Qatar's education reform, which included implementation of a new finance system, appears to be providing schools with adequate funding but is still struggling with issues of transparency and swift policy shifts that have been difficult to accommodate. [For full report, "Developing a School Finance System for K-12 Reform in Qatar", see…

The demand for pervasive access of location-related information (e.g., local traffic, restaurant locations, navigation maps, weather conditions, pollution index, etc.) fosters a tremendous application base of "Location Based Services (LBSs)". Without loss of generality, we model location-related information as "spatial objects" and the accesses…

The recent rise in globalization has brought forth a global wave of academic competitiveness, which has taken its strongest hold in East Asia. In order to attain world class status, Taiwan's Ministry of Education (MoE) initiated a project called Plan to Develop First-class Universities and Top-level Research Centers. The project is often coined…

It seems to happen every day. A meeting is called to outline a new strategy or sales plan. Down go the lights and up goes the PowerPoint. Strange phrases appear--"unlocking shareholder value," "technology-focused innovation," "maximizing utility." Lists of numbers come and go. Bullet point by bullet point, the…

The public has become all too aware of the term "bubble" to describe an asset that is irrationally and artificially overvalued and cannot be sustained. The dot-com bubble burst by 2000. More recently the overextended housing market collapsed, helping to trigger a credit meltdown. The stock market has declined more than 30 percent in the past year,…

In the current economic climate, business schools face crucial decisions. As resources become scarcer, schools must either streamline operations or limit them. An efficiency analysis of U.S. business schools is presented that computes, for each business school, an overall efficiency score and provides separate factor efficiency scores, indicating…

I analyze two issues on the efficiency of schooling choice. The first chapter analyzes changes in the distribution of college enrollment rates that occurred between 1980 and 2000. It aims not only to explain the 69% increase in the overall college enrollment rates, but also changes in the distribution of college attendees by their ability and…

The paradigm change from an input based teaching/learning process to an outcome based process (D. Bluma, 2008, p. 673) reveals efficiency of contribution applied to enhance students' learning outcomes to become particularly important for the development of education and culture change in the constantly changing environment. Aim of the research is…

Through two school case studies in Cyprus, in this paper I explore the role of small internal collaborative networks in promoting school improvement. The analysis of the two cases revealed a series of interrelated themes which indicated issues related to school improvement, and actually, it provided evidence that small internal collaborative…

The present investigation examined the factor structure and psychometric properties of the Injection Phobia Scale-Anxiety (IPS-Anx). Principal components analysis of IPS-Anx items in Study 1 (n = 498) revealed a 2-factor structure consisting of Distal Fear and Contact Fear. However, CFA results in Study 2 (n = 567) suggest that a 1-factor…

"Multitasking" has developed a certain mantra in our culture, and according to this widely held axiom, people in general and students in particular, can and do function productively and learn efficiently doing several things at once. There also seems to be an unshakable conviction that young students excel in a multitasking environment.…

Is it possible to get an "Ivy" education for $7,376 a year? Can a college provide high-quality undergraduate education at a reasonable cost? In this paper, the author explores if cost can be reduced and quality improved through the use of new "value-designed" models of undergraduate education. A value-designed model allows one to appeal to…

In this article, the authors propose "graduation efficiency" as a metric that can show the success of universities in graduating students. They are not suggesting that the current measure of graduation rates be abandoned, but rather that they be supplemented with other measures that could round out the picture of how colleges and universities are…

The dissertation investigates the effect of a concept-based approach to teaching the Chinese temporal system to English-speaking university learners at the elementary level. The pedagogical framework, Systematic-Theoretical Instruction (STI), adopted in this study was proposed by Piotr Gal'perin and originated from Vygotsky's…

This publication is an ECS (Education Commission of the States) "read of the field," built on its scrutiny of new reports and research, and its analysis of emerging drivers of change. This publication is intended to stimulate thinking around how best to craft the "2.0" of powerful policy across the states. The 12 policy areas highlighted in this…