Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the benefits of monitoring and enhancing engagement to impact the overall effectiveness and future success by using the combination of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale along with a daily employee vote to trigger an appropriate "ad hoc" huddle that can be proactive in addressing any engagement…

The purpose of this research was to determine what a school district in Texas does to have consistent bond approval passages. The qualitative research consisted of three interviews that included six questions to district senior staff participants who closely work on school bonds. Research showed that the district relies on guided and established…

This paper reports a validation study based on descriptive multidimensional item response theory (DMIRT), implemented in the R package "D3mirt" by using the ERS-C, an extended version of the Relevance subscale from the Moral Foundations Questionnaire including two new items for collectivism (17 items in total). Two latent models are…

In this paper, the authors study a proposition in California that weakened the constraints on some local governments by lowering the vote share required to approve capital funding for schools and community colleges. The study uses a difference-in-differences design around this policy change and data for over 4,000 local elections across the state…

Background: It has repeatedly been reported that, when making decisions under uncertainty, groups outperform individuals. Real groups are often replaced by simulated groups: Instead of performing an actual group discussion, individual responses are aggregated by a numerical computation. While studies have typically used unweighted majority voting…

Correspondence audits document causal evidence of racial/ethnic discrimination in many contexts. However, few studies have examined whether local political party voting context influences individuals to engage in "stakeholder-centric" discrimination on behalf of or in response to expectations of others. We examine heterogeneity in…

This article examines enrollments in languages other than English in United States higher education from the perspective of geographical distribution. While the overall decline in language enrollments is well known, enrollments are also very unequal across states when accounting for population. By cross-referencing MLA language enrollment data…

Over several decades, a greater share of the expense of earning a college degree has shifted to students and their families as appropriations to public institutions of higher education have declined as a percentage of the overall cost to educate a student. Tuition has greatly outpaced inflation during this period, while inflation-adjusted…

With the rise in popularity of social media and e-commerce platforms, "discrete math" is at the heart of our online experiences, playing a front-end role in the recommendation of what to click, watch, or buy, or who to follow or friend, as well as a back-end role in data storage, access, and transfer. This thesis focuses on two such…

Scholars and legal practitioners of voting rights are concerned with estimating individual-level voting behavior from aggregate-level data. The most commonly used technique, King's ecological inference (EI), has been questioned for inflexibility in multiethnic settings or with multiple candidates. One method for estimating vote support for…

Americans with more education vote at higher rates. Some studies have found evidence of a causal relationship, while others have not. The available data also tell us little about why and how education increases voting. The authors looked the educational trajectories and adult voting records of students who attend charter schools in Boston. The…

Many college students are motivated to vote in presidential elections. Like most Americans, however, they are far less likely to vote in elections for local officeholders. Often this is because they have little to no information about the candidates. Starting in 2020, with university support, the author and a colleague began providing nonpartisan…

The 1971 passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution was a significant step in advancing voting rights that offered a new route for young people to participate in public life. While met with enthusiasm in many quarters, the question of where a substantial segment of the youth vote--college students--would cast their ballots was a…

The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the need to conduct synchronous online instruction in which students and faculty were distributed geographically but aggregated digitally onto a single screen on a computer. This approach will likely persist into the future. Thus, a better understanding of how engagement approaches can be adapted to…

Pundits, politicians, and academics have long worried about potentially low rates of civic participation among STEM-oriented students. Does studying STEM actually decrease the odds that young people will be actively involved in democracy? To answer this question, we created a dataset of over 23 million students in the United States, matched to…