Objective: This study assessed the effects of unified family and drug treatment courts (DTCs) on the resolution of cases involving foster care children and the resulting effects on school performance. Method: The first analytic step was to assess the impacts of presence of unified and DTCs in North Carolina counties on time children spent in…

Against the backdrop of new economic realities, one of the larger forces that is affecting businesses worldwide is cloud computing, whose benefits include agility, time to market, time to capability, reduced cost, renewed focus on the core and strategic partnership with the business. Cloud computing can potentially transform a majority of the…

Behavioral and economic theories have long maintained that actions are chosen so as to minimize demands for exertion or work, a principle sometimes referred to as the "law of less work". The data supporting this idea pertain almost entirely to demands for physical effort. However, the same minimization principle has often been assumed also to…

Previous studies have indicated that visual working memory performance increases with age in childhood, but it is not clear why. One main hypothesis has been that younger children are less efficient in their attention; specifically, they are less able to exclude irrelevant items from working memory to make room for relevant items. We examined this…

Saving energy through energy efficiency improvements can cost less than generating, transmitting, and distributing energy from power plants, and provides multiple economic and environmental benefits. Local governments can promote energy efficiency in their jurisdictions by developing and implementing strategies that improve the efficiency of…

This testimony discusses the findings from our recent work on fragmentation, overlap, and potential duplication in federally funded programs that support teacher quality. We recently issued a report addressing fragmentation, overlap, and potential duplication in federal programs that outlined opportunities to reduce potential duplication across a…

Every administrative action a principal will take is reduced to a decision. These decisions are made in an arena of overlapping moralities stemming from the organizational morality in concert with his/her personal morality. As Barnard stated, it is impossible to divorce one from the other. The purpose of this study was to attempt to describe and…

Learning requires applying limited working memory and attentional resources to intrinsic, germane, and extraneous aspects of the learning task. To reduce the especially undesirable extraneous load aspects of learning environments, cognitive load theorists suggest that spatially integrated learning materials should be used instead of spatially…

States and school districts are facing unprecedented financial pressure due to the continued poor performance of the United States's economy. Dramatic shortfalls in funding due to reduced tax collections were held off for 2 years thanks to federal stimulus funds, but with these revenues already consumed and little likelihood of more in the near…

With growing evidence that human capital investment is more efficiently spent on younger children coupled with wide variation in preschool access across states, this article uses a neoliberal approach to examine the potential social costs and benefits that could accrue should the United States decide to implement a centralized preschool…

Evidence-based policy-making and other recent reforms in public steering emphasize the role systematic evidence can play in improving decision making and public policies. Increasing deficits heighten the pressure on public authorities to legitimate public spending and to find savings. Existing studies show that the influence of research-based…

The Race to the Top-District (RTT-D) competition asks districts to personalize education for all students in their schools, focusing on classrooms and the relationship between educators and students. To reach this bold goal, the competition calls for providing teachers with "the information, tools, and supports that enable them to meet the…

The problem with the study of the concept of electronic government (e-Gov) is that scholars in the field have not adequately explored various dimensions of the concept. Literature on e-Gov is replete with works on the form of government to consumer e-Gov. Much less work had been done on the government to government (G2G) e-Gov. This qualitative…

This paper studies the optimal allocation of resources--in terms of school management, teachers, supporting employees and materials--in secondary schools. We use a flexible budget constrained output distance function model to estimate both technical and allocative efficiency scores for 448 Dutch secondary schools between 2002 and 2007. The results…

The neural efficiency hypothesis of intelligence suggests a more efficient use of the cortex (or even the brain) in brighter as compared to less intelligent individuals. This has been shown in a series of studies employing different neurophysiological measurement methods and a broad range of different cognitive task demands. However, most of the…