standards for undergraduate medical education in the UK, published in Tomorrow's Doctors, include the criterion 'everyone involved in educating medical students will be appropriately selected, trained, supported and appraised'. To establish how new general practice (GP) community teachers of medical students are selected, initially trained and assessed by UK medical schools and establish the extent to which Tomorrow's Doctors standards are being met. A mixed-methods study with questionnaire data collected from 24 lead GPs at UK medical schools, 23 new GP teachers from two medical schools plus a semi-structured telephone interview with two GP leads. Quantitative data were analysed descriptively and qualitative data were analysed informed by framework analysis. GP teachers' selection is non-standardised. One hundred per cent of GP leads provide initial training courses for new GP teachers; 50% are mandatory. The content and length of courses varies. All GP leads use student feedback to assess teaching, but other required methods (peer review and patient feedback) are not universally used. To meet General Medical Council standards, medical schools need to include equality and diversity in initial training and use more than one method to assess new GP teachers. Wider debate about the selection, training and assessment of new GP teachers is needed to agree minimum standards.

Inclusive Education in Government Primary Schools: Teacher Perceptions

Science.gov (United States)

Khan, Itfaq Khaliq; Hashmi, ShujahatHaider; Khanum, Nabeela

2017-01-01

The perceptions of primary school teachers towards inclusive education was investigated in mainstream government schools of Islamabad capital territory where inclusive education was being supported by Sight savers and other international organizations. The study was carried out involving 54 teachers in six randomly selected primary schools. The…

Selectivity and sparseness in randomly connected balanced networks.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Cengiz Pehlevan

Full Text Available Neurons in sensory cortex show stimulus selectivity and sparse population response, even in cases where no strong functionally specific structure in connectivity can be detected. This raises the question whether selectivity and sparseness can be generated and maintained in randomly connected networks. We consider a recurrent network of excitatory and inhibitory spiking neurons with random connectivity, driven by random projections from an input layer of stimulus selective neurons. In this architecture, the stimulus-to-stimulus and neuron-to-neuron modulation of total synaptic input is weak compared to the mean input. Surprisingly, we show that in the balanced state the network can still support high stimulus selectivity and sparse population response. In the balanced state, strong synapses amplify the variation in synaptic input and recurrent inhibition cancels the mean. Functional specificity in connectivity emerges due to the inhomogeneity caused by the generative statistical rule used to build the network. We further elucidate the mechanism behind and evaluate the effects of model parameters on population sparseness and stimulus selectivity. Network response to mixtures of stimuli is investigated. It is shown that a balanced state with unselective inhibition can be achieved with densely connected input to inhibitory population. Balanced networks exhibit the "paradoxical" effect: an increase in excitatory drive to inhibition leads to decreased inhibitory population firing rate. We compare and contrast selectivity and sparseness generated by the balanced network to randomly connected unbalanced networks. Finally, we discuss our results in light of experiments.

Exploring the Innovative Personality Characteristics among Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Othman, Nooraini

2016-01-01

The aim of this study is to explore the characteristics of innovative personality among teachers in Malaysia. Samples of the research were randomly selected among secondary school teachers in three districts in Malaysia. Research instrument was self-developed by the researchers based on interviews carried out with some resource persons who are…

Does clinical teacher training always improve teaching effectiveness as opposed to no teacher training? A randomized controlled study.

Science.gov (United States)

Breckwoldt, Jan; Svensson, Jörg; Lingemann, Christian; Gruber, Hans

2014-01-08

Teacher training may improve teaching effectiveness, but it might also have paradoxical effects. Research on expertise development suggests that the integration of new strategies may result in a temporary deterioration of performance until higher levels of competence are reached. In this study, the impact of a clinical teacher training on teaching effectiveness was assessed in an intensive course in emergency medicine. As primary study outcome students' practical skills at the end of their course were chosen. The authors matched 18 clinical teachers according to clinical experience and teaching experience and then randomly assigned them to a two-day-teacher training, or no training. After 14 days, both groups taught within a 12-hour intensive course in emergency medicine for undergraduate students. The course followed a clearly defined curriculum. After the course students were assessed by structured clinical examination (SCE) and MCQ. The teaching quality was rated by students using a questionnaire. Data for 96 students with trained teachers, and 97 students with untrained teachers were included. Students taught by untrained teachers performed better in the SCE domains 'alarm call' (p teaching quality was rated significantly better by students of untrained teachers (p = 0.05). At the end of a structured intensive course in emergency medicine, students of trained clinical teachers performed worse in 2 of 4 practical SCE domains compared to students of untrained teachers. In addition, subjective evaluations of teaching quality were worse in the group of trained teachers. Difficulties in integrating new strategies in their teaching styles might be a possible explanation.

Enhancing Students' Engagement: Report of a 3-Year Intervention with Middle School Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Turner, Julianne C.; Christensen, Andrea; Kackar-Cam, Hayal Z.; Trucano, Meg; Fulmer, Sara M.

2014-01-01

All teachers (N = 32) at one middle school participated in a university-led intervention to improve student engagement. Teachers discussed four principles of motivation and related instructional strategies. Teachers enacted instructional strategies in their classrooms. We observed six randomly selected teachers and their students over 3 years.…

Influence of Head Teachers' General and Instructional Supervisory Practices on Teachers' Work Performance in Secondary Schools in Entebbe Municipality, Wakiso District, Uganda

Science.gov (United States)

Jared, Nzabonimpa Buregeya

2011-01-01

The study examined the Influence of Secondary School Head Teachers' General and Instructional Supervisory Practices on Teachers' Work Performance. Qualitative and qualitative methods with a descriptive-correlational research approach were used in the study. Purposive sampling technique alongside random sampling technique was used to select the…

Testing, Selection, and Implementation of Random Number Generators

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Collins, Joseph C

2008-01-01

An exhaustive evaluation of state-of-the-art random number generators with several well-known suites of tests provides the basis for selection of suitable random number generators for use in stochastic simulations...

Examining Teachers' Motivation Level According to School Principals' Humor Styles

Science.gov (United States)

Recepoglu, Ergun; Kilinc, Ali Cagatay; Cepni, Osman

2011-01-01

The purpose of this research is to examine the motivation level of teachers according to school principals' humor styles. The humor styles survey and job motivation scale were used to gather data from 305 randomly selected teachers employed in primary schools in Karabuk. Results indicated that 141 of the teachers claimed school principal had…

Healthy lifestyle in teachers

OpenAIRE

Pirzadeh, Asiyeh; Sharifirad, Gholamreza; Kamran, Aziz

2012-01-01

Introduction: The role of individual healthy behaviors like physical activity, nutrition and stress management on reduction of rate of disease mortality and morbidity is well known. The aim of this study is to determine healthy life style in teachers employed in district No.4 in Isfahan, Iran, in 2010. Materials and Methods: The participants of this cross-sectional study were 96 teachers in district No. 4, selected via random sampling method. The data collection was performed using a question...

A Study on Chocolate Consumption in Prospective Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Ozgen, Leyla

2016-01-01

This study was planned and conducted to determine the chocolate consumption habits of prospective teachers. The study population was comprised of students attending the Faculty of Education at Gazi University in Ankara and the sample consisted of 251 prospective teachers selected with simple random sampling. 96.4% and 3.6% of the prospective…

QED's School Market Trends: Teacher Buying Behavior & Attitudes, 2001-2002. Research Report.

Science.gov (United States)

Quality Education Data, Inc., Denver, CO.

This study examined teachers' classroom material buying behaviors and trends. Data came from Quality Education Data's National Education Database, which includes U.S. K-12 public, private, and Catholic schools and districts. Researchers surveyed K-8 teachers randomly selected from QED's National Education Database. Results show that teachers spend…

Kindergarten Teachers' Experience with Reporting Child Abuse in Taiwan

Science.gov (United States)

Feng, Jui-Ying; Huang, Tzu-Yi; Wang, Chi-Jen

2010-01-01

Objective: The objectives were to examine factors associated with reporting child abuse among kindergarten teachers in Taiwan based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). Method: A stratified quota sampling technique was used to randomly select kindergarten teachers in Taiwan. The Child Abuse Intention Report Scale, which includes demographics,…

An Assessment of Teacher Trainees' Attitudes toward Selected Instructional Media.

Science.gov (United States)

Koontz, Franklin R.

This quantitative, descriptive research study measured the attitudes of preservice teachers toward the selection and use of instructional media in the classroom. Two groups were involved in the study: approximately 168 students enrolled in formal training in the selection and utilization of instructional media, and approximately 170 preservice…

Knowledge and attitude of secondary school teachers in Enugu to ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Objective: To assess the knowledge and attitude to sex education among secondary school teachers in Enugu. Materials and Methods: A cross sectional study of 300 teachers drawn from nine randomly selected secondary schools in Enugu metropolis was carried out. Pre-tested self administered structured questionnaire ...

Teachers'Skills in Identification and Management of Students'Talents in Ondo State Secondary Schools

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

M. A. Yusuf

2016-12-01

Full Text Available The study examined the teachers' skills in identification and management of secondary school students' talent in Ondo State. The study adopted a descriptive survey research design for the study. The population of the study com-prised 3462 secondary schools' teachers in Ondo Central Senatorial District while the sample consisted of 360 teachers. Multi-stage sampling technique was used to select the sample. The first stage was a simple random technique to select three Local Government Areas from six Local Government Areas in the District. Proportionate sampling technique was used to select 24 secondary schools from the three Local Government Areas selected. The last stage in-volved using proportionate stratified random sampling to select a total of 360 teachers. Data for the study were collected using questionnaire tagged Teachers Shills in Identifying Students' Talents Questionnaire (TSITQ.Data collected were analysed using frequency count and simple percentages. The results showed that the predominant skill used by teachers in identifying students' talents were Guidance and Counselling, Motivation, Creative teaching and Pedagogical. It was found out that motivational strategy (in form of gifts, prizes and scholarship was predominantly used by teachers in managing students' talents followed by independent study, creative teaching and pro-gramme planning. Based on the findings of the study it was therefore recommended that teachers should improve on their strategies such as independent study, creative teaching, individualised instructions and programme planning in managing secondary school students' talents.

PRINCIPAL AND TEACHER PERCEPTIONS OF SCHOOL FACULTY MEETINGS.

Science.gov (United States)

AMIDON, EDMUND; BLUMBERG, ARTHUR

THE EFFECTS OF FACULTY MEETINGS ON TEACHER MORALE WERE INVESTIGATED VIA A SIX-ITEM QUESTIONNAIRE RESPONDED TO BY 40 ELEMENTARY AND 49 SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHERS ENROLLED IN GROUP DYNAMICS WORK AT ONE UNIVERSITY AND BY 74 ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOL PRINCIPALS SELECTED AT RANDOM FROM A STATE EDUCATIONAL DIRECTORY. RESPONSES WERE ON A NINE-STEP,…

Mathematics Teachers' Use of Ethnomathematics Approach in Mathematics Teaching in Edo State

Science.gov (United States)

Aikpitanyi, Lucky Aiwuyor; Eraikhuemen, Lucy

2017-01-01

The study investigated mathematics teachers' use of ethnomathematics approach to teaching. Descriptive survey research was used with a target population of all mathematics teacher in all public secondary schools in Oredo, Egor and Ikpoba-Okha local government areas of Edo State out of which 121 mathematics teachers in 42 randomly selected public…

Blind Man's Bluff: Instructional Leadership, Teacher Selection and Rational Decision-Making.

Science.gov (United States)

Mertz, Norma T.; McNeely, Sonja R.

Little research has been done to discover the process of selection of teachers by principals. This paper reports the results of a small study in which 29 principals in 11 districts in Tennessee were interviewed to determine the process used to hire a teacher, with the results analyzed for instructional leadership and rational decision making. If…

Tips for Teachers Selecting Toys to Facilitate Social Interaction

Science.gov (United States)

Vail, Cynthia O.; Elmore, Shannon Renee

2011-01-01

Toy selection is an important role for early childhood teachers. This research-to-practice article describes what research tells us about how toys can affect the social interactions and communication of young children including those with developmental delays.

The National Mathematics Curriculum for BEP (Basic Education Programme) and the MDG (Millennium Development Goals) for Mathematics Teachers in Nigeria: Teachers' Perception and Readiness

Science.gov (United States)

Ekwueme, Cecilia Olunwa; Meremikwu, Anne; Kalu, Nnenna

2013-01-01

The study used a survey design. The instrument was teachers' questionnaire and interview on awareness and readiness. The interview was administered to the different categories of the respondents using a 4-point Likert scale. Two hundred mathematics teachers were randomly selected from 100 schools (public and private) using stratified random…

School Principals' Leadership Behaviours and Its Relation with Teachers' Sense of Self-Efficacy

Science.gov (United States)

Mehdinezhad, Vali; Mansouri, Masoumeh

2016-01-01

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between school principals' leadership behaviours and teachers' sense of self-efficacy. The research method was descriptive and correlational. A sample size of 254 teachers was simply selected randomly by proportional sampling. For data collection, the Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale of…

Observed Characteristics and Teacher Quality: Impacts of Sample Selection on a Value Added Model

Science.gov (United States)

Winters, Marcus A.; Dixon, Bruce L.; Greene, Jay P.

2012-01-01

We measure the impact of observed teacher characteristics on student math and reading proficiency using a rich dataset from Florida. We expand upon prior work by accounting directly for nonrandom attrition of teachers from the classroom in a sample selection framework. We find evidence that sample selection is present in the estimation of the…

Determinants of Differing Teacher Attitudes towards Inclusive Education Practice

Science.gov (United States)

Gyimah, Emmanuel K.; Ackah, Francis R., Jr.; Yarquah, John A.

2010-01-01

An examination of literature reveals that teacher attitude is fundamental to the practice of inclusive education. In order to verify the extent to which the assertion is applicable in Ghana, 132 teachers were selected from 16 regular schools in the Cape Coast Metropolis using purposive and simple random sampling techniques to respond to a four…

Application of random effects to the study of resource selection by animals.

Science.gov (United States)

Gillies, Cameron S; Hebblewhite, Mark; Nielsen, Scott E; Krawchuk, Meg A; Aldridge, Cameron L; Frair, Jacqueline L; Saher, D Joanne; Stevens, Cameron E; Jerde, Christopher L

2006-07-01

1. Resource selection estimated by logistic regression is used increasingly in studies to identify critical resources for animal populations and to predict species occurrence. 2. Most frequently, individual animals are monitored and pooled to estimate population-level effects without regard to group or individual-level variation. Pooling assumes that both observations and their errors are independent, and resource selection is constant given individual variation in resource availability. 3. Although researchers have identified ways to minimize autocorrelation, variation between individuals caused by differences in selection or available resources, including functional responses in resource selection, have not been well addressed. 4. Here we review random-effects models and their application to resource selection modelling to overcome these common limitations. We present a simple case study of an analysis of resource selection by grizzly bears in the foothills of the Canadian Rocky Mountains with and without random effects. 5. Both categorical and continuous variables in the grizzly bear model differed in interpretation, both in statistical significance and coefficient sign, depending on how a random effect was included. We used a simulation approach to clarify the application of random effects under three common situations for telemetry studies: (a) discrepancies in sample sizes among individuals; (b) differences among individuals in selection where availability is constant; and (c) differences in availability with and without a functional response in resource selection. 6. We found that random intercepts accounted for unbalanced sample designs, and models with random intercepts and coefficients improved model fit given the variation in selection among individuals and functional responses in selection. Our empirical example and simulations demonstrate how including random effects in resource selection models can aid interpretation and address difficult assumptions

Local randomization in neighbor selection improves PRM roadmap quality

KAUST Repository

McMahon, Troy; Jacobs, Sam; Boyd, Bryan; Tapia, Lydia; Amato, Nancy M.

2012-01-01

Probabilistic Roadmap Methods (PRMs) are one of the most used classes of motion planning methods. These sampling-based methods generate robot configurations (nodes) and then connect them to form a graph (roadmap) containing representative feasible pathways. A key step in PRM roadmap construction involves identifying a set of candidate neighbors for each node. Traditionally, these candidates are chosen to be the k-closest nodes based on a given distance metric. In this paper, we propose a new neighbor selection policy called LocalRand(k,K'), that first computes the K' closest nodes to a specified node and then selects k of those nodes at random. Intuitively, LocalRand attempts to benefit from random sampling while maintaining the higher levels of local planner success inherent to selecting more local neighbors. We provide a methodology for selecting the parameters k and K'. We perform an experimental comparison which shows that for both rigid and articulated robots, LocalRand results in roadmaps that are better connected than the traditional k-closest policy or a purely random neighbor selection policy. The cost required to achieve these results is shown to be comparable to k-closest. © 2012 IEEE.

Local randomization in neighbor selection improves PRM roadmap quality

KAUST Repository

McMahon, Troy

2012-10-01

Probabilistic Roadmap Methods (PRMs) are one of the most used classes of motion planning methods. These sampling-based methods generate robot configurations (nodes) and then connect them to form a graph (roadmap) containing representative feasible pathways. A key step in PRM roadmap construction involves identifying a set of candidate neighbors for each node. Traditionally, these candidates are chosen to be the k-closest nodes based on a given distance metric. In this paper, we propose a new neighbor selection policy called LocalRand(k,K\\'), that first computes the K\\' closest nodes to a specified node and then selects k of those nodes at random. Intuitively, LocalRand attempts to benefit from random sampling while maintaining the higher levels of local planner success inherent to selecting more local neighbors. We provide a methodology for selecting the parameters k and K\\'. We perform an experimental comparison which shows that for both rigid and articulated robots, LocalRand results in roadmaps that are better connected than the traditional k-closest policy or a purely random neighbor selection policy. The cost required to achieve these results is shown to be comparable to k-closest. © 2012 IEEE.

Analyzing the Relationship between Positive Psychological Capital and Organizational Commitment of the Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Yalcin, Sinan

2016-01-01

In this study it was aimed to determine the relationship between teachers' positive psychological capital levels and organisational commitment. The study was conducted as a correlational survey which is one of the quantitative methods. The sample group consists of 244 teachers selected by using random sampling method among 1270 teachers working in…

Teachers' Use of Potentially Reinforcing Behaviors and Students' Task-Oriented Behavior.

Science.gov (United States)

Anderson, Lorin; And Others

The present study focuses on two major questions. First, how often are potentially reinforcing behaviors emitted by teachers in naturally occurring classrooms? Second, what is the relationship between the display of potentially reinforcing behaviors by the teacher and the task-orientation of randomly selected students in the classrooms. Students…

Mindfulness Training and Reductions in Teacher Stress and Burnout: Results from Two Randomized, Waitlist-Control Field Trials

Science.gov (United States)

Roeser, Robert W.; Schonert-Reichl, Kimberly A.; Jha, Amishi; Cullen, Margaret; Wallace, Linda; Wilensky, Rona; Oberle, Eva; Thomson, Kimberly; Taylor, Cynthia; Harrison, Jessica

2013-01-01

The effects of randomization to mindfulness training (MT) or to a waitlist-control condition on psychological and physiological indicators of teachers' occupational stress and burnout were examined in 2 field trials. The sample included 113 elementary and secondary school teachers (89% female) from Canada and the United States. Measures were…

A Randomized Controlled Trial of COMPASS Web-Based and Face-to-Face Teacher Coaching in Autism

Science.gov (United States)

Ruble, Lisa A.; McGrew, John H.; Toland, Michael D.; Dalrymple, Nancy J.; Jung, Lee Ann

2013-01-01

Objective Most children with autism rely on schools as their primary source of intervention, yet research has suggested that teachers rarely use evidence-based practices. To address the need for improved educational outcomes, a previously tested consultation intervention called the Collaborative Model for Promoting Competence and Success (COMPASS; Ruble, Dalrymple, & McGrew, 2010; Ruble, Dalrymple, & McGrew, 2012) was evaluated in a 2nd randomized controlled trial, with the addition of a web-based group. Method Forty-nine teacher–child dyads were randomized into 1 of 3 groups: (1) a placebo control (PBO) group, (2) COMPASS followed by face-to-face (FF) coaching sessions, and (3) COMPASS followed by web-based (WEB) coaching sessions. Three individualized goals (social, communication, and independence skills) were selected for intervention for each child. The primary outcome of independent ratings of child goal attainment and several process measures (e.g., consultant and teacher fidelity) were evaluated. Results Using an intent-to-treat approach, findings replicated earlier results with a very large effect size (d = 1.41) for the FF group and a large effect size (d = 1.12) for the WEB group relative to the PBO group. There were no differences in overall change across goal domains between the FF and WEB groups, suggesting the efficacy of videoconferencing technology. Conclusions COMPASS is effective and results in improved educational outcomes for young children with autism. Videoconferencing technology, as a scalable tool, has promise for facilitating access to autism specialists and bridging the research-to-practice gap. PMID:23438314

Inclusive Education in Government Primary Schools: Teacher Perceptions

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Itfaq Khaliq Khan

2017-06-01

Full Text Available The perceptions of primary school teachers towards inclusive education was investigated in mainstream government schools of Islamabad capital territory where inclusive education was being supported by Sight savers and other international organizations. The study was carried out involving 54 teachers in six randomly selected primary schools. The sampled group comprised both, teachers trained in inclusive education and teachers working in same schools, but not trained in inclusive education. Purposive sampling method was used to select the teachers. Structured questionnaire (Likert Scale and structured interview method was used for data collection. The results of the study revealed that inclusive education is considered to be a desirable practice. The teachers believed that all learners regardless of their disabilities should be in regular classrooms and they showed more favorable attitude towards children with mild disabilities, but were not very optimistic about children with severe disabilities. The study also recognized teachers’ capacity as an essential component of inclusive education and recommends that inclusive education should be a part of pre and in-service teacher education.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE An Investigation of Teachers' use of Amharic ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

fire7-

This study investigated teachers' use of mother tongue in EFL classrooms in ... To select target population for the study, cluster and simple random sampling ...... quasi- experimental study in late French immersion. The Modern Language.

Mental health first aid training for high school teachers: a cluster randomized trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Jorm, Anthony F; Kitchener, Betty A; Sawyer, Michael G; Scales, Helen; Cvetkovski, Stefan

2010-06-24

Mental disorders often have their first onset during adolescence. For this reason, high school teachers are in a good position to provide initial assistance to students who are developing mental health problems. To improve the skills of teachers in this area, a Mental Health First Aid training course was modified to be suitable for high school teachers and evaluated in a cluster randomized trial. The trial was carried out with teachers in South Australian high schools. Teachers at 7 schools received training and those at another 7 were wait-listed for future training. The effects of the training on teachers were evaluated using questionnaires pre- and post-training and at 6 months follow-up. The questionnaires assessed mental health knowledge, stigmatizing attitudes, confidence in providing help to others, help actually provided, school policy and procedures, and teacher mental health. The indirect effects on students were evaluated using questionnaires at pre-training and at follow-up which assessed any mental health help and information received from school staff, and also the mental health of the student. The training increased teachers' knowledge, changed beliefs about treatment to be more like those of mental health professionals, reduced some aspects of stigma, and increased confidence in providing help to students and colleagues. There was an indirect effect on students, who reported receiving more mental health information from school staff. Most of the changes found were sustained 6 months after training. However, no effects were found on teachers' individual support towards students with mental health problems or on student mental health. Mental Health First Aid training has positive effects on teachers' mental health knowledge, attitudes, confidence and some aspects of their behaviour. ACTRN12608000561381.

Effect of Emotional Intelligence and Gender on Job Satisfaction of Primary School Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Singh, Bhagat; Kumar, Arun

2016-01-01

The objective of the study was to find out the effect of EI and gender on job satisfaction of primary school teachers. A total of 300 (150 male and 150 female) primary school teachers were selected randomly for the study. Emotional Intelligence Scale (EIS) and Teachers' Job Satisfaction Scale (TJSS) were used to collect the data. The study found a…

The Effect of Principals' Technological Leadership on Teachers' Technological Literacy and Teaching Effectiveness in Taiwanese Elementary Schools

Science.gov (United States)

Chang, I-Hua

2012-01-01

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships among principals' technological leadership, teachers' technological literacy, and teaching effectiveness. The survey target population consists of 1,000 teachers randomly selected from Taiwanese elementary schools. The survey asked teachers to measure the effectiveness of principals'…

Obstacles of Teaching Mathematics Faced by the Class Teachers in Jordan

Science.gov (United States)

Nejem, Khamis Mousa; Muhanna, Waffa

2013-01-01

The purpose of the study is to investigate the obstacles of teaching mathematics faced by the class teachers in Jordan. To achieve this purpose a study sample of 192 male and female class teachers was selected randomly from government schools. The instrument of the study was a questionnaire used to investigate the obstacles of mathematics…

The Evaluation of Teachers' Job Performance Based on Total Quality Management (TQM)

Science.gov (United States)

Shahmohammadi, Nayereh

2017-01-01

This study aimed to evaluate teachers' job performance based on total quality management (TQM) model. This was a descriptive survey study. The target population consisted of all primary school teachers in Karaj (N = 2917). Using Cochran formula and simple random sampling, 340 participants were selected as sample. A total quality management…

A Study of Occupational Stress and Organizational Climate of Higher Secondary Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Benedicta, A. Sneha

2014-01-01

This study mainly aims to describe the occupational stress and organizational climate of higher secondary teachers with regard to gender, locality, family type, experience and type of management. Simple random sampling technique was adopted for the selection of sample. The data is collected from 200 higher secondary teachers from government and…

Relationship Between Adding Value, Trust and Job Satisfaction Based on Teachers€™ Perceptions

OpenAIRE

Masoumeh Pourrajab, Roya Roustaee, Ramli Bin Basri, Baharak Talebloo, Sara Kasmaienezhadfard

2015-01-01

The aim of this study is to determine the relationship between adding value; trust and teacher satisfaction among primaryand secondary school teachers in Malaysia.In this research,375 teachers were selected based on convenience random sampling from teachers who study in educational field. This study is quantitative research and data were collected based on questionnaire and were analyzed using descriptive, correlation and regression analysis. Based on Pearson Product-Moment Correlation Coeffi...

Development and Evaluation of a Model-Supported Scientific Inquiry Training Program for Elementary Teachers in Indonesia

OpenAIRE

Chandra Ertikanto; Herpratiwi; Tina Yunarti; Post-graduate School of Mathematics Education, Faculty of Teacher Training and Education, University of Lampung, Indonesia,

2017-01-01

A teacher training program, named Model-Supported Scientific Inquiry Training Program (MSSITP) has been successfully developed to improve the inquiry skills of Indonesian elementary teachers. The skills enhanced by MSSITP are defining problems, formulating hypotheses, planning and doing investigations, drawing conclusions, and communicating the results. This teacher training program was evaluated by 48 teachers selected by stratified random sampling technique from 48 element...

A Factor-Analytic Validity Study of the Blumberg-Amidon "Teacher Perceptions of Supervisor-Teacher Conferences" Instrument.

Science.gov (United States)

Sirois, Herman A.; Gable, Robert K.

1979-01-01

It was found that the Blumberg-Amidon instrument, which was administered to 31 randomly selected in-service teachers, grades K-12, is a two-factor or two-scale measure (Relationships, Productivity) which may also be interpreted as a one-scale measure (Productive Relationships), each with a high degree of reliability. (Author/NQ)

Motivation and Quality of Work Life among Secondary School EFL Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Baleghizadeh, Sasan; Gordani, Yahya

2012-01-01

This study set out to investigate the relationship between quality of work life and teacher motivation among 160 secondary school English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers in Tehran, Iran. In addition, 30 of the participants were randomly selected to take part in follow-up interviews which asked why they felt the way they reported. The results…

Why Do They Stay? Elementary Teachers' Perceptions of Job Satisfaction and Retention

Science.gov (United States)

Perrachione, Beverly A.; Rosser, Vicki J.; Petersen, George J.

2008-01-01

The purpose of this study was to identify intrinsic and extrinsic variables that influence teacher job satisfaction and retention. A survey was sent to 300 randomly selected Missouri public elementary school teachers in grades K-5 having 5 or more years of teaching experience. The results from 201 respondents suggest that three intrinsic…

Mental health first aid training for high school teachers: a cluster randomized trial

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jorm Anthony F

2010-06-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Mental disorders often have their first onset during adolescence. For this reason, high school teachers are in a good position to provide initial assistance to students who are developing mental health problems. To improve the skills of teachers in this area, a Mental Health First Aid training course was modified to be suitable for high school teachers and evaluated in a cluster randomized trial. Methods The trial was carried out with teachers in South Australian high schools. Teachers at 7 schools received training and those at another 7 were wait-listed for future training. The effects of the training on teachers were evaluated using questionnaires pre- and post-training and at 6 months follow-up. The questionnaires assessed mental health knowledge, stigmatizing attitudes, confidence in providing help to others, help actually provided, school policy and procedures, and teacher mental health. The indirect effects on students were evaluated using questionnaires at pre-training and at follow-up which assessed any mental health help and information received from school staff, and also the mental health of the student. Results The training increased teachers' knowledge, changed beliefs about treatment to be more like those of mental health professionals, reduced some aspects of stigma, and increased confidence in providing help to students and colleagues. There was an indirect effect on students, who reported receiving more mental health information from school staff. Most of the changes found were sustained 6 months after training. However, no effects were found on teachers' individual support towards students with mental health problems or on student mental health. Conclusions Mental Health First Aid training has positive effects on teachers' mental health knowledge, attitudes, confidence and some aspects of their behaviour. Trial registration ACTRN12608000561381

Holmes versus Traditional Teacher Candidates: Labor Market Receptivity.

Science.gov (United States)

Young, I. Phillip; And Others

1997-01-01

"Typical" paper credentials were used to create 12 hypothetical teacher candidates. Credential contents were varied to reflect all combinations of college preparatory institutions (Holmes vs. traditional), education degree types, and chronological ages. Randomly selected high school principals then evaluated candidates. Holmes-prepared…

Job Satisfaction among Jordan's Kindergarten Teachers: Effects of Workplace Conditions and Demographic Characteristics

Science.gov (United States)

Abu Taleb, Tagreed Fathi

2013-01-01

The main objective of this study was to examine the job satisfaction levels of Jordanian kindergarten teachers in relation to work-related dimensions and socio-demographic variables. The sample consisted of 264 randomly selected teachers working in private kindergartens in Amman. To meet the study's objectives, a two part questionnaire was…

Selection through Interviewing: Entrance Procedures in Teacher Recruitment. Coombe Lodge Research Report. Information Bank Number 1837.

Science.gov (United States)

Theodossin, Ernest

This study looks briefly at work done in the field of teacher selection. It then examines the interviewing arrangements at Balls Park College (Australia) in 1970-71, when candidates were being selected for the teacher training course which began in October 1971. An attempt is made to discern relationships existing among: (1) the data available to…

Teachers' knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs about child abuse and its prevention.

Science.gov (United States)

Abrahams, N; Casey, K; Daro, D

1992-01-01

In considering the great responsibility placed upon teachers to involve themselves in child abuse prevention, education, and detection, the National Committee for Prevention of Child Abuse (NCPCA) conducted a nationwide survey of teachers from 40 school districts in 29 randomly selected counties. The survey explores teachers knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs about child abuse and its prevention. Five hundred and sixty-eight teachers responded, revealing that while the majority of teachers confront child abuse among their students, they are provided insufficient education on how to address it. Other findings are reported with respect to teachers' reporting behavior, potential barriers to reporting, child assault prevention programs, and corporal punishment in schools.

Teachers' Emotional Intelligence and Sense of Self-efficacy Beliefs ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Forty-three randomly selected EFL teachers were taken as a sample of the study. ... of the questionnaires were analyzed by using one sample t-test and Pearson ... teachers‟ EI and self-efficacy beliefs were found low as the observed means ...

Preservice Teachers' Beliefs and Attitude about Teaching and Learning Mathematics through Music: An Intervention Study

Science.gov (United States)

An, Song A.; Ma, Tingting; Capraro, Mary Margaret

2011-01-01

This article presents exploratory research investigating the integration of music and a mathematics lesson as an intervention to promote preservice teachers' attitude and confidence and to extend their beliefs toward teaching mathematics integrated with music. Thirty students were randomly selected from 64 preservice teachers in a southern…

Use of the "Intervention Selection Profile-Social Skills" to Identify Social Skill Acquisition Deficits: A Preliminary Validation Study

Science.gov (United States)

Kilgus, Stephen P.; von der Embse, Nathaniel P.; Scott, Katherine; Paxton, Sara

2015-01-01

The purpose of this investigation was to develop and initially validate the "Intervention Selection Profile-Social Skills" (ISP-SS), a novel brief social skills assessment method intended for use at Tier 2. Participants included 54 elementary school teachers and their 243 randomly selected students. Teachers rated students on two rating…

Examining the Relationship between Teacher Organizational Commitment and School Health in Turkish Primary Schools

Science.gov (United States)

Sezgin, Ferudun

2009-01-01

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between teachers' perceptions of organizational commitment and school health in Turkish primary schools. The Organizational Commitment Scale and the Organizational Health Inventory were used to gather data from 323 randomly selected teachers employed in 20 primary schools in Ankara.…

The association between EFL teachers' interpersonal behavior and ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

This study attempted to map EFL teachers' interpersonal behavior as perceived by students, its relationship with the students' English language achievement, and to examine if it could predict students' English language achievement. The samples of the study were randomly selected 353 grade 9 students from Secondary ...

Leadership, Absenteeism Acceptance, and Ethical Climate as Predictors of Teachers' Absence and Citizenship Behaviors

Science.gov (United States)

Shapira-Lishchinsky, Orly; Raftar-Ozery, Tehila

2018-01-01

The goal of this study was to explore the mediating role of 'absenteeism acceptance' between different leadership styles and school ethical climate (SEC) on organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) and voluntary absence among Israeli teachers. 304 teachers were randomly selected from 304 different mainstream and special-education schools. The…

Relationships between Teacher Organizational Commitment, Psychological Hardiness and Some Demographic Variables in Turkish Primary Schools

Science.gov (United States)

Sezgin, Ferudun

2009-01-01

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between teachers' organizational commitment perceptions and both their psychological hardiness and some demographic variables in a sample of Turkish primary schools. Design/methodology/approach: A total of 405 randomly selected teachers working at primary schools in Ankara…

Voice amplification for primary school teachers with voice disorders: a randomized clinical trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Bovo, Roberto; Trevisi, Patrizia; Emanuelli, Enzo; Martini, Alessandro

2013-06-01

Several studies have demonstrated a high prevalence of voice disorders in teachers, together with the personal, professional and economical consequences of the problem. Good primary prevention should be based on 3 aspects: 1) amelioration of classroom acoustics, 2) voice care programs for future professional voice users, including teachers and 3) classroom or portable amplification systems. The aim of the study was to assess the benefit obtained from the use of portable amplification systems by female primary school teachers in their occupational setting. Forty female primary school teachers attended a course about professional voice care, which comprised two theoretical lectures, each 60 min long. Thereafter, they were randomized into 2 groups: the teachers of the first group were asked to use a portable vocal amplifier for 3 months, till the end of school-year. The other 20 teachers were part of the control group, matched for age and years of employment. All subjects had a grade 1 of dysphonia with no significant organic lesion of the vocal folds. Most teachers of the experimental group used the amplifier consistently for the whole duration of the experiment and found it very useful in reducing the symptoms of vocal fatigue. In fact, after 3 months, Voice Handicap Index (VHI) scores in "course + amplifier" group demonstrated a significant amelioration (p = 0.003). The perceptual grade of dysphonia also improved significantly (p = 0.0005). The same parameters changed favourably also in the "course only" group, but the results were not statistically significant (p = 0.4 for VHI and p = 0.03 for perceptual grade). In teachers, and particularly in those with a constitutional weak voice and/or those who are prone to vocal fold pathology, vocal amplifiers may be an effective and low-cost intervention to decrease potentially damaging vocal loads and may represent a necessary form of prevention.

Management Of Indiscipline Among Teachers By Principals Of ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

This study compared the management of indiscipline among teachers by public and private school principals in Akwa Ibom State. The sample comprised four hundred and fifty (450) principals/vice principals randomly selected from a population of one thousand, four hundred and twenty eight (1,428) principals. The null ...

Mode of Supervision and Teacher Productivity | Akinwumi | Nigerian ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

This paper investigated the impact of principal supervisory techniques on teacher productivity in Oyo State Secondary Schools. An ex-post -facto research design was adopted for the study. The stratified random sampling techniques were used to select 85 schools from among 318 public secondary schools and 15 private ...

Teachers' Continuing Professional Development as Correlates of Sustainable Universal Basic Education in Bayelsa State, Nigeria

Science.gov (United States)

Iyunade, Olufunmilayo T.

2017-01-01

The study examined the correlates of teachers' continuing professional development on universal basic education in Bayelsa State, Nigeria. Using descriptive survey, a sample of 500 teachers was randomly selected from twenty (20) Basic Junior Secondary Schools and Primary Schools used for the study. The instrument used for data collection was a…

Does Fidelity of Implementation Account for Changes in Teacher-Child Interactions in a Randomized Controlled Trial of Banking Time?

Science.gov (United States)

LoCasale-Crouch, Jennifer; Williford, Amanda; Whittaker, Jessica; DeCoster, Jamie; Alamos, Pilar

2018-01-01

This study examined fidelity of implementation in a randomized trial of Banking Time, a classroom-based intervention intended to improve children's behavior, specifically for those at risk for developing externalizing behavior problems, through improving the quality of teacher-child interactions. The study sample comes from a randomized controlled…

Selective Teacher Attention in Lower-Income Countries: A Phenomenon Linked to Dropout and Illiteracy?

Science.gov (United States)

Abadzi, Helen; Llambiri, Stavri

2011-01-01

In lower-income countries students face an important challenge that has not been well documented: selective teacher attention. In classes with many low-income students, teachers may concentrate on those few who can perform and neglect those who require more help. The latter may fail to learn, attend school less often, and eventually drop out.…

Ethical Leadership and Teachers' Voice Behavior: The Mediating Roles of Ethical Culture and Psychological Safety

Science.gov (United States)

Sagnak, Mesut

2017-01-01

The purpose of this study is to investigate the mediating effects of ethical culture and psychological safety on the relationship between ethical leadership and teachers' voice behavior. The sample consists of 342 teachers randomly selected from 25 primary and secondary schools. Four different instruments are used in this study. The scales have…

Psychological Empowerment as a Mediator between Teachers' Perceptions of Authentic Leadership and Their Withdrawal and Citizenship Behaviors

Science.gov (United States)

Shapira-Lishchinsky, Orly; Tsemach, Sigalit

2014-01-01

Purpose: This study explores the mediating role of psychological empowerment on authentic leadership, organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB), and a variety of withdrawal behaviors among teachers, using the psychological model of perceptions-attitudes-behaviors. Research Design: A total of 366 teachers from 23 randomly selected Israeli schools…

Random Intercept and Random Slope 2-Level Multilevel Models

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rehan Ahmad Khan

2012-11-01

Full Text Available Random intercept model and random intercept & random slope model carrying two-levels of hierarchy in the population are presented and compared with the traditional regression approach. The impact of students’ satisfaction on their grade point average (GPA was explored with and without controlling teachers influence. The variation at level-1 can be controlled by introducing the higher levels of hierarchy in the model. The fanny movement of the fitted lines proves variation of student grades around teachers.

Level of Job Creativity among Learning Disabilities Teachers from Their Perspective in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Science.gov (United States)

Hamadneh, Burhan M.

2016-01-01

The current study aims to identify the level of job creativity among learning disabilities teachers from their perspective in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and investigate the differences according to gender, scientific qualification and years of experience. The study sample consisted of (80) male and female teachers, who were randomly selected from…

Efficacy of an internet-based problem-solving training for teachers: results of a randomized controlled trial

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Ebert, D.D.; Lehr, D.; BoB, L.; Riper, H.; Cuijpers, P.; Andersson, G.; Thiart, H.; Heber, E.; Berking, M.

2014-01-01

Objective The primary purpose of this randomized controlled trial (RCT) was to evaluate the efficacy of internet-based problem-solving training (iPST) for employees in the educational sector (teachers) with depressive symptoms. The results of training were compared to those of a waitlist control

A play and joint attention intervention for teachers of young children with autism: a randomized controlled pilot study.

Science.gov (United States)

Wong, Connie S

2013-05-01

The aim of this study was to pilot test a classroom-based intervention focused on facilitating play and joint attention for young children with autism in self-contained special education classrooms. Thirty-three children with autism between the ages of 3 and 6 years participated in the study with their classroom teachers (n = 14). The 14 preschool special education teachers were randomly assigned to one of three groups: (1) symbolic play then joint attention intervention, (2) joint attention then symbolic intervention, and (3) wait-list control period then further randomized to either group 1 or group 2. In the intervention, teachers participated in eight weekly individualized 1-h sessions with a researcher that emphasized embedding strategies targeting symbolic play and joint attention into their everyday classroom routines and activities. The main child outcome variables of interest were collected through direct classroom observations. Findings indicate that teachers can implement an intervention to significantly improve joint engagement of young children with autism in their classrooms. Furthermore, multilevel analyses showed significant increases in joint attention and symbolic play skills. Thus, these pilot data emphasize the need for further research and implementation of classroom-based interventions targeting play and joint attention skills for young children with autism.

Classroom Teacher's Adherence to Philosophy and Ethics of Home ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

This study analyzed and discussed the philosophy and goals of education, evaluating them on how classroom teachers adhere to the ethics of home economics for sustainable development in Anambra state, Nigeria. A descriptive survey design was used and the sample, randomly selected, was made up of two hundred ...

Effects of curriculum-based measurement on teachers' instructional planning.

Science.gov (United States)

Fuchs, L S; Fuchs, D; Stecker, P M

1989-01-01

This study assessed the effects of curriculum-based measurement (CBM) on teachers' instructional planning. Subjects were 30 teachers, assigned randomly to a computer-assisted CBM group, a noncomputer CBM group, and a contrast group. In the CBM groups, teachers specified 15-week reading goals, established CBM systems to measure student progress toward goals at least twice weekly, and systematically evaluated those data bases to determine when instructional modifications were necessary. Contrast teachers monitored student progress toward Individualized Education Program (IEP) goals as they wished and were encouraged to develop instructional programs as necessary. At the end of a 12- to 15-week implementation period, teachers completed a questionnaire with reference to one randomly selected pupil. Analyses of variance indicated no difference between the CBM groups. However, compared to the contrast group, CBM teachers (a) used more specific, acceptable goals; (b) were less optimistic about goal attainment; (c) cited more objective and frequent data sources for determining the adequacy of student progress and for deciding whether program modifications were necessary; and (d) modified student programs more frequently. Questionnaire responses were correlated with verifiable data sources, and results generally supported the usefulness of the self-report information. Implications for special education research and practice are discussed.

Voice amplification for primary school teachers with voice disorders: A randomized clinical trial

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Roberto Bovo

2013-06-01

Full Text Available Objectives: Several studies have demonstrated a high prevalence of voice disorders in teachers, together with the personal, professional and economical consequences of the problem. Good primary prevention should be based on 3 aspects: 1 amelioration of classroom acoustics, 2 voice care programs for future professional voice users, including teachers and 3 classroom or portable amplification systems. The aim of the study was to assess the benefit obtained from the use of portable amplification systems by female primary school teachers in their occupational setting. Materials and Methods: Forty female primary school teachers attended a course about professional voice care, which comprised two theoretical lectures, each 60 min long. Thereafter, they were randomized into 2 groups: the teachers of the first group were asked to use a portable vocal amplifier for 3 months, till the end of school-year. The other 20 teachers were part of the control group, matched for age and years of employment. All subjects had a grade 1 of dysphonia with no significant organic lesion of the vocal folds. Results: Most teachers of the experimental group used the amplifier consistently for the whole duration of the experiment and found it very useful in reducing the symptoms of vocal fatigue. In fact, after 3 months, Voice Handicap Index (VHI scores in "course + amplifier" group demonstrated a significant amelioration (p = 0.003. The perceptual grade of dysphonia also improved significantly (p = 0.0005. The same parameters changed favourably also in the "course only" group, but the results were not statistically significant (p = 0.4 for VHI and p = 0.03 for perceptual grade. Conclusions: In teachers, and particularly in those with a constitutional weak voice and/or those who are prone to vocal fold pathology, vocal amplifiers may be an effective and low-cost intervention to decrease potentially damaging vocal loads and may represent a necessary form of prevention.

