Achieving agri-environmental policy outcomes using models of institutional change     

Stuart Morriss  Mark Paine  Terry Parminter  Gavin Sheath  Roger Wilkinson 《The Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension》2013,19(3):127-137

Abstract

Institutions involved in public policy and technological innovation are concerned with processes that influence the behaviour of people. This paper reports on research in the New Zealand dairy industry that is seeking to develop improved process models for managing change in a range of policy, industry and business contexts. The Practice Interplay Model was used to evaluate mediating methods for negotiating environmental and production outcomes within the context of a farm dairy effluent management case study. Significant misalignments between research, farming, extension and policy practitioners' expectations and perceptions of factors required for effective farm dairy effluent management were found. The combination of interactive workshops linked to quantitative verification and testing and follow-up interviews enabled a depth of investigation that was rich in information yet cost-effective in terms of research resources. The process used identified opportunities to change the actions of system participants and alignment between them. It enabled strategies to be agreed that would continually improve and strengthen the process of change. Further development and application of the Practice Interplay Model to policy problems, including the ongoing development of tools and techniques used within the methodology, has the potential to break though into a new policy-development paradigm in New Zealand.  相似文献   

A longitudinal study of state government homepage accessibility in Maryland and the role of web page templates for improving accessibility     

Jonathan Lazar  Brian Wentz  Abdulelah Almalhem  Alexander Catinella  Catalin Antonescu  Yeveniy Aynbinder  Michael Bands  Edward Bastress  Brandon Chan  Brian Chelden  Darin Feustel  Nabin Gautam  Whitney Gregg  Michael Heppding  Cory Householder  Alex Libby  Corey Melton  Jack Olgren  Loren Palestino  Morgan Ricks  Scott Rinebold  Matthew Seidel 《Government Information Quarterly》2013

It is well documented that government agencies, at all levels, continue to have problems ensuring that government web sites follow laws related to web accessibility for people with disabilities. Although there are a number of published studies on government web accessibility that are point-in-time, there are no published studies consisting of a longitudinal analysis of state-level government web site accessibility. This paper contributes to the research literature in three ways: 1) an accessibility inspection of 25 Maryland state government homepages in 2012 which involved 150 human inspections of web pages, 2) a comparison of the results from 2012 to a similar accessibility evaluation in 2009, and 3) a discussion of the role of a web page template, which was introduced in Maryland state government shortly after the 2009 evaluation. The data from this longitudinal evaluation leads to the conclusion that web page templates do tend to result in more accessible sites within state government.  相似文献   

Precursors to probation and parole agent intent to send informational,emotional, and esteem social support messages to female clients     

Sandi W. Smith  Merry Morash  Brandon Walling  Elizabeth A. Adams  Amanda J. Holmstrom 《Journal of Applied Communication Research》2013,41(3):344-363

Supervising agents serve as sources of social support for over one million women in the US on probation and parole who strive to avoid recidivism. Little is known about the supportive messages agents intend to provide their female clients or their precursors. The optimal matching model of social support is used in an investigation of the precursors to agents’ intent to send different types of social support messages to the women they supervise. Results indicated that supervising agents intended to provide informational support in the form of suggestions or advice, esteem support in the form of compliments, and emotional support in the form of encouragement to the women. Both agent communication pattern and offender level variables were precursors to the intent to send informational support messages, but only agent communication pattern variables predicted the intent to send emotional support messages.  相似文献   

E-Mail as Spectroscopy: Automated Discovery of Community Structure within Organizations     

Joshua R. Tyler  Dennis M. Wilkinson  Bernardo A. Huberman 《The Information Society》2013,29(2):143-153

We describe a method for the automatic identification of communities of practice from e-mail logs within an organization. We use a betweenness centrality algorithm that can rapidly find communities within a graph representing information flows. We apply this algorithm to an initial e-mail corpus of nearly 1 million messages collected over a 2-month span, and show that the method is effective at identifying true communities, both formal and informal, within these scale-free graphs. This approach also enables the identification of leadership roles within the communities. These studies are complemented by a qualitative evaluation of the results in the field.  相似文献   

The impact of federal financial aid policy upon higher education access     

Dannielle Joy Davis  Lisa Celeste Green-Derry  Brandon Jones 《Journal of educational administration and history》2013,45(1):49-57

This article reviews the history of financial aid policy from the Higher Education Act of 1965 to its reauthorisation in 1992 and the subsequent ramifications upon African-American students. It considers issues of race and class with regard to college access. This work concludes with a look at contemporary aid, as well as offers race- and class-conscious financial aid by increasing college affordability to low-income students, as potential solutions to broadening educational access to Black Americans.  相似文献   