Classroom-based Interventions and Teachers' Perceived Job Stressors and Confidence: Evidence from a Randomized Trial in Head Start Settings.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhai, Fuhua; Raver, C Cybele; Li-Grining, Christine

2011-09-01

Preschool teachers' job stressors have received increasing attention but have been understudied in the literature. We investigated the impacts of a classroom-based intervention, the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP), on teachers' perceived job stressors and confidence, as indexed by their perceptions of job control, job resources, job demands, and confidence in behavior management. Using a clustered randomized controlled trial (RCT) design, the CSRP provided multifaceted services to the treatment group, including teacher training and mental health consultation, which were accompanied by stress-reduction services and workshops. Overall, 90 teachers in 35 classrooms at 18 Head Start sites participated in the study. After adjusting for teacher and classroom factors and site fixed effects, we found that the CSRP had significant effects on the improvement of teachers' perceived job control and work-related resources. We also found that the CSRP decreased teachers' confidence in behavior management and had no statistically significant effects on job demands. Overall, we did not find significant moderation effects of teacher race/ethnicity, education, teaching experience, or teacher type. The implications for research and policy are discussed.

How Do School-Based Prevention Programs Impact Teachers? Findings from a Randomized Trial of an Integrated Classroom Management and Social-Emotional Program.

Science.gov (United States)

Domitrovich, Celene E; Bradshaw, Catherine P; Berg, Juliette K; Pas, Elise T; Becker, Kimberly D; Musci, Rashelle; Embry, Dennis D; Ialongo, Nicholas

2016-04-01

A number of classroom-based interventions have been developed to improve social and behavioral outcomes for students, yet few studies have examined how these programs impact the teachers who are implementing them. Impacts on teachers may affect students and therefore also serve as an important proximal outcome to examine. The current study draws upon data from a school-based randomized controlled trial testing the impact of two prevention programs. In one intervention condition, teachers were trained in the classroom behavior management program, PAX Good Behavior Game (PAX GBG). In a second intervention condition, teachers were trained to use an integrated program, referred to as PATHS to PAX, of the PAX GBG and a social and emotional learning curriculum called Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS©). This study aimed to determine whether both interventions positively impacted teachers, with a particular interest in the teachers' own beliefs and perceptions regarding self-efficacy, burnout, and social-emotional competence. The sample included 350 K-5 teachers across 27 schools (18 schools randomized to intervention, 9 to control). Multilevel latent growth curve analyses indicated that the PATHS to PAX condition generally demonstrated the most benefits to teachers, relative to both the control and PAX GBG conditions. These findings suggest that school-based preventive interventions can have a positive impact on teachers' beliefs and perceptions, particularly when the program includes a social-emotional component. Several possible mechanisms might account for the added benefit to teachers. Additional research is needed to better understand how these programs impact teachers, as well as students.

Healthy lifestyle in teachers.

Science.gov (United States)

Pirzadeh, Asiyeh; Sharifirad, Gholamreza; Kamran, Aziz

2012-01-01

The role of individual healthy behaviors like physical activity, nutrition and stress management on reduction of rate of disease mortality and morbidity is well known. The aim of this study is to determine healthy life style in teachers employed in district No.4 in Isfahan, Iran, in 2010. The participants of this cross-sectional study were 96 teachers in district No. 4, selected via random sampling method. The data collection was performed using a questionnaire including demographic healthy lifestyle questions. Analysis of the data was performed through Software SPSS version 18. The mean age of the subjects was 40.26 ± 6.05 years and, BMI mean was 25.08 ± 3.20. 96.8% of them were married and 3.1% also were single. 1% of the teachers had a weak lifestyle, 13.5%had moderate, 85.4% had a good lifestyle. In terms of nutrition, 2% of the teachers had a weak lifestyle, 23% moderate, 74% good. 76% in terms of physical activity, 29.2% smoking and 21.9% stress had a weak lifestyle. According to the results, planning for teachers in school for receiving information about healthy lifestyle is important.

40 CFR 761.308 - Sample selection by random number generation on any two-dimensional square grid.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 40 Protection of Environment 30 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Sample selection by random number... § 761.79(b)(3) § 761.308 Sample selection by random number generation on any two-dimensional square... area created in accordance with paragraph (a) of this section, select two random numbers: one each for...

Applications of random forest feature selection for fine-scale genetic population assignment.

Science.gov (United States)

Sylvester, Emma V A; Bentzen, Paul; Bradbury, Ian R; Clément, Marie; Pearce, Jon; Horne, John; Beiko, Robert G

2018-02-01

Genetic population assignment used to inform wildlife management and conservation efforts requires panels of highly informative genetic markers and sensitive assignment tests. We explored the utility of machine-learning algorithms (random forest, regularized random forest and guided regularized random forest) compared with F ST ranking for selection of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) for fine-scale population assignment. We applied these methods to an unpublished SNP data set for Atlantic salmon ( Salmo salar ) and a published SNP data set for Alaskan Chinook salmon ( Oncorhynchus tshawytscha ). In each species, we identified the minimum panel size required to obtain a self-assignment accuracy of at least 90% using each method to create panels of 50-700 markers Panels of SNPs identified using random forest-based methods performed up to 7.8 and 11.2 percentage points better than F ST -selected panels of similar size for the Atlantic salmon and Chinook salmon data, respectively. Self-assignment accuracy ≥90% was obtained with panels of 670 and 384 SNPs for each data set, respectively, a level of accuracy never reached for these species using F ST -selected panels. Our results demonstrate a role for machine-learning approaches in marker selection across large genomic data sets to improve assignment for management and conservation of exploited populations.

Scientific Reasoning and Its Relationship with Problem Solving: The Case of Upper Primary Science Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Alshamali, Mahmoud A.; Daher, Wajeeh M.

2016-01-01

This study aimed at identifying the levels of scientific reasoning of upper primary stage (grades 4-7) science teachers based on their use of a problem-solving strategy. The study sample (N = 138; 32 % male and 68 % female) was randomly selected using stratified sampling from an original population of 437 upper primary school teachers. The…

Selective traditions in group discussions: teachers' views about good science and the possible obstacles when encountering a new topic

Science.gov (United States)

Lundqvist, Eva; Sund, Per

2016-11-01

There is an ongoing discussion about what content that should be taught in science education and there are different views among teachers about what represent good science content. However, teachers are not isolated individuals making their own interpretations, but are part of institutionalised systems building on patterns in the selection of teaching goals and content. Earlier research shows that teachers teach in alignment with different selective traditions, which can be understood as well-developed teaching habits. Individual teachers seem to develop their personal habits on the basis of the contextual situations created by earlier generations of teachers. In order to find out which content teachers find representative for science education, we asked nine teachers to take part in group interviews to talk about what they value as "good" science content. The participants were grouped according to their selective traditions expressed in earlier studies. The method was used to dynamically explore, challenge and highlight teachers' views. The starting point for the group discussions is national tests in science. In Sweden, national tests in biology, physics and chemistry were introduced in secondary school science (year 9) in 2009. One overarching aim of these tests is to support the implementation of the science curricula and to include for example knowledge about socio-scientific issues (SSI). The content of the tests can consequently be seen as important for teachers to consider. The findings show that `resistance' to including SSI is not just an issue for individual teachers. As individuals teachers can create many kinds of obstacles, but still be interested in integrating SSI in their science teaching. However, in group discussions the teachers tend to collectively adopt the scientific rational discourse. This discourse is what joins them and creates their common identity as science teachers. In turn, they seek to free scientific knowledge from social knowledge

Interference-aware random beam selection for spectrum sharing systems

KAUST Repository

Abdallah, Mohamed M.

2012-09-01

Spectrum sharing systems have been introduced to alleviate the problem of spectrum scarcity by allowing secondary unlicensed networks to share the spectrum with primary licensed networks under acceptable interference levels to the primary users. In this paper, we develop interference-aware random beam selection schemes that provide enhanced throughput for the secondary link under the condition that the interference observed at the primary link is within a predetermined acceptable value. For a secondary transmitter equipped with multiple antennas, our schemes select a random beam, among a set of power- optimized orthogonal random beams, that maximizes the capacity of the secondary link while satisfying the interference constraint at the primary receiver for different levels of feedback information describing the interference level at the primary receiver. For the proposed schemes, we develop a statistical analysis for the signal-to-noise and interference ratio (SINR) statistics as well as the capacity of the secondary link. Finally, we present numerical results that study the effect of system parameters including number of beams and the maximum transmission power on the capacity of the secondary link attained using the proposed schemes. © 2012 IEEE.

Measuring Teaching Quality in Higher Education : Assessing the Problem of Selection Bias in Course Evaluations

OpenAIRE

Salomons, Anna; Goos, Maarten

2014-01-01

Student evaluations of teaching are widely used to measure teaching quality and compare it across different courses, teachers, departments and institutions: as such, they are of increasing importance for teacher promotion decisions as well as student course selection. However, the response on course evaluations is rarely perfect, rendering such uses unwarranted if students who participate in the evaluation are not randomly selected: this paper is the first to investigate this issue. We quanti...

Teacher drug use: a response to occupational stress.

Science.gov (United States)

Watts, W D; Short, A P

1990-01-01

Work-related stress is predicted to be correlated with wanting to leave the teaching profession and drug use. A stratified random sample of 500 Texas teachers was surveyed (56.5% responded), regarding working conditions, collegial and supervisory relationships, job satisfaction, rigidity of attitudes and drug use. Two-thirds of teachers may want to quit the profession, while 36.4 percent are likely to quit. Teachers report higher rates than a national sample of lifetime alcohol, amphetamine, and tranquilizer use and higher rates of alcohol use in the last year and last month. Selected measures of stress are correlated with drug use, particularly amphetamine use, over the lifetime, last year, and last month.

Interference-aware random beam selection for spectrum sharing systems

KAUST Repository

Abdallah, Mohamed M.; Sayed, Mostafa M.; Alouini, Mohamed-Slim; Qaraqe, Khalid A.

2012-01-01

. In this paper, we develop interference-aware random beam selection schemes that provide enhanced throughput for the secondary link under the condition that the interference observed at the primary link is within a predetermined acceptable value. For a secondary

The Extent of Principals' Application of the Transformational Leadership and Its Relationship to the Level of Job Satisfaction among Teachers of Galilee Region

Science.gov (United States)

Haj, Sohil Jameel; Jubran, Ali Mohammed

2016-01-01

The current study aimed to identify the degree of applying the transformational leadership in school administration (among principals), the level of job satisfaction among teachers, and investigate the relationship to each other. The sample consisted of (182) teachers, who were randomly selected from teachers of Galilee region inside the Green…

Utilization of Innovations and Techniques of Educational Technology in Delivering of Educational Practicum and Its Impact on Increasing Academic Achievement among Pre-Service Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Ibrahim, Hatim G.

2017-01-01

The current study aims to identify the utilization of innovations and techniques of educational technology in teaching of educational practicum and its impact on increasing academic achievement among pre-service teachers. The study sample consisted of (60) pre-service teachers (student teachers) randomly selected from public middle and secondary…

Perceptions around teacher's social support with student achievement motivation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Maria Oktasari

2017-11-01

Full Text Available Several indications that indicate student in low achievement motivation, among others: (1 lack of enthusiasm to follow the lesson, (2 less attention to the teacher, (3 the students have not targeted yet, (4 students tend to ignore the task, (5 (6 students are less harmonious with teachers, (7 students are lazy to learn, and (8 some students feel scared with the teacher. Students 'perceptions of teacher's social support are factors that allegedly influence students' achievement motivation. This study aims to determine the relationship of students' perceptions of the social support of teachers with achievement motivation. The method used throughout this research is quantitative with regression technique. Samples numbered to 206 students of SMA Negeri 1 V Koto Timur Padang Pariaman, and selected by proportional random sampling. The instrument used is the student's perception scale of teacher's social support and achievement motivation. The research findings indicate that there is a significant correlation between around teacher's social support with student achievement motivation.

The signature of positive selection at randomly chosen loci.

OpenAIRE

Przeworski, Molly

2002-01-01

In Drosophila and humans, there are accumulating examples of loci with a significant excess of high-frequency-derived alleles or high levels of linkage disequilibrium, relative to a neutral model of a random-mating population of constant size. These are features expected after a recent selective sweep. Their prevalence suggests that positive directional selection may be widespread in both species. However, as I show here, these features do not persist long after the sweep ends: The high-frequ...

Simulated Performance Evaluation of a Selective Tracker Through Random Scenario Generation

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hussain, Dil Muhammad Akbar

2006-01-01

performance assessment. Therefore, a random target motion scenario is adopted. Its implementation in particular for testing the proposed selective track splitting algorithm using Kalman filters is investigated through a number of performance parameters which gives the activity profile of the tracking scenario......  The paper presents a simulation study on the performance of a target tracker using selective track splitting filter algorithm through a random scenario implemented on a digital signal processor.  In a typical track splitting filter all the observation which fall inside a likelihood ellipse...... are used for update, however, in our proposed selective track splitting filter less number of observations are used for track update.  Much of the previous performance work [1] has been done on specific (deterministic) scenarios. One of the reasons for considering the specific scenarios, which were...

The teacher's role in selecting a methodological approach to the interpretation of a literary work

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Stakić Mirjana M.

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The paper looks at the teacher's role in selecting a methodological approach to the interpretation of a literary work. The choice of methodological approach is dependent on: 1 the semiotic structure of the literary text; 2 the specific educational goals of interpretation; 3 the students' age, psychophysical abilities and knowledge, and 4 the planned circumstances of instruction. In selecting a method of interpretation, the teacher should take into consideration not only these factors, but also contemporary literary theory and its methodological apparatus. This can be a challenging task whose fulfillment does not guarantee that the interpretation will be successful, since the validity and functionality of the methodological approach cannot be established in theory but rather through teaching practice. It is up to the teacher to be creative, because a literary work cannot be interpreted by means of a single method but always through a combination of methods, certain of which have their origins in literary theory. There is a widespread belief among teachers that these methods, which have the status of technical/special methods in literary methodology, cannot be used in the first four grades of elementary school. This paper offers an example illustrating that the interpretive model can be used as early as first grade. A teacher's knowledge, as well as their creativity in selecting a method and their openness to creative methodological combinations and skill in applying them, directly affect the effectiveness of interpretation, either succeeding in developing a fondness for books and reading, or, failing that, resulting in a permanent loss of interest in the world of literature.

Minimization over randomly selected lines

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ismet Sahin

2013-07-01

Full Text Available This paper presents a population-based evolutionary optimization method for minimizing a given cost function. The mutation operator of this method selects randomly oriented lines in the cost function domain, constructs quadratic functions interpolating the cost function at three different points over each line, and uses extrema of the quadratics as mutated points. The crossover operator modifies each mutated point based on components of two points in population, instead of one point as is usually performed in other evolutionary algorithms. The stopping criterion of this method depends on the number of almost degenerate quadratics. We demonstrate that the proposed method with these mutation and crossover operations achieves faster and more robust convergence than the well-known Differential Evolution and Particle Swarm algorithms.

Selection for altruism through random drift in variable size populations

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Houchmandzadeh Bahram

2012-05-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Altruistic behavior is defined as helping others at a cost to oneself and a lowered fitness. The lower fitness implies that altruists should be selected against, which is in contradiction with their widespread presence is nature. Present models of selection for altruism (kin or multilevel show that altruistic behaviors can have ‘hidden’ advantages if the ‘common good’ produced by altruists is restricted to some related or unrelated groups. These models are mostly deterministic, or assume a frequency dependent fitness. Results Evolutionary dynamics is a competition between deterministic selection pressure and stochastic events due to random sampling from one generation to the next. We show here that an altruistic allele extending the carrying capacity of the habitat can win by increasing the random drift of “selfish” alleles. In other terms, the fixation probability of altruistic genes can be higher than those of a selfish ones, even though altruists have a smaller fitness. Moreover when populations are geographically structured, the altruists advantage can be highly amplified and the fixation probability of selfish genes can tend toward zero. The above results are obtained both by numerical and analytical calculations. Analytical results are obtained in the limit of large populations. Conclusions The theory we present does not involve kin or multilevel selection, but is based on the existence of random drift in variable size populations. The model is a generalization of the original Fisher-Wright and Moran models where the carrying capacity depends on the number of altruists.

Using Multiple Lenses to Examine the Development of Beginning Biology Teachers' Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Teaching Natural Selection Simulations

Science.gov (United States)

Sickel, Aaron J.; Friedrichsen, Patricia

2018-02-01

Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has become a useful construct to examine science teacher learning. Yet, researchers conceptualize PCK development in different ways. The purpose of this longitudinal study was to use three analytic lenses to understand the development of three beginning biology teachers' PCK for teaching natural selection simulations. We observed three early-career biology teachers as they taught natural selection in their respective school contexts over two consecutive years. Data consisted of six interviews with each participant. Using the PCK model developed by Magnusson et al. (1999), we examined topic-specific PCK development utilizing three different lenses: (1) expansion of knowledge within an individual knowledge base, (2) integration of knowledge across knowledge bases, and (3) knowledge that explicitly addressed core concepts of natural selection. We found commonalities across the participants, yet each lens was also useful to understand the influence of different factors (e.g., orientation, subject matter preparation, and the idiosyncratic nature of teacher knowledge) on PCK development. This multi-angle approach provides implications for considering the quality of beginning science teachers' knowledge and future research on PCK development. We conclude with an argument that explicitly communicating lenses used to understand PCK development will help the research community compare analytic approaches and better understand the nature of science teacher learning.

An investigation of teachers' use of Amharic language in English ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

This study investigated teachers' use of mother tongue in EFL classrooms in ... To select target population for the study, cluster and simple random sampling ... To answer the research questions qualitative and quantitative data were collected. ... By Country · List All Titles · Free To Read Titles This Journal is Open Access.

Selection bias and subject refusal in a cluster-randomized controlled trial

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rochelle Yang

2017-07-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Selection bias and non-participation bias are major methodological concerns which impact external validity. Cluster-randomized controlled trials are especially prone to selection bias as it is impractical to blind clusters to their allocation into intervention or control. This study assessed the impact of selection bias in a large cluster-randomized controlled trial. Methods The Improved Cardiovascular Risk Reduction to Enhance Rural Primary Care (ICARE study examined the impact of a remote pharmacist-led intervention in twelve medical offices. To assess eligibility, a standardized form containing patient demographics and medical information was completed for each screened patient. Eligible patients were approached by the study coordinator for recruitment. Both the study coordinator and the patient were aware of the site’s allocation prior to consent. Patients who consented or declined to participate were compared across control and intervention arms for differing characteristics. Statistical significance was determined using a two-tailed, equal variance t-test and a chi-square test with adjusted Bonferroni p-values. Results were adjusted for random cluster variation. Results There were 2749 completed screening forms returned to research staff with 461 subjects who had either consented or declined participation. Patients with poorly controlled diabetes were found to be significantly more likely to decline participation in intervention sites compared to those in control sites. A higher mean diastolic blood pressure was seen in patients with uncontrolled hypertension who declined in the control sites compared to those who declined in the intervention sites. However, these findings were no longer significant after adjustment for random variation among the sites. After this adjustment, females were now found to be significantly more likely to consent than males (odds ratio = 1.41; 95% confidence interval = 1.03, 1

FACTORS CAUSING OCCUPATIONAL STRESS AMONG SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHERS OF AMRITSAR DISTRICT

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mandeep Singh

2009-12-01

Full Text Available The study attempts to investigate the various factors causing occupational stress experienced by senior secondary school teachers. A sample of 100 teachers (50 science teachers and 50 physical education teachers was randomly selected. They were administered a comprehensive questionnaire which measures various factors of stress. Factor analyses were used to identify underlying factors causing stress. The analysis showed that non cooperation from the colleagues, hastiness to finish the work, unable to perform duty smoothly, unclear instructions and insufficient facilities, unclear expectations of higher authority and having more work load in less time were the significant factors causing occupational stress among the teachers. The monotonous nature of work, ignorance of higher authority and violation of administrative processes and policies were factors also contributing towards occupational stress among teachers

Development and Validation of a Scale for Measuring Mathematics Teaching Self-Efficacy for Teachers in the Sultanate of Oman

Science.gov (United States)

Alkharusi, Hussain; Aldhafri, Said; Al-Hosni, Khoula; Al-Busaidi, Saleh; Al-Kharusi, Bader; Ambusaidi, Abdullah; Alrajhi, Marwa

2017-01-01

A scale for measuring self-efficacy for teaching mathematics in grades 5 to 10 was developed in this study for teachers in Oman. The participants were 328 mathematics teachers randomly selected from five educational governorates in the Sultanate of Oman. Factorial structure of the scale revealed three subscales: self-efficacy for understanding the…

Assessing the Impact of Teacher Job Satisfaction among Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Ansah-Hughes, Winifred

2016-01-01

The purpose of this study was to examine job satisfaction among teachers in the Techiman Municipality. Three hundred and six (306) teachers were randomly sampled from a total of one thousand four hundred and sixty-one (1461) Junior High School and Senior High School teachers in the Municipality. The instrument used for the data collection was the…

Effects of a multifactorial injury prevention intervention in physical education teachers: A randomized controlled trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Vercruysse, Sien; Haerens, Leen; Verhagen, Evert; Goossens, Lennert; De Clercq, Dirk

2016-10-01

Physical education (PE) teachers are at a high risk of musculoskeletal sports or work-related injuries because of the physical activity as inherent part of their profession. Such injuries have a negative impact on work and leisure time activities, and effective injury prevention interventions are needed. The present study aimed at testing the effectiveness of an injury prevention intervention that was developed and optimized according to PE teachers' wishes and values. Fifty-five PE teachers were randomly assigned to intervention or control group. Intervention group teachers engaged in two days of training during which they familiarized with eight injury prevention strategies (seven intrinsic and one extrinsic). A special feature of the intervention was that the way of delivery was based on the self-determination theory in order to stimulate participants' motivation to adhere to the proposed strategies. Prospective registrations during one school year were conducted concerning injuries and preventive behaviours. Results showed that the intervention group teachers had a lower number of injuries per 1000 h time of exposure (TOE) than the controls (INT: 0.49, CON: 1.14 injuries/1000 h TOE, OR: 2.32, 95% CI: 1.06-5.07), and applied a broader variety of strategies including dynamic and static stretching, core stability, balance and strength training, when compared to the controls who mainly engaged in warming-up. In conclusion, with the same amount of time, an injury reduction was found in PE teachers through a more balanced use of provided preventive strategies.

Interference-aware random beam selection schemes for spectrum sharing systems

KAUST Repository

Abdallah, Mohamed; Qaraqe, Khalid; Alouini, Mohamed-Slim

2012-01-01

users. In this work, we develop interference-aware random beam selection schemes that provide enhanced performance for the secondary network under the condition that the interference observed by the receivers of the primary network is below a

The Knowledge and Attitude of Teachers about HIV/AIDS; before and after Training in Khorasan Razavi Province, Iran

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ali Mohammad Hoseinpour

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Introduction The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV is a retrovirus that infects cells of the immune system, destroying or impairing their function. As the infection progresses, the immune system becomes weaker, and the person becomes more susceptible to infections. The most advanced stage of HIV infection is acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS. The present study aimed to evaluate the effect of  intervention training on knowledge and attitude of teachers about HIV/AIDS. Materials and Methods This quasi-experimental study, 11 cities were selected randomly cluster among 27 cities of Khorasan Razavi province- Iran. The study teachers were selected multi stage cluster sampling method; so, in the selected cities, randomly selected a number of 4 high schools of each cluster, and all the teachers of these schools were invited to participate in this research. At pre-test basic knowledge and attitude of teachers about HIV/AIDS were evaluated. Then their educational needs and curriculum were designed. Then 2 weeks after conducting the education, teacher's knowledge and attitude were evaluated (post-test. Results 1,838 teachers with the mean age of 39.81+6.104 participated in this study. The mean score of their knowledge about HIV/AIDS rose from 11.84+2.116 to 12.2+ 1.450 after intervention. The mean score of their attitude about HIV/AIDS rose from 18.07+4.740 to 20.64+4.905 after intervention. The results showed that there was a significant difference between teachers’ knowledge and attitude before and after the training program (P=0.000. Conclusion According to the study it can be concluded teachers training to increase knowledge about HIV/AIDS and improve their attitude towards the disease AIDS.

Continuous-Time Mean-Variance Portfolio Selection with Random Horizon

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Yu, Zhiyong

2013-01-01

This paper examines the continuous-time mean-variance optimal portfolio selection problem with random market parameters and random time horizon. Treating this problem as a linearly constrained stochastic linear-quadratic optimal control problem, I explicitly derive the efficient portfolios and efficient frontier in closed forms based on the solutions of two backward stochastic differential equations. Some related issues such as a minimum variance portfolio and a mutual fund theorem are also addressed. All the results are markedly different from those in the problem with deterministic exit time. A key part of my analysis involves proving the global solvability of a stochastic Riccati equation, which is interesting in its own right

Continuous-Time Mean-Variance Portfolio Selection with Random Horizon

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Yu, Zhiyong, E-mail: yuzhiyong@sdu.edu.cn [Shandong University, School of Mathematics (China)

2013-12-15

This paper examines the continuous-time mean-variance optimal portfolio selection problem with random market parameters and random time horizon. Treating this problem as a linearly constrained stochastic linear-quadratic optimal control problem, I explicitly derive the efficient portfolios and efficient frontier in closed forms based on the solutions of two backward stochastic differential equations. Some related issues such as a minimum variance portfolio and a mutual fund theorem are also addressed. All the results are markedly different from those in the problem with deterministic exit time. A key part of my analysis involves proving the global solvability of a stochastic Riccati equation, which is interesting in its own right.

TEHRAN AIR POLLUTANTS PREDICTION BASED ON RANDOM FOREST FEATURE SELECTION METHOD

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

A. Shamsoddini

2017-09-01

Full Text Available Air pollution as one of the most serious forms of environmental pollutions poses huge threat to human life. Air pollution leads to environmental instability, and has harmful and undesirable effects on the environment. Modern prediction methods of the pollutant concentration are able to improve decision making and provide appropriate solutions. This study examines the performance of the Random Forest feature selection in combination with multiple-linear regression and Multilayer Perceptron Artificial Neural Networks methods, in order to achieve an efficient model to estimate carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and PM2.5 contents in the air. The results indicated that Artificial Neural Networks fed by the attributes selected by Random Forest feature selection method performed more accurate than other models for the modeling of all pollutants. The estimation accuracy of sulfur dioxide emissions was lower than the other air contaminants whereas the nitrogen dioxide was predicted more accurate than the other pollutants.

Tehran Air Pollutants Prediction Based on Random Forest Feature Selection Method

Science.gov (United States)

Shamsoddini, A.; Aboodi, M. R.; Karami, J.

2017-09-01

Air pollution as one of the most serious forms of environmental pollutions poses huge threat to human life. Air pollution leads to environmental instability, and has harmful and undesirable effects on the environment. Modern prediction methods of the pollutant concentration are able to improve decision making and provide appropriate solutions. This study examines the performance of the Random Forest feature selection in combination with multiple-linear regression and Multilayer Perceptron Artificial Neural Networks methods, in order to achieve an efficient model to estimate carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and PM2.5 contents in the air. The results indicated that Artificial Neural Networks fed by the attributes selected by Random Forest feature selection method performed more accurate than other models for the modeling of all pollutants. The estimation accuracy of sulfur dioxide emissions was lower than the other air contaminants whereas the nitrogen dioxide was predicted more accurate than the other pollutants.

Selection of nursing teaching strategies in mainland China: A questionnaire survey.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhou, HouXiu; Liu, MengJie; Zeng, Jing; Zhu, JingCi

2016-04-01

In nursing education, the traditional lecture and direct demonstration teaching method cannot cultivate the various skills that nursing students need. How to choose a more scientific and rational teaching method is a common concern for nursing educators worldwide. To investigate the basis for selecting teaching methods among nursing teachers in mainland China, the factors affecting the selection of different teaching methods, and the application of different teaching methods in theoretical and skill-based nursing courses. Questionnaire survey. Seventy one nursing colleges from 28 provincial-level administrative regions in mainland China. Following the principle of voluntary informed consent, 262 nursing teachers were randomly selected through a nursing education network platform and a conference platform. The questionnaire contents included the basis for and the factors influencing the selection of nursing teaching methods, the participants' common teaching methods, and the teaching experience of the surveyed nursing teachers. The questionnaires were distributed through the network or conference platform, and the data were analyzed by SPSS 17.0 software. The surveyed nursing teachers selected teaching methods mainly based on the characteristics of the teaching content, the characteristics of the students, and their previous teaching experiences. The factors affecting the selection of teaching methods mainly included large class sizes, limited class time, and limited examination formats. The surveyed nursing teachers primarily used lectures to teach theory courses and the direct demonstration method to teach skills courses, and the application frequencies of these two teaching methods were significantly higher than those of other teaching methods (P=0.000). More attention should be paid to the selection of nursing teaching methods. Every teacher should strategically choose teaching methods before each lesson, and nursing education training focused on selecting

How Select Groups of Preservice Science Teachers with Inquiry Orientations View Teaching and Learning Science through Inquiry

Science.gov (United States)

Ward, Peggy

Although hailed as a powerful form of instruction, in most teaching and learning contexts, inquiry-based instruction is fraught with ambiguous and conflicting definitions and descriptions. Yet little has been written about the experiences preservice science teacher have regarding their learning to teach science through inquiry. This project sought to understand how select preservice secondary science teachers enrolled in three UTeach programs in Arkansas conceptualize inquiry instruction and how they rationalize its value in a teaching and learning context. The three teacher education programs investigated in this study are adoption sites aligned with the UTeach Program in Austin, TX that distinguishes itself in part by its inquiry emphasis. Using a mixed method investigation design, this study utilized two sources of data to explore the preservice science teachers' thinking. In the first phase, a modified version of the Pedagogy of Science teaching Tests (POSTT) was used to identify select program participants who indicated preferences for inquiry instruction over other instructional strategies. Secondly, the study used an open-ended questionnaire to explore the selected subjects' beliefs and conceptions of teaching and learning science in an inquiry context. The study also focused on identifying particular junctures in the prospective science teachers' education preparation that might impact their understanding about inquiry. Using a constant comparative approach, this study explored 19 preservice science teachers' conceptions about inquiry. The results indicate that across all levels of instruction, the prospective teachers tended to have strong student-centered teaching orientations. Except subjects in for the earliest courses, subjects' definitions and descriptions of inquiry tended toward a few of the science practices. More advanced subjects, however, expressed more in-depth descriptions. Excluding the subjects who have completed the program, multiple

Hebbian Learning in a Random Network Captures Selectivity Properties of the Prefrontal Cortex

Science.gov (United States)

Lindsay, Grace W.

2017-01-01

Complex cognitive behaviors, such as context-switching and rule-following, are thought to be supported by the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Neural activity in the PFC must thus be specialized to specific tasks while retaining flexibility. Nonlinear “mixed” selectivity is an important neurophysiological trait for enabling complex and context-dependent behaviors. Here we investigate (1) the extent to which the PFC exhibits computationally relevant properties, such as mixed selectivity, and (2) how such properties could arise via circuit mechanisms. We show that PFC cells recorded from male and female rhesus macaques during a complex task show a moderate level of specialization and structure that is not replicated by a model wherein cells receive random feedforward inputs. While random connectivity can be effective at generating mixed selectivity, the data show significantly more mixed selectivity than predicted by a model with otherwise matched parameters. A simple Hebbian learning rule applied to the random connectivity, however, increases mixed selectivity and enables the model to match the data more accurately. To explain how learning achieves this, we provide analysis along with a clear geometric interpretation of the impact of learning on selectivity. After learning, the model also matches the data on measures of noise, response density, clustering, and the distribution of selectivities. Of two styles of Hebbian learning tested, the simpler and more biologically plausible option better matches the data. These modeling results provide clues about how neural properties important for cognition can arise in a circuit and make clear experimental predictions regarding how various measures of selectivity would evolve during animal training. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The prefrontal cortex is a brain region believed to support the ability of animals to engage in complex behavior. How neurons in this area respond to stimuli—and in particular, to combinations of stimuli (�

Performance Evaluation of User Selection Protocols in Random Networks with Energy Harvesting and Hardware Impairments

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tan Nhat Nguyen

2016-01-01

Full Text Available In this paper, we evaluate performances of various user selection protocols under impact of hardware impairments. In the considered protocols, a Base Station (BS selects one of available Users (US to serve, while the remaining USs harvest the energy from the Radio Frequency (RF transmitted by the BS. We assume that all of the US randomly appear around the BS. In the Random Selection Protocol (RAN, the BS randomly selects a US to transmit the data. In the second proposed protocol, named Minimum Distance Protocol (MIND, the US that is nearest to the BS will be chosen. In the Optimal Selection Protocol (OPT, the US providing the highest channel gain between itself and the BS will be served. For performance evaluation, we derive exact and asymptotic closed-form expressions of average Outage Probability (OP over Rayleigh fading channels. We also consider average harvested energy per a US. Finally, Monte-Carlo simulations are then performed to verify the theoretical results.

Teachers Reflect on Homophobia in the Cypriot Education System: A Qualitative Study

Science.gov (United States)

Shoshilou, Panayiota A.; Vasiliou, Elena

2016-01-01

A review of the academic and lay literature concerning Cyprus reveals that homophobia is prevalent throughout society. This research aimed to investigate homophobia through the narratives of educators. Twenty-three teachers were randomly selected out of the pool of volunteers in a training project. Aspects of homophobia previously reported in…

A Grounded Theory of Behavior Management Strategy Selection, Implementation, and Perceived Effectiveness Reported by First-Year Elementary Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Smart, Julie B.; Igo, L. Brent

2010-01-01

In this grounded theory study, 19 teachers were interviewed and then, in constant comparative fashion, the interview data were analyzed. The theoretical model that emerged from the data describes novice teachers' tendencies to select and implement differing strategies related to the severity of student behavior. When confronting mild student…

A comparison between unwanted sexual behavior by teachers and by peers in secondary schools

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Timmerman, M.C.

2002-01-01

This study explores differences and similarities between sexual harassment of students by teachers and by peers. Respondents were adolescents in 22 secondary schools, randomly selected in 2 regions in the Netherlands. Of the 2808 students 512 (18%) reported unwanted sexual experiences at school in

Secondary Mathematics Pre-Service Teachers' Processes of Selection and Integration of Technology

Science.gov (United States)

Uzan, Erol

2017-01-01

This study investigated secondary mathematics pre-service teachers' (PSTs) knowledge of resources in terms of digital technologies, and explored the processes of both selection and integration of technology into their lesson plans. This study employed a case study design. Participants were six secondary mathematics PSTs who enrolled in a methods…

The reliability of randomly selected final year pharmacy students in ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Employing ANOVA, factorial experimental analysis, and the theory of error, reliability studies were conducted on the assessment of the drug product chloroquine phosphate tablets. The G–Study employed equal numbers of the factors for uniform control, and involved three analysts (randomly selected final year Pharmacy ...

[Occupational mental health and job satisfaction in university teachers in Shenyang, China].

Science.gov (United States)

Li, M Y; Wang, Z Y; Wu, H; Wang, J N; Wang, L

2017-02-20

Objective: To investigate the current status of occupational mental health and job satisfaction in university teachers in Shenyang, China and related influencing factors. Methods: A total of 1500 teachers from 6 universities in Shenyang were randomly selected as study subjects from November 2013 to January 2014. Self-administered questionnaires were used to investigate mental health, including effort-reward imbalance questionnaire, Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire, Center for Epidemiological Survey-Depression Scale, and Psychological Capital Questionnaire. Results: Of all teachers, 58.9% had depressive symptoms. Depressive symptoms in university teachers were negatively correlated with the scores of psychological capital, supervisory commitment, and perceived organizational support ( r =-0.461, -0.306, and -0.366, all P university teachers in Shenyang, and psychological capital has a mediating effect on perceived organizational support, supervisory commitment, occupational stress, job satisfaction, and depressive symptoms.

The Relationship between Critical Thinking Abilities and Classroom Management Skills of High School Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Demirdag, Seyithan

2015-01-01

High school teachers experience difficulties while providing effective teaching approaches in their classrooms. Some of the difficulties are associated with the lack of classroom management skills and critical thinking abilities. This quantitative study includes non-random selection of the participants and aims to examine critical thinking…

The influence of professional teachers on Padang vocational school students' achievement

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ramli Bakar

2018-01-01

Full Text Available This study determined: (1 the competency of professional teachers teaching in the classroom, (2 students' achievement in vocational schools in Padang, and (3 the influence of professional teachers on vocational school students' achievement in Padang. The population was 2,647 students in vocational schools. The sample, consisting of 160 students, was selected using a multistage, random sampling technique. Data were collected using questionnaires and documentation, and then analyzed and presented using the SPSS software. The results showed: (1 overall, the professional teachers of vocational schools in Padang had good qualifications in pedagogical competence, professional competence, social competence, and personal competence, (2 the learning process of vocational schools in Padang was going well and in general, student achievement was at a good level of performance, and (3 there was a significant influence of professional teachers on vocational school students' achievement in Padang. Keywords: professional teacher, student achievement, vocational school

Random selection of items. Selection of n1 samples among N items composing a stratum

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Jaech, J.L.; Lemaire, R.J.

1987-02-01

STR-224 provides generalized procedures to determine required sample sizes, for instance in the course of a Physical Inventory Verification at Bulk Handling Facilities. The present report describes procedures to generate random numbers and select groups of items to be verified in a given stratum through each of the measurement methods involved in the verification. (author). 3 refs

School-based intervention for childhood disruptive behavior in disadvantaged settings: A randomized controlled trial with and without active teacher support

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Liber, J.M.; de Boo, G.M.; Huizenga, H.; Prins, P.J.M.

2013-01-01

Objective: In this randomized controlled trial, we investigated the effectiveness of a school-based targeted intervention program for disruptive behavior. A child-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) program was introduced at schools in disadvantaged settings and with active teacher support

Selection and Implementation of Skill Acquisition Programs by Special Education Teachers and Staff for Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Science.gov (United States)

Kodak, Tiffany; Cariveau, Tom; LeBlanc, Brittany A; Mahon, Jacob J; Carroll, Regina A

2018-01-01

The present investigation examined special education teachers' selection and use of teaching strategies for receptive identification training with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in their classrooms. Teachers first responded to a survey in which they provided examples of receptive identification tasks taught in their classrooms, rated the efficacy of teaching strategies, described how they determined whether skills were mastered, listed any assessments they conducted to identify relevant prerequisite skills prior to receptive identification training, described how they selected teaching strategies for use in their classrooms, and listed their years of experience as a teacher and working with children with ASD. Subsequent observations of implementation of teaching strategies during trial-based instruction occurred in a proportion of teachers' classrooms. The results of the observations showed that participants did not consistently implement components of trial-based instruction as described in the literature, and there were differences in implementation depending on the types of skills targeted during instruction.

Development of the Teacher Candidates’ Level of being Affected from Public Personnel Selection Examination Scale

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Fatma SUSAR KIRMIZI

2016-07-01

Full Text Available This study aimed to develop a scale to evaluate teacher candidates' level of being affected from the public personnel selection examination. The participants of the study consisted of the final year students at Pamukkale University Education Faculty. The participants were 207 teacher candidates, of whom 143 were female and 64 were male. The validity and reliability study of the scale was conducted on the data gathered from teacher candidates studying at Art Teaching, Music Teaching, Turkish Language Teaching, Social Studies Education, Science Teaching, Psychological Counseling and Guidance Education, Elementary Education and Preschool Education departments of Pamukkale University Education Faculty. The Lawshe technique was used in the evaluation of the scale by experts. To determine the construct validity, factor analysis was performed on the data, and two sub-scales were identified. The factor loading values of the items in the first sub-scale ranged between 0,65 and 0,35, and those in the second sub-scale between 0,75 and 0,39. As a result of the analyses, the "Teacher Candidates' Level of Being Affected From Public Personnel Selection Examination Scale" (TCLBAPPSES including 33 items, 23 negative and 10 positive, and two sub-scales was produced. The Cronbach's Alpha reliability coefficient was found as 0,86 for the first sub-dimension, 0,73 for the second sub-dimension, and 0,91 for the whole scale. As a result, it can be argued that the scale is reliable

The mathematics of random mutation and natural selection for multiple simultaneous selection pressures and the evolution of antimicrobial drug resistance.

Science.gov (United States)

Kleinman, Alan

2016-12-20

The random mutation and natural selection phenomenon act in a mathematically predictable behavior, which when understood leads to approaches to reduce and prevent the failure of the use of these selection pressures when treating infections and cancers. The underlying principle to impair the random mutation and natural selection phenomenon is to use combination therapy, which forces the population to evolve to multiple selection pressures simultaneously that invoke the multiplication rule of probabilities simultaneously as well. Recently, it has been seen that combination therapy for the treatment of malaria has failed to prevent the emergence of drug-resistant variants. Using this empirical example and the principles of probability theory, the derivation of the equations describing this treatment failure is carried out. These equations give guidance as to how to use combination therapy for the treatment of cancers and infectious diseases and prevent the emergence of drug resistance. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Assessing Affordances of Selected Cloud Computing Tools for Language Teacher Education in Nigeria

Science.gov (United States)

Ofemile, Abdulmalik Yusuf

2015-01-01

This paper reports part of a study that hoped to understand Teacher Educators' (TE) assessment of the affordances of selected cloud computing tools ranked among the top 100 for the year 2010. Research has shown that ICT and by extension cloud computing has positive impacts on daily life and this informed the Nigerian government's policy to…

World Health Organization "School Mental Health Manual"-based training for school teachers in Urban Lahore, Pakistan: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Imran, Nazish; Rahman, Atif; Chaudhry, Nakhshab; Asif, Aftab

2018-05-24

The teacher's role in school mental health initiatives cannot be overemphasized. Despite global evidence of educational interventions in improving teachers' knowledge and attitudes regarding mental health, this area remains under researched in Pakistan. This paper presents a study protocol of a pilot randomized controlled trial to examine the effectiveness of a teacher training intervention for improving mental health literacy and self-efficacy among school teachers in urban Lahore, Pakistan. The randomized controlled trial will follow the CONSORT guidelines. Participants will be allocated to the Intervention group (receiving the World Health Organization, Eastern Mediterranean Region (WHO-EMRO) School Mental Health Manual-based intervention in three 6-h, face-to-face sessions) or a waitlist control group (not receiving training during the study period). Participants will be teachers of private schools with similar broad demographic characteristics in an inner city area of Lahore. The primary outcome measures for the trial is teachers' mental health literacy. It will be assessed by using the previously applied (during WHO training of Master Trainers) self-administered questionnaire in both groups pre and post training and at 3 months' follow-up. Secondary outcomes include: for teachers: Teachers' self-efficacy (assessed by the Teachers' Sense of Self Efficacy Scale (TSES) short form.); for students (11-16 years): socio-emotional skills and psychological problems measured by the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (assessed at baseline and 3 months post intervention); for schools: the WHO School Psychosocial Profile Questionnaire (baseline and 3 months post intervention). Given the high prevalence of child mental health problems, stigma and lack of services, it is important to consider alternate avenues for promoting positive mental health among youth. This pilot study should establish the effectiveness of the WHO-EMRO School Mental Health Manual

Incentives, Selection, and Teacher Performance: Evidence from IMPACT

Science.gov (United States)

Dee, Thomas S.; Wyckoff, James

2015-01-01

Teachers in the United States are compensated largely on the basis of fixed schedules that reward experience and credentials. However, there is a growing interest in whether performance-based incentives based on rigorous teacher evaluations can improve teacher retention and performance. The evidence available to date has been mixed at best. This…

When teacher clusters work: selected experiences of South African ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Recent scholarship on teacher professional development has shown renewed interest in collaborative forms of teacher learning. Networks, communities of practice and clusters are related concepts that describe forms of collaboration between schools and/or teachers that encourage such learning. In South Africa, teacher ...

A Bayesian random effects discrete-choice model for resource selection: Population-level selection inference

Science.gov (United States)

Thomas, D.L.; Johnson, D.; Griffith, B.

2006-01-01

Modeling the probability of use of land units characterized by discrete and continuous measures, we present a Bayesian random-effects model to assess resource selection. This model provides simultaneous estimation of both individual- and population-level selection. Deviance information criterion (DIC), a Bayesian alternative to AIC that is sample-size specific, is used for model selection. Aerial radiolocation data from 76 adult female caribou (Rangifer tarandus) and calf pairs during 1 year on an Arctic coastal plain calving ground were used to illustrate models and assess population-level selection of landscape attributes, as well as individual heterogeneity of selection. Landscape attributes included elevation, NDVI (a measure of forage greenness), and land cover-type classification. Results from the first of a 2-stage model-selection procedure indicated that there is substantial heterogeneity among cow-calf pairs with respect to selection of the landscape attributes. In the second stage, selection of models with heterogeneity included indicated that at the population-level, NDVI and land cover class were significant attributes for selection of different landscapes by pairs on the calving ground. Population-level selection coefficients indicate that the pairs generally select landscapes with higher levels of NDVI, but the relationship is quadratic. The highest rate of selection occurs at values of NDVI less than the maximum observed. Results for land cover-class selections coefficients indicate that wet sedge, moist sedge, herbaceous tussock tundra, and shrub tussock tundra are selected at approximately the same rate, while alpine and sparsely vegetated landscapes are selected at a lower rate. Furthermore, the variability in selection by individual caribou for moist sedge and sparsely vegetated landscapes is large relative to the variability in selection of other land cover types. The example analysis illustrates that, while sometimes computationally intense, a

Instructional Materials Commonly Employed by Foreign Language Teachers at Elementary Schools

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

İsmail Çakır

2015-09-01

Full Text Available This study aimed to determine the teachers’ choices of instructional materials in teaching English at elementary schools. The reasons behind preferring or not preferring some certain instructional materials specified within the research were analysed. To this end, during the course of School Experience, 68 prospective English teachers observed 38 teachers of English working at 14 elementary schools on a weekly basis, and they completed a questionnaire. A semi-structured interview was also conducted with five randomly selected teachers to identify their reasons for choosing certain instructional materials. The descriptive results revealed that most of the teachers were reluctant to use many of the highly beneficial materials due to reasons including overcrowded classes, limited technological knowledge, lack of time for preparation, curricular time constraints, heavy work load, burnout etc. The study suggests that apart from course-books teachers should be encouraged to use other instructional materials to motivate learners and offer an interactive foreign language teaching atmosphere.

Instructional materials commonly employed by foreign language teachers at elementary schools

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

İsmail Çakır

2015-09-01

Full Text Available This study aimed to determine the teachers’ choices of instructional materials in teaching English at elementary schools. The reasons behind preferring or not preferring some certain instructional materials specified within the research were analysed. To this end, during the course of School Experience, 68 prospective English teachers observed 38 teachers of English working at 14 elementary schools on a weekly basis, and they completed a questionnaire. A semi-structured interview was also conducted with five randomly selected teachers to identify their reasons for choosing certain instructional materials. The descriptive results revealed that most of the teachers were reluctant to use many of the highly beneficial materials due to reasons including overcrowded classes, limited technological knowledge, lack of time for preparation, curricular time constraints, heavy work load, burnout etc. The study suggests that apart from course-books teachers should be encouraged to use other instructional materials to motivate learners and offer an interactive foreign language teaching atmosphere.

The signature of positive selection at randomly chosen loci.

Science.gov (United States)

Przeworski, Molly

2002-03-01

In Drosophila and humans, there are accumulating examples of loci with a significant excess of high-frequency-derived alleles or high levels of linkage disequilibrium, relative to a neutral model of a random-mating population of constant size. These are features expected after a recent selective sweep. Their prevalence suggests that positive directional selection may be widespread in both species. However, as I show here, these features do not persist long after the sweep ends: The high-frequency alleles drift to fixation and no longer contribute to polymorphism, while linkage disequilibrium is broken down by recombination. As a result, loci chosen without independent evidence of recent selection are not expected to exhibit either of these features, even if they have been affected by numerous sweeps in their genealogical history. How then can we explain the patterns in the data? One possibility is population structure, with unequal sampling from different subpopulations. Alternatively, positive selection may not operate as is commonly modeled. In particular, the rate of fixation of advantageous mutations may have increased in the recent past.

Differential privacy-based evaporative cooling feature selection and classification with relief-F and random forests.

Science.gov (United States)

Le, Trang T; Simmons, W Kyle; Misaki, Masaya; Bodurka, Jerzy; White, Bill C; Savitz, Jonathan; McKinney, Brett A

2017-09-15

Classification of individuals into disease or clinical categories from high-dimensional biological data with low prediction error is an important challenge of statistical learning in bioinformatics. Feature selection can improve classification accuracy but must be incorporated carefully into cross-validation to avoid overfitting. Recently, feature selection methods based on differential privacy, such as differentially private random forests and reusable holdout sets, have been proposed. However, for domains such as bioinformatics, where the number of features is much larger than the number of observations p≫n , these differential privacy methods are susceptible to overfitting. We introduce private Evaporative Cooling, a stochastic privacy-preserving machine learning algorithm that uses Relief-F for feature selection and random forest for privacy preserving classification that also prevents overfitting. We relate the privacy-preserving threshold mechanism to a thermodynamic Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, where the temperature represents the privacy threshold. We use the thermal statistical physics concept of Evaporative Cooling of atomic gases to perform backward stepwise privacy-preserving feature selection. On simulated data with main effects and statistical interactions, we compare accuracies on holdout and validation sets for three privacy-preserving methods: the reusable holdout, reusable holdout with random forest, and private Evaporative Cooling, which uses Relief-F feature selection and random forest classification. In simulations where interactions exist between attributes, private Evaporative Cooling provides higher classification accuracy without overfitting based on an independent validation set. In simulations without interactions, thresholdout with random forest and private Evaporative Cooling give comparable accuracies. We also apply these privacy methods to human brain resting-state fMRI data from a study of major depressive disorder. Code

Teacher quality and teacher salaries: the case of Pennsylvania

OpenAIRE

Tin-chun Lin

2009-01-01

Both teacher quality and teacher salaries are endogenously correlated in the teacher labor market. Therefore, due to endogeneity, we develop three econometric simultaneous-equation models to examine the link between teacher quality and teacher salaries. A total of 500 school districts in the state of Pennsylvania during the school years 1999-2000 to 2001-2002 are selected for a case study. Results reveal a positive and significant relationship between these two.

Development and validation of a questionnaire (the IRA-AGHN to assess teachers' knowledge of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Marian Soroa

2014-10-01

Full Text Available The purpose of this study was to develop a questionnaire, called IRA-AGHN, to assess infant and primary school teachers' knowledge of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The psychometric properties of this questionnaire were examined in a sample of 752 teachers aged between 20 and 64 years (M = 41.57; SD = 9.69. These teachers were employed at 84 randomly selected schools in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country and Navarre. The factor validity, internal consistency, temporal stability, convergent validity and external validity of the instrument were all analysed. The results suggest that the IRA-AGHN is a valid and reliable measure for assessing teachers' knowledge of ADHD.

Perceptions of the Selection Criteria of Omani English Language Teachers: Implications for Policy Reconsideration

Science.gov (United States)

Al-Issa, Ali; Al-Bulushi, Ali; Al-Zadjali, Rima

2017-01-01

Proficiency in the English language has been described as central for determining Non-Native English Speaking Teachers (N-NESTs) selection for joining the profession. The Ministry of Education in the Sultanate of Oman decided to set the score of Band 6 on the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) for accepting the English Language…

Influence of Leadership Styles on Teachers' Job Satisfaction: A Case of Selected Primary Schools in Songea and Morogoro Districts, Tanzania

Science.gov (United States)

Machumu, Haruni J.; Kaitila, Mafwimbo M.

2014-01-01

This study reports on the kind of school leadership style that best suits for promoting teachers' job satisfaction in primary schools in Tanzania. The study employed cross sectional research design with samples of 200 teachers from 20 selected primary schools in Songea and Morogoro districts. Interviews, documentary analysis and questionnaires…

Interference-aware random beam selection schemes for spectrum sharing systems

KAUST Repository

Abdallah, Mohamed

2012-10-19

Spectrum sharing systems have been recently introduced to alleviate the problem of spectrum scarcity by allowing secondary unlicensed networks to share the spectrum with primary licensed networks under acceptable interference levels to the primary users. In this work, we develop interference-aware random beam selection schemes that provide enhanced performance for the secondary network under the condition that the interference observed by the receivers of the primary network is below a predetermined/acceptable value. We consider a secondary link composed of a transmitter equipped with multiple antennas and a single-antenna receiver sharing the same spectrum with a primary link composed of a single-antenna transmitter and a single-antenna receiver. The proposed schemes select a beam, among a set of power-optimized random beams, that maximizes the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of the secondary link while satisfying the primary interference constraint for different levels of feedback information describing the interference level at the primary receiver. For the proposed schemes, we develop a statistical analysis for the SINR statistics as well as the capacity and bit error rate (BER) of the secondary link.

Teacher Inequality

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Andrew J. Wayne

2002-06-01

Full Text Available When discussing the teacher quality gap, policy makers have tended to focus on teacher certification, degrees, and experience. These indicators have become key benchmarks for progress toward equality of educational opportunity, in part for lack of additional teacher quality indicators. This article turns attention to teachers' academic skills. National data on teachers' entrance examination scores and college selectivity reveal substantial disparities by school poverty level. The findings commend attention to the gap in academic skills in the formulation of future policy and research on the teacher quality gap.

Topology-selective jamming of fully-connected, code-division random-access networks

Science.gov (United States)

Polydoros, Andreas; Cheng, Unjeng

1990-01-01

The purpose is to introduce certain models of topology selective stochastic jamming and examine its impact on a class of fully-connected, spread-spectrum, slotted ALOHA-type random access networks. The theory covers dedicated as well as half-duplex units. The dominant role of the spatial duty factor is established, and connections with the dual concept of time selective jamming are discussed. The optimal choices of coding rate and link access parameters (from the users' side) and the jamming spatial fraction are numerically established for DS and FH spreading.

Hot Spots on the Web for Teacher Librarians: A Selection of Recommended Web Sites for TLs To Visit.

Science.gov (United States)

1996

Six papers review and recommend sites on the Web as resources for teacher librarians include: "Just Do It: A Guide to Getting Out There and Doing It Yourself" (Catherine Ryan); "A Selection of Recommended Web Sites for TLs To Visit" (Karen Bonanno); "A Selection of Recommended Web Sites for TLs To Visit" (Sandra…

The Relationship between Special Education Teachers' Sense of Teacher Efficacy and Their Intent to Leave

Science.gov (United States)

McCarty, Kristine A.

2013-01-01

The purpose of this mixed method study was to examine if there is a predictive relationship among special education teachers' sense of teacher efficacy and intent to leave while accounting for job satisfaction and a special education teacher's perceptions of principal support. Electronic surveys were sent via Survey Monkey to a random sample of…

Peculiarities of the statistics of spectrally selected fluorescence radiation in laser-pumped dye-doped random media

Science.gov (United States)

Yuvchenko, S. A.; Ushakova, E. V.; Pavlova, M. V.; Alonova, M. V.; Zimnyakov, D. A.

2018-04-01

We consider the practical realization of a new optical probe method of the random media which is defined as the reference-free path length interferometry with the intensity moments analysis. A peculiarity in the statistics of the spectrally selected fluorescence radiation in laser-pumped dye-doped random medium is discussed. Previously established correlations between the second- and the third-order moments of the intensity fluctuations in the random interference patterns, the coherence function of the probe radiation, and the path difference probability density for the interfering partial waves in the medium are confirmed. The correlations were verified using the statistical analysis of the spectrally selected fluorescence radiation emitted by a laser-pumped dye-doped random medium. Water solution of Rhodamine 6G was applied as the doping fluorescent agent for the ensembles of the densely packed silica grains, which were pumped by the 532 nm radiation of a solid state laser. The spectrum of the mean path length for a random medium was reconstructed.

Impact of Teacher Self-Efficacy on Secondary School Students’ Academic Achievement

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Khurram Shahzad

2017-06-01

Full Text Available The study of self-efficacy and its impact on human performance has intrigued many scholars during the last two decades, for example, Clayson and Sheffet, 2006; Nauta, 2004; Muijsand Rejnolds 2001; Bandura, 1997 and Soodak and Podell, 1993. This study was conducted with the objective to find out the impact ofteacher self-efficacy on the secondary school students’ academic achievement. For this purpose, sixty (60 secondary school teachers and a hundred (100 secondary school students in Chiltan Town of Quetta city were randomly selected. To collect the data, teacher self-efficacy questionnaire for teachers was used and to measure students’ academic achievement a test was developed. Data were analyzed through Pearson Correlation and Multiple Regressions. The findings of the study revealed that teacher self-efficacy has a positive impact on the students’ academic achievement. The results of the study and their pedagogical implications have been discussed, and recommendations have been provided for further researches.

When teacher clusters work: selected experiences of South African teachers with the cluster approach to professional development

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Loyiso C Jita

2014-06-01

Full Text Available Recent scholarship on teacher professional development has shown renewed interest in collaborative forms of teacher learning. Networks, communities of practice and clusters are related concepts that describe forms of collaboration between schools and/or teachers that encourage such learning. In South Africa, teacher clusters represent a relatively recent and popular experiment in teacher professional development. However, there is no verdict yet about their effectiveness. While the utility of such collaborative structures for teacher learning is fairly well established in many developed countries, we still know very little about how the intended beneficiaries (the teachers experience these non-traditional structures of professional development. Using qualitative data from a large-scale research project, we explore teachers' perspectives on what constitutes a successful clustering experience, and the kinds of professional development benefits they derive from their participation therein. Our major findings are twofold: First, clusters seem to enhance teachers' content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. Second, and somewhat unexpectedly, the teachers identified another set of benefits, the so-called "process benefits" that include collaboration, instructional guidance and teacher leadership. In a context where teachers have tended to work solo and insulated their classroom practices from influence, the presence of the "process benefits" represents a significant finding. We conclude the paper by exploring several possible directions for further research on these process benefits of clusters for teachers in South Africa and elsewhere.

teachers' perception of their head teachers' role effectiveness

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Global Journal

This paper is a survey study focused on teacher's perception of their head ... constructed and distributed to 100 teachers selected from primary schools in the ... Ability to motivate the student to learn ... policies, a counsellor and decision maker.

Primary School Teachers' Understanding of Science Process Skills in Relation to Their Teaching Qualifications and Teaching Experience

Science.gov (United States)

Shahali, Edy H. M.; Halim, Lilia; Treagust, David F.; Won, Mihye; Chandrasegaran, A. L.

2017-04-01

This study investigated the understanding of science process skills (SPS) of 329 science teachers from 52 primary schools selected by random sampling. The understanding of SPS was measured in terms of conceptual and operational aspects of SPS using an instrument called the Science Process Skills Questionnaire (SPSQ) with a Cronbach's alpha reliability of 0.88. The findings showed that the teachers' conceptual understanding of SPS was much weaker than their practical application of SPS. The teachers' understanding of SPS differed by their teaching qualifications but not so much by their teaching experience. Emphasis needs to be given to both conceptual and operational understanding of SPS during pre-service and in-service teacher education to enable science teachers to use the skills and implement inquiry-based lessons in schools.

The Perception of Tertiary Institutions Prospective Teachers on the Benefits of Teaching Practice

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hassan Olusola

2017-03-01

Full Text Available This study assessed the perception of two tertiary institutions prospective teachers’ on the Benefits of Teaching Practice in Ogun State. Survey research design was adopted for the study. A sample of four hundred students was randomly selected for the study. Prospective Teachers Perception on Teaching practice Benefits Questionnaire (PTPTPBQ with the reliability coefficient of 0.80 was administered on the respondents. Data collected was analyzed using Mean Score, Charts, Percentages and t-test of significance. The study reveals that prospective teachers have low perception on the benefits of teaching practice also, finance and housing were the two major challenges faced by prospective teachers.. It is evident from the findings that there is need for concerted effort by school to orientate prospective teachers on the benefits of teaching practice. Also the major challenges faced by prospective teachers should also be addressed to allow them have good grasp from the benefits of teaching practice.

The Effects of the SUN Project on Teacher Knowledge and Self-Efficacy Regarding Biological Energy Transfer Are Significant and Long-Lasting: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial

Science.gov (United States)

Batiza, Ann Finney; Gruhl, Mary; Zhang, Bo; Harrington, Tom; Roberts, Marisa; LaFlamme, Donna; Haasch, Mary Anne; Knopp, Jonathan; Vogt, Gina; Goodsell, David; Hagedorn, Eric; Marcey, David; Hoelzer, Mark; Nelson, Dave

2013-01-01

Biological energy flow has been notoriously difficult to teach. Our approach to this topic relies on abiotic and biotic examples of the energy released by moving electrons in thermodynamically spontaneous reactions. A series of analogical model-building experiences was supported with common language and representations including manipulatives. These materials were designed to help learners understand why electrons move in a hydrogen explosion and hydrogen fuel cell, so they could ultimately understand the rationale for energy transfer in the mitochondrion and the chloroplast. High school biology teachers attended a 2-wk Students Understanding eNergy (SUN) workshop during a randomized controlled trial. These treatment group teachers then took hydrogen fuel cells, manipulatives, and other materials into their regular biology classrooms. In this paper, we report significant gains in teacher knowledge and self-efficacy regarding biological energy transfer in the treatment group versus randomized controls. Significant effects on treatment group teacher knowledge and self-efficacy were found not only post–SUN workshop but even 1 yr later. Teacher knowledge was measured with both a multiple-choice exam and a drawing with a written explanation. Teacher confidence in their ability to teach biological energy transfer was measured by a modified form of the Science Teaching Efficacy Belief Instrument, In-Service A. Professional development implications regarding this topic are discussed. PMID:23737635

The beginning teacher of the deaf in the United States. A view from the field.

Science.gov (United States)

Rittenhouse, B; Kenyon-Rittenhouse, P

1997-03-01

This study explored the strengths and weaknesses of first year teachers of the deaf through 2 randomly-distributed national surveys and interviews with randomly-selected respondents. The data were gathered over a 2-year period. Interviews were carried out on location in day and residential schools for the deaf and at university sites. Results indicate that there is much clearly focused dissatisfaction, but also some real satisfaction in the deaf education community. From the college-bound deaf students and those presently attending college, to the teachers in schools for deaf students and in the universities that prepare them, there are consistent concerns, a real desire to work together, and a commitment to the deaf students. Deaf students, schools, and their alumni sense that they are all part of the whole but too often at odds with each other. Students want to be involved in school decision making and school supervisors agree that this should happen. Teachers want to work with university programs and program directors value the teachers' work. Alumni retrospectively see ways to improve high school education and their high school contemporaries articulated similar suggestions.

The ECE Pre-Service Teachers' Perception on Factors Affecting the Integration of Educational Computer Games in Two Conditions: Selecting versus Redesigning

Science.gov (United States)

Sancar Tokmak, Hatice; Ozgelen, Sinan

2013-01-01

This case study aimed to examine early childhood education (ECE) pre-service teachers' perception on the factors affecting integration of educational computer games to their instruction in two areas: selecting and redesigning. Twenty-six ECE pre-service teachers participated in the study. The data was collected through open-ended questionnaires,…

Inculcation of Values across the School Curriculum: Development and Validation of Teachers' Orientation Scale

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mohamad Sahari

1999-12-01

Full Text Available Teacher orientation to the inculcation of values across school curriculum-a function of the teacher knowledge and attitudes-has been conceptualised as his or her (1 identification with the goals of the curriculum, and (2 conformity with the predetermined instructional behaviours. Based on this framework, the study explored the construct of teacher orientation to the inculcation of values across school subjects. More specifically, the study examined the likelihood of two underlying dimensions explaining the presence of variability in teacher orientation and the reliability of the dimensions. Using a 15-item instrument developed earlier for a descriptive inquiry, the present study measured and analysed responses from 103 secondary school teachers from two randomly selected schools. To arrive at the conclusions, the study applied principal component analysis and Cronbach's alpha procedures. The results suggested that teacher orientation to value inculcation is a multidimensional construct. The more reliable dimensions of Teacher Orientation were found to be goal identification, conformity to planning tasks, and conformity to delivery tasks. The results add new information to, and may serve as a guide for future research.

Efficacy of an internet-based problem-solving training for teachers: results of a randomized controlled trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Ebert, David Daniel; Lehr, Dirk; Boß, Leif; Riper, Heleen; Cuijpers, Pim; Andersson, Gerhard; Thiart, Hanne; Heber, Elena; Berking, Matthias

2014-11-01

The primary purpose of this randomized controlled trial (RCT) was to evaluate the efficacy of internet-based problem-solving training (iPST) for employees in the educational sector (teachers) with depressive symptoms. The results of training were compared to those of a waitlist control group (WLC). One-hundred and fifty teachers with elevated depressive symptoms (Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale, CES-D ≥16) were assigned to either the iPST or WLC group. The iPST consisted of five lessons, including problem-solving and rumination techniques. Symptoms were assessed before the intervention began and in follow-up assessments after seven weeks, three months, and six months. The primary outcome was depressive symptom severity (CES-D). Secondary outcomes included general and work-specific self-efficacy, perceived stress, pathological worries, burnout symptoms, general physical and mental health, and absenteeism. iPST participants displayed a significantly greater reduction in depressive symptoms after the intervention (d=0.59, 95% CI 0.26-0.92), after three months (d=0.37, 95% CI 0.05-0.70) and after six months (d=0.38, 95% CI 0.05-0.70) compared to the control group. The iPST participants also displayed significantly higher improvements in secondary outcomes. However, workplace absenteeism was not significantly affected. iPST is effective in reducing symptoms of depression among teachers. Disseminated on a large scale, iPST could contribute to reducing the burden of stress-related mental health problems among teachers. Future studies should evaluate iPST approaches for use in other working populations.

The Relationship between Happiness, Subjective Well-Being, Creativity and Job Performance of Primary School Teachers in Ramhormoz City

Science.gov (United States)

Jalali, Zohreh; Heidari, Alireza

2016-01-01

The research aimed to investigate the relationship between happiness, subjective well-being, creativity and job performance of primary school teachers in Ramhormoz City. Hence, a sample of 330 individuals was selected through random stratified sampling. The research tools included Oxford Happiness Inventory, Subjective Well-being Scale by Keyes…

Teacher's and Students' Beliefs on English for General Academic Purposes: The Case of Iranian University Students

Science.gov (United States)

Kojour, Masoud Kermani; Heirati, Javad Kia

2015-01-01

This study was framed in the sociocultural theory to look into the evolution of L2 learners' beliefs about the general English course during a term. One hundred ninety-eight male and female university students and their general English course teacher were randomly selected as the participants of the study. Data were gathered through the…

The influence of fidelity of implementation on teacher-student interaction quality in the context of a randomized controlled trial of the Responsive Classroom approach.

Science.gov (United States)

Abry, Tashia; Rimm-Kaufman, Sara E; Larsen, Ross A; Brewer, Alexis J

2013-08-01

This study examined the direct and indirect effects between training in the Responsive Classroom® (RC) approach, teachers' uptake of RC practices, and teacher-student interaction quality, using a structural equation modeling framework. A total of 24 schools were randomly assigned to experimental or control conditions. Third- and fourth-grade teachers in treatment schools (n=132) received training in the RC approach, whereas teachers in control schools (n=107) continued "business as usual." Observers rated teachers' fidelity of implementation (FOI) of RC practices 5 times throughout the year using the Classroom Practices Observation Measure. In addition, teachers completed self-report measures of FOI, the Classroom Practices Teacher Survey and Classroom Practices Frequency Survey, at the end of the school year. Teacher-student interactions were rated during classroom observations using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System. Controlling for teachers' grade level and teacher-student interaction quality at pretest, RC training was expected to predict posttest teacher-student interaction quality directly and indirectly through FOI. Results supported only a significant indirect effect, β=0.85, p=.002. Specifically, RC teachers had higher levels of FOI of RC practices, β=1.62, pteacher-student interaction quality, β=0.52, p=.001, R2=.32. Discussion highlights factors contributing to variability in FOI and school administrators roles in supporting FOI. Copyright © 2013 Society for the Study of School Psychology. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Approaches to Building Teacher-Parent Cooperation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Franc Cankar

2012-01-01

Full Text Available The purpose of this study was to explore the areas of cooperation inwhich parent and teacher expectations were the same and where they differed. Data were obtained from a sample of 55 randomly selected primary schools. We analyzed school-to home communications, parentalinfluence on school decisions, and parent involvement in different school activities. At the same time, we also explored building cooperation among the teachers, students, and their parents, within the framework of the program ‘Reading and Conversation’. The findings indicated that the third- and ninth- grade lead teachers were mostly in agreement about the importance of parent involvement and as such represented a fairly homogenous group. The third-grade lead teachers were more open about actual involvement of parents in instruction than their ninth-grade colleagues, who were more cautious and restrained. In contrast to the lead teachers who represented a relatively narrow professional group, parents’ views were much more diverse. Parental education was the best predictor of their readiness to become involved in the life and work of their children’s school. Whether the area in which the families lived was urban or suburban did not make any difference. The evaluation of the one-year ‘Reading and Conversation’ programme revealed increases in parents’motivation to collaborate with the school as a consequence of the program’s approach to work, as well as improvement in mutual relationships and dialogue.

The relationship between teacher-related factors and students' attitudes towards secondary school chemistry subject in Bureti district, Kenya

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Salome Chepkorir

2014-12-01

Full Text Available This paper examines the relationship between teacher-related factors and student’s attitudes towards Chemistry subject in secondary schools in Kenya. The paper is based on a study conducted in Bureti District in Kericho County, Kenya. This paper highlights issues on the teaching methods used by chemistry teachers, the teachers’ availability to attend to various needs of students on the subject, their use of teaching and learning resources in teaching, teachers’ personal levels of skills and knowledge of the subject matter in Chemistry and the impact of students’ negative attitudes towards Chemistry on teachers’ effectiveness. The research design used in the study was descriptive survey. The target population comprised Form Four students in ten selected secondary schools in Bureti District of Rift Valley Province Kenya. Stratified random sampling technique was used to select the study sample. Schools were selected from the following categories: Girls’ schools, Boys’ schools and Co-educational schools. Simple random sampling was used to select the respondents from Form Four classes as well as a teacher in each school. In all, one hundred and eighty-nine students and ten teachers filled the questionnaires. The data collection instruments were questionnaires based on the Likert scale and document analysis. Data was analyzed descriptively using frequency tables, means and percentages while hypotheses were tested using Analysis of Variance. From the study findings, a number of indicators revealed that there are some factors influencing students’ attitudes towards Chemistry, including lack of successful experiences in Chemistry, poor teaching. It was recommended that science teachers’ should encourage development of positive self-concept of ability among students. Among other recommendations, the study suggests that guidance and counselling of students in schools should be encouraged, to ensure positive attitudes towards and full

Relationships between school support, school facilities, ICT culture and mathematics teachers' attitudes towards ICT in teaching and learning

Science.gov (United States)

Ayub, Ahmad Fauzi Mohd; Bakar, Kamariah Abu; Ismail, Rohayati

2012-05-01

Information communication Technology (ICT) has been a major influence in the Malaysian Education System, especially in the teaching of mathematics. Since 2003, the Malaysian Ministry of Education has provided incentives to mathematics teacher to motivate them to use ICT using English as the medium of instruction, during the teaching and learning process. However, there are barriers that prevented mathematics teachers from using ICT in the classrooms. This study is to determine factors that influenced the attitudes of Malaysian Mathematic Teachers in integrating ICT in their teaching and learning. One hundred ninety one mathematics teachers were randomly selected for the purpose of this study. The three factors investigated were school support, school facilities and school culture which had been selected to be correlated with teachers' attitudes towards integrating ICT in the teaching and learning of mathematics. Findings showed that significant positive relationships existed between teachers' attitudes toward integrating ICT in the teaching and learning and school support, school facilities and ICT culture and This finding indicated that, in order to develop teachers' attitudes in using ICT during their teaching and learning process, they needed support from the school principals and also their colleagues. Apart from that, school facilities and also ICT culture were also found to be essential.

Enhancing pre-service physics teachers' creative thinking skills through HOT lab design

Science.gov (United States)

Malik, Adam; Setiawan, Agus; Suhandi, Andi; Permanasari, Anna

2017-08-01

A research on the implementation of HOT (Higher Order Thinking) Laboratory has been carried out. This research is aimed to compare increasing of creative thinking skills of pre-service physics teachers who receive physics lesson with HOT Lab and with verification lab for the topic of electric circuit. This research used a quasi-experiment methods with control group pretest-posttest design. The subject of the research is 40 Physics Education pre-service physics teachers of UIN Sunan Gunung Djati Bandung. Research samples were selected by class random sampling technique. Data on pre-service physics teachers' creative thinking skills were collected using test of creative thinking skills in the form of essay. The results of the research reveal that average of N-gain of creative thinking skills are for pre-service physics teachers who received lesson with HOT Lab design and for pre-service physics teachers who received lesson with verification lab, respectively. Therefore, we conclude that application of HOT Lab design is more effective to increase creative thinking skills in the lesson of electric circuit.

INVESTIGATION OF PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHERS INDIVIDUAL INNOVATIVENESS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zeynep YILMAZ ÖZTÜRK

2014-07-01

Full Text Available The rapid changes in the global sense of individual adaptation to the new situation quickly necessitates individuals to show an innovative style in order to wriggle out similars. Being innovative becomes prerequisites of bringing qualified person fort he provision of skilled labor in the 21st century. Many of our teachers’ sincere behaviours are example for students following them. It is thought that an innovative structure of our teachers causes students to develop in this directi on. The aim of our research in this context is to propound individual innovativeness ,categories and the levels of the teachers in primary schools who shapes the future of our country . This study is a descriptive research conducted quantitative approach. Universe of the study consists of 190 primary schools in the townships constitutes of şehitkamil Sahinbey city in Gaziantep. The sample was selected randomly. They belong to the category of teachers and determine their level of innovation data f or the Hurt et al. (1997 developed by the "Individual Innovativeness" scale Kılıçer and Odabaşı (2010 made by the Turkish cultural adaptation, validity and reliability studies were collected by state.individual Innovation level of teachers and categorie s are determined.

Medical students-as-teachers: a systematic review of peer-assisted teaching during medical school

Science.gov (United States)

Yu, Tzu-Chieh; Wilson, Nichola C; Singh, Primal P; Lemanu, Daniel P; Hawken, Susan J; Hill, Andrew G

2011-01-01

Introduction International interest in peer-teaching and peer-assisted learning (PAL) during undergraduate medical programs has grown in recent years, reflected both in literature and in practice. There, remains however, a distinct lack of objective clarity and consensus on the true effectiveness of peer-teaching and its short- and long-term impacts on learning outcomes and clinical practice. Objective To summarize and critically appraise evidence presented on peer-teaching effectiveness and its impact on objective learning outcomes of medical students. Method A literature search was conducted in four electronic databases. Titles and abstracts were screened and selection was based on strict eligibility criteria after examining full-texts. Two reviewers used a standard review and analysis framework to independently extract data from each study. Discrepancies in opinions were resolved by discussion in consultation with other reviewers. Adapted models of “Kirkpatrick’s Levels of Learning” were used to grade the impact size of study outcomes. Results From 127 potential titles, 41 were obtained as full-texts, and 19 selected after close examination and group deliberation. Fifteen studies focused on student-learner outcomes and four on student-teacher learning outcomes. Ten studies utilized randomized allocation and the majority of study participants were self-selected volunteers. Written examinations and observed clinical evaluations were common study outcome assessments. Eleven studies provided student-teachers with formal teacher training. Overall, results suggest that peer-teaching, in highly selective contexts, achieves short-term learner outcomes that are comparable with those produced by faculty-based teaching. Furthermore, peer-teaching has beneficial effects on student-teacher learning outcomes. Conclusions Peer-teaching in undergraduate medical programs is comparable to conventional teaching when utilized in selected contexts. There is evidence to suggest

Blind Measurement Selection: A Random Matrix Theory Approach

KAUST Repository

Elkhalil, Khalil

2016-12-14

This paper considers the problem of selecting a set of $k$ measurements from $n$ available sensor observations. The selected measurements should minimize a certain error function assessing the error in estimating a certain $m$ dimensional parameter vector. The exhaustive search inspecting each of the $n\\\\choose k$ possible choices would require a very high computational complexity and as such is not practical for large $n$ and $k$. Alternative methods with low complexity have recently been investigated but their main drawbacks are that 1) they require perfect knowledge of the measurement matrix and 2) they need to be applied at the pace of change of the measurement matrix. To overcome these issues, we consider the asymptotic regime in which $k$, $n$ and $m$ grow large at the same pace. Tools from random matrix theory are then used to approximate in closed-form the most important error measures that are commonly used. The asymptotic approximations are then leveraged to select properly $k$ measurements exhibiting low values for the asymptotic error measures. Two heuristic algorithms are proposed: the first one merely consists in applying the convex optimization artifice to the asymptotic error measure. The second algorithm is a low-complexity greedy algorithm that attempts to look for a sufficiently good solution for the original minimization problem. The greedy algorithm can be applied to both the exact and the asymptotic error measures and can be thus implemented in blind and channel-aware fashions. We present two potential applications where the proposed algorithms can be used, namely antenna selection for uplink transmissions in large scale multi-user systems and sensor selection for wireless sensor networks. Numerical results are also presented and sustain the efficiency of the proposed blind methods in reaching the performances of channel-aware algorithms.

Determination of in-service needs of Turkish high school science teachers in Istanbul

Science.gov (United States)

Ogan, Feral

The purposes of this study were to identify the in-service needs of high school science teachers in Istanbul, Turkey according to the subgroups such as school type and gender and determine the priority obstacles preventing these science teachers from attendance at in-service programs. Moreover, this study aimed to find the other greatest needs of high school science teachers that are not mentioned in the survey instrument. The data for this research was gathered by conducting a survey in Istanbul, Turkey in Fall 2001 and Spring 2002 Semesters. Turkish translation of the modified version of a science teacher's needs inventory, Science Teacher Inventory of Need (STIN), entitled STIN-2 was used as the survey instrument. The subjects consisted of 75 high school science teachers who were selected from 369 high schools by using stratified random sampling in grades nine through eleven. By personally administering the survey, 422 science teachers from 75 high schools completed the survey and a 97% response rate was achieved. The results obtained in this study show that Turkish high school science teachers in Istanbul have a number of shared needs. One other indication is that they also have a number of needs, which are specific to subgroups of those science teachers.

Obeying the Rules or Gaming the System? Delegating Random Selection for Examinations to Head Teachers within an Accountability System

Science.gov (United States)

Elstad, Eyvind; Turmo, Are

2011-01-01

As education systems around the world move towards increased accountability based on performance measures, it is important to investigate the unintended effects of accountability systems. This article seeks to explore the extent to which head teachers in a large Norwegian municipality may resort to gaming the incentive system to boost their…

When teacher clusters work: selected experiences of South African ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Using qualitative data from a large-scale research project, we explore teachers' perspec- tives on what ... a common purpose: to alter the knowledge, beliefs and practices of teachers (Guskey,. 2002). Indeed .... Research methodology.

Using ArcMap, Google Earth, and Global Positioning Systems to select and locate random households in rural Haiti.

Science.gov (United States)

Wampler, Peter J; Rediske, Richard R; Molla, Azizur R

2013-01-18

A remote sensing technique was developed which combines a Geographic Information System (GIS); Google Earth, and Microsoft Excel to identify home locations for a random sample of households in rural Haiti. The method was used to select homes for ethnographic and water quality research in a region of rural Haiti located within 9 km of a local hospital and source of health education in Deschapelles, Haiti. The technique does not require access to governmental records or ground based surveys to collect household location data and can be performed in a rapid, cost-effective manner. The random selection of households and the location of these households during field surveys were accomplished using GIS, Google Earth, Microsoft Excel, and handheld Garmin GPSmap 76CSx GPS units. Homes were identified and mapped in Google Earth, exported to ArcMap 10.0, and a random list of homes was generated using Microsoft Excel which was then loaded onto handheld GPS units for field location. The development and use of a remote sensing method was essential to the selection and location of random households. A total of 537 homes initially were mapped and a randomized subset of 96 was identified as potential survey locations. Over 96% of the homes mapped using Google Earth imagery were correctly identified as occupied dwellings. Only 3.6% of the occupants of mapped homes visited declined to be interviewed. 16.4% of the homes visited were not occupied at the time of the visit due to work away from the home or market days. A total of 55 households were located using this method during the 10 days of fieldwork in May and June of 2012. The method used to generate and field locate random homes for surveys and water sampling was an effective means of selecting random households in a rural environment lacking geolocation infrastructure. The success rate for locating households using a handheld GPS was excellent and only rarely was local knowledge required to identify and locate households. This

Using ArcMap, Google Earth, and Global Positioning Systems to select and locate random households in rural Haiti

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Wampler Peter J

2013-01-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background A remote sensing technique was developed which combines a Geographic Information System (GIS; Google Earth, and Microsoft Excel to identify home locations for a random sample of households in rural Haiti. The method was used to select homes for ethnographic and water quality research in a region of rural Haiti located within 9 km of a local hospital and source of health education in Deschapelles, Haiti. The technique does not require access to governmental records or ground based surveys to collect household location data and can be performed in a rapid, cost-effective manner. Methods The random selection of households and the location of these households during field surveys were accomplished using GIS, Google Earth, Microsoft Excel, and handheld Garmin GPSmap 76CSx GPS units. Homes were identified and mapped in Google Earth, exported to ArcMap 10.0, and a random list of homes was generated using Microsoft Excel which was then loaded onto handheld GPS units for field location. The development and use of a remote sensing method was essential to the selection and location of random households. Results A total of 537 homes initially were mapped and a randomized subset of 96 was identified as potential survey locations. Over 96% of the homes mapped using Google Earth imagery were correctly identified as occupied dwellings. Only 3.6% of the occupants of mapped homes visited declined to be interviewed. 16.4% of the homes visited were not occupied at the time of the visit due to work away from the home or market days. A total of 55 households were located using this method during the 10 days of fieldwork in May and June of 2012. Conclusions The method used to generate and field locate random homes for surveys and water sampling was an effective means of selecting random households in a rural environment lacking geolocation infrastructure. The success rate for locating households using a handheld GPS was excellent and only

Asthma knowledge level of child daycare center teachers' in Istanbul, Turkey.

Science.gov (United States)

Akcay, A; Tamay, Z; Duksal, F; Celtik, C; Ergin, A; Guler, N

2014-08-01

Teachers are primarily responsible for supervising schoolchildren with asthma during school hours. The purpose of this study was to elucidate the level of knowledge of child daycare center teachers about asthma and factors affecting their knowledge. This study was performed on 297 teachers from 20 randomly selected child daycare centers in Istanbul. The teachers' level of knowledge about asthma was assessed by a questionnaire with 32 questions about asthma. The teachers were asked thirteen additional questions about demographic data and other characteristics of the child daycare centers and about themselves. One-way ANOVA and the independent samples t-test were used to determine differences in the level of asthma knowledge. A total of 297 teachers (287 females/10 males) filled in the questionnaire. The mean age of the teachers was 26.4 ± 8.1 years (range, 20-53 year). The teachers' "response score rate for each question" ranged from 38% to 94%. The teachers' "completely true response rate for each question" was lower and ranged from 1.6% to 83.9%. "The mean of asthma knowledge score" for the 32 questions was 113.64 ± 20.26 (71% ± 12.7%) from a maximum of 160 marks. "Asthma knowledge score for all questions" was related to teachers' gender, age, location and property of child daycare center and number of children in child daycare center. Although teachers of child daycare centers have some knowledge about asthma, their "completely true response rate for each question" was insufficient. Much more efficient educational programs are needed for these teachers.

Designation of teacher candidates self-efficacy and success level about designing multimedia

OpenAIRE

Vasfi Tugun; Fezile Özdamlı

2016-01-01

This research aims to determine the self-efficacy and success levels of teacher candidates on developing multimedia to the Docebo learning management system through integrating various online tools in developing multimedia course and using this method in project-based learning process. Second year students from the department of Computer Education and Educational Technology participated in this research. Random selection method was used in order to assign the students to the groups. Online (3...

Correlation of Dimensions of an Effective Teacher with Students’ Entrepreneurial Motivation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bijan Rezaei

2016-12-01

Full Text Available Introduction: This study was conducted to evaluate the association of dimensions of an efficient teacher with entrepreneurial motivation from the viewpoint of students. Methods: The study population of this research included 110 pharmacy students (above third semester at Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences, among whom 86 students were selected as the study sample through simple random sampling using Cochrane formula. The effective teacher questionnaire (researcher-made, with Cronbach's alpha of 0.95, and the entrepreneurial motivation scale, with Cronbach's alpha of 0.81, were used to collect the data. The collected data were analyzed by SPSS.21 software using correlation coefficient and simple linear and simultaneous regression analysis. Results: The results showed a significantly positive correlation between personality traits from among the dimensions of effective teacher and students' entrepreneurial motivation (P<0.01. Other dimensions had a slight impact on students' entrepreneurial motivation. Conclusion: The personality traits of an effective teacher can significantly explain entrepreneurial motivation. Thus, personality traits are the most essential factors to be used to achieve educational objectives and to inspire entrepreneurial motivation.

Optimizing Event Selection with the Random Grid Search

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Bhat, Pushpalatha C. [Fermilab; Prosper, Harrison B. [Florida State U.; Sekmen, Sezen [Kyungpook Natl. U.; Stewart, Chip [Broad Inst., Cambridge

2017-06-29

The random grid search (RGS) is a simple, but efficient, stochastic algorithm to find optimal cuts that was developed in the context of the search for the top quark at Fermilab in the mid-1990s. The algorithm, and associated code, have been enhanced recently with the introduction of two new cut types, one of which has been successfully used in searches for supersymmetry at the Large Hadron Collider. The RGS optimization algorithm is described along with the recent developments, which are illustrated with two examples from particle physics. One explores the optimization of the selection of vector boson fusion events in the four-lepton decay mode of the Higgs boson and the other optimizes SUSY searches using boosted objects and the razor variables.