The Waterloo longitudinal project: correlates and consequences of social withdrawal in childhood     

Kenneth Rubin  Lilly Both  Margaret Wilkinson 《Infancia y Aprendizaje》2013,36(49):73-90

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The development,validation, and potential uses of the Student Interest-in-the-Arts Questionnaire     

Paul R. Brandon  Brian E. Lawton 《Studies in Educational Evaluation》2013

The Student Interest-in-the-Arts Questionnaire was designed to measure elementary school students’ interest in dance, drama, music, and the visual arts. We collected data providing evidence for reliability, content validity, construct validity, and convergent and discriminant validity. We describe the development of the method and the collection and analysis of the validity data. The brief instrument is easy to administer, fills a gap in the compendium of available instruments, and is useful in a variety of settings with a variety of research and evaluation designs.  相似文献   

Improving Physics Teaching through Collaborative Research     

David Treagust  Monica Leggett  Peter Glasson  William J. Wilkinson 《Research in Science & Technological Education》2013,31(2):93-101

For one semester a team of researchers observed, recorded and discussed the manner in which physics knowledge was being transmitted by the teacher and acquired by a class of Year 11 students (aged 15‐16 years) and the role of the students' textbooks in this process. The collaboration provided an environment in which the teacher, as a member of the research team, could reflect on practice and initiate changes in his teaching. The results of the study are presented as two assertions. First, the collaborative approach enhanced the teacher's philosophical basis for his physics teaching and created an environment in which changes in teaching could occur. Secondly, deficiencies in students' use of the required textbooks were identified, and more effective means for student learning from text were adopted and evaluated.  相似文献   

Child sexual abuse prevention education: A review of school policy and curriculum provision in Australia     

Kerryann Walsh  Donna Berthelsen  Jan M. Nicholson  Leisa Brandon  Judyann Stevens  Jerome N. Rachele 《牛津教育评论》2013,39(5):649-680

The past four decades have seen increasing public and professional awareness of child sexual abuse. Congruent with public health approaches to prevention, efforts to eliminate child sexual abuse have inspired the emergence of prevention initiatives which can be provided to all children as part of their standard school curriculum. However, relatively little is known about the scope and nature of child sexual abuse prevention efforts in government school systems internationally. This paper assesses and compares the policies and curriculum initiatives in primary (elementary) schools across state and territory Departments of Education in Australia. Using publicly available electronic data, a deductive qualitative content analysis of policy and curriculum documents was undertaken to examine the characteristics of child sexual abuse prevention education in these school systems. It was found that the system-level provision occurs unevenly across state and territory jurisdictions. This results in the potential for substantial inequity in Australian children’s access to learning opportunities in child abuse prevention education as a part of their standard school curriculum. In this research, we have developed a strategy for generating a set of theoretically-sound empirical criteria that may be more extensively applied in comparative research about prevention initiatives internationally.  相似文献   

Upper and lower body responses to repeated cyclical sprints     

Israel Halperin  Brandon W. Collins  Michael Monks  Chris T. Compton  Joseph D. Yetman  Angela Loucks-Atkinson 《European Journal of Sport Science》2018,18(7):994-1003

Purpose: To compare the physiological and perceptual responses of the upper and lower body to all-out cyclical sprints with short or long rest periods between sprints.

Methods: Ten recreationally trained males completed four 10?×?10?s sprint protocols in a randomized order: upper body with 30?s and 180?s of rest between sprints, and lower body with 30?s and 180?s of rest between sprints. Additionally, maximum voluntary contractions (MVC) were measured at pre-sprint and post-sprints 5 and 10. Normalized (% of first sprint) peak power, MVC, heart rate (HR) and rating of perceived exertion (RPE) were compared between upper and lower body within the same recovery period, and absolute values (Watts, bpm, RPE scores) were compared within the same body part and between recovery periods.

Results: Trivial differences were identified in normalized peak power, HR and RPE values between the upper and lower body in both recovery conditions (<2%, d?≤?0.1), but MVC forces were better maintained with the upper body (～9.5%, d?=?1.0) in both recovery conditions. Absolute peak power was lower (～147?Watts, d?=?1.3), and HR was higher (～10?bpm, d?=?0.73) in the 30?s compared to 180?s condition in both the upper and lower body whereas RPE scores were similar (<0.6?RPE units, d?≤?0.1). Despite the reductions in peak power, MVC forces were better maintained in the 30?s condition in both upper (2.5?kg, d?=?0.4) and lower (7.5?kg, d?=?0.7) body.

Conclusions: Completing a commonly used repeated sprint protocol with the upper and lower body results in comparable normalized physiological and perceptual responses.  相似文献