Factors predicting teachers' attitudes towards the use of ICT in teaching and learning

Science.gov (United States)

Ayub, Ahmad Fauzi Mohd; Bakar, Kamariah Abu; Ismail, Rohayati

2015-10-01

Technology has revolutionized in the field of Education. The importance of technology in schools cannot be ignored. While it is important that mathematics teachers should have positive attitudes towards adopting ICT in their teaching, various problems can arise when integrating ICT into classroom lessons. This study explored the factors that influence the attitudes of mathematic teachers in the integration of ICT in the teaching and learning process. A total of 187 mathematics teachers from the state of Selangor in Malaysia were randomly selected from a stratified cluster sample. The research examined five factors that were postulated to impact teachers' attitudes towards the integration of ICT in their lessons, viz. teachers' technology competence, school culture, access to ICT, school support, and years of classroom teaching experience. The findings showed that the teachers' attitudes towards using ICT in teaching and learning were positively correlated with the teachers' technology competence [r = .41; p ICT school culture [r = .261; p ICT resources [r = .220; p ICT in teaching and learning [r = -0.192; p ICT in the classroom was explained by the variation in teachers' technology competence, school support and school culture, with the effects of teaching experience and ICT resource access being negligible.

Teacher Quality Indicators as Predictors of Instructional Assessment Practices in Science Classrooms in Secondary Schools in Barbados

Science.gov (United States)

Ogunkola, Babalola J.; Archer-Bradshaw, Ramona E.

2013-02-01

This study investigated the self-reported instructional assessment practices of a selected sample of secondary school science teachers in Barbados. The study sought to determine if there were statistically significant differences in the instructional assessment practices of teachers based on their sex and teacher quality (teaching experience, professional qualification and teacher academic qualification). It also sought to determine the extent to which each of these four selected variables individually and jointly affected the teachers' report of their instructional assessment practices. A sample of 55 science teachers from nine secondary schools in Barbados was randomly selected to participate in this study. Data was collected by means of a survey and was analyzed using the means and standard deviations of the instructional assessment practices scores and linear, multiple and binary logistic regression. The results of the study were such that the majority of the sample reported good overall instructional assessment practices while only a few participants reported moderate assessment practices. The instructional assessment practices in the area of student knowledge were mostly moderate as indicated by the sample. There were no statistically significant differences between or among the mean scores of the teachers' reported instructional assessment practices based on sex ( t = 0.10; df = 53; p = 0.992), teaching experience ( F[4,50] = 1.766; p = 0.150), the level of professional qualification (F[3,45] = 0.2117; p = 0.111) or the level of academic qualification (F[2,52] = 0.504; p = 0.607). The independent variables (teacher sex, teaching experience, teacher professional qualification or teacher academic qualification) were not significant predictors of the instructional assessment practices scores. However, teacher sex was a significant predictor of the teachers' report of good instructional assessment practices. The study also found that the joint effect of the

Non-random mating for selection with restricted rates of inbreeding and overlapping generations

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Sonesson, A.K.; Meuwissen, T.H.E.

2002-01-01

Minimum coancestry mating with a maximum of one offspring per mating pair (MC1) is compared with random mating schemes for populations with overlapping generations. Optimum contribution selection is used, whereby $\\\\\\\\Delta F$ is restricted. For schemes with $\\\\\\\\Delta F$ restricted to 0.25% per

Occupational low back pain in primary and high school teachers: prevalence and associated factors.

Science.gov (United States)

Mohseni Bandpei, Mohammad A; Ehsani, Fatemeh; Behtash, Hamid; Ghanipour, Marziyeh

2014-01-01

The purposes of this study were to investigate the prevalence of and risk factors for low back pain (LBP) in teachers and to evaluate the association of individual and occupational characteristics with the prevalence of LBP. In this cross-sectional study, 586 asymptomatic teachers were randomly selected from 22 primary and high schools in Semnan city of Iran. Data on the personal, occupational characteristics, pain intensity, and functional disability as well as the prevalence and risk factors of LBP were collected using different questionnaires. Point, last month, last 6 months, annual, and lifetime prevalence rates of LBP were 21.8%, 26.3%, 29.6%, 31.1%, and 36.5%, respectively. The highest prevalence was obtained for the high school teachers. The prevalence of LBP was significantly associated with age, body mass index, job satisfaction, and length of employment (P teachers appears to be high. High school teachers were more likely to experience LBP than primary school teachers. Factors such as age, body mass index, length of employment, job satisfaction, and work-related activities were significant factors associated with LBP in this teacher population. Copyright © 2014 National University of Health Sciences. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Implementing HIV/AIDS education: impact of teachers' training on HIV/AIDS education in Bangladesh.

Science.gov (United States)

Sarma, Haribondhu; Oliveras, Elizabeth

2013-03-01

School-based HIV/AIDS education is a common and well-proven intervention strategy for providing information on HIV/AIDS to young people. However, lack of skills among teachers for imparting sensitive information to students can lead to programme failure in terms of achieving goals. A cross-sectional study was conducted among teachers to identify the factors that support or hinder their role in HIV/AIDS education. A self-administered questionnaire was used for interviewing teachers from randomly-selected schools in two adjacent districts in Bangladesh. Based on exposure to teachers' training, the districts were divided into control and intervention areas and the teachers' ability, skill, and their participation in HIV/AIDS education were compared between the districts. Trained teachers in the intervention schools were more likely to participate, less likely to face difficulties, and more likely to use interactive teaching methods in HIV/ AIDS classes compared to the controls who did not receive any training. Inadequate allocation of time for conducting the HIV/AIDS class was found to be barriers to HIV/AIDS education that suggest the need to provide teachers with more support in terms of training and logistics.

The Impact of Short-Term Science Teacher Professional Development on the Evaluation of Student Understanding and Errors Related to Natural Selection

Science.gov (United States)

Buschang, Rebecca Ellen

2012-01-01

This study evaluated the effects of a short-term professional development session. Forty volunteer high school biology teachers were randomly assigned to one of two professional development conditions: (a) developing deep content knowledge (i.e., control condition) or (b) evaluating student errors and understanding in writing samples (i.e.,…

Probing Language Teacher Accountability in Utilizing Self-developed Language Teaching Resources

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Marjan Vosoughi

2018-03-01

Full Text Available This study was aimed at recognizing constraints on the way of some Iranian language teachers' utilization of self-developed, localized, English language teaching resources. To this aim, three sets of teacher variables on pedagogical and personal accounts were examined including Language teachers' experience (novice/experienced, their educational level (BA/MA/PhD and their gender. Data were collected in two phases. In the first phase, through stratified sampling, some eighty-three volunteering, English language teachers (Male and Female, who were indulged in the Iranian Ministry of Education (MoE, university settings (public and private and language institutes were randomly selected.  Teachers’ responses to a validated researcher-made questionnaire on language teacher curriculum autonomy revealed an overall significant Multiple R with F (3, 80 =.88, (0.04 but each individual above-cited predictors could not significantly predict teacher curriculum autonomy score. In the second phase for triangulation aims, three above-cited teacher variables were mapped over the insights gained through written interview sessions with some fourteen English language teachers.  Language teachers' self-reported 'challenges' and 'opportunities' for using self-developed language teaching resources for class use were content analyzed. It became evident that teaching experience was mystified in some respects in terms of its influence over interviewed teachers since diverse intentions on the part of the language teachers in this research might have deterred them not to use their full potential over using their own materials in class. Possible reasons for this situation have been fully discussed in the end.

Do Science and Technology Teachers and Pre-Service Primary Teachers Have Different Thoughts about Concept Maps in Science and Technology Lessons?

Science.gov (United States)

Karakuyu, Yunus

2011-01-01

The purpose of this study is to determine the thoughts of primary science and technology teachers, primary class teachers, pre-service primary class teachers and pre-service primary science and technology teachers' about concept maps. This scale applied the use of basic and random method on the chosen 125 4th and 5th grade primary class teachers…

Comparative Evaluations of Randomly Selected Four Point-of-Care Glucometer Devices in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Science.gov (United States)

Wolde, Mistire; Tarekegn, Getahun; Kebede, Tedla

2018-05-01

Point-of-care glucometer (PoCG) devices play a significant role in self-monitoring of the blood sugar level, particularly in the follow-up of high blood sugar therapeutic response. The aim of this study was to evaluate blood glucose test results performed with four randomly selected glucometers on diabetes and control subjects versus standard wet chemistry (hexokinase) methods in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A prospective cross-sectional study was conducted on randomly selected 200 study participants (100 participants with diabetes and 100 healthy controls). Four randomly selected PoCG devices (CareSens N, DIAVUE Prudential, On Call Extra, i-QARE DS-W) were evaluated against hexokinase method and ISO 15197:2003 and ISO 15197:2013 standards. The minimum and maximum blood sugar values were recorded by CareSens N (21 mg/dl) and hexokinase method (498.8 mg/dl), respectively. The mean sugar values of all PoCG devices except On Call Extra showed significant differences compared with the reference hexokinase method. Meanwhile, all four PoCG devices had strong positive relationship (>80%) with the reference method (hexokinase). On the other hand, none of the four PoCG devices fulfilled the minimum accuracy measurement set by ISO 15197:2003 and ISO 15197:2013 standards. In addition, the linear regression analysis revealed that all four selected PoCG overestimated the glucose concentrations. The overall evaluation of the selected four PoCG measurements were poorly correlated with standard reference method. Therefore, before introducing PoCG devices to the market, there should be a standardized evaluation platform for validation. Further similar large-scale studies on other PoCG devices also need to be undertaken.

Geography and genography: prediction of continental origin using randomly selected single nucleotide polymorphisms

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ramoni Marco F

2007-03-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Recent studies have shown that when individuals are grouped on the basis of genetic similarity, group membership corresponds closely to continental origin. There has been considerable debate about the implications of these findings in the context of larger debates about race and the extent of genetic variation between groups. Some have argued that clustering according to continental origin demonstrates the existence of significant genetic differences between groups and that these differences may have important implications for differences in health and disease. Others argue that clustering according to continental origin requires the use of large amounts of genetic data or specifically chosen markers and is indicative only of very subtle genetic differences that are unlikely to have biomedical significance. Results We used small numbers of randomly selected single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs from the International HapMap Project to train naïve Bayes classifiers for prediction of ancestral continent of origin. Predictive accuracy was tested on two independent data sets. Genetically similar groups should be difficult to distinguish, especially if only a small number of genetic markers are used. The genetic differences between continentally defined groups are sufficiently large that one can accurately predict ancestral continent of origin using only a minute, randomly selected fraction of the genetic variation present in the human genome. Genotype data from only 50 random SNPs was sufficient to predict ancestral continent of origin in our primary test data set with an average accuracy of 95%. Genetic variations informative about ancestry were common and widely distributed throughout the genome. Conclusion Accurate characterization of ancestry is possible using small numbers of randomly selected SNPs. The results presented here show how investigators conducting genetic association studies can use small numbers of arbitrarily

Job satisfaction among urban secondary-school teachers in Namibia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Evy George

2008-05-01

Full Text Available An exploratory study on the role of extrinsic and intrinsic factors in determining job satisfaction amongst urban secondary-school teachers in Namibia was undertaken. Biographical variables pertaining to the teachers' gender, age, marital status, school resources, teaching experience, academic qualifications, and rank were investigated to determine whether these had any significant relevance, or made any notable contribution, to the level of job satisfaction experienced. Also, the correlation between burnout and job satisfaction was investigated to determine the extent to which these two factors are related. A sample of 337 secondary-school teachers randomly selected from 17 government schools, in the Windhoek region of Namibia, voluntarily participated in the study. Results showed significant levels of dissatisfaction pertaining to intrinsic factors of work and, more especially, those factors relating to school area and rank. A significant correlation between levels of burnout and job satisfaction was found, particularly in respect of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, which were shown to correlate with low levels of job satisfaction. Limitations and recommendations pertaining to the study are discussed.

Transportability of an Evidence-Based Early Childhood Intervention in a Low-Income African Country: Results of a Cluster Randomized Controlled Study.

Science.gov (United States)

Huang, Keng-Yen; Nakigudde, Janet; Rhule, Dana; Gumikiriza-Onoria, Joy Louise; Abura, Gloria; Kolawole, Bukky; Ndyanabangi, Sheila; Kim, Sharon; Seidman, Edward; Ogedegbe, Gbenga; Brotman, Laurie Miller

2017-11-01

Children in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are burdened by significant unmet mental health needs. Despite the successes of numerous school-based interventions for promoting child mental health, most evidence-based interventions (EBIs) are not available in SSA. This study investigated the implementation quality and effectiveness of one component of an EBI from a developed country (USA) in a SSA country (Uganda). The EBI component, Professional Development, was provided by trained Ugandan mental health professionals to Ugandan primary school teachers. It included large-group experiential training and small-group coaching to introduce and support a range of evidence-based practices (EBPs) to create nurturing and predictable classroom experiences. The study was guided by the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research, the Teacher Training Implementation Model, and the RE-AIM evaluation framework. Effectiveness outcomes were studied using a cluster randomized design, in which 10 schools were randomized to intervention and wait-list control conditions. A total of 79 early childhood teachers participated. Teacher knowledge and the use of EBPs were assessed at baseline and immediately post-intervention (4-5 months later). A sample of 154 parents was randomly selected to report on child behavior at baseline and post-intervention. Linear mixed effect modeling was applied to examine effectiveness outcomes. Findings support the feasibility of training Ugandan mental health professionals to provide Professional Development for Ugandan teachers. Professional Development was delivered with high levels of fidelity and resulted in improved teacher EBP knowledge and the use of EBPs in the classroom, and child social competence.

Science Teacher Training Programme in Rural Schools: An ODL Lesson from Zimbabwe

OpenAIRE

Misheck Mhishi; Crispen Erinos Bhukuvhani; Abel Farikai Sana

2012-01-01

This case study looked at 76 randomly selected preservice science teachers from Mbire and Guruve districts who were learning at the Mushumbi Centre in Zimbabwe and assessed their motivations for enrolling under the Bindura University of Science Education (BUSE)’s Virtual and Open Distance Learning (VODL) programme. It also looked at the challenges they faced, their views on how instruction under the programme can be improved, and their deployment preferences after graduation. The districts ar...

Structural equation modeling assessing relationship between mathematics beliefs, teachers' attitudes and teaching practices among novice teachers in Malaysia

Science.gov (United States)

Borhan, Noziati; Zakaria, Effandi

2017-05-01

This quantitative study was conducted to investigate the perception level of novice teachers about mathematics belief, teachers' attitude towards mathematics and teaching practices of mathematics in the classroom. In addition, it also aims to identify whether there is a correspondence model with the data obtained and to identify the relationship between the variables of beliefs, attitudes and practices among novice teachers in Malaysia. A total of 263 primary novice teachers throughout the country were involved in this study were selected randomly. Respondents are required to provide a response to the questionnaire of 66 items related to mathematics beliefs, attitudes and practices of the teaching mathematics. There are ten sub-factors which have been established in this instrument for three major constructs using a Likert scale rating of five points. The items of the constructs undergo the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) procedure involve of unidimensionality test, convergent validity, construct validity and discriminant validity. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the frequency, percentage, the mean and standard deviation for completing some research questions that have been expressed. As for inferential statistical analysis, the researchers used structural equation modeling (SEM) to answer the question of correspondents model and the relationship between these three variables. The results of the study were found that there exist a correspondence measurement and structural model with the data obtained. While the relationship between variable found that mathematics beliefs have a significant influence on teachers' attitudes towards mathematics as well as the relationship between the attitudes with teaching practices. Meanwhile, mathematics belief had no significant relationship with mathematics teaching practices among novice teachers in Malaysia.

Fuzzy Random λ-Mean SAD Portfolio Selection Problem: An Ant Colony Optimization Approach

Science.gov (United States)

Thakur, Gour Sundar Mitra; Bhattacharyya, Rupak; Mitra, Swapan Kumar

2010-10-01

To reach the investment goal, one has to select a combination of securities among different portfolios containing large number of securities. Only the past records of each security do not guarantee the future return. As there are many uncertain factors which directly or indirectly influence the stock market and there are also some newer stock markets which do not have enough historical data, experts' expectation and experience must be combined with the past records to generate an effective portfolio selection model. In this paper the return of security is assumed to be Fuzzy Random Variable Set (FRVS), where returns are set of random numbers which are in turn fuzzy numbers. A new λ-Mean Semi Absolute Deviation (λ-MSAD) portfolio selection model is developed. The subjective opinions of the investors to the rate of returns of each security are taken into consideration by introducing a pessimistic-optimistic parameter vector λ. λ-Mean Semi Absolute Deviation (λ-MSAD) model is preferred as it follows absolute deviation of the rate of returns of a portfolio instead of the variance as the measure of the risk. As this model can be reduced to Linear Programming Problem (LPP) it can be solved much faster than quadratic programming problems. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is used for solving the portfolio selection problem. ACO is a paradigm for designing meta-heuristic algorithms for combinatorial optimization problem. Data from BSE is used for illustration.

General Music Teachers' Backgrounds and Multicultural Repertoire Selection

Science.gov (United States)

Lee, Soojin

2018-01-01

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine how teachers' backgrounds could contribute to their decisions to include music from diverse cultures. Analysis of interviews with three general music teachers indicated that their music training and experiences, ethnic backgrounds, and years of teaching experience may have influenced their…

Pediatric selective mutism therapy: a randomized controlled trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Esposito, Maria; Gimigliano, Francesca; Barillari, Maria R; Precenzano, Francesco; Ruberto, Maria; Sepe, Joseph; Barillari, Umberto; Gimigliano, Raffaele; Militerni, Roberto; Messina, Giovanni; Carotenuto, Marco

2017-10-01

Selective mutism (SM) is a rare disease in children coded by DSM-5 as an anxiety disorder. Despite the disabling nature of the disease, there is still no specific treatment. The aims of this study were to verify the efficacy of six-month standard psychomotor treatment and the positive changes in lifestyle, in a population of children affected by SM. Randomized controlled trial registered in the European Clinical Trials Registry (EuDract 2015-001161-36). University third level Centre (Child and Adolescent Neuropsychiatry Clinic). Study population was composed by 67 children in group A (psychomotricity treatment) (35 M, mean age 7.84±1.15) and 71 children in group B (behavioral and educational counseling) (37 M, mean age 7.75±1.36). Psychomotor treatment was administered by trained child therapists in residential settings three times per week. Each child was treated for the whole period by the same therapist and all the therapists shared the same protocol. The standard psychomotor session length is of 45 minutes. At T0 and after 6 months (T1) of treatments, patients underwent a behavioral and SM severity assessment. To verify the effects of the psychomotor management, the Child Behavior Checklist questionnaire (CBCL) and Selective Mutism Questionnaire (SMQ) were administered to the parents. After 6 months of psychomotor treatment SM children showed a significant reduction among CBCL scores such as in social relations, anxious/depressed, social problems and total problems (Pselective mutism, even if further studies are needed. The present study identifies in psychomotricity a safe and efficacy therapy for pediatric selective mutism.

Teacher-Child Relationships and Pedagogical Practices: Considering the Teacher's Perspective

Science.gov (United States)

Thijs, Jochem T.; Koomen, Helma M. Y.; van der Leij, Aryan

2008-01-01

This study explored the link between teachers' reports of their relationships with individual kindergartners and their self-reported pedagogical practices toward these children. Two samples of kindergarten teachers were examined. They were questioned about, respectively, 117 and 167 children selected as socially inhibited, hyperactive, or average…

The SUPERCOMET 2 Project: Teacher Seminar and Teacher Guide

Science.gov (United States)

Engstrom, V.; Ireson, G.; Latal, H.; Mathelitsch, L.; Michelini, M.; Peeters, W.; Rath, G.

2008-05-01

The Leonardo da Vinci pilot projects SUPERCOMET (2001-2004) and SUPERCOMET 2 (2004-2007) developed and tested teacher training materials for active, minds-on learning of electromagnetism and superconductivity at the level of upper secondary school. New multimedia materials for the pupils supported the teacher materials, including a teacher seminar in 4 half-day modules detailing the scientific contents, teaching methods, using ICT in physics teaching and learning, online collaboration and further resources for exploring the selected topics. The aim of these projects were to improve the quality of physics teaching on a European level, involving a combined total of 45 partners in 16 countries, and conducting trials at 67 schools with approx. 230 teachers, 280 trainee teachers and 2200 pupils. New follow-up projects develop hands-on materials for carrying out the activities described in the teacher guide and seminars and additional teacher materials involving modelling, simulations and data logging.

Teacher cognition and the teaching of EFL reading in Norwegian upper primary classrooms

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Trine Mathiesen Gilje

2014-10-01

Full Text Available This article is about a qualitative study of teacher cognition and the teaching of EFL reading in Norwegian upper primary classrooms. Teacher cognition, defined by Borg (2003, p.81 as ‘what teachers think, know, and believe and the relationships of these mental constructs to what teachers do in the language teaching classroom’, is a relatively new field of research, with few studies focussing on its link to the teaching of EFL reading skills in state schools or in young language learner classrooms. The study therefore aimed to explore upper primary EFL teachers’ reading-related materials and practices, what knowledge, attitudes and beliefs formed the basis of their choices, and the role of teacher education in this context. The method was semi-structured interviews with eight randomly selected 6th grade EFL-teachers. The study showed that the teachers primarily based their teaching of EFL reading on textbooks, used them in similar ways, but also used additional reading materials to varying extents. The teachers thus appeared to be heavily guided by their textbooks, in addition to intuition and routines. The impact of formal teacher education varied from teacher to teacher. Nevertheless, it was argued that pre-service and in-service teacher education will play an important role in helping future EFL teachers make and understand the choices they make about reading materials and pracices, so that they can meet the demands of increasingly diverse classrooms due to differences in linguistic, social and national backgrounds between pupils.

A Guide to Selected Curriculum Materials on Interdependence, Conflict, and Change: Teacher Comments on Classroom Use and Implementation.

Science.gov (United States)

New York Friends Group, Inc., New York. Center for War/Peace Studies.

The purpose of this compilation of teacher-developed descriptive evaluations of curriculum materials is to provide practical guidance to available materials dealing with the selected themes of interdependence, conflict, and change. Each of six conceptual units presented on change, conflict, identity, interdependence, power and authority, and…

Primitive polynomials selection method for pseudo-random number generator

Science.gov (United States)

Anikin, I. V.; Alnajjar, Kh

2018-01-01

In this paper we suggested the method for primitive polynomials selection of special type. This kind of polynomials can be efficiently used as a characteristic polynomials for linear feedback shift registers in pseudo-random number generators. The proposed method consists of two basic steps: finding minimum-cost irreducible polynomials of the desired degree and applying primitivity tests to get the primitive ones. Finally two primitive polynomials, which was found by the proposed method, used in pseudorandom number generator based on fuzzy logic (FRNG) which had been suggested before by the authors. The sequences generated by new version of FRNG have low correlation magnitude, high linear complexity, less power consumption, is more balanced and have better statistical properties.

Evaluation of DynED Courses Used in Elementary Schools From the Views of Teachers in Turkey

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gökhan BAŞ

2010-04-01

Full Text Available In this study, it was aimed to evaluate DynED courses used in English classes in elementary schools of Turkey from the views of teachers. The study was conducted with the students and teachers in Nigde, Turkey in the spring term of 2008-2009 academic year. The participants of the study were twelve English language teachers from six elementary schools. Two teachers from each school participated in the study which makes totally twelve English language teachers. Six teachers from some rural area elementary schools and six teachers from city centre elementary schools participated in the study. The teachers were selected randomly. The data of this study were analysed through descriptive analysis techniques by using NVivo2 Qualitative Data Analysis Programme. In this study, semi-structured illustrative qualitative research method was used. Consequently, the teachers stated that they were applying DynED courses in schools. Similarly, they had positive observations during the application of these courses. On the other hand, they stated that they faced with some difficulties such as technological problems, limited time of English courses at school and school principals‟ negative attitudes towards the usage of these courses, etc. They also stated other difficulties and problems they faced in the duration of DynED courses at school.

Attitude of Regular and Itinerant Teachers Towards the Inclusion of Hearing Impairment Children

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kamal Parhoon

2014-12-01

Full Text Available Objectives: Inclusive education is a process of enabling all children to learn and participate effectively within mainstream school systems. It does not segregate children who have different abilities or needs. This article explores the attitudes of regular and itinerant teachers about inclusion of hearing impairment children in their schools in general education. Methods: In a descriptive Survey research design, the sample included 100 teachers (50 regular and 50 itinerant who were selected randomly, according to a multistage sampling method. Data was collected by using questionnaire with 32 questions regarding their attitudes. One-way Analysis of Variance and t-test were performed to obtain between- group comparisons. Results: The results indicated that the teacher's positive attitudes towards inclusive educational system of students with hearing impairment. Significant difference in attitudes was observed, based on the teaching experience, gender, level of teaching. The results also indicate that most teachers are agreeable to the inclusion of students with hearing impairment in their classrooms. Discussion: successful inclusion for hearing impairment children in regular classrooms entails the positive attitudes of Regular and itinerant teachers through a systematic programming within the classroom.

The Student-Teacher Relationship

Science.gov (United States)

Schlechty, Phillip C.; Atwood, Helen E.

1977-01-01

Possible bases for student influence over teachers are examined. Since teachers cannot avoid being influenced by students, it is important for them to consciously select the kinds of influence efforts to which they will respond. (MJB)

[Effects of mental workload on work ability in primary and secondary school teachers].

Science.gov (United States)

Xiao, Yuanmei; Li, Weijuan; Ren, Qingfeng; Ren, Xiaohui; Wang, Zhiming; Wang, Mianzhen; Lan, Yajia

2015-02-01

To investigate the change pattern of primary and secondary school teachers' work ability with the changes in their mental workload. A total of 901 primary and secondary school teachers were selected by random cluster sampling, and then their mental workload and work ability were assessed by National Aeronautics and Space Administration-Task Load Index (NASA-TLX) and Work Ability Index (WAI) questionnaires, whose reliability and validity had been tested. The effects of their mental workload on the work ability were analyzed. Primary and secondary school teachers' work ability reached the highest level at a certain level of mental workload (55.73work ability had a positive correlation with the mental workload. Their work ability increased or maintained stable with the increasing mental workload. Moreover, the percentage of teachers with good work ability increased, while that of teachers with moderate work ability decreased. But when their mental workload was higher than the level, their work ability had a negative correlation with the mental workload. Their work ability significantly decreased with the increasing mental workload (P work ability decreased, while that of teachers with moderate work ability increased (P work ability. Moderate mental workload (55.73∼64.10) will benefit the maintaining and stabilization of their work ability.

Randomizing Roaches: Exploring the "Bugs" of Randomization in Experimental Design

Science.gov (United States)

Wagler, Amy; Wagler, Ron

2014-01-01

Understanding the roles of random selection and random assignment in experimental design is a central learning objective in most introductory statistics courses. This article describes an activity, appropriate for a high school or introductory statistics course, designed to teach the concepts, values and pitfalls of random selection and assignment…

The readiness of teachers to integrate information and communication technology for learning in a selected school in the GautengOnline project.

OpenAIRE

2008-01-01

This study is aimed at providing the reader with a detailed description of the readiness of teachers to integrate Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for learning in a selected school in the GautengOnline (GoL) Project, through qualitative research design that used various data collecting methods: Questionnaire, observations and interview. A large number of teachers showed some interest in using ICT learning but had difficulties on how to get started due to the lack of suitable ICT...

Teacher Perfectionism and Iranian English Language Learners’ Motivation and Achievement

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Reza Rezvani

2015-11-01

Full Text Available Educational psychology has recently reflected a policy shift from focusing on “what goes wrong” in schools, including psychological, physical, and educational disabilities, to recognizing and promoting strengths and positive aspects of students and their environments. Within this scope, some lines of research have examined the extent to which setting personal high standards influences such positive outcomes as educational achievement and high level of motivation. The present study was motivated by the concern that Iranian English language teachers' setting high standards, i.e. perfectionism, may predict English language learners’ motivation and language achievement. Through cluster random sampling, a total of 30 English language teachers with more than one year of experience and 300 elementary English language learners were selected from English Language Institutes in Fars province, Iran. Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism scale and Motivations Underlying English Language Learning questionnaire were used to measure teachers' perfectionism and learners’ language learning motivation, respectively. The learners' final scores in the English courses were collected as a measure of their language learning achievement. The result of simple regression analysis revealed that the teachers' perfectionism did not predict English language learners’ motivation and language achievement. In other words, Iranian English language teachers' perfectionism did not account for any variance in these two variables of interest. Keywords: Perfectionism, Motivation, Language Learning Achievement

An Exploration of EFL Teachers' Attributions

Science.gov (United States)

Ghonsooly, Behzad; Ghanizadeh, Afsaneh; Ghazanfari, Mohammad; Ghabanchi, Zargham

2015-01-01

The present study investigated English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers' attributions of success and failure. It also set out to investigate whether these attributions vary by teachers' age, teaching experience, gender and educational level. To do so, 200 EFL teachers were selected according to convenience sampling among EFL teachers teaching…

Materials selection for oxide-based resistive random access memories

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Guo, Yuzheng; Robertson, John

2014-01-01

The energies of atomic processes in resistive random access memories (RRAMs) are calculated for four typical oxides, HfO 2 , TiO 2 , Ta 2 O 5 , and Al 2 O 3 , to define a materials selection process. O vacancies have the lowest defect formation energy in the O-poor limit and dominate the processes. A band diagram defines the operating Fermi energy and O chemical potential range. It is shown how the scavenger metal can be used to vary the O vacancy formation energy, via controlling the O chemical potential, and the mean Fermi energy. The high endurance of Ta 2 O 5 RRAM is related to its more stable amorphous phase and the adaptive lattice rearrangements of its O vacancy

Teacher coaching supported by formative assessment for improving classroom practices.

Science.gov (United States)

Fabiano, Gregory A; Reddy, Linda A; Dudek, Christopher M

2018-06-01

The present study is a wait-list controlled, randomized study investigating a teacher coaching approach that emphasizes formative assessment and visual performance feedback to enhance elementary school teachers' classroom practices. The coaching model targeted instructional and behavioral management practices as measured by the Classroom Strategies Assessment System (CSAS) Observer and Teacher Forms. The sample included 89 general education teachers, stratified by grade level, and randomly assigned to 1 of 2 conditions: (a) immediate coaching, or (b) waitlist control. Results indicated that, relative to the waitlist control, teachers in immediate coaching demonstrated significantly greater improvements in observations of behavior management strategy use but not for observations of instructional strategy use. Observer- and teacher-completed ratings of behavioral management strategy use at postassessment were significantly improved by both raters; ratings of instructional strategy use were significantly improved for teacher but not observer ratings. A brief coaching intervention improved teachers' use of observed behavior management strategies and self-reported use of behavior management and instructional strategies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Knowledge and attitude of secondary school teachers in Enugu to school based sex education.

Science.gov (United States)

Aniebue, P N

2007-12-01

To assess the knowledge and attitude to sex education among secondary school teachers in Enugu. A cross sectional study of 300 teachers drawn from nine randomly selected secondary schools in Enugu metropolis was carried out. Pre-tested self administered structured questionnaire was used as instrument for data collection. Three hundred teachers, 215 females and 85 males were interviewed. The mean age of the teachers was 38.1+/-7.5 years. Sixty-nine (23.0%) had adequate knowledge of sex education and 282 (94.0%) approved the inclusion of sex education into the school curriculum. The commonest reason for disapproval of sex education was fear that it would lead to promiscuity amongst the students. Educational status and marital status of the teachers were significant determinants of positive attitude to sex education psex education according to the teachers is 11-15 years. Two hundred and thirty eight (79.3%) respondents were of the opinion that teachers needed to be trained to provide sex education to students and 244 (81.3%) admitted that sex education was not in the school curriculum. Secondary school teachers are in support of provision of sex education to students. However they need training and skills on how to present sex information in a positive manner to achieve the desired goal. There is need to include sex education in the school curriculum.

The Effects of a Voice Education Program on VHI Scores of Elementary School Teachers.

Science.gov (United States)

Faham, Maryam; Ahmadi, Akram; Drinnan, Michael; Saadatmand, Najme; Fatahi, Elahe; Jalalipour, Maryam

2016-11-01

Teachers seem to be vulnerable to voice disorders because of excessive use of their voice. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of a voice education program on the Vocal Handicap Index (VHI) scores of elementary school teachers in the Persian education system. This was a semi-experimental study, performed in Shiraz public schools. Ten schools were selected on their similarity in number of students and teachers, and allocated at random to training or control groups. Sixty-one teachers in the training group and 66 teachers in the control group completed the VHI in the first week. Teachers in the trained group received voice education for 4 weeks, and then continued to follow the program for a further 4 weeks. The control group received no training. After 8 weeks, all subjects completed the questionnaire again. Compliance was good for all practices except "breathing exercises" and "using amplifiers" where it was exceptionally poor. Teachers in the training group improved significantly in total VHI score (from 14.2 to 6.8), whereas the control group showed a significant worsening (from 10.1 to 13.7). These effects were significant (P teachers, even without dysphonia, in the middle of their teaching. Such a program may have a place in the Persian education system. Copyright © 2016 The Voice Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A construct of the instrument for measuring junior high school mathematics teacher's self-efficacy

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rachmadi Widdiharto

2017-08-01

Full Text Available The aim of this study was to develop a construct of the instrument for junior high school mathematics teacher self-efficacy and its mapping in the Special Region of  Yogyakarta. The population was 816 junior high mathematics teacher and a sample of 274 teachers was selected through proportionate random sampling technique. The data were analyzed using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA, using software Lisrel 8.80 through the first order and the second order stages. The result of data analysis toward four dimensions obtained: 11 fit items for dimension of personal efficacy (PE, 12 fit items for dimension of general teaching efficacy  (GTE, 13 fit  items for dimension of subject matter teaching efficacy (STE, and 8 fit items for dimension of outcome efficacy (OE. Afterward, the result of selecting 54 items in the first order stage was examined for the second order CFA which obtained Chi-Square = 297.58; df = 271; p-value = 0.12824; RMSEA = 0.019, which showed the model was fit to the data and obtained 25 fit items.  The loading factors for each dimension PE, GTE, STE, and OE consecutively were: 0.46; 0.84; 0.89, and 0.92, and mapping of mathematics teacher self-efficacy level, which showed: 43.07% in low category, 55.47% in medium category (55.47% and 1.46% in the high category.

Effectiveness of a randomized school-based intervention involving families and teachers to prevent excessive weight gain among adolescents in Brazil.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Diana B Cunha

Full Text Available To evaluate the effectiveness of a school-based intervention involving the families and teachers that aimed to promote healthy eating habits in adolescents; the ultimate aim of the intervention was to reduce the increase in body mass index (BMI of the students.Paired cluster randomized school-based trial conducted with a sample of fifth graders.Twenty classes were randomly assigned into either an intervention group or a control group.From a total of 574 eligible students, 559 students participated in the study (intervention: 10 classes with 277 participants; control: 10 classes with 282 participants. The mean age of students was 11 years.Students attended 9 nutritional education sessions during the 2010 academic year. Parents/guardians and teachers received information on the same subjects.Changes in BMI and percentage of body fat.Intention-to-treat analysis showed that changes in BMI were not significantly different between the 2 groups (β = 0.003; p = 0.75. There was a major reduction in the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and cookies in the intervention group; students in this group also consumed more fruits.Encouraging the adoption of healthy eating habits promoted important changes in the adolescent diet, but this did not lead to a reduction in BMI gain. Strategies based exclusively on the quality of diet may not reduce weight gain among adolescents.Clinicaltrials.gov NCT01046474.

Emergence of multilevel selection in the prisoner's dilemma game on coevolving random networks

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Szolnoki, Attila; Perc, Matjaz

2009-01-01

We study the evolution of cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma game, whereby a coevolutionary rule is introduced that molds the random topology of the interaction network in two ways. First, existing links are deleted whenever a player adopts a new strategy or its degree exceeds a threshold value; second, new links are added randomly after a given number of game iterations. These coevolutionary processes correspond to the generic formation of new links and deletion of existing links that, especially in human societies, appear frequently as a consequence of ongoing socialization, change of lifestyle or death. Due to the counteraction of deletions and additions of links the initial heterogeneity of the interaction network is qualitatively preserved, and thus cannot be held responsible for the observed promotion of cooperation. Indeed, the coevolutionary rule evokes the spontaneous emergence of a powerful multilevel selection mechanism, which despite the sustained random topology of the evolving network, maintains cooperation across the whole span of defection temptation values.

Assessing the accuracy and stability of variable selection methods for random forest modeling in ecology

Science.gov (United States)

Random forest (RF) modeling has emerged as an important statistical learning method in ecology due to its exceptional predictive performance. However, for large and complex ecological datasets there is limited guidance on variable selection methods for RF modeling. Typically, e...

Optimization of the Dutch Matrix Test by Random Selection of Sentences From a Preselected Subset

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rolph Houben

2015-04-01

Full Text Available Matrix tests are available for speech recognition testing in many languages. For an accurate measurement, a steep psychometric function of the speech materials is required. For existing tests, it would be beneficial if it were possible to further optimize the available materials by increasing the function’s steepness. The objective is to show if the steepness of the psychometric function of an existing matrix test can be increased by selecting a homogeneous subset of recordings with the steepest sentence-based psychometric functions. We took data from a previous multicenter evaluation of the Dutch matrix test (45 normal-hearing listeners. Based on half of the data set, first the sentences (140 out of 311 with a similar speech reception threshold and with the steepest psychometric function (≥9.7%/dB were selected. Subsequently, the steepness of the psychometric function for this selection was calculated from the remaining (unused second half of the data set. The calculation showed that the slope increased from 10.2%/dB to 13.7%/dB. The resulting subset did not allow the construction of enough balanced test lists. Therefore, the measurement procedure was changed to randomly select the sentences during testing. Random selection may interfere with a representative occurrence of phonemes. However, in our material, the median phonemic occurrence remained close to that of the original test. This finding indicates that phonemic occurrence is not a critical factor. The work highlights the possibility that existing speech tests might be improved by selecting sentences with a steep psychometric function.

Does Teacher Preparation Matter? Evidence about Teacher Certification, Teach for America, and Teacher Effectiveness.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Linda Darling-Hammond

2005-10-01

Full Text Available Recent debates about the utility of teacher education have raised questions about whether certified teachers are, in general, more effective than those who have not met the testing and training requirements for certification, and whether some candidates with strong liberal arts backgrounds might be at least as effective as teacher education graduates. This study examines these questions with a large student-level data set from Houston, Texas that links student characteristics and achievement with data about their teachers' certification status, experience, and degree levels from 1995-2002. The data set also allows an examination of whether Teach for America (TFA candidates-recruits from selective universities who receive a few weeks of training before they begin teaching-are as effective as similarly experienced certified teachers. In a series of regression analyses looking at 4th and 5th grade student achievement gains on six different reading and mathematics tests over a six-year period, we find that certified teachers consistently produce stronger student achievement gains than do uncertified teachers. These findings hold for TFA recruits as well as others. Controlling for teacher experience, degrees, and student characteristics, uncertified TFA recruits are less effective than certified teachers, and perform about as well as other uncertified teachers. TFA recruits who become certified after 2 or 3 years do about as well as other certified teachers in supporting student achievement gains; however, nearly all of them leave within three years. Teachers' effectiveness appears strongly related to the preparation they have received for teaching.

Analyzing Mathematics Beliefs of Pre-Service Teachers Using Confirmatory Factor Analysis

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mazlini Adnan

2011-12-01

Full Text Available Mathematics beliefs play an important role in enhancing the quality and the effectiveness of teaching and learning. This study analyzes the mathematics beliefs of 317 pre-service teachers from six Higher Education Institutions (HEIs (Government Public Universities who were randomly selected to participate in this study. Questionnaires consisting of twenty three items were given to the respondents during the data collection process. The validation of the items was done by using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA. In order to obtain a model fit for the measurement model of mathematics beliefs, several fit index tests such as CMINDF, GFI, AGFI, IFI, NFI, CFI, TLI and RMSEA were used. Constructivist beliefs and traditional beliefs were identified as the contributing factors in the model. The analysis also revealed that mathematics beliefs consist of structures of two hidden variables. The correlation between the two variables (constructivist beliefs and traditional beliefs is at a moderate level. Hence, pre-service teachers should be able to recognize their type of mathematics beliefs in order to become effective mathematics teachers.

Random drift versus selection in academic vocabulary: an evolutionary analysis of published keywords.

Science.gov (United States)

Bentley, R Alexander

2008-08-27

The evolution of vocabulary in academic publishing is characterized via keyword frequencies recorded in the ISI Web of Science citations database. In four distinct case-studies, evolutionary analysis of keyword frequency change through time is compared to a model of random copying used as the null hypothesis, such that selection may be identified against it. The case studies from the physical sciences indicate greater selection in keyword choice than in the social sciences. Similar evolutionary analyses can be applied to a wide range of phenomena; wherever the popularity of multiple items through time has been recorded, as with web searches, or sales of popular music and books, for example.

Materials selection for oxide-based resistive random access memories

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Guo, Yuzheng; Robertson, John [Engineering Department, Cambridge University, Cambridge CB2 1PZ (United Kingdom)

2014-12-01

The energies of atomic processes in resistive random access memories (RRAMs) are calculated for four typical oxides, HfO{sub 2}, TiO{sub 2}, Ta{sub 2}O{sub 5}, and Al{sub 2}O{sub 3}, to define a materials selection process. O vacancies have the lowest defect formation energy in the O-poor limit and dominate the processes. A band diagram defines the operating Fermi energy and O chemical potential range. It is shown how the scavenger metal can be used to vary the O vacancy formation energy, via controlling the O chemical potential, and the mean Fermi energy. The high endurance of Ta{sub 2}O{sub 5} RRAM is related to its more stable amorphous phase and the adaptive lattice rearrangements of its O vacancy.

Effect of Structured Teaching Programme on Knowledge of School Teachers regarding First Aid Management in Selected Schools of Bangalore.

Science.gov (United States)

De, Piyali

2014-01-01

Safe childhood is the foundation of a good future. Children face different kinds of accidents at school premises while playing. Prevention of these accidents and their management is essential. A study was therefore conducted among school teachers at Anekal Taluk, Bangalore to make them aware about different accidents of children at school premises and their first aid management. The sample consisted of 30 primary and higher primary school teachers selected by convenience sampling technique. The analysis showed that improvement of knowledge occurred after administering structured teaching programme (STP) on first aid management. Nursing professionals can benefit from the study result at the area of community, administration, research and education.

The Impact of Short-Term Science Teacher Professional Development on the Evaluation of Student Understanding and Errors Related to Natural Selection. CRESST Report 822

Science.gov (United States)

Buschang, Rebecca E.

2012-01-01

This study evaluated the effects of a short-term professional development session. Forty volunteer high school biology teachers were randomly assigned to one of two professional development conditions: (a) developing deep content knowledge (i.e., control condition) or (b) evaluating student errors and understanding in writing samples (i.e.,…

JOB STRESS AMONG SCHOOL TEACHERS OF JAMMU REGION OF JAMMU AND KASHMIR

OpenAIRE

Sapana Sharma; Dr. Rajesh Kumar Sharma

2017-01-01

Stress is an organism’s total response to environmental demands or pressures. When stress was first studied in 1950’s, the term was used to denote both the causes and the experienced effects of these pressures .Stress may be good or bad. More recently, however, the word stressor has been used for the stimulus that provokes a stress response. The aim of the study was to find out the factor that creates stress among school teachers in Jammu region .The 60 respondents were selected by random s...

Student Teachers' Perceptions towards Teaching Practice Assessment

Science.gov (United States)

Chireshe, R.; Chireshe, E.

2010-01-01

The study investigated the perceptions of student teachers towards teaching practice assessment. Participants N=180:90 males, 90 females were randomly drawn from three primary school teachers' colleges in Masvingo Educational Region of Zimbabwe. A questionnaire was used to gather data from the respondents. A chi-square test was used to analyse the…

Factors on Enhancing the Competitive Edge and Attributes of Graduates as Inputs to the Development of Teacher Education Enhancement Program

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Susan S. Janer

2015-11-01

Full Text Available In response to the CHED’s Higher Education Development Project and the need to track the status of Sorsogon State College (SSC teacher education graduates, this research was conceptualized. The study aims to gauge the teacher education program’s thrust of providing a quality and relevant education that could ensure worthwhile and appropriate employment opportunity to its graduates. Descriptive research design was employed in this study. Surveys, unstructured interviews, and documentary analysis were undertaken to gather pertinent data among the respondents. The study consists of 427 teacher education graduates who were selected through stratified random technique. This tracer study determined the employability of Teacher Education graduates in SSC, Sorsogon Campus from 2009 to 2013 with an end-view of proposing a Teacher Education Enhancement Program (TEEP to enhance the competitive edge of SSC Teacher Education graduates in all teaching job opportunities. The intellectual, social and linguistic attributes of the SSC graduates were likewise identified in this study. Some of the factors identified by the respondents that could help improve their competitive edge are the pre-service trainings, job placement program, teacher education curriculum enrichment, and Licensure Examination for Teachers (LET review program.

Who's doing the talking? Teacher and parent experiences of parent-teacher conferences

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

E M Lemmer

2012-01-01

Full Text Available The most common form of direct communication between parents and teachers in schools worldwide is the parent-teacher conference. Purposeful parent-teacher conferences afford the teacher and the parent the opportunity to address a particular topic related to the child, such as academic progress and behaviour. However, teachers are seldom trained to interact with parents, and both parents and teachers often find such encounters stressful and ineffective. This paper investigates parent and teacher perspectives on the parent-teacher conference through a qualitative inquiry. This is framed by the contributions of ecological theorists to home-school communication and an overview of extant themes in the literature. In the present qualitative inquiry, teacher, parent and learner participants were selected by purposeful and snowball sampling and data were gathered by individual and focus group interviews, school visits and the perusal of written parent-teacher conference reports. The findings indicate that parent-teacher conferences are ritualised school events in all types of schools; parents and teachers' expectations of conferences are limited; teachers are not trained to conduct parent-teacher conferences; and conferencesare overwhelmingly directed at problem solution. Parent-teacher conferences are characterised by a client orientation to parents, rather than a partnership orientation to home-school relations.

The Division of PA Teacher Certification and Its Impact on Teacher Hiring

Science.gov (United States)

Vaughn, Ann Marie G.

2017-01-01

In 2008, the Pennsylvania Department of Education enacted Chapter 49-2 which divided the certified grade spans of Elementary Teachers. This dissertation addresses the question of how the change of PA Teacher Certifications, known as Chapter 49-2, has affected the selecting, interviewing, and hiring process for administrators. A problem was…

40 CFR 761.306 - Sampling 1 meter square surfaces by random selection of halves.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 40 Protection of Environment 30 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Sampling 1 meter square surfaces by...(b)(3) § 761.306 Sampling 1 meter square surfaces by random selection of halves. (a) Divide each 1 meter square portion where it is necessary to collect a surface wipe test sample into two equal (or as...

From Protocols to Publications: A Study in Selective Reporting of Outcomes in Randomized Trials in Oncology

Science.gov (United States)

Raghav, Kanwal Pratap Singh; Mahajan, Sminil; Yao, James C.; Hobbs, Brian P.; Berry, Donald A.; Pentz, Rebecca D.; Tam, Alda; Hong, Waun K.; Ellis, Lee M.; Abbruzzese, James; Overman, Michael J.

2015-01-01

Purpose The decision by journals to append protocols to published reports of randomized trials was a landmark event in clinical trial reporting. However, limited information is available on how this initiative effected transparency and selective reporting of clinical trial data. Methods We analyzed 74 oncology-based randomized trials published in Journal of Clinical Oncology, the New England Journal of Medicine, and The Lancet in 2012. To ascertain integrity of reporting, we compared published reports with their respective appended protocols with regard to primary end points, nonprimary end points, unplanned end points, and unplanned analyses. Results A total of 86 primary end points were reported in 74 randomized trials; nine trials had greater than one primary end point. Nine trials (12.2%) had some discrepancy between their planned and published primary end points. A total of 579 nonprimary end points (median, seven per trial) were planned, of which 373 (64.4%; median, five per trial) were reported. A significant positive correlation was found between the number of planned and nonreported nonprimary end points (Spearman r = 0.66; P < .001). Twenty-eight studies (37.8%) reported a total of 65 unplanned end points; 52 (80.0%) of which were not identified as unplanned. Thirty-one (41.9%) and 19 (25.7%) of 74 trials reported a total of 52 unplanned analyses involving primary end points and 33 unplanned analyses involving nonprimary end points, respectively. Studies reported positive unplanned end points and unplanned analyses more frequently than negative outcomes in abstracts (unplanned end points odds ratio, 6.8; P = .002; unplanned analyses odd ratio, 8.4; P = .007). Conclusion Despite public and reviewer access to protocols, selective outcome reporting persists and is a major concern in the reporting of randomized clinical trials. To foster credible evidence-based medicine, additional initiatives are needed to minimize selective reporting. PMID:26304898

Joint random beam and spectrum selection for spectrum sharing systems with partial channel state information

KAUST Repository

Abdallah, Mohamed M.

2013-11-01

In this work, we develop joint interference-aware random beam and spectrum selection scheme that provide enhanced performance for the secondary network under the condition that the interference observed at the primary receiver is below a predetermined acceptable value. We consider a secondary link composed of a transmitter equipped with multiple antennas and a single-antenna receiver sharing the same spectrum with a set of primary links composed of a single-antenna transmitter and a single-antenna receiver. The proposed schemes jointly select a beam, among a set of power-optimized random beams, as well as the primary spectrum that maximizes the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of the secondary link while satisfying the primary interference constraint. In particular, we consider the case where the interference level is described by a q-bit description of its magnitude, whereby we propose a technique to find the optimal quantizer thresholds in a mean square error (MSE) sense. © 2013 IEEE.

Joint random beam and spectrum selection for spectrum sharing systems with partial channel state information

KAUST Repository

Abdallah, Mohamed M.; Sayed, Mostafa M.; Alouini, Mohamed-Slim; Qaraqe, Khalid A.

2013-01-01

In this work, we develop joint interference-aware random beam and spectrum selection scheme that provide enhanced performance for the secondary network under the condition that the interference observed at the primary receiver is below a predetermined acceptable value. We consider a secondary link composed of a transmitter equipped with multiple antennas and a single-antenna receiver sharing the same spectrum with a set of primary links composed of a single-antenna transmitter and a single-antenna receiver. The proposed schemes jointly select a beam, among a set of power-optimized random beams, as well as the primary spectrum that maximizes the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of the secondary link while satisfying the primary interference constraint. In particular, we consider the case where the interference level is described by a q-bit description of its magnitude, whereby we propose a technique to find the optimal quantizer thresholds in a mean square error (MSE) sense. © 2013 IEEE.

The RANDOM computer program: A linear congruential random number generator

Science.gov (United States)

Miles, R. F., Jr.

1986-01-01

The RANDOM Computer Program is a FORTRAN program for generating random number sequences and testing linear congruential random number generators (LCGs). The linear congruential form of random number generator is discussed, and the selection of parameters of an LCG for a microcomputer described. This document describes the following: (1) The RANDOM Computer Program; (2) RANDOM.MOD, the computer code needed to implement an LCG in a FORTRAN program; and (3) The RANCYCLE and the ARITH Computer Programs that provide computational assistance in the selection of parameters for an LCG. The RANDOM, RANCYCLE, and ARITH Computer Programs are written in Microsoft FORTRAN for the IBM PC microcomputer and its compatibles. With only minor modifications, the RANDOM Computer Program and its LCG can be run on most micromputers or mainframe computers.

Analysis and applications of a frequency selective surface via a random distribution method

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Xie Shao-Yi; Huang Jing-Jian; Yuan Nai-Chang; Liu Li-Guo

2014-01-01

A novel frequency selective surface (FSS) for reducing radar cross section (RCS) is proposed in this paper. This FSS is based on the random distribution method, so it can be called random surface. In this paper, the stacked patches serving as periodic elements are employed for RCS reduction. Previous work has demonstrated the efficiency by utilizing the microstrip patches, especially for the reflectarray. First, the relevant theory of the method is described. Then a sample of a three-layer variable-sized stacked patch random surface with a dimension of 260 mm×260 mm is simulated, fabricated, and measured in order to demonstrate the validity of the proposed design. For the normal incidence, the 8-dB RCS reduction can be achieved both by the simulation and the measurement in 8 GHz–13 GHz. The oblique incidence of 30° is also investigated, in which the 7-dB RCS reduction can be obtained in a frequency range of 8 GHz–14 GHz. (condensed matter: electronic structure, electrical, magnetic, and optical properties)

THE INFLUENCE OF ORGANIZATIONAL CLIMATE, TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP, AND WORK MOTIVATION ON TEACHER JOB PERFORMANCE

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

K. Kartini

2017-07-01

Full Text Available This research aimed at investigating the influence of organizational climate, transformational leadership, and work motivation on teacher job performance at Pondok Modern Tazakka, Batang - Central Java.The research using a quantitative approach with survey method. Amount of the samples in this research are 55 teachers that selected randomly. The data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics and inferential statistic using path analysis. (1 organizational climate have positive direct effect on teacher performance with path coefficient (py1 = 0,257 and t-count 2,963> t-table 1,684; (2 transformational leadership have positive direct effect on teacher performance with path coefficient (py2 = 0,489 and t-count 5,164> t-table 1,684, (3 work motivation have positive direct effect to teacher performance with path coefficient (py3 = 0,261 and t count 2,42> t-table 1,684, (4 organizational climate have positive direct effect (p31 = 0.391 and t-count 3.990> t-table 1.684, and (5 transformational leadership have a direct positive effect on work motivation with path coefficient (p32 = 0.526 and t-count 5,376> t- table 1,684. The Conclusion is organizational climate, transformational leadership, and work motivation have a direct effect on teacher job performance. Organizational climate and transformational leadership also have a direct effect on teacher work motivation. Therefore to improve teacher job performance, organizational climate, transformational leadership, and work motivation must be considered to be improved.

Psycho-Social Factors Causing Stress: A Study of Teacher Educators

Science.gov (United States)

Jain, Geetika; Tyagi, Harish Kumar; Kumar, Anil

2015-01-01

Purpose: The present investigation was planned to determine the influence of type of personality, gender, age, qualification and experience causing stress among teacher educators at work. Method: A sample of 100 subjects from male and female teachers teaching in teacher training colleges, Delhi, India was drawn randomly. The data was collected by…

Random drift versus selection in academic vocabulary: an evolutionary analysis of published keywords.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

R Alexander Bentley

Full Text Available The evolution of vocabulary in academic publishing is characterized via keyword frequencies recorded in the ISI Web of Science citations database. In four distinct case-studies, evolutionary analysis of keyword frequency change through time is compared to a model of random copying used as the null hypothesis, such that selection may be identified against it. The case studies from the physical sciences indicate greater selection in keyword choice than in the social sciences. Similar evolutionary analyses can be applied to a wide range of phenomena; wherever the popularity of multiple items through time has been recorded, as with web searches, or sales of popular music and books, for example.

On theoretical models of gene expression evolution with random genetic drift and natural selection.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Osamu Ogasawara

2009-11-01

Full Text Available The relative contributions of natural selection and random genetic drift are a major source of debate in the study of gene expression evolution, which is hypothesized to serve as a bridge from molecular to phenotypic evolution. It has been suggested that the conflict between views is caused by the lack of a definite model of the neutral hypothesis, which can describe the long-run behavior of evolutionary change in mRNA abundance. Therefore previous studies have used inadequate analogies with the neutral prediction of other phenomena, such as amino acid or nucleotide sequence evolution, as the null hypothesis of their statistical inference.In this study, we introduced two novel theoretical models, one based on neutral drift and the other assuming natural selection, by focusing on a common property of the distribution of mRNA abundance among a variety of eukaryotic cells, which reflects the result of long-term evolution. Our results demonstrated that (1 our models can reproduce two independently found phenomena simultaneously: the time development of gene expression divergence and Zipf's law of the transcriptome; (2 cytological constraints can be explicitly formulated to describe long-term evolution; (3 the model assuming that natural selection optimized relative mRNA abundance was more consistent with previously published observations than the model of optimized absolute mRNA abundances.The models introduced in this study give a formulation of evolutionary change in the mRNA abundance of each gene as a stochastic process, on the basis of previously published observations. This model provides a foundation for interpreting observed data in studies of gene expression evolution, including identifying an adequate time scale for discriminating the effect of natural selection from that of random genetic drift of selectively neutral variations.

STUDY CONCERNING THE ELABORATION OF CERTAIN ORIENTATION MODELS AND THE INITIAL SELECTION FOR SPEED SKATING

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Vaida Marius

2009-12-01

Full Text Available In realizing this study I started from the premise that, by elaborating certain orientation models and initial selection for the speed skating and their application will appear superior results, necessary results, taking into account the actual evolution of the high performance sport in general and of the speed skating, in special.The target of this study has been the identification of an orientation model and a complete initial selection that should be based on the favorable aptitudes of the speed skating. On the basis of the made researched orientation models and initial selection has been made, things that have been demonstrated experimental that are not viable, the study starting from the data of the 120 copies, the complete experiment being made by 32 subjects separated in two groups, one using the proposed model and the other formed fromsubjects randomly selected.These models can serve as common working instruments both for the orientation process and for the initial selection one, being able to integrate in the proper practical activity, these being used easily both by coaches that are in charge with the proper selection of the athletes but also by the physical education teachers orschool teachers that are in contact with children of an early age.

From Protocols to Publications: A Study in Selective Reporting of Outcomes in Randomized Trials in Oncology.

Science.gov (United States)

Raghav, Kanwal Pratap Singh; Mahajan, Sminil; Yao, James C; Hobbs, Brian P; Berry, Donald A; Pentz, Rebecca D; Tam, Alda; Hong, Waun K; Ellis, Lee M; Abbruzzese, James; Overman, Michael J

2015-11-01

The decision by journals to append protocols to published reports of randomized trials was a landmark event in clinical trial reporting. However, limited information is available on how this initiative effected transparency and selective reporting of clinical trial data. We analyzed 74 oncology-based randomized trials published in Journal of Clinical Oncology, the New England Journal of Medicine, and The Lancet in 2012. To ascertain integrity of reporting, we compared published reports with their respective appended protocols with regard to primary end points, nonprimary end points, unplanned end points, and unplanned analyses. A total of 86 primary end points were reported in 74 randomized trials; nine trials had greater than one primary end point. Nine trials (12.2%) had some discrepancy between their planned and published primary end points. A total of 579 nonprimary end points (median, seven per trial) were planned, of which 373 (64.4%; median, five per trial) were reported. A significant positive correlation was found between the number of planned and nonreported nonprimary end points (Spearman r = 0.66; P medicine, additional initiatives are needed to minimize selective reporting. © 2015 by American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Effects of Pre-Service Teacher Learning and Student Teaching on Teacher Education

Science.gov (United States)

AlAjmi, Maadi M.; Al-Dhafiri, Mohammed D.; Al-Shammari, Zaid N.

2016-01-01

The purposes of this research were to investigate and examine the effects of pre-service teacher learning and student teaching on teacher education.Three hundred and ten out of 349 intentionally selected participants responded to a two-dimensional survey. The gender, nationality, marital status, age, and academic year had no significant effects,…

Dental trauma management awareness among primary school teachers in the Emirate of Ajman, United Arab Emirates.

Science.gov (United States)

Hashim, R

2011-06-01

To assess, by means of self-administered structured questionnaire, the level of knowledge of primary schools teachers in Ajman with regards to the immediate emergency management of dental trauma. The questionnaire was sent to teachers in randomly selected primary schools in Ajman. A total of 161 teachers responded (response rate 84.4%). The questionnaire surveyed teachers' background, knowledge and management of tooth fracture, avulsion, and also investigated teachers' attitudes and self-assessed knowledge. Ninety-one percent of the teachers were females, 51.6% in their thirties and 61.5% had university qualification. Fifty teachers had received formal first aid training, and only thirteen of them recalled that they had received training on the management of dental trauma. Concerning the management of tooth fracture, 138 respondents (85.8%) gave the appropriate management for fractured tooth. One hundred twenty-one (75%) of the respondents indicated that is very urgent to seek professional assistance if a permanent tooth is avulsed, but they had little knowledge on the correct media for transporting the avulsed tooth. Most teaches were unsatisfied with their level of knowledge for dental trauma and the majority were interested in having further education on the topic. The findings revealed that the level of knowledge of management of dental trauma (especially tooth avulsion) among school teachers in Ajman is inadequate, and education campaigns are necessary to improve their emergency management of dental injuries.

Head Teachers and Teachers as Pioneers in Facilitating Dyslexic Children in Primary Mainstream Schools

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Fahima Salman Jaka

2015-12-01

Full Text Available This study explores the perceptions of school heads and teachers in facilitating young dyslexic children in primary mainstream schools of Pakistan. Through purposive sampling, the researcher selected eight participants: Four primary school heads and four primary teachers from elite schools of Karachi. The research instrument selected for this study was in-depth interviews to get a deeper insight of school heads and teachers perceptions regarding the facilitation of dyslexic children. The findings revealed that children with dyslexia face many emotional and academic problems and only a few elite schools provide policy to facilitate them in mainstream education. Findings showed that some schools hired remedial teaching services or special education services and the school heads and primary teachers put in immense effort in preparing intervention plans and evaluation plans to suit individual and young dyslexic children needs. It was also suggested that positivity of the learning environment depends upon the teachers. The findings further disclosed that unlike the more developed nations, apart from a few elite schools in Pakistan, there is no importance paid to professional training related to dyslexia.

The perceptions and practices of selected high school teachers in special admission schools regarding writing across the curriculum

Science.gov (United States)

Mitchell, Rebecca Hayward

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) measured the writing achievement of 55,000 American school children. The students performed at the basic or lower level. In 1988, "The Writing Report Card of the NAEP," and in 1996, the Pennsylvania Mathematics and Reading Assessment along with the Stanford 9 Exam concluded that students, of all racial/ethnic backgrounds, are unable to write well except in response to the simplest tasks. The purpose of this study was to determine the perceptions and practices of math, science, and social studies high school teachers in special admission schools regarding writing across the curriculum (WAC). Specifically, this study attempted to answer: (1) Do math, science, and social studies teachers differ in their perceptions and practices regarding student writing in their classrooms? (2) Are teacher characteristics related to the perceptions and practices of math, science, and social studies teachers regarding the need for student writing in their classrooms? The questions led to the following null hypotheses: (1) There is no significant difference among math, science, and social studies teachers regarding their perceptions and practices for student writing in their classrooms. (2) There is no significant relationship between the highest degree earned, the length of teaching experience, and the level of grades taught by math, science, and social studies teachers and their perceptions and practices regarding the need for student writing in their classrooms. A review of the literature since 1992 using ERIC and Dissertation Abstracts revealed that there were no studies concerned with the focus of this particular study. A cross sectional survey of School District of Philadelphia math, science, and social studies high school teachers in special admission schools was conducted. A questionnaire was developed to obtain the data. A panel of experts was selected to establish validity of the instrument. Thirty-two usable

Teacher Empowerment as an Important Component of Job Satisfaction: A Comparative Study of Teachers' Perspectives in Al-Farwaniya District, Kuwait

Science.gov (United States)

Al-Yaseen, Wafaa Salem; Al-Musaileem, Mohammad Yousef

2015-01-01

The present comparative study investigates the perceptions of male and female teachers regarding the relationship between empowerment and job satisfaction. The study aims to look at factors that empower teachers and lead to job satisfaction from teachers' perspectives. For that purpose, teachers were selected from three educational levels…

Spanish language teacher program

CERN Multimedia

Caraban Gonzalez, Noemi

2017-01-01

These one-week programmes are held in one of the national languages of CERN Member States. National teacher programmes are also open for teachers from other countries speaking the same language. To follow up after each teacher programme, the lecture material and video recordings of selected lectures are archived to act as unique resources for all physics teachers when introducing particle physics into the classroom. CERN provides all scientific, administrative and technical support for the programme free of charge. This includes the scientific content and provision of national language facilitators, lecturers, and guides. However, costs for travel, accommodation and meals have to be covered individually by the teachers or by official sources, e.g. educational foundations or national authorities.

Screen Twice, Cut Once: Assessing the Predictive Validity of Teacher Selection Tools

Science.gov (United States)

Goldhaber, Dan; Grout, Cyrus; Huntington-Klein, Nick

2015-01-01

It is well documented that teachers can have profound effects on student outcomes. Empirical estimates find that a one standard deviation increase in teacher quality raises student test achievement by 10 to 25 percent of a standard deviation. More recent evidence shows that the effectiveness of teachers can affect long-term student outcomes, such…

High Entropy Random Selection Protocols

NARCIS (Netherlands)

H. Buhrman (Harry); M. Christandl (Matthias); M. Koucky (Michal); Z. Lotker (Zvi); B. Patt-Shamir; M. Charikar; K. Jansen; O. Reingold; J. Rolim

2007-01-01

textabstractIn this paper, we construct protocols for two parties that do not trust each other, to generate random variables with high Shannon entropy. We improve known bounds for the trade off between the number of rounds, length of communication and the entropy of the outcome.

Teachers' Attitude towards Implementation of Learner-Centered Methodology in Science Education in Kenya

Science.gov (United States)

Ndirangu, Caroline

2017-01-01

This study aims to evaluate teachers' attitude towards implementation of learner-centered methodology in science education in Kenya. The study used a survey design methodology, adopting the purposive, stratified random and simple random sampling procedures and hypothesised that there was no significant relationship between the head teachers'…

Centauri High School Teacher Honored as Colorado Outstanding Biology

Science.gov (United States)

Teacher Centauri High School Teacher Honored as Colorado Outstanding Biology Teacher For more information contact: e:mail: Public Affairs Golden, Colo., May 2, 1997 -- Tracy Swedlund, biology teacher at Centauri High School in LaJara, was selected as Colorado's 1997 Outstanding Biology Teacher and will be

The Role of Nice and Nasty Theory of Mind in Teacher-Selected Peer Models for Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Science.gov (United States)

Laghi, Fiorenzo; Lonigro, Antonia; Levanto, Simona; Ferraro, Maurizio; Baumgartner, Emma; Baiocco, Roberto

2016-01-01

The study aimed at verifying if nice and nasty theory of mind behaviors, in association with teachers' peer buddy nomination, could be used to correctly select peer models for adolescents with autism spectrum disorder. Mentalizing abilities and emotional and behavioral characteristics of 601 adolescents were assessed. Results suggest that teachers…

The Effects of a STEM Professional Development Intervention on Elementary Teachers' Science Process Skills

Science.gov (United States)

Cotabish, Alicia; Dailey, Deborah; Hughes, Gail D.; Robinson, Ann

2011-01-01

In order to increase the quality and quantity of science instruction, elementary teachers must receive professional development in science learning processes. The current study was part of a larger randomized field study of teacher and student learning in science. In two districts in a southern state, researchers randomly assigned teacher…

Field-based random sampling without a sampling frame: control selection for a case-control study in rural Africa.

Science.gov (United States)

Crampin, A C; Mwinuka, V; Malema, S S; Glynn, J R; Fine, P E

2001-01-01

Selection bias, particularly of controls, is common in case-control studies and may materially affect the results. Methods of control selection should be tailored both for the risk factors and disease under investigation and for the population being studied. We present here a control selection method devised for a case-control study of tuberculosis in rural Africa (Karonga, northern Malawi) that selects an age/sex frequency-matched random sample of the population, with a geographical distribution in proportion to the population density. We also present an audit of the selection process, and discuss the potential of this method in other settings.

Treatment selection in a randomized clinical trial via covariate-specific treatment effect curves.

Science.gov (United States)

Ma, Yunbei; Zhou, Xiao-Hua

2017-02-01

For time-to-event data in a randomized clinical trial, we proposed two new methods for selecting an optimal treatment for a patient based on the covariate-specific treatment effect curve, which is used to represent the clinical utility of a predictive biomarker. To select an optimal treatment for a patient with a specific biomarker value, we proposed pointwise confidence intervals for each covariate-specific treatment effect curve and the difference between covariate-specific treatment effect curves of two treatments. Furthermore, to select an optimal treatment for a future biomarker-defined subpopulation of patients, we proposed confidence bands for each covariate-specific treatment effect curve and the difference between each pair of covariate-specific treatment effect curve over a fixed interval of biomarker values. We constructed the confidence bands based on a resampling technique. We also conducted simulation studies to evaluate finite-sample properties of the proposed estimation methods. Finally, we illustrated the application of the proposed method in a real-world data set.

Motivation among Public Primary School Teachers in Mauritius

Science.gov (United States)

Seebaluck, Ashley Keshwar; Seegum, Trisha Devi

2013-01-01

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to critically analyse the factors that affect the motivation of public primary school teachers and also to investigate if there is any relationship between teacher motivation and job satisfaction in Mauritius. Design/methodology/approach: Simple random sampling method was used to collect data from 250 primary…

A Study on the Relationship between Teacher Self Efficacy and Burnout

Science.gov (United States)

Savas, Ahmet Cezmi; Bozgeyik, Yunus; Eser, Ismail

2014-01-01

The major purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between teacher self efficacy and burnout. In order to collect the related data, "Maslach Burnout Inventory" and "Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale" were used. The sample of the study consisted of 163 randomly chosen teachers who worked in various primary and…

Common psychiatric symptoms among public school teachers in Palmas, Tocantins, Brazil. An observational cross-sectional study

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Leonardo Baldaçara

Full Text Available CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVE: Teachers are at great risk of physical and mental stress due to material or psychological difficulties associated with their work. This study aimed to assess the prevalence of common psychiatric symptoms measured on the Self-Reporting Questionnaire (SRQ-20 scale that would suggest a diagnosis of psychiatric disorders among public school teachers in Palmas, Tocantins, Brazil, in 2012. DESIGN AND SETTING: Observational cross-sectional study in Palmas, Tocantins, Brazil. METHOD: We assessed 110 municipal teachers in the city of Palmas, Tocantins, Brazil. They were selected randomly from a list of employees of the Municipal Education Department of Palmas. All of them answered the SRQ-20 questionnaire after giving their consent. RESULTS: Between the years 2008 and 2011, 24 cases of absence from work due to mental disorders were found. We excluded one case and 109 teachers answered the SRQ-20questionnaire. Out of the 109 teachers assessed, 54 had ≥ 7 points on the SRQ-20 scale. This finding suggests that 49.5% of the teachers had symptoms that were sufficient to consider a diagnosis of mental disorder, with the need for treatment. CONCLUSION: Our study found that the prevalence of mental disorders among teachers is as high as seen in the literature. Our results suggest that recognition of mental disorders is low and that the current statistics fail to reach the occupational health sector.

Common psychiatric symptoms among public school teachers in Palmas, Tocantins, Brazil. An observational cross-sectional study.

Science.gov (United States)

Baldaçara, Leonardo; Silva, Álvaro Ferreira; Castro, José Gerley Díaz; Santos, Gessi de Carvalho Araújo

2015-01-01

Teachers are at great risk of physical and mental stress due to material or psychological difficulties associated with their work. This study aimed to assess the prevalence of common psychiatric symptoms measured on the Self-Reporting Questionnaire (SRQ-20) scale that would suggest a diagnosis of psychiatric disorders among public school teachers in Palmas, Tocantins, Brazil, in 2012. Observational cross-sectional study in Palmas, Tocantins, Brazil. We assessed 110 municipal teachers in the city of Palmas, Tocantins, Brazil. They were selected randomly from a list of employees of the Municipal Education Department of Palmas. All of them answered the SRQ-20 questionnaire after giving their consent. Between the years 2008 and 2011, 24 cases of absence from work due to mental disorders were found. We excluded one case and 109 teachers answered the SRQ-20questionnaire. Out of the 109 teachers assessed, 54 had ≥ 7 points on the SRQ-20 scale. This finding suggests that 49.5% of the teachers had symptoms that were sufficient to consider a diagnosis of mental disorder, with the need for treatment. Our study found that the prevalence of mental disorders among teachers is as high as seen in the literature. Our results suggest that recognition of mental disorders is low and that the current statistics fail to reach the occupational health sector.

Antecedent and Consequence of School Academic Optimism and Teachers' Academic Optimism Model

Science.gov (United States)

Hong, Fu-Yuan

2017-01-01

The main purpose of this research was to examine the relationships among school principals' transformational leadership, school academic optimism, teachers' academic optimism and teachers' professional commitment. This study conducted a questionnaire survey on 367 teachers from 20 high schools in Taiwan by random sampling, using principals'…

Emergency management of dental trauma: knowledge of Hong Kong primary and secondary school teachers.

Science.gov (United States)

Young, Cecilia; Wong, K Y; Cheung, L K

2012-10-01

OBJECTIVES. To investigate the level of knowledge about emergency management of dental trauma among Hong Kong primary and secondary school teachers. DESIGN. Questionnaire survey. SETTING. A teachers' union that unites 90% of teachers in Hong Kong. PARTICIPANTS. Randomly selected primary and secondary school teachers. RESULTS. Only 32.8% of respondents correctly stated that a person sustaining dental trauma should go to dentists directly. In all, 73.1% of teachers correctly stated that a dental trauma patient should go for treatment immediately. Only 32.5% knew that a fractured tooth should be put in liquid. Even fewer (23.2%) realised that the displaced tooth should be repositioned back to the original position. Relatively more respondents (74.7%) understood that an avulsed baby tooth should not be put back. Disappointingly, only 16.3% of teachers knew that an avulsed permanent tooth should be replanted. Furthermore, only 29.6% of teachers thought that they were able to distinguish between deciduous teeth and permanent teeth, whilst 20.4% correctly identified at least one of the appropriate mediums: milk, physiological saline or saliva, for storing an avulsed tooth. Teachers who previously received first-aid training with dental content or acquired dental injury information from other sources, scored significantly higher than teachers without such training or acquired information. CONCLUSION. The knowledge on emergency management of dental trauma among primary and secondary school teachers in Hong Kong is insufficient, particularly on the handling of permanent tooth avulsion and the appropriate storage medium for avulsed teeth. Receipt of first-aid training with dental contents and acquisition of dental injury information from other sources were positively correlated with knowledge in managing dental trauma.

Differentiating Science Instruction: Secondary science teachers' practices

Science.gov (United States)

Maeng, Jennifer L.; Bell, Randy L.

2015-09-01

This descriptive study investigated the implementation practices of secondary science teachers who differentiate instruction. Participants included seven high school science teachers purposefully selected from four different schools located in a mid-Atlantic state. Purposeful selection ensured participants included differentiated instruction (DI) in their lesson implementation. Data included semi-structured interviews and field notes from a minimum of four classroom observations, selected to capture the variety of differentiation strategies employed. These data were analyzed using a constant-comparative approach. Each classroom observation was scored using the validated Differentiated Instruction Implementation Matrix-Modified, which captured both the extent to which critical indicators of DI were present in teachers' instruction and the performance levels at which they engaged in these components of DI. Results indicated participants implemented a variety of differentiation strategies in their classrooms with varying proficiency. Evidence suggested all participants used instructional modifications that required little advance preparation to accommodate differences in students' interests and learning profile. Four of the seven participants implemented more complex instructional strategies that required substantial advance preparation by the teacher. Most significantly, this study provides practical strategies for in-service science teachers beginning to differentiate instruction and recommendations for professional development and preservice science teacher education.

Exploring the Relationship between Secondary Science Teachers' Subject Matter Knowledge and Knowledge of Student Conceptions While Teaching Evolution by Natural Selection

Science.gov (United States)

Lucero, Margaret M.; Petrosino, Anthony J.; Delgado, Cesar

2017-01-01

The fundamental scientific concept of evolution occurring by natural selection is home to many deeply held alternative conceptions and considered difficult to teach. Science teachers' subject matter knowledge (SMK) and the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) component of knowledge of students' conceptions (KOSC) can be valuable resources for…

School-based intervention for childhood disruptive behavior in disadvantaged settings: a randomized controlled trial with and without active teacher support.

Science.gov (United States)

Liber, Juliette M; De Boo, Gerly M; Huizenga, Hilde; Prins, Pier J M

2013-12-01

In this randomized controlled trial, we investigated the effectiveness of a school-based targeted intervention program for disruptive behavior. A child-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) program was introduced at schools in disadvantaged settings and with active teacher support (ATS) versus educational teacher support (ETS) (CBT + ATS vs. CBT + ETS). Screening (n = 1,929) and assessment (n = 224) led to the inclusion of 173 children ages 8-12 years from 17 elementary schools. Most of the children were boys (n = 136, 79%) of low or low-to-middle class socioeconomic status (87%); the sample was ethnically diverse (63% of non-Western origin). Children received CBT + ATS (n = 29) or CBT + ETS (n = 41) or were entered into a waitlist control condition (n = 103) to be treated afterward (CBT + ATS, n = 39, and CBT + ETS, n = 64). Effect sizes (ES), clinical significance (reliable change), and the results of multilevel modeling are reported. Ninety-seven percent of children completed treatment. Teachers and parents reported positive posttreatment effects (mean ES = .31) for CBT compared with the waitlist control condition on disruptive behavior. Multilevel modeling showed similar results. Clinical significance was modest. Changes had remained stable or had increased at 3-months follow-up (mean ES = .39). No consistent effect of teacher condition was found at posttreatment; however, at follow-up, children who received ETS fared significantly better. This study shows that a school-based CBT program is beneficial for difficult-to-reach children with disruptive behavior: The completion rate was remarkably high, ESs (mean ES = .31) matched those of previous studies with targeted intervention, and effects were maintained or had increased at follow-up.

Teachers' Health.

Science.gov (United States)

Scheuch, Klaus; Haufe, Eva; Seibt, Reingard

2015-05-15

Almost 800,000 teachers were working in Germany in the 2012-13 school year. A determination of the most common medical problems in this large occupational group serves as the basis for measures that help maintain teachers' health and their ability to work in their profession. We present our own research findings, a selective review of the literature, and data derived from the German statutory health insurance scheme concerning medical disability, long-term illness, and inability to work among teachers. Compared to the general population, teachers have a more healthful lifestyle and a lower frequency of cardiovascular risk factors (except hypertension). Like non-teachers, they commonly suffer from musculoskeletal and cardiovascular diseases. Mental and psychosomatic diseases are more common in teachers than in non-teachers, as are nonspecific complaints such as exhaustion, fatigue, headache, and tension. It is commonly said that 3-5% of teachers suffer from "burnout," but reliable data on this topic are lacking, among other reasons because the term has no standard definition. The percentage of teachers on sick leave is generally lower than the overall percentage among statutory insurees; it is higher in the former East Germany than in the former West Germany. The number of teachers taking early retirement because of illness has steadily declined from over 60% in 2001 and currently stands at 19%, with an average age of 58 years, among tenured teachers taking early retirement. The main reasons for early retirement are mental and psychosomatic illnesses, which together account for 32-50% of cases. Although German law mandates the medical care of persons in the teaching professions by occupational physicians, this requirement is implemented to varying extents in the different German federal states. Teachers need qualified, interdisciplinary occupational health care with the involvement of their treating physicians.

The Impact of Teacher Study Groups in Vocabulary on Teaching Practice, Teacher Knowledge, and Student Vocabulary Knowledge: A Large-Scale Replication Study

Science.gov (United States)

Jayanthi, Madhavi; Dimino, Joseph; Gersten, Russell; Taylor, Mary Jo; Haymond, Kelly; Smolkowski, Keith; Newman-Gonchar, Rebecca

2018-01-01

The purpose of this replication study was to examine the impact of the Teacher Study Group (TSG) professional development in vocabulary on first-grade teachers' knowledge of vocabulary instruction and observed teaching practice, and on students' vocabulary knowledge. Sixty-two schools from 16 districts in four states were randomly assigned to…

The rationale for consuming cognitive enhancement drugs in university students and teachers.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sebastian Sattler

Full Text Available Cognitive enhancement (CE is the pharmaceutical augmentation of mental abilities (e.g., learning or memory without medical necessity. This topic has recently attracted widespread attention in scientific and social circles. However, knowledge regarding the mechanisms that underlie the decision to use CE medication is limited. To analyze these decisions, we used data from two online surveys of randomly sampled university teachers (N = 1,406 and students (N = 3,486. Each respondent evaluated one randomly selected vignette with regard to a hypothetical CE drug. We experimentally varied the characteristics of the drugs among vignettes and distributed them among respondents. In addition, the respondent's internalization of social norms with respect to CE drug use was measured. Our results revealed that students were more willing to enhance cognitive performance via drugs than university teachers, although the overall willingness was low. The probability of side effects and their strength reduced the willingness to use CE drugs among students and university teachers, whereas higher likelihoods and magnitudes of CE increased this propensity. In addition, the internalized norm against CE drug use influenced decision making: Higher internalization decreased the willingness to use such medications. Students' internalized norms more strongly affected CE abstinence compared with those of university teachers. Furthermore, internalized norms negatively interacted with the instrumental incentives for taking CE medication. This internalization limited the influence of and deliberation on instrumental incentives. This study is the first to provide empirical evidence regarding the importance of social norms and their influence on rational decision making with regard to CE. We identified previously undiscovered decision-making patterns concerning CE. Thus, this study provides insight into the motivators and inhibitors of CE drug use. These findings have

The rationale for consuming cognitive enhancement drugs in university students and teachers.

Science.gov (United States)

Sattler, Sebastian; Sauer, Carsten; Mehlkop, Guido; Graeff, Peter

2013-01-01

Cognitive enhancement (CE) is the pharmaceutical augmentation of mental abilities (e.g., learning or memory) without medical necessity. This topic has recently attracted widespread attention in scientific and social circles. However, knowledge regarding the mechanisms that underlie the decision to use CE medication is limited. To analyze these decisions, we used data from two online surveys of randomly sampled university teachers (N = 1,406) and students (N = 3,486). Each respondent evaluated one randomly selected vignette with regard to a hypothetical CE drug. We experimentally varied the characteristics of the drugs among vignettes and distributed them among respondents. In addition, the respondent's internalization of social norms with respect to CE drug use was measured. Our results revealed that students were more willing to enhance cognitive performance via drugs than university teachers, although the overall willingness was low. The probability of side effects and their strength reduced the willingness to use CE drugs among students and university teachers, whereas higher likelihoods and magnitudes of CE increased this propensity. In addition, the internalized norm against CE drug use influenced decision making: Higher internalization decreased the willingness to use such medications. Students' internalized norms more strongly affected CE abstinence compared with those of university teachers. Furthermore, internalized norms negatively interacted with the instrumental incentives for taking CE medication. This internalization limited the influence of and deliberation on instrumental incentives. This study is the first to provide empirical evidence regarding the importance of social norms and their influence on rational decision making with regard to CE. We identified previously undiscovered decision-making patterns concerning CE. Thus, this study provides insight into the motivators and inhibitors of CE drug use. These findings have implications for

The Rationale for Consuming Cognitive Enhancement Drugs in University Students and Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Sattler, Sebastian; Sauer, Carsten; Mehlkop, Guido; Graeff, Peter

2013-01-01

Cognitive enhancement (CE) is the pharmaceutical augmentation of mental abilities (e.g., learning or memory) without medical necessity. This topic has recently attracted widespread attention in scientific and social circles. However, knowledge regarding the mechanisms that underlie the decision to use CE medication is limited. To analyze these decisions, we used data from two online surveys of randomly sampled university teachers (N = 1,406) and students (N = 3,486). Each respondent evaluated one randomly selected vignette with regard to a hypothetical CE drug. We experimentally varied the characteristics of the drugs among vignettes and distributed them among respondents. In addition, the respondent’s internalization of social norms with respect to CE drug use was measured. Our results revealed that students were more willing to enhance cognitive performance via drugs than university teachers, although the overall willingness was low. The probability of side effects and their strength reduced the willingness to use CE drugs among students and university teachers, whereas higher likelihoods and magnitudes of CE increased this propensity. In addition, the internalized norm against CE drug use influenced decision making: Higher internalization decreased the willingness to use such medications. Students’ internalized norms more strongly affected CE abstinence compared with those of university teachers. Furthermore, internalized norms negatively interacted with the instrumental incentives for taking CE medication. This internalization limited the influence of and deliberation on instrumental incentives. This study is the first to provide empirical evidence regarding the importance of social norms and their influence on rational decision making with regard to CE. We identified previously undiscovered decision-making patterns concerning CE. Thus, this study provides insight into the motivators and inhibitors of CE drug use. These findings have implications

Selective decontamination in pediatric liver transplants. A randomized prospective study.

Science.gov (United States)

Smith, S D; Jackson, R J; Hannakan, C J; Wadowsky, R M; Tzakis, A G; Rowe, M I

1993-06-01

Although it has been suggested that selective decontamination of the digestive tract (SDD) decreases postoperative aerobic Gram-negative and fungal infections in orthotopic liver transplantation (OLT), no controlled trials exist in pediatric patients. This prospective, randomized controlled study of 36 pediatric OLT patients examines the effect of short-term SDD on postoperative infection and digestive tract flora. Patients were randomized into two groups. The control group received perioperative parenteral antibiotics only. The SDD group received in addition polymyxin E, tobramycin, and amphotericin B enterally and by oropharyngeal swab postoperatively until oral intake was tolerated (6 +/- 4 days). Indications for operation, preoperative status, age, and intensive care unit and hospital length of stay were no different in SDD (n = 18) and control (n = 18) groups. A total of 14 Gram-negative infections (intraabdominal abscess 7, septicemia 5, pneumonia 1, urinary tract 1) developed in the 36 patients studied. Mortality was not significantly different in the two groups. However, there were significantly fewer patients with Gram-negative infections in the SDD group: 3/18 patients (11%) vs. 11/18 patients (50%) in the control group, P < 0.001. There was also significant reduction in aerobic Gram-negative flora in the stool and pharynx in patients receiving SDD. Gram-positive and anaerobic organisms were unaffected. We conclude that short-term postoperative SDD significantly reduces Gram-negative infections in pediatric OLT patients.

Effects of pediatric first aid training on preschool teachers: a longitudinal cohort study in China.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Feng; Sheng, Xiaoyang; Zhang, Jinsong; Jiang, Fan; Shen, Xiaoming

2014-08-24

Unintentional injuries are a major cause of death among children. Data suggest that the retention of knowledge and skills about first aid declined over time. The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of pediatric first aid training among teachers. A stratified random sampling method was used to select 1,067 teachers. The selected trainees received pediatric first aid training. Follow-up assessments were conducted 6 months, 9 months and 4 years following the training. A standardized collection of demographics was performed, and participants were given a questionnaire to indicate knowledge of and emotions about first aid. In the pretest, 1067 people responded with a mean of 21.0 correct answers to 37 questions, whereas in the post-test period, the mean score increased to 32.2 correct answers of 37 questions (P 70%) had administered correct first aid for injuries. This study demonstrated that the acquisition of knowledge, both short and long term, significantly improves. Despite appreciable decreases in knowledge long term, knowledge retention was modest but stable.

Day-ahead load forecast using random forest and expert input selection

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Lahouar, A.; Ben Hadj Slama, J.

2015-01-01

Highlights: • A model based on random forests for short term load forecast is proposed. • An expert feature selection is added to refine inputs. • Special attention is paid to customers behavior, load profile and special holidays. • The model is flexible and able to handle complex load signal. • A technical comparison is performed to assess the forecast accuracy. - Abstract: The electrical load forecast is getting more and more important in recent years due to the electricity market deregulation and integration of renewable resources. To overcome the incoming challenges and ensure accurate power prediction for different time horizons, sophisticated intelligent methods are elaborated. Utilization of intelligent forecast algorithms is among main characteristics of smart grids, and is an efficient tool to face uncertainty. Several crucial tasks of power operators such as load dispatch rely on the short term forecast, thus it should be as accurate as possible. To this end, this paper proposes a short term load predictor, able to forecast the next 24 h of load. Using random forest, characterized by immunity to parameter variations and internal cross validation, the model is constructed following an online learning process. The inputs are refined by expert feature selection using a set of if–then rules, in order to include the own user specifications about the country weather or market, and to generalize the forecast ability. The proposed approach is tested through a real historical set from the Tunisian Power Company, and the simulation shows accurate and satisfactory results for one day in advance, with an average error exceeding rarely 2.3%. The model is validated for regular working days and weekends, and special attention is paid to moving holidays, following non Gregorian calendar

Teacher Professional Development through Digital Content Evaluation

Science.gov (United States)

Xie, Kui; Kim, Min Kyu; Cheng, Sheng-Lun; Luthy, Nicole C.

2017-01-01

In this study, researchers designed and implemented a 1-year professional development (PD) program that focused on supporting teachers in evaluating and selecting digital learning contents. Participants in this investigation included 109 teachers who consented to the study amongst a total of 171 teachers from five school districts across central…

CEC Teacher of the Year.

Science.gov (United States)

Voyles, Lynda

1995-01-01

This interview with Brenda Jean Robbins, a Florida music therapist and teacher selected as 1995 Teacher of the Year by the Council for Exceptional Children, reveals her views about music therapy, goals, relationship of music therapy to the special education classroom, musical performance, and getting parents involved. (DB)

An Exploratory Survey of Teachers' Attitudes toward Sex-Stereotyping.

Science.gov (United States)

Minix, Nancy A.; And Others

This survey examined the attitudes of teachers in southwestern Kentucky toward sex-stereotyping in the classroom. A random sample of 35 teachers of grades kindergarten through adult completed a written survey instrument that asked them to read statements regarding sex-stereotyping and to rate themselves regarding their own classroom practices.…

Effect of mindfulness and yoga on quality of life for elementary school students and teachers: results of a randomized controlled school-based study.

Science.gov (United States)

Bazzano, Alessandra N; Anderson, Christopher E; Hylton, Chelsea; Gustat, Jeanette

2018-01-01

To assess the impact of a yoga curriculum in an elementary school on student quality of life, and to assess teacher and staff perception of potential barriers to, and benefits of, introducing yoga and mindfulness into the classroom. A randomized controlled trial was utilized to assess the impact of a brief intervention on third-grade students who screened positive for symptoms of anxiety. Students were randomized to an intervention group of 20 students receiving small-group yoga/mindfulness activities for 8 weeks between October 2016 and February 2017, and a control group of 32 students receiving care as usual. The Brief Multidimensional Students' Life Satisfaction Scale-Peabody Treatment Progress Battery and the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory (PedsQL) served as outcomes. Teachers were invited to participate in two professional development sessions about introducing yoga and mindfulness into the classroom, and completed a survey following each of the sessions. In generalized estimating equation models adjusted for time, the yoga-based intervention was associated with a 14.17 unit increase in student emotional PedsQL ( p -value 0.001) and a 7.43 unit increase in psychosocial PedsQL ( p -value 0.01). Results were not attenuated by adjustment. Teachers and staff reported using yoga more frequently in the classroom following the second of two professional development sessions ( p -value classroom were similar at two data collection time points, while perceived benefits remained high. The intervention was associated with a significant improvement in emotional and psychosocial quality of life in the intervention group when compared to the control group, suggesting that yoga/mindfulness interventions may improve symptoms of anxiety among students. Yoga/mindfulness activities may facilitate stress management among elementary school students and may be added as a complement to social and emotional learning activities.

Factors That Predict Pre-Service Teachers' Teaching Performance

Science.gov (United States)

Corcoran, Roisin P.; O'Flaherty, Joanne

2018-01-01

Understanding the factors that contribute to an effective teacher has the potential to influence selection and preparation of pre-service teachers and may influence student outcomes. Prior research suggests a relationship between teacher characteristics (academic achievement, verbal ability, gender) and teacher effectiveness, however, these…

Awareness of Teachers Towards The Law AND#8220;4207AND#8221;

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Neriman Aydin

2011-10-01

Full Text Available The aim of this study is to evaluate knowledge, opinion and advices of the teachers towards the law no “4207”. A minimum sample size of 600 was selected by using a table of random numbers from schools which were surveyed in the study. Frequency distributions, factor analysis, student's t test, chi-square analysis were used for data evaluation. The study consisted of 663 teachers. Male/female ratio 1.04 and mean age was 34.2±7.9. The rate of current smokers of the teachers was 27.6%. Smokers among male teachers were higher than female (38.2%, respectively, 16.6%, p=0.000. The rate of people who think that students who see their teachers smoking negative affect were mainly consisted of nonsmoker teachers who think non-smokers than smokers were significantly higher (95.5% and 76.5%, respectively, p=0.000. Only 6.5% of the teachers knew the rate of smoking in Turkey and just 8% of teachers knew that in high-price sale of tobacco products was the most effective method for tobacco control; similarly. On the other hand, 49.2% of teachers were able to describe accurately the purpose of tobacco control. 30.5% of teachers were thinking that water pipe, light cigarette, tobacco pipe and Maras powder is less harmful than cigarette smoking. Prohibited places for consumption of tobacco products which were known by teachers were high school (91.1%, hospital garden (89.3%, classroom (86.4%, cafe, and restaurants (80.1%, stadium (49.8% open areas of city line boats (41.6%; respectively. Male teachers had a significantly higher knowledge score in terms of information about the law (p=0.041. 80.4% of the teachers did not found indoor smoking acceptable. Lower rates for current smokers obtained who found indoor smoking acceptable (p=0.000. This study emphasizes high awareness status of a group that acts as both role model and leader in community for implementation of process about tobacco epidemic in Turkey. [TAF Prev Med Bull 2011; 10(5.000: 543-548

Teacher Efficacy of Secondary Special Education Science Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Bonton, Celeste

Students with disabilities are a specific group of the student population that are guaranteed rights that allow them to receive a free and unbiased education in an environment with their non-disabled peers. The importance of this study relates to providing students with disabilities with the opportunity to receive instruction from the most efficient and prepared educators. The purpose of this study is to determine how specific factors influence special education belief systems. In particular, educators who provide science instruction in whole group or small group classrooms in a large metropolitan area in Georgia possess specific beliefs about their ability to provide meaningful instruction. Data was collected through a correlational study completed by educators through an online survey website. The SEBEST quantitative survey instrument was used on a medium sample size (approximately 120 teachers) in a large metropolitan school district. The selected statistical analysis was the Shapiro-Wilk and Mann-Whitney in order to determine if any correlation exists among preservice training and perceived self-efficacy of secondary special education teachers in the content area of science. The results of this study showed that special education teachers in the content area of science have a higher perceived self-efficacy if they have completed an alternative certification program. Other variables tested did not show any statistical significance. Further research can be centered on the analysis of actual teacher efficacy, year end teacher efficacy measurements, teacher stipends, increased recruitment, and special education teachers of multiple content areas.

Preparing beginning reading teachers: An experimental comparison of initial early literacy field experiences

OpenAIRE

Al Otaiba, Stephanie; Lake, Vickie E.; Greulich, Luana; Folsom, Jessica S.; Guidry, Lisa

2012-01-01

This randomized-control trial examined the learning of preservice teachers taking an initial Early Literacy course in an early childhood education program and of the kindergarten or first grade students they tutored in their field experience. Preservice teachers were randomly assigned to one of two tutoring programs: Book Buddies and Tutor Assisted Intensive Learning Strategies (TAILS), which provided identical meaning-focused instruction (shared book reading), but differed ...

The Effects of Teacher's Selected Educational Experiences on Perceptions of Children of Divorce.

Science.gov (United States)

Green, Virginia P.; Schaefer, Lyn

Teachers' beliefs about the probable classroom performances of children from broken homes were explored. The investigation had three purposes: (1) to obtain data on teachers' opinions and knowledge about children of divorce; (2) to investigate teachers' feelings about the school's role regarding children of divorce; and (3) to determine how two…

Work related musculoskeletal pain among teachers in selected ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The impact of musculoskeletal pain specifically within the teaching profession has not been given sufficient attention in the literature especially in Nigeria. This study determined the prevalence of work related musculoskeletal pain among public secondary school teachers in Ife-Central Local Government Area (LGA), Osun ...

Distribution of orientation selectivity in recurrent networks of spiking neurons with different random topologies.

Science.gov (United States)

Sadeh, Sadra; Rotter, Stefan

2014-01-01

Neurons in the primary visual cortex are more or less selective for the orientation of a light bar used for stimulation. A broad distribution of individual grades of orientation selectivity has in fact been reported in all species. A possible reason for emergence of broad distributions is the recurrent network within which the stimulus is being processed. Here we compute the distribution of orientation selectivity in randomly connected model networks that are equipped with different spatial patterns of connectivity. We show that, for a wide variety of connectivity patterns, a linear theory based on firing rates accurately approximates the outcome of direct numerical simulations of networks of spiking neurons. Distance dependent connectivity in networks with a more biologically realistic structure does not compromise our linear analysis, as long as the linearized dynamics, and hence the uniform asynchronous irregular activity state, remain stable. We conclude that linear mechanisms of stimulus processing are indeed responsible for the emergence of orientation selectivity and its distribution in recurrent networks with functionally heterogeneous synaptic connectivity.

Medical students-as-teachers: a systematic review of peer-assisted teaching during medical school

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yu TC

2011-06-01

Full Text Available Tzu-Chieh Yu¹, Nichola C Wilson², Primal P Singh¹, Daniel P Lemanu¹, Susan J Hawken³, Andrew G Hill¹¹South Auckland Clinical School, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand; ²Department of Surgery, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand; ³Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Auckland, Auckland, New ZealandIntroduction: International interest in peer-teaching and peer-assisted learning (PAL during undergraduate medical programs has grown in recent years, reflected both in literature and in practice. There, remains however, a distinct lack of objective clarity and consensus on the true effectiveness of peer-teaching and its short- and long-term impacts on learning outcomes and clinical practice.Objective: To summarize and critically appraise evidence presented on peer-teaching effectiveness and its impact on objective learning outcomes of medical students.Method: A literature search was conducted in four electronic databases. Titles and abstracts were screened and selection was based on strict eligibility criteria after examining full-texts. Two reviewers used a standard review and analysis framework to independently extract data from each study. Discrepancies in opinions were resolved by discussion in consultation with other reviewers. Adapted models of “Kirkpatrick’s Levels of Learning” were used to grade the impact size of study outcomes.Results: From 127 potential titles, 41 were obtained as full-texts, and 19 selected after close examination and group deliberation. Fifteen studies focused on student-learner outcomes and four on student-teacher learning outcomes. Ten studies utilized randomized allocation and the majority of study participants were self-selected volunteers. Written examinations and observed clinical evaluations were common study outcome assessments. Eleven studies provided student-teachers with formal teacher training. Overall, results suggest that peer-teaching, in highly selective

The Relationship between Job Satisfaction and Selected Demographics and Teacher Retention

Science.gov (United States)

Claybon, Karen M.

2008-01-01

According to the Texas State Board of Education in 2002, 60% of teachers in Texas classrooms quit the profession after only five years in the classroom. In 1998-99, Texas filled over 63,000 teaching positions. Most vacant positions resulted from existing teachers retiring (11,000) or leaving the profession (46,600). A recent study in Texas…

Randomized controlled trial of vocal function exercises on muscle tension dysphonia in Vietnamese female teachers.

Science.gov (United States)

Nguyen, Duong Duy; Kenny, Dianna T

2009-04-01

This study evaluated the treatment effects of vocal function exercises on muscle tension dysphonia (MTD) in tonal language speakers. Single-blinded, randomized, controlled, clinical trial. Forty female primary school teachers from Northern Vietnam, diagnosed with MTD, were randomly allocated into a treatment group (n = 22), which used a full vocal exercise protocol (FE) (modified for use with Vietnamese speakers), and a control group (n = 18) which was treated with a partial vocal exercise protocol (PE). The treatment duration was 4 weeks for both groups. Acoustic and perceptual data were used as primary outcome measures. Acoustic parameters included frequency and amplitude perturbation, harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR), mean fundamental frequency of the broken and rising tones, and parameters representing pitch movement in the rising tone. Perceptual analyses were performed on pre- and posttreatment samples of the sustained /a/ sound using anchor vocal samples. Self-report data, collected via a posttreatment questionnaire, comprised the secondary outcome measure. Significant changes in perturbation, HNR, and perceptual data were observed in the FE group but not in the PE group. The FE group showed increased size and speed of pitch change. Participants from both groups showed positive changes in some tonal parameters after treatment. However, the magnitude of change and the number of participants with positive changes were larger in the FE group. The data showed that vocal function exercises may be a cost-effective treatment for MTD.

A Study Similarities and Differences in Selected Human Resource Practices and Their Relation to Teacher Retention in a Sample of Four School Districts, Two with High and Two with Low Rates of Retention

Science.gov (United States)

Phelan, Patrick M.

2010-01-01

This is a study of the practices utilized by four school districts, two with high and two with low retention rates of teachers, to examine how similarities and differences in selected human resources practices relate to the successful retention of teachers in these districts. The factors studied that may impact teacher retention included…

Impact of MDGs capacity building workshop on teachers ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

To address the issue, Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) sponsored capacity building workshops for primary school teachers. The paper explores the impact of this capacity building workshop on teachers' level of competence and pupils' performance. Sixty teachers were selected purposively for the study and 418 ...

Cognitive and Psychosocial Predictors of Academic Achievement among Pre-Service Teachers in University of Ilorin, Nigeria

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Adewale Adegunju

2017-05-01

Full Text Available Cognitive and psychosocial development is crucial during the period of adolescence. This study was conducted to examine the cognitive and psychosocial predictors of academic achievement of Pre - service teachers in the University of Ilorin, Nigeria.The resea rch design used for this study was a descriptive survey using an expost - facto method. The population for this study consisted of all 200 level undergraduates at the Faculty of Education, University of Ilorin,Ilorin, Nigeria. Simple Random sampling techniqu es was used to select 400 students. Self - esteem scale developed by Rosenberg in 1965 was used to measure the respondents’ self - esteem while Proforma was used to collect their O’Level, UTME, Post UTME results and the respondents CPGA. The findings of this s tudy indicated that the level of self - esteem of pre - service teachers sampled was high;the level of academic achievement of Pre - service teachers in University of Ilorin, Nigeria sampled was average; there was a significant relationship among cognitive entry characteristics (O’LEVEL, UTME, and Post - UTME, self - esteem and Academic Achievement of pre - service teachers in University of Ilorin, Nigeria. The study recommended that educational psychologists, teachers and other stakeholders should be aware of stude nts’ cognitive ability in order to be effective in helping them learn and achieve.

Confirmatory factors analysis of science teacher leadership in the Thailand world-class standard schools

Science.gov (United States)

Thawinkarn, Dawruwan

2018-01-01

This research aims to analyze factors of science teacher leadership in the Thailand World-Class Standard Schools. The research instrument was a five scale rating questionnaire with reliability 0.986. The sample group included 500 science teachers from World-Class Standard Schools who had been selected by using the stratified random sampling technique. Factor analysis of science teacher leadership in the Thailand World-Class Standard Schools was conducted by using M plus for Windows. The results are as follows: The results of confirmatory factor analysis on science teacher leadership in the Thailand World-Class Standard Schools revealed that the model significantly correlated with the empirical data. The consistency index value was x2 = 105.655, df = 88, P-Value = 0.086, TLI = 0.997, CFI = 0.999, RMSEA = 0.022, and SRMR = 0.019. The value of factor loading of science teacher leadership was positive, with statistical significance at the level of 0.01. The value of six factors was between 0.880-0.996. The highest factor loading was the professional learning community, followed by child-centered instruction, participation in development, the role model in teaching, transformational leaders, and self-development with factor loading at 0.996, 0.928, 0.911, 0.907, 0.901, and 0.871, respectively. The reliability of each factor was 99.1%, 86.0%, 83.0%, 82.2%, 81.0%, and 75.8%, respectively.

Examining Teacher Effectiveness Using Classroom Observation Scores: Evidence from the Randomization of Teachers to Students

Science.gov (United States)

Garrett, Rachel; Steinberg, Matthew P.

2015-01-01

Despite policy efforts to encourage multiple measures of performance in newly developing teacher evaluation systems, practical constraints often result in evaluations based predominantly on formal classroom observations. Yet there is limited knowledge of how these observational measures relate to student achievement. This article leverages the…

Appropriation and educational uses of cell phones by students and university teachers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Javier Organista Sandoval

2013-12-01

Full Text Available Abstract This article presents a study on appropriation and educational uses of cell phones. For the research, a random sample of 954 students and 246 teachers was selected, representing respectively 12% and 24% of the total population in two facilities of UABC in Ensenada, Mexico. Our survey showed that 97% of teachers or students have some kind of cell phone or smartphone. However, we observed that one of every four interactions with the mobile device had a concrete educational purpose. We also found that in general the educational use of the cell phone is mainly aimed to establish communication between the students and to access information via Internet. However, in spite of its limitations, our results show that the cell phone is a technological tool with great pedagogical potential. We suggest that institutional policies are necessary in order to tap that the cell phone potential to adequately support the teaching-learning process.

Development and Evaluation of a Model-Supported Scientific Inquiry Training Program for Elementary Teachers in Indonesia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Chandra Ertikanto

2017-07-01

Full Text Available A teacher training program, named Model-Supported Scientific Inquiry Training Program (MSSITP has been successfully developed to improve the inquiry skills of Indonesian elementary teachers. The skills enhanced by MSSITP are defining problems, formulating hypotheses, planning and doing investigations, drawing conclusions, and communicating the results. This teacher training program was evaluated by 48 teachers selected by stratified random sampling technique from 48 elementary schools in Bandar Lampung City, Lampung Province, Indonesia. The program was designed to follow Bandura’s stages of social learning: attention, retention, production, and motivation. The impact of MSSITP was evaluated in three ways. First, by analyzing the improvements of inquiry skills compared to conventional SITP through pretest and posttest control group design. Second, by using an inquiry questionnaire to describe teachers’ perceptions of inquiry learning. Last, by using a response instrument to elicit teachers’ opinions of the program. The results indicate a significant difference (sig 0.00 in teachers’ skills acquired from the two different training programs. Mean posttest scores, varying from 34.7 to 56.9 for the control group and 58.3 to 98.6 for the experimental group, confirmed the effectiveness of MSSITP.

Skills among Teachers in Selected Public Secondary School ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The study examined the availability of ICT facilities and skills of secondary school teachers in Zaria Metropolis in Kaduna State, Nigeria. Two objectives were developed to guide the study. Five schools were surveyed. Two separate questionnaires was developed, one for ICT facilities and are administered to head of ICTs in ...

Relationship Between Teachers\\' Qualification And Students ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

It has been observed that students\\' performance in technical subjects is very poor. Coupled with this problem is that of lack of qualified technical teachers. This study determines the relationship between teachers\\' qualification and students\\' performance in technical subjects in selected schools in northern Nigeria.

USAGE OF SELECTED RESOURCES FOR INCLUSIVE EDUCATION IN MAINSTREAM PRIMARY SCHOOLS: ISSUES AND CHALLENGES FROM A KENYAN PERSPECTIVE

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Pamela Buhere

2013-12-01

Full Text Available This study assessed the effectiveness of the use of selected teaching/learning resources in the implementation of Inclusive Education (I.E for Special Needs Education (SNE learners in mainstream primary schools. Focusing on the organisational effectiveness of the school management in meeting the needs of Special needs Learners, research questions explored the following: the availability of the selected teaching/learning resources, effectiveness of the use of available teaching /learning for Inclusive Education, challenges in the use of available teaching/learning resources and possible improvements with regard to the implementation of Inclusive Education for Special Needs Learners in mainstream primary schools. The study adopted a descriptive survey design. Out of 150 schools that had integrated Special Needs Learners in Bungoma Count, Kenya, 20% were stratified, proportionately and randomly sampled. Purposive sampling was used to obtain the participants; head teachers, regular, and special teachers. The sample comprised of 30 head teachers, 120 regular teachers and 8 special teachers (total 158. Data were collected using questionnaires for 30 head teachers, 120 regular teachers, interview schedules for 8 special teachers and observation schedule. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics. The study findings reveal that the integration of inclusive education has not been accompanied by support structures; educators lack the knowledge in handling the available resources, the available learning resources are inadequate and inappropriate. The study recommends that Ministry of education and school managers can implement inclusion smoothly and effectively through a variety of vehicles including in-service opportunities, professional support groups, mentoring activities, monitoring the degree of collaboration between general and special educators and improving the school setting to accommodate learner diversity. In addition, the government should

Job Satisfaction and Work Performance of Public Secondary School Teachers In Akoko North West Local Government Area Of Ondo State

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Aroge Stephen Talabi

2016-08-01

Full Text Available The study examined the relationship between job satisfaction and work performance of secondary school teachers in Akoko North West Local Government Area of Ondo-State, Nigeria. The study population consisted of all secondary school teachers, while two hundred of them were randomly selected for the study. Regular payment of salary, opportunities for promotion, rapport with school authority, in-service training, job security, career prospect and retirement benefits were the variables considered. The questionnaire titled “Workers Opinion Survey Inventory (WOSI” and the Productivity Rating Scale (PRS which was in line with Annual Performance Evaluation Report (APPER was used to obtain information for the study. The data was analyzed using Pearson Product Correlation Moment.  One of the recommendations made include the onward review of policies, remuneration and work conditions of teachers in the public secondary schools in Nigeria for optimum productivity.

An investigation of factors affecting elementary female student teachers' choice of science as a major at college level in Zimbabwe

Science.gov (United States)

Mlenga, Francis Howard

The purpose of the study was to determine factors affecting elementary female student teachers' choice of science as a major at college level in Zimbabwe. The study was conducted at one of the Primary School Teachers' Colleges in Zimbabwe. A sample of two hundred and thirty-eight female student teachers was used in the study. Of these one hundred and forty-two were non-science majors who had been randomly selected, forty-one were science majors and forty-five were math majors. Both science and math majors were a convenient sample because the total enrollment of the two groups was small. All the subjects completed a survey questionnaire that had sixty-eight items. Ten students from the non-science majors were selected for individual interviews and the same was done for the science majors. A further eighteen were selected from the non-science majors and divided into three groups of six each for focus group interviews. The same was done for the science majors. The interviews were audio taped and transcribed. Data from the survey questionnaires were analyzed using Binary Logistic Regression which predicted factors that affected students' choice of science as a major. The transcribed interview data were analyzed used using domain, taxonomic and componential analyses. Results of the study indicated that elementary female students' choice of science as a major at college level is affected by students' attitudes toward science, teacher behavior, out-of-school experiences, role models, gender stereotyping, parental influence, peer influence, in-school experiences, and societal expectations, namely cultural and social expectations.

Malaysian Tertiary Level ESL Students’ Perceptions toward Teacher Feedback, Peer Feedback and Self-assessment in their Writing

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kayatri Vasu

2016-09-01

Full Text Available In Malaysia, teacher feedback is highly preferred by students, who often believe that teachers know best. Teacher feedback shows them their teacher’s idea of an ideal writing. However, excessive dependence on teachers adds to their workload. Therefore, teachers are increasingly promoting two other alternative methods that are gradually gaining importance. These methods are peer feedback and self-assessment. This study investigates ESL students’ perceptions toward teacher feedback, peer feedback and self-assessment in students’ writing process. Questionnaires, adapted from the instruments in the literature, were administered to 107 randomly selected students in a private local university in Malaysia. Students found feedback given to the content and organization of their writing more useful than feedback provided for their vocabulary and grammar. It was also found that students perceived feedback from teacher, peers and self-assessment all as highly useful. Additionally the results indicated while there was no significant difference (p > .05 between the students’ perceptions toward teacher feedback and self-assessment, they were both perceived as significantly more useful (p < .001 than peer feedback. The students also perceived explicit feedback as significantly more useful (p < .001 than implicit feedback. The results of this study have implications for English language learning-teaching practitioners and researchers. They shed light on the options preferred by students in revising their writing in ESL writing classrooms. Future research on the effects of teacher feedback, peer feedback and self-assessment on students’ writing performance will provide better insight on the preferred methods in ESL writing classrooms in similar settings.

A STUDY OF THE LEADERSHIP BEHAVIORS REPORTED BY PRINCIPALS AND OBSERVED BY TEACHERS AND ITS RELATION WITH PRINCIPALS’ MANAGEMENT EXPERIENCE

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zaid Sardarzahi, Zaid

2015-06-01

Full Text Available The present paper aims to study the leadership behaviors reported by principals and observed by teachers and its relationship with management experience of principals. A quantitative method used in this study. Target population included all principals and teachers of guidance schools and high schools in Dashtiari District, Iran. A sample consisted of 46 principals and 129 teachers were selected by stratified sampling and simple random sampling methods. Leadership Behavior Description Questionnaire (LBDQ developed by Kozes and Posner (2001 was used for data collection. The obtained data were analyzed using one sample and independent t-test, correlation coefficient and pearson chi-square test. The results showed that teachers describe the leadership behaviors of their principals relatively good. However, the principals themselves evaluated their leadership behaviors as very good. In comparison between leadership behaviors self-reported by principals and those observed by teachers, it was found that there is a significant difference between the views and evaluations of teachers and principals on all components of leadership behaviors of principals, except empowerment. In fact, principals have described their leadership behaviors at a better and more appropriate level than what teachers have done. From the perspective of both teachers and principals, there is no significant relationship between none of the components of leadership behaviors and management experience of principals.

Impact of Psychological Hardiness and Self-Monitoring on Teacher Burnout

Science.gov (United States)

Erkutlu, Hakan

2012-01-01

The purpose of this research is to examine the moderating effects of psychological hardiness and self-monitoring on the linkage between organizational politics and teacher burnout. Totally 1344 teachers from 112 high schools chosen by random method in Ankara, Istanbul, Adana, Antalya, Samsun, Kahramanmaras, Adiyaman and Gaziantep in 2010-2011…

The role of repetition and reinforcement in school-based oral health education-a cluster randomized controlled trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Haleem, Abdul; Khan, Muhammad Khalil; Sufia, Shamta; Chaudhry, Saima; Siddiqui, Muhammad Irfanullah; Khan, Ayyaz Ali

2016-01-04

Repetition and reinforcement have been shown to play a crucial role in the sustainability of the effect of Oral Health Education (OHE) programs. However, its relevance to school-based OHE imparted by different personnel is not depicted by the existing dental literature. The present study was undertaken to determine the effectiveness of the repeated and reinforced OHE (RR-OHE) compared to one-time OHE intervention and to assess its role in school-based OHE imparted by dentist, teachers and peers. The study was a cluster randomized controlled trial that involved 935 adolescents aged 10-11 years. Twenty four boys' and girls' schools selected at random in two towns of Karachi, Pakistan were randomly assigned to three groups to receive OHE by dentist (DL), teachers (TL) and peer-leaders (PL). The groups received a single OHE session and were evaluated post-intervention and 6 months after. The three groups were then exposed to OHE for 6 months followed by 1 year of no OHE activity. Two further evaluations at 6-month and 12-month intervals were conducted. The data were collected by a self-administered questionnaire preceded by a structured interview and followed by oral examination of participants. The adolescents' oral health knowledge (OHK) in the DL and PL groups increased significantly by a single OHE session compared to their baseline knowledge (p strategy. Although the OHK scores of the DL and PL groups decreased significantly at 12-month evaluation of RR-OHE (p play a key role in school-based OHE irrespective of educators. The trained teachers and peers can play a complementary role in RR-OHE.

Teacher Enhancement Institute

Science.gov (United States)

Marshall-Bradley, Tina

1994-01-01

/Mathematics model school has been established. Teachers selected for this project represented school systems where income levels are extremely low, and students served tend not to receive innovative instruction in mathematics and science and their use of technology is limited. The Teacher Enhancement Institute contained several features, that when combined, allowed for a unique experience. Some of these features included local teachers, administrators and school board members as presenters, instruction and use of technology every day, tours of select features of the research facility, briefings by NASA/LaRC scientists, engineers and researchers as well as individuals from the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF). Another unique feature of this program is to have participants convene on three separate occasions throughout the academic year to discuss strategies for information dissemination and implementation results. Teachers' attitudes towards the use of technology, their ability to develop lessons using technology and their ability to develop lessons using information obtained through TEI were assessed using instruments developed by TEI summer faculty members. Data from these instruments were analyzed and reported in a final report submitted to the director of the Office of Education.

The Impact of Globalization on Teacher Education: The Philippine Perspective

Science.gov (United States)

de Guzman, Allan B.; dela Rosa, Praxedes S. M.; Arcangel, Clotilde N.

2005-01-01

This qualitative study is an attempt to describe how administrators, teachers and researchers in a select group of teacher education institutions (TEIs) in the capital of the Philippines collectively view globalization. Specifically, concepts of a globalized teacher education, impact of globalization in teacher education, and problems of teacher…

Exploring Science Teachers' Affective States: Pedagogical Discontentment, Self-efficacy, Intentions to Reform, and Their Relationships

Science.gov (United States)

Kahveci, Ajda; Kahveci, Murat; Mansour, Nasser; Alarfaj, Maher Mohammed

2017-06-01

Teachers play a key role in moving reform-based science education practices into the classroom. Based on research that emphasizes the importance of teachers' affective states, this study aimed to explore the constructs pedagogical discontentment, science teaching self-efficacy, intentions to reform, and their correlations. Also, it aimed to provide empirical evidence in light of a previously proposed theoretical model while focusing on an entirely new context in Middle East. Data were collected in Saudi Arabia with a total of randomly selected 994 science teachers, 656 of whom were females and 338 were males. To collect the data, the Arabic versions of the Science Teachers' Pedagogical Discontentment scale, the Science Teaching Efficacy Beliefs Instrument and the Intentions to Reform Science Teaching scale were developed. For assuring the validity of the instruments in a non-Western context, rigorous cross-cultural validations procedures were followed. Factor analyses were conducted for construct validation and descriptive statistical analyses were performed including frequency distributions and normality checks. Univariate analyses of variance were run to explore statistically significant differences between groups of teachers. Cross-tabulation and correlation analyses were conducted to explore relationships. The findings suggest effect of teacher characteristics such as age and professional development program attendance on the affective states. The results demonstrate that teachers who attended a relatively higher number of programs had lower level of intentions to reform raising issues regarding the conduct and outcomes of professional development. Some of the findings concerning interrelationships among the three constructs challenge and serve to expand the previously proposed theoretical model.

Why Agriculture Teachers Leave: A National Examination of Turnover Intentions and Work-Family Conflict

Science.gov (United States)

Sorensen, Tyson J.; McKim, Aaron J.; Velez, Jonathan J.

2016-01-01

Using data from a random sample of secondary school agriculture teachers in the United States, this study explored the work-family conflict and turnover intentions of agriculture teachers. Additionally, this study sought to determine the relationship between work-family conflict and turnover intentions among agriculture teachers. Work-family…

Connecting Pre-Service Teachers with Contemporary Mathematics Practices: Selecting and Sequencing Students' Work Samples

Science.gov (United States)

Livy, Sharyn; Muir, Tracey; Downton, Ann

2017-01-01

One of the challenges facing teacher educators is providing our pre-service teachers (PSTs) with authentic experiences that cross the boundaries between Initial Teacher Education (ITE) and the classroom. An additional challenge facing the mathematics teacher educator, is addressing and deepening PSTs' mathematical content knowledge (MCK), which…

Extrinsic motivation and job satisfaction of teachers' in public post ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

This study was aimed at evaluating the relationship between extrinsic motivation and the job satisfaction of teachers' in public post primary schools in Cross River State, Nigeria. A sample of 125 teachers' was randomly drawn for the study. A four point likert-type questionnaire was used to gather data which was analyzed ...

A randomized controlled study of a social skills training for preadolescent children with autism spectrum disorders: generalization of skills by training parents and teachers?

Science.gov (United States)

2014-01-01

Background Social skills training (SST) is a common intervention for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) to improve their social and communication skills. Despite the fact that SSTs are often applied in clinical practice, the evidence for the effectiveness of these trainings for children with ASD is inconclusive. Moreover, long term outcome and generalization of learned skills are little evaluated. Additionally, there is no research on the influence of involvement of parents and teachers on effectiveness of SST and on the generalization of learned social skills to daily life. We expect parent and teacher involvement in SST to enhance treatment efficacy and to facilitate generalization of learned skills to daily life. Method/Design In a randomized controlled trial (RCT) with three conditions, 120 participants with ASD at the end of primary school (10–12 years of calendar age) have been randomized to SST, SST-PTI (SST with Parent & Teacher Involvement), or care-as-usual. The SST consists of 18 group sessions of 1.5 hours for the children. In the SST-PTI condition, parents additionally participate in 8 parent sessions and parents and teachers are actively involved in homework assignments. Assessment takes place at three moments: before and immediately after the intervention period and at 6 months follow-up. Primary outcome is socialization, as an aspect of adaptive functioning. Secondary outcomes focus on specific social skills children learn during SST and on more general social skills pertaining to home and community settings from a multi-informant perspective. Additionally, possible predictors of treatment outcome will be assessed. Discussion The current study is an RCT study evaluating SST in a large sample of Dutch children with ASD in a specific age range (10–12 years). Strengths of the study are the use of one manualized protocol, application of standardized and internationally used rating instruments, use of multiple raters, investigation of

How special are teachers of specialized schools? : a quantitative investigation of Turkish mathematics teachers' self-confidence levels in the technology domain

OpenAIRE

Çatma, Zehra

2013-01-01

Ankara : The Program of Curriculum and Instruction, Bilkent University, 2013. Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2013. Includes bibliographical refences. The purpose of the current study was to investigate whether specialized high school mathematics teachers, who were selected to educate selected students, were mentally ready to integrate Fatih project technologies into their teaching. The sample consisted of 40 teachers, who voluntarily participated the study and work...

Perceptions of teachers about learning disorder in a northern city of India

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Susanta Kumar Padhy

2015-01-01

Full Text Available Background: Teachers are perhaps the closest observers of child′s academic performance and can be instrumental in detecting learning disorder (LD early. Objectives: The present study aimed to assess the teachers′ perceptions about LD. Materials and Methods: This is a cross-sectional questionnaire-based study in the public schools located in the urban, rural and slum areas of Chandigarh. Teachers were recruited from 20 randomly selected schools out of a total of 103 schools in the Union Territory by proportionate sampling. The sample size required for α of 0.05 and power of 0.80 to detect a difference of 15% from base rate of 35% was 80. Eighty teachers of 3 rd and 4 th grades of these schools were recruited using purposive sampling. Teachers were briefed for 5 minutes about the symptoms of LD. They were asked questions using a structured questionnaire about their socio-demographic status, methods of teaching, and students′ progress and their perception about LD. Descriptive statistics was mainly used to represent nominal and ordinal data using frequency and percentages. Non-parametric statistical tests were used to assess relationship between the variables. Results: Eighty teachers were recruited, 87.5% were females, 57.5% had more than 5 years teaching experience; 56.3% of teachers thought that they were aware of LD, 67.5% of teachers perceived that they do encounter children with LD in the school, 43.8% endorsed educating such children in special schools, while 36.3% endorsed integration to regular schools. Interestingly, more than three fifth of teachers were willing to undergo special training for LD intervention. Conclusion: Teachers acknowledge that there is a need for further steps to be taken to help children with LD. They perceive opening special cells or sending such children to special schools for appropriate intervention which may not tally with the perception of clinician who may wish to provide LD intervention in hospital

Using Random Forests to Select Optimal Input Variables for Short-Term Wind Speed Forecasting Models

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hui Wang

2017-10-01

Full Text Available Achieving relatively high-accuracy short-term wind speed forecasting estimates is a precondition for the construction and grid-connected operation of wind power forecasting systems for wind farms. Currently, most research is focused on the structure of forecasting models and does not consider the selection of input variables, which can have significant impacts on forecasting performance. This paper presents an input variable selection method for wind speed forecasting models. The candidate input variables for various leading periods are selected and random forests (RF is employed to evaluate the importance of all variable as features. The feature subset with the best evaluation performance is selected as the optimal feature set. Then, kernel-based extreme learning machine is constructed to evaluate the performance of input variables selection based on RF. The results of the case study show that by removing the uncorrelated and redundant features, RF effectively extracts the most strongly correlated set of features from the candidate input variables. By finding the optimal feature combination to represent the original information, RF simplifies the structure of the wind speed forecasting model, shortens the training time required, and substantially improves the model’s accuracy and generalization ability, demonstrating that the input variables selected by RF are effective.

Inclusion in Early Childhood Education: Pre-Service Teachers Voices

Science.gov (United States)

Majoko, Tawanda

2016-01-01

This study examined pre-service teachers' understanding, attitudes, preparation and concerns regarding inclusion in early childhood education (ECE) in Zimbabwe. Entrenched within inclusive pedagogy, this descriptive study draws on a sample of 24 pre-service teachers purposively selected from the largest teachers' college with the oldest…

Beliefs and Attitudes of Secondary Agriculture Teachers about Global Agriculture Issues

Science.gov (United States)

Hurst, Sara D.; Roberts, T. Grady; Harder, Amy

2015-01-01

The purpose of this study was to explore the beliefs and attitudes of secondary agriculture teachers regarding global agricultural issues. A randomized national sample of 417 teachers were surveyed using a modified version of the International Agricultural Awareness and Understanding Survey (Wingenbach, Boyd, Lindner, Dick, Arispe, & Haba,…

The Effects of Social Capital Levels in Elementary Schools on Organizational Information Sharing

Science.gov (United States)

Ekinci, Abdurrahman

2012-01-01

This study aims to assess the effects of social capital levels at elementary schools on organizational information sharing as reported by teachers. Participants were 267 teachers selected randomly from 16 elementary schools; schools also selected randomly among 42 elementary schools located in the city center of Batman. The data were analyzed by…

The Effect of Teacher's Aides in the Classroom

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Andersen, Simon Calmar; Beuchert-Pedersen, Louise Voldby; Nielsen, Helena Skyt

2015-01-01

-34%, but it is a much more flexible instrument than class-size reduction. We find substantial positive average effects on reading scores, which tend to be greater when resources are spent on teaching assistants without teaching degrees who - at a fixed budget - can spend more time in class in comparison to co......This paper evaluates the impact of three kinds of teacher's aides on 13-year-old students' test scores, behavior and well-being. We gain leverage from combining a randomized experiment with rich survey and registry data from Denmark. The intervention reduces student-to-teacher ratios by 27......-teachers with teaching degrees....

Early prevention of antisocial personality: long-term follow-up of two randomized controlled trials comparing indicated and selective approaches.

Science.gov (United States)

Scott, Stephen; Briskman, Jackie; O'Connor, Thomas G

2014-06-01

Antisocial personality is a common adult problem that imposes a major public health burden, but for which there is no effective treatment. Affected individuals exhibit persistent antisocial behavior and pervasive antisocial character traits, such as irritability, manipulativeness, and lack of remorse. Prevention of antisocial personality in childhood has been advocated, but evidence for effective interventions is lacking. The authors conducted two follow-up studies of randomized trials of group parent training. One involved 120 clinic-referred 3- to 7-year-olds with severe antisocial behavior for whom treatment was indicated, 93 of whom were reassessed between ages 10 and 17. The other involved 109 high-risk 4- to 6-year-olds with elevated antisocial behavior who were selectively screened from the community, 90 of whom were reassessed between ages 9 and 13. The primary psychiatric outcome measures were the two elements of antisocial personality, namely, antisocial behavior (assessed by a diagnostic interview) and antisocial character traits (assessed by a questionnaire). Also assessed were reading achievement (an important domain of youth functioning at work) and parent-adolescent relationship quality. In the indicated sample, both elements of antisocial personality were improved in the early intervention group at long-term follow-up compared with the control group (antisocial behavior: odds ratio of oppositional defiant disorder=0.20, 95% CI=0.06, 0.69; antisocial character traits: B=-4.41, 95% CI=-1.12, -8.64). Additionally, reading ability improved (B=9.18, 95% CI=0.58, 18.0). Parental expressed emotion was warmer (B=0.86, 95% CI=0.20, 1.41) and supervision was closer (B=-0.43, 95% CI=-0.11, -0.75), but direct observation of parenting showed no differences. Teacher-rated and self-rated antisocial behavior were unchanged. In contrast, in the selective high-risk sample, early intervention was not associated with improved long-term outcomes. Early intervention with

The Nigerian University Teachers' Effectiveness as Perceived by Their Students

Science.gov (United States)

Okoye, Nnamdi S.

2008-01-01

The study investigated the Delta State University, Abraka, Students' concept of the "effective teacher". A sample of 200 second year university students selected from four faculties were asked to select three most important characteristics of a good teacher from a list of ten. The data obtained were analysed using the percentage…

Matching Level between Professors’ Selected Media and Emotional-Perception Preferences of Students

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hedayati N

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Aims: Considering individual differences and different learning styles in the learners is necessary in more effective learning. If the used learning style may be fully correspond with the students’ preffered style, there is a better learning performance. The aim of this study was to assess the conformity of the students’ learning styles with educational media and technologies used by the teachers at Isfahan University of Medical Sciences. Instrument & Methods: In the descriptive-correlational study, 90 medicine and dentistry students of Isfahan University were randomly selected via Stratified Sampling method in 2014-15 academic year. The study tool was a researcher-made questionnaire to investigate the learning styles and technologies used by the teachers. Data was analyzed in SPSS 22 software using Hotelling’s T test, and Somers’, Kendall’s, and Gamma Agreement Coefficients. Findings: From the students’ viewpoints, visual and auditory styles were the most and the least preffered styles, respectively. A combination of the technologies was used by the teachers. In addition, visual and kinesthetic/motion mediae were the most and the least used technologies by the teachers, respectively. There was no significant conformity between read/write, aural, and kinesthetic/motion styles of the students and the technologies used by the teachers (p>0.05. Neverheless, there was a significant conformity between the students’ visual style and the visual technologies used by the teachers (p<0.05. Conclusion: There is conformity between the technologies used by the teachers of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences and the students’ viual learning style. However, the technologies are not compatible with read/write, aural, and kinesthetic/motion styles of the students.

Primary School Teachers' Knowledge and Awareness of Dyslexia in Kuwaiti Students

Science.gov (United States)

Aladwani, Amel M.; Al Shaye, Shaye S.

2012-01-01

This study investigated Kuwaiti primary school teachers' knowledge and awareness of early signs of dyslexia among Kuwaiti students. To achieve this purpose, a survey was developed to collect data randomly from more than 700 participants of primary language teachers across Kuwait's six educational districts. The results showed that the majority of…

Treatment of selective mutism: focus on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

Science.gov (United States)

Kaakeh, Yaman; Stumpf, Janice L

2008-02-01

Abstract Selective mutism is a pediatric psychiatric disorder that occurs when a child consistently fails to speak in specific situations in which speaking is expected, such as at school and social gatherings, but speaks appropriately in other settings. Selective mutism often is diagnosed when a child starts school and does not talk to teachers or peers, but talks to family members at home; the condition is frequently accompanied by anxiety and shyness. Although the underlying etiology of the condition remains unclear, psychotherapy is the preferred initial treatment, with the support of parents and teachers. If the child does not respond to psychotherapy, addition of pharmacologic treatment should be considered, depending on the severity of symptoms and presence of other illnesses. Although data are limited to case reports and trials with small patient populations and short follow-up periods, some patients with selective mutism respond to therapy with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Fluoxetine is the most studied SSRI as treatment for the condition, although further investigation is required to determine the optimal dosage and duration of therapy.

Algerian medical teachers' research output and its determinants during the 2000-2009 decade.

Science.gov (United States)

Bezzaoucha, A; Atif, M L; Bouamra, A; El Kebboub, A; Benzerga, M; Ben Abdelaziz, A; Soulimane, A; Ladner, J; Borgès Da Silva, G; Meguenni, K; Quessar, A; Heroual, N; Bouguizi, A; Boussouf, N; Makhlouf, F; Lamdjadani, N; Tibiche, A; Abbassene, S; Regagba, D; Benameur, M

2014-02-01

Publications are the primary output of scientific research. We conducted a national study to quantify Algerian medical teachers' research output and identify its determinants during the 2000-2009 decade. The American Medline database and the French Pascal database were used. A publication was eligible only if the lead author was an Algerian medical teacher (in medicine, pharmacy, or dentistry) working in Algeria. The same questionnaire was completed by cases (teachers who were first authors of an original article during the study period) and randomly selected controls. Logistic regression analysis was used to identify factors related to research output. A total of 79 original articles (42.2% of publications) were retrieved, a quarter of which were listed in Pascal alone. The publication rate was 2.6 original articles per 1000 teachers per year. The journals that published these original articles had a median impact factor of 0.83. The ability to publish an original article was 4.3 times higher if the teacher had undergone training in biostatistics and/or epidemiology (adjusted odds ratio [aOR]=4.31, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.79-10.38). A promotion evaluation grid that did not encourage writing (aOR=3.44, 95% CI: 1.42-8.33), a doctoral thesis, seniority, foreign collaboration, and English language proficiency were found to be associated with publication output. Algerian medical teachers' research output was particularly low. Replacing the current promotion grid with a grid that promotes writing, developing abilities to read and write articles and developing English language proficiency are likely to improve this situation. Copyright © 2014. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS.

Teachers' preferences towards textbook

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Stanojević Darko D.

2016-01-01

Full Text Available In this paper, using the method named Conjoint analysis, and with the goal of determining teacher's preferences in the process of textbook selection, and also defining the prototype of quality textbook which will could be used in the classroom. With consideration of criteria defined in the previous researches on this topic, an continuing the work on those results, we will create clear hypothetical prototype of the textbook which will satisfy the teacher's preference.

Determinants of Teachers' Attitudes towards E- Learning in Tanzanian Higher Learning Institutions

Science.gov (United States)

Kisanga, Dalton H.

2016-01-01

This survey research study presents the findings on determinants of teachers' attitudes towards e-learning in Tanzanian higher learning institutions. The study involved 258 teachers from 4 higher learning institutions obtained through stratified, simple random sampling. Questionnaires and documentary review were used in data collection. Data were…

Examining iPod Use by Texas Agricultural Science and Technology Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Murphrey, Theresa Pesl; Miller, Kimberly A.; Roberts, T. Grady

2009-01-01

The purpose of this study was to establish baseline data regarding the adoption of iPods and similar technologies by agricultural science and technology teachers. The population consisted of all agricultural science and technology teachers in Texas. A sample of 310 was randomly drawn from the population. Study findings reveal that while…

Science Teachers' Information Processing Behaviours in Nepal: A Reflective Comparative Study

Science.gov (United States)

Acharya, Kamal Prasad

2017-01-01

This study examines the investigation of the information processing behaviours of secondary level science teachers. It is based on the data collected from 50 secondary level school science teachers working in Kathmandy valley. The simple random sampling and the Cognitive Style Inventory have been used respectively as the technique and tool to…

VOCATIONAL AGRICULTURE TEACHER MORALE STUDY--A COMPARISON OF SELECTED FACTORS IN SCHOOLS WHERE THE MORALE OF VOCATIONAL AGRICULTURE TEACHERS IS "HIGH" WITH SCHOOLS WHERE THE MORALE OF VOCATIONAL AGRICULTURE TEACHERS IS "LOW".

Science.gov (United States)

BENTLEY, RALPH R.; REMPEL, AVERNO M.

A STUDY WAS UNDERTAKEN TO DETERMINE WHETHER DIFFERENCES EXISTED WITH RESPECT TO STUDENT ATTITUDE TOWARD THEIR TEACHER, FEELINGS ABOUT SCHOOL WORK PROBLEMS, AND ACADEMIC APTITUDE BETWEEN VOCATIONAL AGRICULTURE DEPARTMENTS IN WHICH TEACHER MORALE WAS HIGH AND THOSE IN WHICH TEACHER MORALE WAS LOW. THE TEACHER SAMPLE INCLUDED 21 WITH THE HIGHEST…

The relationship between wellbeing indicators and teacher psychological stress in Eastern Cape public schools in South Africa

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Malik L.M. Vazi

2013-07-01

Research purpose: The main objective of this study was to assess the relationship between indicators of wellbeing and stress and to further assess the relative importance of these wellbeing indicators in explaining stress variance in a large sample of Eastern Cape primary and high school teachers in South Africa. Motivation for the study: The majority of teacher stress studies focus on the misfit between the individual’s resources and the environmental demands. There is a scarcity of studies reporting on protective factors in teaching and we know little about their possible role as possible protective factors against stress. This is important in developing stress prevention strategies. Research design, approach and method: A cross-sectional survey was used targeting public school teachers in the Eastern Cape. The sample size was 562 randomly selected teachers from both public primary and high schools. Main findings: The results revealed that stress is prevalent amongst teachers. Subjective and psychological wellbeing factors added significantly to the explained stress variance. Also, both negative affect and role problems had significant positive correlations with stress, whilst psychological wellbeing had a strong inverse relationship with stress. Practical/managerial implications: The results implied that interventions focusing on improving psychological wellbeing and reduction of negative affect can contribute to stress prevention. Contribution/value-add: The results contributed towards a better understanding of the relative importance of wellbeing constructs as protective factors against teacher stress.

Efficacy of teachers in a number of selected schools in the KwaZulu ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Erna Kinsey

Teacher efficacy is a type of self-efficacy — a cognitive process in which people ... inclined to refer a difficult student to special education. Teachers with ..... An even greater percentage of them (86%) took a huge work load home from time to.

Are Teachers Biased When Nominating Students for Gifted Services? Evidence from Kazakhstan

Science.gov (United States)

Hernández-Torrano, Daniel; Tursunbayeva, Xeniya

2016-01-01

The purpose of this experimental, vignette study was to analyze whether certain demographic characteristics of students (i.e. gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status) influence secondary education teachers in referring students for gifted services in Kazakhstan. A sample of 132 teachers were randomly assigned to one of eight profiles…

Stressors and Stressor Response Levels of Hong Kong Primary School Music Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Wong, Marina Wai-yee; Chik, Maria Pik-yuk; Chan, Edmund Sze Shing

2018-01-01

Responses from 309 randomly sampled Hong Kong primary school music teachers to the shortened version of the Chinese Teacher Stress Questionnaire were subjected to a descriptive percentage analysis, one-way ANOVA and independent t test. Obtained results identify five key stressors: "changing education policy of the government";…

A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF VIRTUAL INTERACTIVE TEACHER TRAINING THROUGH OPEN AND DISTANCE LEARNING FOR THE REMOTE AREAS ENGLISH TEACHERS OF BANGLADESH

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Irene PARVIN

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Since we are living in the information age and the importance of the need for communication among people of different cultures is increasing day by day in the globalizing world, people need to learn the languages of different cultures, particularly English, which is the common language of this global communication. This need for learning English requires trained qualified teachers of English. A scan of those who are teaching English in schools of Bangladesh reveals that most of them are very limited in both English skills and teaching methodologies for English. This situation is exacerbated when one moves into the rural areas. Most of the teachers are staying far away from the teachers’ training colleges and also for different constraint like administrative, financial, time constraint and were also unable to receive any training due to family problems. So Distance Education has a great demand to them. ICT is an effective media of distance education. For many years, universities with a significant commitment to distance and open education institutions have been at the forefront of adopting new technologies to increase access to education and training opportunities. Information and Communications Technology (ICT is an umbrella term that includes all technologies for the manipulation and communication of information. Bangladesh Open University (BOU is till now belonging to the second generation of distance education model but due to the enhancement of technology in Bangladesh, BOU can proceed further. The main purpose of this study is to identify a suitable technology for developing a virtual interactive teachers’ training program for the disadvantaged English teachers of Bangladesh. Respondents were selected through random sampling and data were analyzed using both descriptive statistics and quantitative themes. From the opinion of the secondary English teachers their access and acceptability on ICT was identified and also a need analysis was

Implications of structural genomics target selection strategies: Pfam5000, whole genome, and random approaches

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Chandonia, John-Marc; Brenner, Steven E.

2004-07-14

The structural genomics project is an international effort to determine the three-dimensional shapes of all important biological macromolecules, with a primary focus on proteins. Target proteins should be selected according to a strategy which is medically and biologically relevant, of good value, and tractable. As an option to consider, we present the Pfam5000 strategy, which involves selecting the 5000 most important families from the Pfam database as sources for targets. We compare the Pfam5000 strategy to several other proposed strategies that would require similar numbers of targets. These include including complete solution of several small to moderately sized bacterial proteomes, partial coverage of the human proteome, and random selection of approximately 5000 targets from sequenced genomes. We measure the impact that successful implementation of these strategies would have upon structural interpretation of the proteins in Swiss-Prot, TrEMBL, and 131 complete proteomes (including 10 of eukaryotes) from the Proteome Analysis database at EBI. Solving the structures of proteins from the 5000 largest Pfam families would allow accurate fold assignment for approximately 68 percent of all prokaryotic proteins (covering 59 percent of residues) and 61 percent of eukaryotic proteins (40 percent of residues). More fine-grained coverage which would allow accurate modeling of these proteins would require an order of magnitude more targets. The Pfam5000 strategy may be modified in several ways, for example to focus on larger families, bacterial sequences, or eukaryotic sequences; as long as secondary consideration is given to large families within Pfam, coverage results vary only slightly. In contrast, focusing structural genomics on a single tractable genome would have only a limited impact in structural knowledge of other proteomes: a significant fraction (about 30-40 percent of the proteins, and 40-60 percent of the residues) of each proteome is classified in small

Genome-wide association data classification and SNPs selection using two-stage quality-based Random Forests.

Science.gov (United States)

Nguyen, Thanh-Tung; Huang, Joshua; Wu, Qingyao; Nguyen, Thuy; Li, Mark

2015-01-01

Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) selection and identification are the most important tasks in Genome-wide association data analysis. The problem is difficult because genome-wide association data is very high dimensional and a large portion of SNPs in the data is irrelevant to the disease. Advanced machine learning methods have been successfully used in Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for identification of genetic variants that have relatively big effects in some common, complex diseases. Among them, the most successful one is Random Forests (RF). Despite of performing well in terms of prediction accuracy in some data sets with moderate size, RF still suffers from working in GWAS for selecting informative SNPs and building accurate prediction models. In this paper, we propose to use a new two-stage quality-based sampling method in random forests, named ts-RF, for SNP subspace selection for GWAS. The method first applies p-value assessment to find a cut-off point that separates informative and irrelevant SNPs in two groups. The informative SNPs group is further divided into two sub-groups: highly informative and weak informative SNPs. When sampling the SNP subspace for building trees for the forest, only those SNPs from the two sub-groups are taken into account. The feature subspaces always contain highly informative SNPs when used to split a node at a tree. This approach enables one to generate more accurate trees with a lower prediction error, meanwhile possibly avoiding overfitting. It allows one to detect interactions of multiple SNPs with the diseases, and to reduce the dimensionality and the amount of Genome-wide association data needed for learning the RF model. Extensive experiments on two genome-wide SNP data sets (Parkinson case-control data comprised of 408,803 SNPs and Alzheimer case-control data comprised of 380,157 SNPs) and 10 gene data sets have demonstrated that the proposed model significantly reduced prediction errors and outperformed

Searching for Mirrors: Preservice Teachers' Journey toward More Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

Science.gov (United States)

Christ, Tanya; Sharma, Sue Ann

2018-01-01

Culturally relevant text selection and pedagogy support students' motivation, engagement, literacy outcomes, and positive identity formation. Nevertheless, there is limited research on teacher preparation that fosters these outcomes. We explore 17 preservice teachers' challenges and successes with culturally relevant text selection and pedagogy…

Impact on quality of life in teachers after educational actions for prevention of voice disorders: a longitudinal study.

Science.gov (United States)

Pizolato, Raquel Aparecida; Rehder, Maria Inês Beltrati Cornacchioni; Meneghim, Marcelo de Castro; Ambrosano, Glaucia Maria Bovi; Mialhe, Fábio Luiz; Pereira, Antonio Carlos

2013-02-27

Voice problems are more common in teachers due to intensive voice use during routine at work. There is evidence that occupational disphonia prevention programs are important in improving the quality voice and consequently the quality of subjects' lives. To investigate the impact of educational voice interventions for teachers on quality of life and voice. A longitudinal interventional study involving 70 teachers randomly selected from 11 public schools, 30 to receive educational intervention with vocal training exercises and vocal hygiene habits (experimental group) and 40 to receive guidance on vocal hygiene habits (control group control). Before the process of educational activities, the Voice-Related Quality of Life instrument (V-RQOL) was applied, and 3 months after conclusion of the activities, the subjects were interviewed again, using the same instrument. For data analysis, Prox MIXED were applied, with a level of significance α Educational actions for vocal health had a positive impact on the quality of life of the participants, and the incorporation of permanent educational actions at institutional level is suggested.

Changes in teachers' involvement versus rejection and links with academic motivation during the first year of secondary education: a multilevel growth curve analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Maulana, Ridwan; Opdenakker, Marie-Christine; Stroet, Kim; Bosker, Roel

2013-09-01

Research consistently shows that the learning environment plays an important role for early adolescents' learning and outcomes and suggests that good teacher-student relationships can serve as a protective factor for maintaining young adolescents' interest and active engagement in learning. However, less is known about the dynamic nature of teacher-student relationships and how they link with academic motivation development. Furthermore, little is known about the nature and the effects of teacher-student relationships in a cross-national context. The present study investigated changes in two components of teacher-student relationships (teachers' involvement vs. rejection) and examined links with students' academic motivation during the first grade of secondary school. Ten Dutch and ten Indonesian teachers (65 % female) from 24 classes were videoed 12 times across the school year, and four videos for each class were selected randomly and coded on teachers' involvement versus rejection. A total of 713 students (52 % girls) completed four-wave measures of their academic motivation after each video observation. Multilevel growth curve modeling revealed that the teacher's involvement changed in a curvilinear way and decreased across the first year of secondary education, while changes in the teacher's rejection did not follow a linear time function. Academic motivation changed in an undesirable way: controlled motivation increased, while autonomous motivation decreased over time. Teachers' involvement had a unique contribution in preventing high levels of controlled motivation in both countries. Findings suggest that teacher-student relationships (teachers' involvement) play an essential role in early adolescents' motivation regardless of the nations and should be a priority for schools.

Linking a Learning Progression for Natural Selection to Teachers' Enactment of Formative Assessment

Science.gov (United States)

Furtak, Erin Marie

2012-01-01

Learning progressions, or representations of how student ideas develop in a domain, hold promise as tools to support teachers' formative assessment practices. The ideas represented in a learning progression might help teachers to identify and make inferences about evidence collected of student thinking, necessary precursors to modifying…

Participant-selected music and physical activity in older adults following cardiac rehabilitation: a randomized controlled trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Clark, Imogen N; Baker, Felicity A; Peiris, Casey L; Shoebridge, Georgie; Taylor, Nicholas F

2017-03-01

To evaluate effects of participant-selected music on older adults' achievement of activity levels recommended in the physical activity guidelines following cardiac rehabilitation. A parallel group randomized controlled trial with measurements at Weeks 0, 6 and 26. A multisite outpatient rehabilitation programme of a publicly funded metropolitan health service. Adults aged 60 years and older who had completed a cardiac rehabilitation programme. Experimental participants selected music to support walking with guidance from a music therapist. Control participants received usual care only. The primary outcome was the proportion of participants achieving activity levels recommended in physical activity guidelines. Secondary outcomes compared amounts of physical activity, exercise capacity, cardiac risk factors, and exercise self-efficacy. A total of 56 participants, mean age 68.2 years (SD = 6.5), were randomized to the experimental ( n = 28) and control groups ( n = 28). There were no differences between groups in proportions of participants achieving activity recommended in physical activity guidelines at Week 6 or 26. Secondary outcomes demonstrated between-group differences in male waist circumference at both measurements (Week 6 difference -2.0 cm, 95% CI -4.0 to 0; Week 26 difference -2.8 cm, 95% CI -5.4 to -0.1), and observed effect sizes favoured the experimental group for amounts of physical activity (d = 0.30), exercise capacity (d = 0.48), and blood pressure (d = -0.32). Participant-selected music did not increase the proportion of participants achieving recommended amounts of physical activity, but may have contributed to exercise-related benefits.

Conflict and Consensus in Teacher Candidates' Discussion of Ethnic Autobiography.

Science.gov (United States)

Florio-Ruane, Susan; deTar, Julie

A Future Teachers' Autobiography Club discussion group/research project invited six elementary teacher candidates to read, write about, and discuss ethnic autobiography in order to foster and investigate the potential of peer discussion in teacher learning. Using a selected list of six autobiographies, the researcher hosted monthly dinner…

SELECTED INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS FOR DISTRIBUTIVE EDUCATION.

Science.gov (United States)

LEVENDOWSKI, J.C.

CITATIONS SUPPLEMENTING BULLETIN NO. 5, "DISTRIBUTIVE EDUCATION LIBRARY LIST," (ED 012 778) WERE SELECTED FOR DISTRIBUTIVE TEACHER EDUCATORS, ADULT INSTRUCTORS AND TEACHER COORDINATORS. THE PUBLICATIONS ARE FREE OR INEXPENSIVE BROCHURES, BULLETINS, PAMPHLETS AND PAPERBACK BOOKS, LISTED BY TOPICS--(1) "ADVERTISING AND DISPLAY," (2) "DISTRIBUTIVE…

Teacher-student interactions and domain-specific motivation: The relationship between students' perceptions of teacher interpersonal behavior and motivation in middle school science

Science.gov (United States)

Smart, Julie Brockman

2009-11-01

This study examined interactions between middle school science students' perceptions of teacher-student interactions and their motivation for learning science. Specifically, in order to better understand factors affecting middle school students' motivation for science, this study investigated the interactions between middle school students' perceptions of teacher interpersonal behavior in their science classroom and their efficacy, task value, mastery orientations, and goal orientation for learning science. This mixed methods study followed a sequential explanatory model (Cresswell & Plano-Clark, 2007). Quantitative and qualitative data were collected in two phases, with quantitative data in the first phase informing the selection of participants for the qualitative phase that followed. The qualitative phase also helped to clarify and explain results from the quantitative phase. Data mixing occurred between Phase One and Phase Two (participant selection) and at the interpretation level (explanatory) after quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed separately. Results from Phase One indicated that students' perceptions of teacher interpersonal behaviors were predictive of their efficacy for learning science, task value for learning science, mastery orientation, and performance orientation. These results were used to create motivation/perception composites, which were used in order to select students for the qualitative interviews. A total of 24 students with high motivation/high perceptions, low motivation/low perceptions, high motivation/low perceptions, and low motivation/high perceptions were selected in order to represent students whose profiles either supported or refuted the quantitative results. Results from Phase Two revealed themes relating to students' construction of their perceptions of teacher interpersonal behavior and dimensions of their efficacy and task value for science. Students who reported high motivation and high perceptions of teacher

Awareness in Primary School Teachers regarding Traumatic Dental Injuries in Children and Their Emergency Management: A Survey in South Jaipur.

Science.gov (United States)

Nirwan, Mitakshara; Syed, Ather Ahmed; Chaturvedi, Shefali; Goenka, Puneet; Sharma, Swati

2016-01-01

Trauma to primary and permanent teeth and their supporting structures is one of the most common dental problems seen in children. The prognosis of traumatized teeth depends on timely attention with prompt and appropriate treatment, which often relies on knowledge of the teachers who may be present at the place of accidents. Thus, the aim of this study was to evaluate via a questionnaire the knowledge level of primary school teachers in South Jaipur regarding dental trauma. Questionnaire survey. A self-designed questionnaire was administered to 300 primary school teachers from 20 randomly selected private and semi-aided schools of South Jaipur. A total of 278 teachers responded to the survey. The collected data were subjected to statistical analysis. It was found that most of the respondents had accepted poor knowledge regarding dental trauma, with a mean knowledge of 10.56 ± 2.58. This study highlighted inadequate knowledge regarding emergency management of traumatic dental injuries, and teachers felt the need for training in the management of dental trauma as part of their training program. How to cite this article: Nirwan M, Syed AA, Chaturvedi S, Goenka P, Sharma S. Awareness in Primary School Teachers regarding Traumatic Dental Injuries in Children and Their Emergency Management: A Survey in South Jaipur. Int J Clin Pediatr Dent 2016;9(1):62-66.

r2VIM: A new variable selection method for random forests in genome-wide association studies.

Science.gov (United States)

Szymczak, Silke; Holzinger, Emily; Dasgupta, Abhijit; Malley, James D; Molloy, Anne M; Mills, James L; Brody, Lawrence C; Stambolian, Dwight; Bailey-Wilson, Joan E

2016-01-01

Machine learning methods and in particular random forests (RFs) are a promising alternative to standard single SNP analyses in genome-wide association studies (GWAS). RFs provide variable importance measures (VIMs) to rank SNPs according to their predictive power. However, in contrast to the established genome-wide significance threshold, no clear criteria exist to determine how many SNPs should be selected for downstream analyses. We propose a new variable selection approach, recurrent relative variable importance measure (r2VIM). Importance values are calculated relative to an observed minimal importance score for several runs of RF and only SNPs with large relative VIMs in all of the runs are selected as important. Evaluations on simulated GWAS data show that the new method controls the number of false-positives under the null hypothesis. Under a simple alternative hypothesis with several independent main effects it is only slightly less powerful than logistic regression. In an experimental GWAS data set, the same strong signal is identified while the approach selects none of the SNPs in an underpowered GWAS. The novel variable selection method r2VIM is a promising extension to standard RF for objectively selecting relevant SNPs in GWAS while controlling the number of false-positive results.

What Do Primary and Secondary School Teachers Know About ADHD in Children?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Mohr-Jensen, Christina; Steen-Jensen, T.; Bang-Schnack, Maria

2017-01-01

OBJECTIVE: To identify what primary and secondary school teachers know about ADHD in children and, furthermore, to identify which factors predict their knowledge. METHOD: A 29-item questionnaire about ADHD was distributed to a random, nationwide, and representative sample of Danish primary...... and secondary school teachers. Data were analyzed descriptively and by hierarchical regression analysis. RESULTS: A total of 528 teachers were included. Most teachers identified the symptoms of ADHD (79%-96%) and effective classroom intervention strategies (75%-98%). However, knowledge about other...... knowledge about ADHD to successfully include and manage children with ADHD and, additionally, to ensure positive working environments for teachers and support constructive school-home working collaborations....

Log in and breathe out: efficacy and cost-effectiveness of an online sleep training for teachers affected by work-related strain--study protocol for a randomized controlled trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Thiart, Hanne; Lehr, Dirk; Ebert, David Daniel; Sieland, Bernhard; Berking, Matthias; Riper, Heleen

2013-06-11

Insomnia and work-related stress often co-occur. Both are associated with personal distress and diminished general functioning, as well as substantial socio-economic costs due to, for example, reduced productivity at the work place and absenteeism. Insomnia complaints by people experiencing work-related stress are correlated with a deficient cognitive detachment from work. Diffuse boundaries between work and private life can additionally complicate the use of recreational activities that facilitate cognitive detachment.Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is effective but rarely implemented. Internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia could potentially reduce this deficit given its demonstrated effectiveness. Less is known, however, about the efficacy of internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia in populations affected by high work stress. Thus, the aim of the present study is to evaluate the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of a newly developed, guided online training which is based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for insomnia and tailored to teachers affected by occupational stress. In a two-arm randomized controlled trial (N = 128), the effects of a guided online sleep training will be compared to a waitlist-control condition. German teachers with significant clinical insomnia complaints (Insomnia Severity Index ≥ 15) and work-related rumination (Irritation Scale, subscale Cognitive Irritation ≥ 15) will be included in the study. The primary outcome measure will be insomnia severity. Additionally, an economic evaluation from a societal perspective will be conducted. Data from the intention-to-treat sample will be analyzed two and six months after randomization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate an online sleep training tailored to a specific population with work stress, that is, teachers. If this type of intervention is effective, it could reduce the paucity of cognitive behavioral therapy for

The Relationship between Transformational Leadership and Job Satisfaction: The Case of Government Secondary School Teachers in Ethiopia

Science.gov (United States)

Tesfaw, Tadele Akalu

2014-01-01

The purpose of this study is to determine the relationship between transformational leadership of government secondary school principals and teachers' job satisfaction. A random sample of 320 teachers responded to a three-part instrument (the transformational leadership questionnaire, the teachers' job satisfaction questionnaire and a demographic…

Effects of a Rubric-Driven Assessment on Teacher Performance with Regard to Behavioral Management Skills

Science.gov (United States)

Simmons, Kevin R.

2010-01-01

The purpose of this researcher was to evaluate the efficacy of an in-service training program in the use of a rubric-driven assessment system for classroom behavior management. Thirty randomly assigned teachers received in-service training and 30 teachers served as a control group. The use of a rubric-driven assessment provided both teachers and…

The Managerial Role of the Principal in Promoting Teacher Professionalism in Selected Eastern Cape Schools

Science.gov (United States)

Botha, R. J.

2011-01-01

In the last two to three decades teachers' work has been plagued by problems internationally. These problems include a growing dissatisfaction of teachers about their working conditions (characterized by heavy workloads and low salaries), the growing attempts by governments to control teachers' work and the increasing negative public image of the…

Argumentation Practices in Classroom: Pre-Service Teachers' Conceptual Understanding of Chemical Equilibrium

Science.gov (United States)

Kaya, Ebru

2013-01-01

This study examines the impact of argumentation practices on pre-service teachers' understanding of chemical equilibrium. The sample consisted of 100 pre-service teachers in two classes of a public university. One of these classes was assigned as experimental and the other as control group, randomly. In the experimental group, the subject of…

A Preliminary Investigation of a Randomized Dependent Group Contingency for Hallway Transitions

Science.gov (United States)

Deshais, Meghan A.; Fisher, Alyssa B.; Kahng, SungWoo

2018-01-01

We conducted a preliminary investigation of a randomized dependent group contingency to decrease disruptive behavior during hallway transitions. Two first-graders, identified by their classroom teacher, participated in this study. A multiple baseline across transitions was used to evaluate the effects of the randomized dependent group contingency…

Student Teachers' Conceptions of Creativity in the Secondary Music Classroom

Science.gov (United States)

Kokotsaki, Dimitra

2011-01-01

This study aims to explore the meaning of the concept of creativity from the perspective of student teachers pursuing a one year teacher training course following their first degree. Seventeen student teachers following a specialist music teaching route in secondary education were selected as the sample for this study to offer their understanding…

Two-year Randomized Clinical Trial of Self-etching Adhesives and Selective Enamel Etching.

Science.gov (United States)

Pena, C E; Rodrigues, J A; Ely, C; Giannini, M; Reis, A F

2016-01-01

The aim of this randomized, controlled prospective clinical trial was to evaluate the clinical effectiveness of restoring noncarious cervical lesions with two self-etching adhesive systems applied with or without selective enamel etching. A one-step self-etching adhesive (Xeno V(+)) and a two-step self-etching system (Clearfil SE Bond) were used. The effectiveness of phosphoric acid selective etching of enamel margins was also evaluated. Fifty-six cavities were restored with each adhesive system and divided into two subgroups (n=28; etch and non-etch). All 112 cavities were restored with the nanohybrid composite Esthet.X HD. The clinical effectiveness of restorations was recorded in terms of retention, marginal integrity, marginal staining, caries recurrence, and postoperative sensitivity after 3, 6, 12, 18, and 24 months (modified United States Public Health Service). The Friedman test detected significant differences only after 18 months for marginal staining in the groups Clearfil SE non-etch (p=0.009) and Xeno V(+) etch (p=0.004). One restoration was lost during the trial (Xeno V(+) etch; p>0.05). Although an increase in marginal staining was recorded for groups Clearfil SE non-etch and Xeno V(+) etch, the clinical effectiveness of restorations was considered acceptable for the single-step and two-step self-etching systems with or without selective enamel etching in this 24-month clinical trial.

Science Teacher Training Programme in Rural Schools: An ODL Lesson from Zimbabwe

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Misheck Mhishi

2012-01-01

Full Text Available This case study looked at 76 randomly selected preservice science teachers from Mbire and Guruve districts who were learning at the Mushumbi Centre in Zimbabwe and assessed their motivations for enrolling under the Bindura University of Science Education (BUSE’s Virtual and Open Distance Learning (VODL programme. It also looked at the challenges they faced, their views on how instruction under the programme can be improved, and their deployment preferences after graduation. The districts are located in the remote Zambezi Valley, which is characterized by poor infrastructure, pests and diseases, frequent attacks by wild animals on people, domestic animals, and crops, harsh climatic conditions, and seasonal floods, which make it very difficult to attract and retain qualified teachers. Through targeted recruitment, BUSE’s VODL programme sought to train relief teachers already serving in the area in the hope that personal history and family connections would entice them to continue teaching in these areas after attaining their teacher certification. Data was collected using a questionnaire with closed and open-ended questions. Results obtained indicate that despite a lack of funding, a shortage of reading materials, and the nonavailability of e-learning facilities, the students were motivated to join the programme for personal and professional motives and that the students, the majority of whom had taught for two or more years in the districts, would prefer deployments in the area after graduation. The study therefore recommends that deliberate efforts be directed toward the targeted recruitment of school leavers and relief teachers from disadvantaged rural areas who possess the requisite minimum entry qualifications to train as science teachers in order to improve teacher retention in remote areas. Further research into the intrinsic problems in BUSE’s VODL programme and a close scrutiny of its course development techniques are also

A comparison of random forest and its Gini importance with standard chemometric methods for the feature selection and classification of spectral data

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Himmelreich Uwe

2009-07-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Regularized regression methods such as principal component or partial least squares regression perform well in learning tasks on high dimensional spectral data, but cannot explicitly eliminate irrelevant features. The random forest classifier with its associated Gini feature importance, on the other hand, allows for an explicit feature elimination, but may not be optimally adapted to spectral data due to the topology of its constituent classification trees which are based on orthogonal splits in feature space. Results We propose to combine the best of both approaches, and evaluated the joint use of a feature selection based on a recursive feature elimination using the Gini importance of random forests' together with regularized classification methods on spectral data sets from medical diagnostics, chemotaxonomy, biomedical analytics, food science, and synthetically modified spectral data. Here, a feature selection using the Gini feature importance with a regularized classification by discriminant partial least squares regression performed as well as or better than a filtering according to different univariate statistical tests, or using regression coefficients in a backward feature elimination. It outperformed the direct application of the random forest classifier, or the direct application of the regularized classifiers on the full set of features. Conclusion The Gini importance of the random forest provided superior means for measuring feature relevance on spectral data, but – on an optimal subset of features – the regularized classifiers might be preferable over the random forest classifier, in spite of their limitation to model linear dependencies only. A feature selection based on Gini importance, however, may precede a regularized linear classification to identify this optimal subset of features, and to earn a double benefit of both dimensionality reduction and the elimination of noise from the classification task.

Effectiveness of Structured Teacher Adaptations to an Evidence-Based Summer Literacy Program

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, James S.; Burkhauser, Mary A.; Quinn, David M.; Guryan, Jonathan; Kingston, Helen Chen; Aleman, Kirsten

2017-01-01

The authors conducted a cluster-randomized trial to examine the effectiveness of structured teacher adaptations to the implementation of an evidence-based summer literacy program that provided students with (a) books matched to their reading level and interests and (b) teacher scaffolding for summer reading in the form of end-of-year comprehension…

Third and Fourth Grade Teacher's Classroom Practices in Writing: A National Survey

Science.gov (United States)

Brindle, Mary; Graham, Steve; Harris, Karen R.; Hebert, Michael

2016-01-01

A random sample of teachers in grades 3 and 4 (N = 157) from across the United States were surveyed about their use of evidence-based writing practices, preparation to teach writing, and beliefs about writing. Teachers' beliefs included their efficacy to teach writing, their orientations to teach writing, their attitude about teaching writing, and…

Ethics Education Adherence by Teacher Trainees during Teaching Practice: A Botswana Perspective

Science.gov (United States)

Moswela, Bernard; Gobagoba, Marina

2014-01-01

This paper presents the results of a survey conducted to find out the extent to which teacher trainees understand and observe professional ethics. It also sought the contribution of the Faculty of Education and secondary schools make in promoting teacher ethics among trainees on teaching practice. Data were gathered from randomly chosen 90…

Random effect selection in generalised linear models

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Denwood, Matt; Houe, Hans; Forkman, Björn

We analysed abattoir recordings of meat inspection codes with possible relevance to onfarm animal welfare in cattle. Random effects logistic regression models were used to describe individual-level data obtained from 461,406 cattle slaughtered in Denmark. Our results demonstrate that the largest...

Knowledge, attitudes, and first-aid measures about epilepsy among primary school teachers in northern Iran.

Science.gov (United States)

Kolahi, A-A; Ghorbanpur-Valukolaei, M; Abbasi-Kangevari, M; Farsar, A-R

2018-07-01

To assess knowledge, attitudes, and first-aid measures about epilepsy among primary school teachers. This cross-sectional study was conducted with participation of 342 primary school teachers during September 2016 to January 2017 in cities of Babol and Qaem-Shahr in Mazandaran Province in northern Iran. Primary schools were selected using simple random sampling. Data were collected through interviews using a structured questionnaire. The knowledge section included general knowledge, causes, symptoms, seizure triggers, first-aid measures, and recommended treatments. The Likert scale was used for the attitudes section. Answers about first-aid measures were categorized as helpful or harmful. The level of total knowledge score of 25 (7.7%) teachers was very high, 140 (43.3%) high, 141 (43.8%) moderate, and 17 (5.2%) low. The mean score about general knowledge was as follows: 6.1 (1.9), range = 0-9; causes 6.3 (1.9), range = 0-10; symptoms of seizures 8.5 (2.5), range = 0-12; and first-aid measures 6.8 (2.0), range = 0-11. Some 83% knew not taking anticonvulsants regularly could trigger seizures, and all teachers said a person with epilepsy should go see a physician. Attitudes were generally positive except for marriage and having children. The level of first-aid measures score of 8 (7.2) teachers was very high, 79 (70.5) high, 25 (22.3) low. Teachers with teaching experience at special schools took more helpful measures CONCLUSIONS: The knowledge of teachers about epilepsy was insufficient, attitudes toward people with epilepsy were generally positive, and first-aid measures at the last witnessed seizure were fairly helpful. Having teaching experience in special schools had a positive influence over knowledge and taking appropriate first-aid measure at time of the last witnessed seizure. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

A National Study of Work-Family Balance and Job Satisfaction among Agriculture Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Sorensen, Tyson J.; McKim, Aaron J.; Velez, Jonathan J.

2016-01-01

This national study sought to extend previous research on the work-family balance (WFB) ability of secondary school agriculture teachers. We utilized data from a simple random sample of agriculture teachers to explore the relationships between work and family characteristics, WFB ability, and job satisfaction. Work role characteristics of interest…

A cluster-randomized controlled trial of strategies to increase adolescents' physical activity and motivation during physical education lessons: the Motivating Active Learning in Physical Education (MALP) trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Rosenkranz, Richard R; Lubans, David R; Peralta, Louisa R; Bennie, Andrew; Sanders, Taren; Lonsdale, Chris

2012-10-01

The physical activity (PA) levels of many children and adolescents in Australia are currently insufficient to promote health benefits. Physical education (PE) programs aim to promote PA and reach nearly all school-aged children, but PA levels within PE lessons are often low. PE teachers may influence children's motivation to be physically active in PE lessons, but little is known about teacher strategies that effectively motivate children to participate in PA, and few intervention studies have examined motivational strategies in PE. The purpose of this study was to compare the effect of three motivational strategies, each based on Self-Determination Theory (SDT), on PA levels, and their hypothesized antecedents, during year 8 PE lessons. This study employed a cluster-randomized controlled trial design. Following a familiarization session, PA levels and hypothesized PA antecedents were measured during a baseline lesson and a post-intervention or control lesson. Teachers (n = 16) and their classes from five secondary schools in Sydney, Australia were randomly assigned into four blocks and instructed to provide one of four 20-min lesson teaching strategy conditions: (1) explaining the relevance of activities; (2) providing choice from PA options selected by the teacher; (3) providing equipment and free choice of activities; or (4) usual practice. The primary outcomes were lesson time spent in moderate-to-vigorous PA, and motivation towards the lesson. Secondary outcomes were perceptions of teacher behavior, psychological needs satisfaction, and lesson time spent in sedentary behavior. PA and sedentary behavior were measured during baseline and post-intervention lessons with waist-mounted Actigraph GT3X accelerometers. Teacher behavior, psychological needs satisfaction, and motivation were assessed via questionnaires at the end of each lesson. Linear mixed-model analyses will be run on all outcomes, with students nested within teachers as a random effect. Study

A cluster-randomized controlled trial of strategies to increase adolescents’ physical activity and motivation during physical education lessons: the Motivating Active Learning in Physical Education (MALP trial

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rosenkranz Richard R

2012-10-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background The physical activity (PA levels of many children and adolescents in Australia are currently insufficient to promote health benefits. Physical education (PE programs aim to promote PA and reach nearly all school-aged children, but PA levels within PE lessons are often low. PE teachers may influence children’s motivation to be physically active in PE lessons, but little is known about teacher strategies that effectively motivate children to participate in PA, and few intervention studies have examined motivational strategies in PE. The purpose of this study was to compare the effect of three motivational strategies, each based on Self-Determination Theory (SDT, on PA levels, and their hypothesized antecedents, during year 8 PE lessons. Methods/design This study employed a cluster-randomized controlled trial design. Following a familiarization session, PA levels and hypothesized PA antecedents were measured during a baseline lesson and a post-intervention or control lesson. Teachers (n = 16 and their classes from five secondary schools in Sydney, Australia were randomly assigned into four blocks and instructed to provide one of four 20-min lesson teaching strategy conditions: (1 explaining the relevance of activities; (2 providing choice from PA options selected by the teacher; (3 providing equipment and free choice of activities; or (4 usual practice. The primary outcomes were lesson time spent in moderate-to-vigorous PA, and motivation towards the lesson. Secondary outcomes were perceptions of teacher behavior, psychological needs satisfaction, and lesson time spent in sedentary behavior. PA and sedentary behavior were measured during baseline and post-intervention lessons with waist-mounted Actigraph GT3X accelerometers. Teacher behavior, psychological needs satisfaction, and motivation were assessed via questionnaires at the end of each lesson. Linear mixed-model analyses will be run on all outcomes, with students nested

Preparing beginning reading teachers: An experimental comparison of initial early literacy field experiences.

Science.gov (United States)

Al Otaiba, Stephanie; Lake, Vickie E; Greulich, Luana; Folsom, Jessica S; Guidry, Lisa

2012-01-01

This randomized-control trial examined the learning of preservice teachers taking an initial Early Literacy course in an early childhood education program and of the kindergarten or first grade students they tutored in their field experience. Preservice teachers were randomly assigned to one of two tutoring programs: Book Buddies and Tutor Assisted Intensive Learning Strategies (TAILS), which provided identical meaning-focused instruction (shared book reading), but differed in the presentation of code-focused skills. TAILS used explicit, scripted lessons, and the Book Buddies required that code-focused instruction take place during shared book reading. Our research goal was to understand which tutoring program would be most effective in improving knowledge about reading, lead to broad and deep language and preparedness of the novice preservice teachers, and yield the most successful student reading outcomes. Findings indicate that all pre-service teachers demonstrated similar gains in knowledge, but preservice teachers in the TAILS program demonstrated broader and deeper application of knowledge and higher self-ratings of preparedness to teach reading. Students in both conditions made similar comprehension gains, but students tutored with TAILS showed significantly stronger decoding gains.

The perception of science teachers on the role of student relationships in the classroom

Science.gov (United States)

Mattison, Cheryl Ann

With the increased accountability of educators comes the responsibility of the entire educational community to find ways in which we can help our students succeed in the classroom. In addition, it is important to discover what it takes to keep those students in school Many science teachers enter the profession unprepared to handle the regular classroom routine. Classroom management, grading, lesson planning, setting up labs, and the myriad of other obligations, can leave teachers overwhelmed and sometimes can get in the way of actually helping students be successful. This study investigated how science teachers viewed the importance of developing strong teacher/student relationships to the increase of student success in a science classroom. I attempted to answer 4 major questions: · How do science teachers in a select high school community view the role of interactive relationships in their classrooms and how that might impact their students? · How do science teachers in a select high school community believe they establish successful interactive relationships with their students? · What do science teachers in a select high school community believe are some of the outcomes of those relationships? · What do science teachers suggest to increase the teacher's ability to form good relationships with their students? A qualitative research method was used including observations, interviews and group discussions of 5 high school science teachers in a small urban school.

Use of online social networking sites among pre-service information technology teachers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Elif Buğra Kuzu

2013-12-01

Full Text Available The current study aimed to investigate the current status and perceptions of pre-service information technology (IT teachers regarding the use of online social networking sites (SNSs. The investigation was further supported through participant feedback regarding the design and implementation of a blended learning environment to embrace online SNSs in instructional settings. The study had a qualitative nature and employed a focus group interview to collect data. Participants were ten fourth graders who were randomly selected from voluntary undergraduate students enrolled at an IT education department of a Turkish state university. Researchers resorted to content analysis through an inductive coding process, provided themes addressing student perceptions and needs, and proposed implications and suggestions for further instructional practices.

Teacher Competencies through the Prism of Educational Research

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Cirila Peklaj

2015-09-01

Full Text Available The present article focuses on teacher competencies as a major factor that impacts student learning. Ultimately, all attempts to improve education converge in the teacher and the quality of his/her work with students. With their teaching methods, their communication and their classroom management, teachers can structure the kind of learning environment that will either promote or hinder learning. The purpose of the article is to analyse research on educational productivity in order to select the most important teacher competencies that are related to student achievement. A model of teacher competencies is developed that serves as a framework for understanding the synergetic effects of teacher competencies on achievement thorough promoting students’ cognitive, affective and social processes. The teacher competencies that impact each of the processes are described and their impact on student achievement is explained.

Experimental Effects of Program Management Approach on Teachers' Professional Ties and Social Capital

Science.gov (United States)

Quinn, David M.; Kim, James S.

2018-01-01

Theory and empirical work suggest that teachers' social capital influences school improvement efforts. Social ties are prerequisite for social capital, yet little causal evidence exists on how malleable factors, such as instructional management approaches, affect teachers' ties. In this cluster-randomized trial, we apply a decision-making…

The Impact of Water Shortages on Educational Delivery in Selected ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The goal of the study was to investigate the impact of water shortages on educational delivery in selected schools in Harare East District. The population included school heads, teachers and pupils all drawn from selected schools of Harare East District. The sample consisted of five school heads, fifty teachers and one ...

Knowledge about Epilepsy and Attitudes toward Students with Epilepsy among Middle and High School Teachers in Kuwait

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Eman Al-Hashemi

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Background and Objectives. Attitudes toward students with epilepsy and epilepsy-related knowledge of teachers are crucial for child’s safety in the school. The aim of this study was to evaluate teachers’ knowledge and attitudes toward epilepsy. Methods. This cross-sectional study included 824 teachers from 24 randomly selected middle and high schools. Scale of Attitudes Toward Persons with Epilepsy (ATPE was modified to assess teachers’ knowledge about epilepsy and attitudes toward students with epilepsy. Results. Median knowledge score about epilepsy was 5 (out of 13, while median attitude score was 10 (out of 15. Both knowledge and attitude median scores were significantly higher in senior teachers with longer teaching experience and in respondents who dealt with a person with epilepsy. There was significant association between knowledge score and attitude score (p<0.01. Logistic regression showed that significant variables, independently associated with poor knowledge after adjusting for possible confounders, were not having a family member with epilepsy (p=0.009, unawareness of life circumstances of persons with epilepsy (p=0.048, and a poor attitude score (p<0.001. Conclusion. School teachers in Kuwait have relatively poor knowledge about epilepsy but have positive attitudes toward students with epilepsy. A number of historical and stigmatizing ideas about epilepsy still exist. It is recommended to provide teachers with information about handling seizures in the educational setting through development and implementation of epilepsy education programs.

The Relationship between Transformational Leadership and Organizational Commitment: The Case for Vocational Teachers in Jordan

Science.gov (United States)

Khasawneh, Samer; Omari, Aieman; Abu-Tineh, Abdullah M.

2012-01-01

The purpose of this article is to determine the relationship between transformational leadership of vocational school principals on vocational teachers-organizational commitment. A random sample of 340 vocational teachers responded to a three-part instrument (the transformational leadership questionnaire, the organizational commitment…

TEFL Textbook Evaluation: From Teachers' Perspectives

Science.gov (United States)

Tok, Hidayet

2010-01-01

This study aims to examine the advantages and disadvantages of one type of TEFL materials, English language textbook "Spot On", used in state primary schools in Turkey. Sample of the research consists of 46 English teachers chosen randomly from state primary schools in Malatya and Adiyaman city centres. A five-likert type scale was used…

Random forest variable selection in spatial malaria transmission modelling in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Thandi Kapwata

2016-11-01

Full Text Available Malaria is an environmentally driven disease. In order to quantify the spatial variability of malaria transmission, it is imperative to understand the interactions between environmental variables and malaria epidemiology at a micro-geographic level using a novel statistical approach. The random forest (RF statistical learning method, a relatively new variable-importance ranking method, measures the variable importance of potentially influential parameters through the percent increase of the mean squared error. As this value increases, so does the relative importance of the associated variable. The principal aim of this study was to create predictive malaria maps generated using the selected variables based on the RF algorithm in the Ehlanzeni District of Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. From the seven environmental variables used [temperature, lag temperature, rainfall, lag rainfall, humidity, altitude, and the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI], altitude was identified as the most influential predictor variable due its high selection frequency. It was selected as the top predictor for 4 out of 12 months of the year, followed by NDVI, temperature and lag rainfall, which were each selected twice. The combination of climatic variables that produced the highest prediction accuracy was altitude, NDVI, and temperature. This suggests that these three variables have high predictive capabilities in relation to malaria transmission. Furthermore, it is anticipated that the predictive maps generated from predictions made by the RF algorithm could be used to monitor the progression of malaria and assist in intervention and prevention efforts with respect to malaria.

A Study of the Relationships between Distributed Leadership, Teacher Academic Optimism and Student Achievement in Taiwanese Elementary Schools

Science.gov (United States)

Chang, I-Hua

2011-01-01

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between distributed leadership, teachers' academic optimism and student achievement in learning. The study targeted public elementary schools in Taiwan and adopted stratified random sampling to investigate 1500 teachers. Teachers' perceptions were collected by a self-report scale. In…

Selecting Optimal Parameters of Random Linear Network Coding for Wireless Sensor Networks

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Heide, J; Zhang, Qi; Fitzek, F H P

2013-01-01

This work studies how to select optimal code parameters of Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). With Rateless Deluge [1] the authors proposed to apply Network Coding (NC) for Over-the-Air Programming (OAP) in WSNs, and demonstrated that with NC a significant...... reduction in the number of transmitted packets can be achieved. However, NC introduces additional computations and potentially a non-negligible transmission overhead, both of which depend on the chosen coding parameters. Therefore it is necessary to consider the trade-off that these coding parameters...... present in order to obtain the lowest energy consumption per transmitted bit. This problem is analyzed and suitable coding parameters are determined for the popular Tmote Sky platform. Compared to the use of traditional RLNC, these parameters enable a reduction in the energy spent per bit which grows...

Voice disorders and mental health in teachers: a cross-sectional nationwide study.

Science.gov (United States)

Nerrière, Eléna; Vercambre, Marie-Noël; Gilbert, Fabien; Kovess-Masféty, Viviane

2009-10-02

Teachers, as professional voice users, are at particular risk of voice disorders. Among contributing factors, stress and psychological tension could play a role but epidemiological data on this problem are scarce. The aim of this study was to evaluate prevalence and cofactors of voice disorders among teachers in the French National Education system, with particular attention paid to the association between voice complaint and psychological status. The source data come from an epidemiological postal survey on physical and mental health conducted in a sample of 20,099 adults (in activity or retired) selected at random from the health plan records of the national education system. Overall response rate was 53%. Of the 10,288 respondents, 3,940 were teachers in activity currently giving classes to students. In the sample of those with complete data (n = 3,646), variables associated with voice disorders were investigated using logistic regression models. Studied variables referred to demographic characteristics, socio-professional environment, psychological distress, mental health disorders (DSM-IV), and sick leave. One in two female teachers reported voice disorders (50.0%) compared to one in four males (26.0%). Those who reported voice disorders presented higher level of psychological distress. Sex- and age-adjusted odds ratios [95% confidence interval] were respectively 1.8 [1.5-2.2] for major depressive episode, 1.7 [1.3-2.2] for general anxiety disorder, and 1.6 [1.2-2.2] for phobia. A significant association between voice disorders and sick leave was also demonstrated (1.5 [1.3-1.7]). Voice disorders were frequent among French teachers. Associations with psychiatric disorders suggest that a situation may exist which is more complex than simple mechanical failure. Further longitudinal research is needed to clarify the comorbidity between voice and psychological disorders.

Voice disorders and mental health in teachers: a cross-sectional nationwide study

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gilbert Fabien

2009-10-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Teachers, as professional voice users, are at particular risk of voice disorders. Among contributing factors, stress and psychological tension could play a role but epidemiological data on this problem are scarce. The aim of this study was to evaluate prevalence and cofactors of voice disorders among teachers in the French National Education system, with particular attention paid to the association between voice complaint and psychological status. Methods The source data come from an epidemiological postal survey on physical and mental health conducted in a sample of 20,099 adults (in activity or retired selected at random from the health plan records of the national education system. Overall response rate was 53%. Of the 10,288 respondents, 3,940 were teachers in activity currently giving classes to students. In the sample of those with complete data (n = 3,646, variables associated with voice disorders were investigated using logistic regression models. Studied variables referred to demographic characteristics, socio-professional environment, psychological distress, mental health disorders (DSM-IV, and sick leave. Results One in two female teachers reported voice disorders (50.0% compared to one in four males (26.0%. Those who reported voice disorders presented higher level of psychological distress. Sex- and age-adjusted odds ratios [95% confidence interval] were respectively 1.8 [1.5-2.2] for major depressive episode, 1.7 [1.3-2.2] for general anxiety disorder, and 1.6 [1.2-2.2] for phobia. A significant association between voice disorders and sick leave was also demonstrated (1.5 [1.3-1.7]. Conclusion Voice disorders were frequent among French teachers. Associations with psychiatric disorders suggest that a situation may exist which is more complex than simple mechanical failure. Further longitudinal research is needed to clarify the comorbidity between voice and psychological disorders.

Application of random coherence order selection in gradient-enhanced multidimensional NMR

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bostock, Mark J.; Nietlispach, Daniel

2016-01-01

Development of multidimensional NMR is essential to many applications, for example in high resolution structural studies of biomolecules. Multidimensional techniques enable separation of NMR signals over several dimensions, improving signal resolution, whilst also allowing identification of new connectivities. However, these advantages come at a significant cost. The Fourier transform theorem requires acquisition of a grid of regularly spaced points to satisfy the Nyquist criterion, while frequency discrimination and acquisition of a pure phase spectrum require acquisition of both quadrature components for each time point in every indirect (non-acquisition) dimension, adding a factor of 2 N -1 to the number of free- induction decays which must be acquired, where N is the number of dimensions. Compressed sensing (CS) ℓ 1 -norm minimisation in combination with non-uniform sampling (NUS) has been shown to be extremely successful in overcoming the Nyquist criterion. Previously, maximum entropy reconstruction has also been used to overcome the limitation of frequency discrimination, processing data acquired with only one quadrature component at a given time interval, known as random phase detection (RPD), allowing a factor of two reduction in the number of points for each indirect dimension (Maciejewski et al. 2011 PNAS 108 16640). However, whilst this approach can be easily applied in situations where the quadrature components are acquired as amplitude modulated data, the same principle is not easily extended to phase modulated (P-/N-type) experiments where data is acquired in the form exp (iωt) or exp (-iωt), and which make up many of the multidimensional experiments used in modern NMR. Here we demonstrate a modification of the CS ℓ 1 -norm approach to allow random coherence order selection (RCS) for phase modulated experiments; we generalise the nomenclature for RCS and RPD as random quadrature detection (RQD). With this method, the power of RQD can be extended

Individual and contextual covariates of burnout: a cross-sectional nationwide study of French teachers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nerrière Eléna

2009-09-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Limited information on the covariates of burnout syndrome in French teachers is available. The aim of this study was to evaluate the relative contributions of individual and contextual factors on the three burnout dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. Methods The source data come from an epidemiological postal survey on physical and mental health conducted in 2005 among 20,099 education workers (in activity or retired selected at random from the health plan records of the national education system. The response rate was 52.4%. Teachers in activity currently giving classes to students who participated in the survey (n = 3,940 were invited to complete a self-administered questionnaire including the Maslach Burnout Inventory. 2,558 teachers provided complete data (64.9%. Variables associated with high emotional exhaustion (highest quartile of score, high depersonalization (highest quartile, and reduced personal accomplishment (lowest quartile were evaluated using multivariate logistic regression. Studied variables referred to demographic characteristics, socio-professional environment, job dissatisfaction, experienced difficulties at work, and teaching motivations. Results Different variables were associated with each burnout dimension. Female teachers were more susceptible to high emotional exhaustion and reduced personal accomplishment, whereas male teachers were more susceptible to high depersonalization. Elementary school teachers were more susceptible to high emotional exhaustion, but less susceptible to high depersonalization and reduced personal accomplishment than their higher school level counterparts. Experienced difficulties with pupils were associated with all three dimensions. A socio-economically underprivileged school neighbourhood was also related to high emotional exhaustion and high depersonalization. Conclusion Programs to enhance teaching environment might

Improving Vocabulary and Pre-Literacy Skills of At-Risk Preschoolers through Teacher Professional Development

Science.gov (United States)

Wasik, Barbara A.; Hindman, Annemarie H.

2011-01-01

In a randomized control study, Head Start teachers were assigned to either an intervention group that received intensive, ongoing professional development (PD) or to a comparison group that received the "business as usual" PD provided by Head Start. The PD intervention provided teachers with conceptual knowledge and instructional…

Personality Profile of Teachers and their Students' Performance in ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The study investigated the effect of teachers' personality profile on students' academic performance in senior secondary modern physics in selected schools in Nsit Ibom Local Government Area of Akwa Ibom State. The survey research design was adopted. Two resercher-made instruments namely: Teachers' personality ...

Four Notions on the Qualities of Cooperating Music Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Abramo, Joseph Michael; Campbell, Mark Robin

2016-01-01

This article develops criteria for the selection, professional development, and assessment of cooperating teachers through four "notions." These notions suggest that cooperating teachers might (1) possess knowledge of educational theory and practice; (2) understand the importance of context in education; (3) understand narrative's role…

On Random Numbers and Design

Science.gov (United States)

Ben-Ari, Morechai

2004-01-01

The term "random" is frequently used in discussion of the theory of evolution, even though the mathematical concept of randomness is problematic and of little relevance in the theory. Therefore, since the core concept of the theory of evolution is the non-random process of natural selection, the term random should not be used in teaching the…

Teachers' attitudes and perceptions about preparation of public schools to assist students with type 1 diabetes.

Science.gov (United States)

Carral San Laureano, Florentino; Gutiérrez Manzanedo, José Vicente; Moreno Vides, Pablo; de Castro Maqueda, Guillermo; Fernández Santos, Jorge R; Ponce González, Jesús Gustavo; Ayala Ortega, María Del Carmen

2018-04-01

To assess teachers' attitudes and perceptions about preparation of public primary and secondary education schools in the Puerto Real University Hospital (Cádiz, Spain) area to care for students with type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) METHODS: A descriptive observational study where answers to an attitude and perception questionnaire on the preparation of schools to care for pupils with T1DM were analyzed. A total of 765 teachers (mean age, 44.3±8.8 years; 61.7% women) from 44 public schools in the area of the Puerto Real University Hospital were selected by random sampling. Overall, 43.2% of teachers surveyed had or had previously had students with T1DM, but only 0.8% had received specific training on diabetes. 18.9% of teachers reported that one of their students with T1DM had experienced at least one episode of hypoglycemia at school, and half of them felt that their school was not prepared to deal with diabetic emergencies. 6.4% stated that their school had glucagon in its first aid kit, and 46.9% would be willing to administer it personally. Women, physical education teachers, and headmasters had a more positive perception of the school than their colleagues. Teachers with a positive perception of school preparation and with a positive attitude to administer glucagon were significantly younger than those with no positive perception and attitude. The study results suggest that teachers of public schools in our health area have not been specifically trained in the care of patients with T1DM and perceive that their educational centers are not qualified to address diabetic emergencies. Copyright © 2017 SEEN y SED. Publicado por Elsevier España, S.L.U. All rights reserved.

Introducing Teacher Mentoring in Kosovo Schools--Potential and Challenges for Sustainability

Science.gov (United States)

Vula, Eda; Berisha, Fatlume; Saqipi, Blerim

2015-01-01

This study examined the lessons learned from the introduction of a teacher mentoring culture within a teacher professional development program in selected pilot schools in Kosovo. Four mentor teachers and four mentee focus groups were involved in the open interviews, and their portfolios were examined. The important themes in terms of developing a…

Reading Aloud in High Schools: Students and Teachers across the Curriculum

Science.gov (United States)

Warner, Lionel; Crolla, Caroline; Goodwyn, Andy; Hyder, Eileen; Richards, Brian

2016-01-01

Reading aloud is apparently an indispensible part of teaching. Nevertheless, little is known about reading aloud across the curriculum by students and teachers in high schools. Nor do we understand teachers' attitudes towards issues such as error correction, rehearsal time, and selecting students to read. A survey of 360 teachers in England shows…

Selecting for Fast Protein-Protein Association As Demonstrated on a Random TEM1 Yeast Library Binding BLIP.

Science.gov (United States)

Cohen-Khait, Ruth; Schreiber, Gideon

2018-04-27

Protein-protein interactions mediate the vast majority of cellular processes. Though protein interactions obey basic chemical principles also within the cell, the in vivo physiological environment may not allow for equilibrium to be reached. Thus, in vitro measured thermodynamic affinity may not provide a complete picture of protein interactions in the biological context. Binding kinetics composed of the association and dissociation rate constants are relevant and important in the cell. Therefore, changes in protein-protein interaction kinetics have a significant impact on the in vivo activity of the proteins. The common protocol for the selection of tighter binders from a mutant library selects for protein complexes with slower dissociation rate constants. Here we describe a method to specifically select for variants with faster association rate constants by using pre-equilibrium selection, starting from a large random library. Toward this end, we refine the selection conditions of a TEM1-β-lactamase library against its natural nanomolar affinity binder β-lactamase inhibitor protein (BLIP). The optimal selection conditions depend on the ligand concentration and on the incubation time. In addition, we show that a second sort of the library helps to separate signal from noise, resulting in a higher percent of faster binders in the selected library. Fast associating protein variants are of particular interest for drug development and other biotechnological applications.

PREVALENCIA DEL SÍNDROME DEL BURNOUT Y SU CORRELACIÓN CON FACTORES PSICOSOCIALES EN DOCENTES DE UNA INSTITUCIÓN UNIVERSITARIA PRIVADA DE LA CIUDAD DE BARRANQUILLA -- PREVALENCE OF BURNOUT SINDROME AND ITS CORRELATION WITH PSYCHOSOCIAL FACTORS IN TEACHERS AT A PRIVATE ACADEMIC INSTITUTION IN THE CITY OF BARRANQUILLA

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

CARMEN CABALLERO DOMÍNGUEZ

2009-06-01

Full Text Available The University teachers are forced to quite high levels of stress, largely related to psychosocial factors of work context of the educational institution, this may influence the development of Burnout syndrome. According to this the question arises, wich is the prevalence of Burnout syndrome and its correlation with psychosocial factors in academics?. To give answer to this question we made a correlational type of research, with a sample of 101 teachers with a form of full-time contract, wich were selected through stratified random sampling method. Were applied component of psychosocial risk factors questionnaire revised teacher Burnout (CBP-R and Burnout syndrome questionnaire (CESQT

Formative evaluation of the STAR intervention: improving teachers' ability to provide psychosocial support for vulnerable individuals in the school community.

Science.gov (United States)

Ferreira, Ronél; Ebersöhn, Liesel

2011-04-01

The article describes the pilot phase of a participatory reflection and action (PRA) study. The longitudinal investigation explores teachers' ability to provide psychosocial support within the context of HIV/AIDS following an asset-based intervention. The study ensued from our desire to understand and contribute to knowledge about the changed roles of teachers due to adversity in the community, specifically in relation to HIV/AIDS and education. The supportive teachers, assets and resilience (STAR) intervention was facilitated from November 2003 to October 2005 and consisted of the research team undertaking nine field visits and facilitating 20 intervention sessions (2-3 hours each), and 12 post-intervention research visits have been conducted to date. Ten female teachers were selected for participation through random purposeful sampling at a primary school in an informal settlement outside Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Data-generation included PRA activities, observation, informal interactive interviews, and focus group discussions. The data were analysed by means of inductive thematic analysis. We found that the teachers did not view vulnerability as being related to children or HIV/AIDS in isolation, but rather that their psychosocial support to children and the school community was inclusive across a spectrum of vulnerabilities and services. We argue that teachers who are inclined to provide such support will fulfil this role irrespective of understanding policy or receiving training. We contend that teachers are well-positioned to manage school-based psychosocial support in order to create relevant and caring spaces for vulnerable individuals in the school community.

Can a student learn optimally from two different teachers?

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Neirotti, J P

2010-01-01

We explore the effects of over-specificity in learning algorithms by investigating the behavior of a student, suited to learn optimally from a teacher B, learning from a teacher B' ≠ B. We only considered the supervised, on-line learning scenario with teachers selected from a particular family. We found that, in the general case, the application of the optimal algorithm to the wrong teacher produces a residual generalization error, even if the right teacher is harder. By imposing mild conditions to the learning algorithm form, we obtained an approximation for the residual generalization error. Simulations carried out in finite networks validate the estimate found.

Towards Science Education for all: Teacher Support for Female ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Towards Science Education for all: Teacher Support for Female Pupils in the Zimbabwean Science Class. ... Annals of Modern Education ... One hundred female pupils studying sciences at either Ordinary or Advanced level, and 10 science teachers from 10 selected secondary schools in one province in Zimbabwe, ...

Modeling eBook acceptance: A study on mathematics teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Jalal, Azlin Abd; Ayub, Ahmad Fauzi Mohd; Tarmizi, Rohani Ahmad

2014-12-01

The integration and effectiveness of eBook utilization in Mathematics teaching and learning greatly relied upon the teachers, hence the need to understand their perceptions and beliefs. The eBook, an individual laptop completed with digitized textbook sofwares, were provided for each students in line with the concept of 1 student:1 laptop. This study focuses on predicting a model on the acceptance of the eBook among Mathematics teachers. Data was collected from 304 mathematics teachers in selected schools using a survey questionnaire. The selection were based on the proportionate stratified sampling. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) were employed where the model was tested and evaluated and was found to have a good fit. The variance explained for the teachers' attitude towards eBook is approximately 69.1% where perceived usefulness appeared to be a stronger determinant compared to perceived ease of use. This study concluded that the attitude of mathematics teachers towards eBook depends largely on the perception of how useful the eBook is on improving their teaching performance, implying that teachers should be kept updated with the latest mathematical application and sofwares to use with the eBook to ensure positive attitude towards using it in class.

Eastern Kentucky Teacher and Administrative Stress: Part II

Science.gov (United States)

Wright, Sam; Ballestero, Victor

2012-01-01

The purpose of this research was to survey selected Eastern Kentucky Teachers (Elementary, Middle, and High School) to collect data about stress in public schools. This was a continuation study for Eastern Kentucky that collected data on how men and women teachers and men and women administrators handle stress. A stress survey (Appendix C) was…

Examples in the Teaching of Mathematics: Teachers' Perceptions

Science.gov (United States)

Ng, Lay Keow; Dindyal, Jaguthsing

2015-01-01

As part of a study examining how teachers in Singapore select and use examples for teaching mathematics, 121 teachers from 24 secondary schools responded to three open-ended questions about the use of examples in teaching. The results show that students' abilities and the difficulty level of the examples were among the topmost considerations…

Predictors of Cyberloafing among Preservice Information Technology Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Dursun, Ozcan Ozgur; Donmez, Onur; Akbulut, Yavuz

2018-01-01

The current mixed-method study investigated the extent of involvement in cyberloafing within classroom settings among preservice information technology teachers. Thirteen state universities were picked randomly from hierarchical clusters, which were determined according to the national university rankings. Then, a recent five-factor cyberloafing…

Knowledge and attitude of some nigerian school teachers on the emergency management of avulsed permanent incisor.

Science.gov (United States)

Olatosi, O O; Iwuala, S O; Isiekwe, G I; Oredugba, F A; Adenaike, A S; Oluwo, A O

2013-01-01

Tooth avulsion has been known to be the most severe of all dental injuries. The immediate action taken at the accident site will determine the prognosis of the tooth. Replantation of an avulsed tooth is the treatment of choice. To assess the knowledge and attitude of primary and secondary (Basic educational) school teachers on the emergency management of avulsed permanent incisors. Twenty public and private basic educational schools were randomly selected from Lagos State. Descriptive cross-sectional study. A 23 item self administered questionnaire was distributed to teachers to determine their knowledge and attitude on the emergency management of avulsed permanent incisors. Data was analysed using SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences), Version 21.0. The responses obtained were tabulated and expressed as frequency distributions and then computed in percentages. Chi-square was used to test the association between knowledge of the schools teachers regarding the emergency management of avulsed permanent incisors and their socio-demographic variables. Multivariate analysis was used to adjust for confounding variables. The level of significance was set at P ≤0.05. A total of 320 teachers answered the questionnaires. Most of the teachers were female (63.1%). Only (30.9%) had received first aid training which included emergency management of dental trauma. Forty- two percent (134) didn't know that an avulsed permanent tooth could be replanted. Twenty teachers (44.4%) would clean an avulsed tooth with toothbrush and toothpaste. A greater proportion of the respondents 130 (40.6%) would transport an avulsed tooth using a clean white handkerchief. The overall knowledge of the school teachers was poor (84%).There was a statistically significant association between the knowledge of the school teachers and the inclusion of emergency management of dental trauma in the first aid training of the teachers P=0.05. Predictors of teachers' level of knowledge of emergency

English Language Learner Representation in Teacher Education Textbooks: A Null Curriculum?

Science.gov (United States)

Watson, Sandy; Miller, Ted L.; Driver, Jennifer; Rutledge, Valerie; McAllister, Deborah

2005-01-01

The purpose of this article is to explore the issue of the English Language Learner as it is presented in teacher education textbooks developed for pre-service teachers. Rather than identify "typical" teacher education texts, the authors elect to review a selection of the most influential and widely used texts. Monument Information Resource (MIR)…

The Validity and Reliability Studies of the Internet Use of Pre-Service English Teachers Survey: A Turkish Context

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gülşah Külekçi

2011-11-01

Full Text Available As the availability of computers and the Internet in schools and classrooms has grown, so has interest in the extent to which these technologies are being used and for what purposes. Recently there has been many studies on teachers’ use of education technology in their classrooms and schools, the availability of this technology in their classrooms and schools, their training and preparation for their use and the barriers to technology use they encounter. Using the Internet effectively and the success of the Internet utilization is very much related to the users’ attitudes toward the Internet. This study aims at investigating the reliability and the validity of the Internet Use of Pre-service English Teachers Survey modified from the Master Thesis of Sudsuang Yutdhana. The survey contains two subscales as Internet Attitude Scale and Self-perception of Computing Skills. The survey was administered to randomly selected third and fourth year 96 pre – service English Teachers at Dokuz Eylül University Buca, Faculty of Education, Department of English Language Teaching. The results indicated that Internet Use of Pre-service English Teachers Survey (IUPETS is reliable and valid.

Effect of health education on trainee teachers' knowledge, attitudes, and first aid management of epilepsy: An interventional study.

Science.gov (United States)

Eze, Christian N; Ebuehi, Olufunke M; Brigo, Francesco; Otte, Willem M; Igwe, Stanley C

2015-12-01

High rates of poor knowledge of, and negative attitudes towards people with epilepsy (PWE) are generally found among school teachers. Their first aid epilepsy management skills are poor. It remains unknown if this is different among trainee teachers and whether educational intervention might reduce these rates. We examined the effect of health education on the knowledge, attitudes, and first aid management of epilepsy on trainee teachers in Nigeria. Baseline data and socio-demographic determinants were collected from 226 randomly selected trainee teachers, at the Federal College of Education, Lagos, Nigeria, with self-administered questionnaires. They received a health intervention comprising an hour and half epilepsy lecture followed by a discussion. Baseline knowledge of, and attitudes towards PWE and their first aid epilepsy management skills were compared to post-interventional follow-up data collected twelve weeks later with similar questionnaires. At baseline the majority (61.9%) and largest proportion (44.2%) of respondents had negative attitudes and poor knowledge of epilepsy, respectively. The knowledge of, and attitudes towards epilepsy, and the first aid management skill increased in most respondents, post-intervention. The proportion of respondents with poor knowledge and negative attitudes dropped by 15.5% (pfirst aid management skills increased by 25.0% (pfirst aid management. This emphasizes the potential benefit of incorporating an epilepsy tailored intervention programme into teachers' training curricula. Copyright © 2015 British Epilepsy Association. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The personality structure of toddlers and pre-school children as perceived by their kindergarten teachers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Maja Zupančič

2003-04-01

Full Text Available The present study was designed to analyse the personality structure of children aged one to seven, as perceived by their kindergarten teachers. In addition, gender differences were examined to determine whether kindergarten teachers perceived the personality characteristics of toddler and pre-school girls differently than those of boys. 508 randomly-selected Slovenian children were assessed by their kindergarten teachers using adapted Flemish Big-Five Bipolar Rating Scales. Four-factor structures that explained more than two-thirds of the variance emerged for teachers' personality ratings of children in each of the three age groups: toddlers, three- to five-year-olds and five- to seven-year-olds. However, five of the twenty-five scales, four of them referring to the Conscientiousness dimension, did not appear to be relevant when assessing individual differences in the toddlerhood. Intellect/Openness, as observed for the toddler sample, and the combined Conscientiousness-Intellect/Openness factor, extracted for each of the two older age groups, accounted for the greatest part of the variance. Extroversion was obtained as a second factor in each of the three age groups, while Emotional Stability showed relatively less stability across these groups. Agreeableness was clearly differentiated only in the oldest age group, emerging there for the first time as an independent factor. A few gender differences were found to be significant within the two groups of pre-school children, with girls consistently being rated higher in terms of Conscientiousness-Intellect/Openness.

Childhood Fruit and Vegetable Intake: A Randomized Trial

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rafaela Rosário

2012-01-01

Full Text Available Our study aimed to assess the impact of a six-months nutrition program, taught by trained teachers, on fruit and vegetable consumption among children in grades 1 to 4. Four hundred and sixty-four children (239 female, 6 to 12 years old, from seven elementary schools were assigned to this randomized trial. Teachers were trained by researchers over six months, according to the following topics: nutrition, healthy eating, and strategies to increase physical activity. After each session, teachers were encouraged to develop activities in the classroom on the topics learned. Children's sociodemographic, anthropometric, dietary, and physical activity data were assessed at baseline and at the end of the intervention. The effect sizes ranged between small (Cohen's d=0.12 on “other vegetables” to medium (0.56 on “fruit and vegetable”, and intervened children reported a significantly higher consumption of vegetables and fruit. Interventions involving trained teachers offer promise to increase consumption of fruit and vegetable in children.

Principals Leadership Styles and Gender Influence on Teachers Morale in Public Secondary Schools

Science.gov (United States)

Eboka, Obiajulu Chinyelum

2016-01-01

The study investigated the perception of teachers on the influence of principals' leadership styles and gender on teacher morale. Four research questions and four research hypotheses guided the study. An ex-post facto research design was adopted in the study. Through the simple random sampling technique a total of 72 principals and 2,506 in 72…

The Influence of Selected Societal, University, and School Conditions on the Preparation and Practice of Teachers.

Science.gov (United States)

Haberman, Martin

An unresolved dilemma in teacher education is the organizational dislocation that occurs between the setting in which teachers are educated and those in which they are expected to practice. College students are conditioned to be independent and self-interested, while beginning teachers are expected to conform to and support their school system. In…

Are Ontario Teachers Paid More Equitably? Do Local Variables Matter?

OpenAIRE

Xiaobin Li

2010-01-01

This study investigated whether Ontario’s education funding reform of 1998 made teacher salaries more equitable. It also examined whether selected local variables had the same influence on teacher salaries in 2001-02 as they did in 1995-96 before the reform. Average teacher salaries before the reform in 1995-96 and after the reform in 2001-02 among school boards and among census divisions were compared to see whether the variation in teacher salaries increased or decreased. A partial co...

A randomized trial of written emotional disclosure interventions in school teachers: controlling for positive expectancies and effects on health and job satisfaction.

Science.gov (United States)

Ashley, Laura; O'Connor, Daryl B; Jones, Fiona

2013-01-01

Writing expressively about distressing experiences has been found to have beneficial health effects. This study examined the effects of written emotional disclosure (WED) interventions on the self-reported health and job satisfaction of school teachers, and compared standard WED instructions with two commonly used more prescriptive variants. The study also controlled and measured the between-condition comparability of participants' post-writing benefit expectations. Teachers (final N = 77) were randomized to a control writing condition or one of three WED conditions that varied the number and/or type of experiences participants wrote about. All teachers wrote for 20 min on three consecutive days at home. Psychological health, physical health, and job satisfaction were assessed at baseline, two weeks, two months, and six months post-intervention. Participants' expectations of benefit following writing were equivalent across conditions. There was no significant effect of any of the three WED interventions, compared to control writing, on psychological or physical health or job satisfaction. There was, however, a significant and sizeable improvement in physical health across writing conditions from baseline to two-month follow-up, and this was maintained at six months. The findings show that control writing can produce comparable expectations of benefit to WED, and are consistent with the possibility that benefit expectancies can effect health improvements following disclosure or control writing. Most previous studies have examined WED with students or patient groups, and the findings also raise an important question about the feasibility of multi-session writing interventions for mid-life working samples. Further studies with occupational groups are warranted, as is further investigation into the role of positive expectancies in WED effects.

Predicting Secondary Agriculture Teachers' Job Stress from Selected Personal, Family, and Work-Related Characteristics

Science.gov (United States)

Torres, Robert M.; Lambert, Misty D.; Lawver, Rebecca G.

2010-01-01

The study sought to describe the characteristics and explain the current level of job stress among secondary agriculture teachers. The sample consisted of 370 secondary agriculture teachers. Data were collected using the Job Stress Survey (Spielberger & Vagg, 1999). From the findings it was concluded that the average secondary agriculture teacher…

A Permutation Importance-Based Feature Selection Method for Short-Term Electricity Load Forecasting Using Random Forest

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nantian Huang

2016-09-01

Full Text Available The prediction accuracy of short-term load forecast (STLF depends on prediction model choice and feature selection result. In this paper, a novel random forest (RF-based feature selection method for STLF is proposed. First, 243 related features were extracted from historical load data and the time information of prediction points to form the original feature set. Subsequently, the original feature set was used to train an RF as the original model. After the training process, the prediction error of the original model on the test set was recorded and the permutation importance (PI value of each feature was obtained. Then, an improved sequential backward search method was used to select the optimal forecasting feature subset based on the PI value of each feature. Finally, the optimal forecasting feature subset was used to train a new RF model as the final prediction model. Experiments showed that the prediction accuracy of RF trained by the optimal forecasting feature subset was higher than that of the original model and comparative models based on support vector regression and artificial neural network.

Pedagogical and conflict situations of teacher of physical training

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Pechko O.M.

2011-02-01

Full Text Available The article reveals the essence of pedagogical and conflict situations between teacher and student. Considered ways of solving and preventing pedagogical and conflict situations in school. Principal reasons of conflict situations are selected, situations of activity, conduct and relations. The receptions of influence of teacher of physical culture are separated on personality of schoolchildren. It is well-proven that the profession of teacher of physical culture supposes possibility of conflict situations.

Choice and control in a museal environment: a study with science teachers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Charles Tiago dos Santos Soares

2013-12-01

Full Text Available This study aims to understand teachers’ strategies of planning students’ visits to science museums and how they intend to relate this visit to formal science teaching. The study was conducted with 21 teachers of Science, Physics, Chemistry and Biology, randomly identified among visitors to a science museum, who were accompanying their students. Interviews and written records of teachers about teachers strategies were analyzed using the textual discursive analysis revealed five levels of control (or choice adopted by teachers for planning and tracking of students' visits to the museum. The results showed that most teachers surveyed use control elements, requesting notes for reports to be retrieved in school. The evaluation mechanisms planned by teachers after the visit showed an intention for preserving and contextualization of the museum experience in other contexts, like in school.

In-Service Preschool Teachers' Thoughts about Technology and Technology Use in Early Educational Settings

Science.gov (United States)

Kara, Nuri; Cagiltay, Kursat

2017-01-01

The purpose of this study is to understand in-service preschool teachers' thoughts about technology and technology use in early educational settings. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 in-service preschool teachers. These teachers were selected from public and private preschools. Convenient sampling was applied because teachers who…

Teacher consultation and coaching within mental health practice: classroom and child effects in urban elementary schools.

Science.gov (United States)

Cappella, Elise; Hamre, Bridget K; Kim, Ha Yeon; Henry, David B; Frazier, Stacy L; Atkins, Marc S; Schoenwald, Sonja K

2012-08-01

To examine effects of a teacher consultation and coaching program delivered by school and community mental health professionals on change in observed classroom interactions and child functioning across one school year. Thirty-six classrooms within 5 urban elementary schools (87% Latino, 11% Black) were randomly assigned to intervention (training + consultation/coaching) and control (training only) conditions. Classroom and child outcomes (n = 364; 43% girls) were assessed in the fall and spring. Random effects regression models showed main effects of intervention on teacher-student relationship closeness, academic self-concept, and peer victimization. Results of multiple regression models showed levels of observed teacher emotional support in the fall moderated intervention impact on emotional support at the end of the school year. Results suggest teacher consultation and coaching can be integrated within existing mental health activities in urban schools and impact classroom effectiveness and child adaptation across multiple domains. © 2012 American Psychological Association

Comparison of Four Teacher Training Procedures in Achieving Teacher and Pupil "Translation" Behaviors in Secondary School Social Studies.

Science.gov (United States)

Millett, Gregg B.

A study was designed to determine whether different training procedures could change specific behaviors of 39 intern teachers and their pupils in secondary school social studies classes. Interns were randomly assigned to four training groups each of which received typescripts from the 1953 McCarthy investigations which were to be used the next day…

Direct random insertion mutagenesis of Helicobacter pylori

NARCIS (Netherlands)

de Jonge, Ramon; Bakker, Dennis; van Vliet, Arnoud H. M.; Kuipers, Ernst J.; Vandenbroucke-Grauls, Christina M. J. E.; Kusters, Johannes G.

2003-01-01

Random insertion mutagenesis is a widely used technique for the identification of bacterial virulence genes. Most strategies for random mutagenesis involve cloning in Escherichia coli for passage of plasmids or for phenotypic selection. This can result in biased selection due to restriction or

Direct random insertion mutagenesis of Helicobacter pylori.

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Jonge, de R.; Bakker, D.; Vliet, van AH; Kuipers, E.J.; Vandenbroucke-Grauls, C.M.J.E.; Kusters, J.G.

2003-01-01

Random insertion mutagenesis is a widely used technique for the identification of bacterial virulence genes. Most strategies for random mutagenesis involve cloning in Escherichia coli for passage of plasmids or for phenotypic selection. This can result in biased selection due to restriction or

The Teacher and the Teaching Profession - An Ecological Adaptation.

Science.gov (United States)

Zak, Itai

This study aimed at assessing the relationships between the structures of the teaching occupation and teacher training institutions and the personality characteristics of teachers in Israel. The hypothesis considered was that recruitment by self-selection would promote an image of conservatism by bringing into teaching people with matched…

Effect of Short- and Long-Term Play Therapy Services on Teacher-Child Relationship Stress

Science.gov (United States)

Ray, Dee C.; Henson, Robin K.; Schottelkorb, April A.; Brown, April Garofano; Muro, Joel

2008-01-01

The purpose of the present study was to explore the effect of both short- and long term Child-Centered Play Therapy on teacher-student relationship stress. Teachers identified 58 students exhibiting emotional and behavioral difficulties who were randomly assigned to one of two treatment groups. Students in the short-term intensive play therapy…

In-Service Science Teachers' and the Use of Multimedia as a Teaching Tool

Science.gov (United States)

Ameyaw, Y.; Quansah, E.

2013-01-01

The study investigated the attitudes of in-service teachers' towards the use of multimedia as a tool for science teaching in Junior High Schools in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. The population sample consisted of 100 Junior High School (JHS) science teachers made up of 60 urban teachers and 40 rural teachers from three selected districts…

Moderators influencing the effectiveness of a behavioral teacher program

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Veenman, Betty; Luman, Marjolein; Oosterlaan, Jaap

2018-01-01

Objective: This study assessed which moderators influenced the effectiveness of a low-intensive behavioral teacher program for children with symptoms of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Methods: Primary school children (N = 114) with ADHD symptoms in the classroom were randomly

A Readability Analysis of Selected Introductory Economics.

Science.gov (United States)

Gallagher, Daniel J.; Thompson, G. Rodney

1981-01-01

To aid secondary school and college level economics teachers as they select textbooks for introductory economics courses, this article recounts how teachers can use the Flesch Reading Ease Test to measure readability. Data are presented on application of the Flesch Reading Ease Test to 15 introductory economics textbooks. (Author/DB)

A Consumer's Hopes and Dreams for Teacher Education. The Tenth Charles W. Hunt Lecture.

Science.gov (United States)

Koontz, Elizabeth D.

From the point of view of the consumer, there is too much of a consumer-producer dichotomy in teacher education. Four distinct hopes and dreams, all interrelated, constitute selected aspects of this problem. First, teacher education should become a joint endeavor between inservice teachers and teacher educators possibly through the implementation…

Violence Directed against Teachers: Results from a National Survey

Science.gov (United States)

Mcmahon, Susan D.; Martinez, Andrew; Espelage, Dorothy; Rose, Chad; Reddy, Linda A.; Lane, Kathleen; Anderman, Eric M.; Reynolds, Cecil R.; Jones, Abraham; Brown, Veda

2014-01-01

Teachers in U.S. schools report high rates of victimization, yet previous studies focus on select types of victimization and student perpetrators, which may underestimate the extent of the problem. This national study was based on work conducted by the American Psychological Association Classroom Violence Directed Against Teachers Task Force and…

Using Analysis in Children's Literature to Challenge Future Teachers.

Science.gov (United States)

Roberts, Sherron Killingsworth

Teacher educators need to take the responsibility for providing future teachers with long-term evaluative skills necessary to select good literature. Educators must also take responsibility for modeling the powerful notion that books or literature aid in everyone's personal search for meaning. The process of analyzing literature is helpful in…

The Relationship between Teachers' Occupational Professionalism and Organizational Alienation

Science.gov (United States)

Yorulmaz, Yilmaz Ilker; Altinkurt, Yahya; Yilmaz, Kursad

2015-01-01

The purpose of this study is to determine the relationship between occupational professionalism and organizational alienation levels of teachers. The study is designed as a survey model. The sample of the study consists of 303 teachers working in the Mugla province of Turkey. Participants were selected by using the disproportionate cluster…

A Randomized Effectiveness Trial of a Behavioral Teacher Program Targeting ADHD Symptoms

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Veenman, B.Y.; Luman, M.; Oosterlaan, J.

2016-01-01

Objective: This study investigated the effectiveness of the Positivity & Rules Program (PR program), a behavioral teacher program targeting ADHD symptoms in the classroom involving both student-focused and classroom-focused programs. Method: Primary school children with ADHD symptoms (N = 114) were

Selective oropharyngeal decontamination versus selective digestive decontamination in critically ill patients: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zhao D

2015-07-01

Full Text Available Di Zhao,1,* Jian Song,2,* Xuan Gao,3 Fei Gao,4 Yupeng Wu,2 Yingying Lu,5 Kai Hou1 1Department of Neurosurgery, The First Hospital of Hebei Medical University, 2Department of Neurosurgery, 3Department of Neurology, The Second Hospital of Hebei Medical University, 4Hebei Provincial Procurement Centers for Medical Drugs and Devices, 5Department of Neurosurgery, The Second Hospital of Hebei Medical University, Shijiazhuang People’s Republic of China *These authors contributed equally to this work Background: Selective digestive decontamination (SDD and selective oropharyngeal decontamination (SOD are associated with reduced mortality and infection rates among patients in intensive care units (ICUs; however, whether SOD has a superior effect than SDD remains uncertain. Hence, we conducted a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs to compare SOD with SDD in terms of clinical outcomes and antimicrobial resistance rates in patients who were critically ill. Methods: RCTs published in PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science were systematically reviewed to compare the effects of SOD and SDD in patients who were critically ill. Outcomes included day-28 mortality, length of ICU stay, length of hospital stay, duration of mechanical ventilation, ICU-acquired bacteremia, and prevalence of antibiotic-resistant Gram-negative bacteria. Results were expressed as risk ratio (RR with 95% confidence intervals (CIs, and weighted mean differences (WMDs with 95% CIs. Pooled estimates were performed using a fixed-effects model or random-effects model, depending on the heterogeneity among studies. Results: A total of four RCTs involving 23,822 patients met the inclusion criteria and were included in this meta-analysis. Among patients whose admitting specialty was surgery, cardiothoracic surgery (57.3% and neurosurgery (29.7% were the two main types of surgery being performed. Pooled results showed that SOD had similar effects as SDD in day-28 mortality (RR =1

Development of a Goal Setting Process and Instrumentation for Teachers and Principals.

Science.gov (United States)

Minix, Nancy; And Others

A pilot program, the Career Ladder Plan, was developed in Kentucky to evaluate a teacher's performance in terms of professional growth and development and professional leadership/initiative based on that teacher's performance on a setting/goal attainment process. Goals jointly selected by the teacher and his/her principal must contribute to school…

Careers in Industrial Sewing for the Apparel Manufacturing Industry: Teacher-Student Guide.

Science.gov (United States)

American Apparel Manufacturers Association, Arlington, VA. Education Committee.

The teacher-student guide has been developed as a service to schools in an effort to help them organize and operate meaningful courses in apparel manufacturing. For the school it furnishes practical information in implementing the course, such as facility design, equipment requirements, and teacher selection. For the teacher it provides a…

Assessment of Teacher Perceived Skill in Classroom Assessment Practices Using IRT Models