Research-oriented Schools Research Articles

Identifying and Prioritizing the Explanatory Components of Research-Oriented School with the Aim of Improving the Quality of the Teaching-Learning Process

Background and Aim: A research-oriented school can improve the quality of the teaching-learning process. Therefore, the purpose of this study was identifying and prioritizing the explanatory components of research-oriented school with the aim of improving the quality of the teaching-learning process. Methods: This study in terms of purpose was applied and in terms of implementation method was cross-sectional. The research population was the teachers of all educational levels of Mazandaran province in the 2022-2023 academic years, which based on the Cochran formula numbers of 380 people of them were selected as a sample with using multistep cluster sampling methods with respect to the ratio of the size of townships. The research tool was a researcher-made questionnaire with 118 items in 24 components. Data were analyzed by exploratory factor analysis and Friedman test in SPSS software. Results: The results of the exploratory factor analysis showed that the factor loading of all items was higher than 0.40 and the research-oriented school with the aim of improving the quality of the teaching-learning process had 24 components in 11 dimensions, which the factor loading and average variance extracted of all of them were higher than 0.50 and Cronbach and combination reliability of all of them were higher than 0.70. The results of the Friedman test showed that in the research-oriented school with the aim of improving the quality of the teaching-learning process respectively the components of social consequences, scientific and research workshops and festivals, motivational incentives, educational system consequences, forward-looking thinking to research, individual consequences, human resource empowerment, developmental attitude to research and education, academic consequences, upstream policies, creativity-oriented and intellectual orientation of education, religious and national values, creation of research-oriented environment, weakness of education-oriented system, educational contents, dissemination of research-oriented culture, necessity of research-oriented in education, curriculum, facilities and infrastructures, leadership of educational system managers, motivation of students, fostering of critical spirit and problem solving, material and non-material support and research-based evaluation had a higher priority. Conclusion: Considering the identification of the explanatory components of research-oriented school with the aim of improving the quality of the teaching-learning process and prioritizing them, can be taken effective step to improve the research-oriented school through the components with higher priority.

My REU Experience

Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs are research projects funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. They are typically completed during the summer after a student?s sophomore or junior year. They usually last eight to 12 weeks and fund a small research project at research-oriented universities. REUs are usually targeted toward underrepresented groups and students from smaller, less research-oriented schools.

Faculty Appointment Policies and Tracks in U.S. Dental Schools with Clinical or Research Emphases

The 1995 Institute of Medicine study of the future of dental education, Dental Education at the Crossroads: Challenges and Change, recommended that dental schools increase the use of nontenure-track positions in their employment of faculty. As part of a larger investigation of faculty appointment processes in U.S. dental schools, dental deans were queried about institutional policies governing faculty appointments and the use of tenure and nontenure faculty tracks. Response from the fifty-four U.S. schools exceeded 90 percent for each of two mailed questionnaires. Dental schools were classified according to one of two emphases: clinical or research. Deans classified faculty into one of seven appointment tracks. Nontenure-track appointments were less common in clinical-emphasis schools. Research-emphasis schools had a greater mean proportion of their faculties in both the nontenure research track (7.0 percent vs. 2.7 percent) and the nontenure clinical track (20.8 percent vs. 17.4 percent). Compared to faculty appointment data reported in 1990, there were more nontenure-track faculty in 81 percent of research-oriented schools and 55 percent of clinical-oriented schools. The most frequently cited reasons for more nontenure faculty in these thirty-three schools were greater administrative flexibility, better fulfillment of mission, and increased difficulty achieving tenure. This study showed the number of faculty holding nontenure-track appointments had increased since 1990, especially among research-emphasis dental schools.

Identifying Consensus in Teacher Education Reform Documents: A Proposed Framework and Action Implications

Since the publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), dialogue on school improvement has increasingly focused on the improvement of teacher preparation. In the mid-1980s, three reform documents, A Call for Change in Teacher Education (National Commission on Excellence in Teacher Education [NCETE], 1985), Tomorrow's Teachers (Holmes Group, 1986), and A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century (Carnegie Forum, 1986), signaled a new direction for the literature on school reform. No longer solely concerned with the lack of curriculum standards and academic rigor in American schools, the authors of these documents shifted the focus to teachers and the quality of their preparation. In the 1990s, additional documents drifted in and out of the teacher education debate. But this wide array of proposals, coupled with the lack of coordinated effort among sponsoring groups, has obscured the degree to which reform agendas are compatible. Given the proliferation of proposals, with each carrying its own set of assumptions and objectives, the body of teacher education reform literature as a whole appears fragmented and the individual proposals, idiosyncratic. Recommendations advocated by some are ignored or even opposed by others. Some analysts see convergence of opinion: proposals that are philosophically, programmatically, and/or strategically compatible (Fullan, Galluzzo, Morris, & Watson, 1998). Others see mostly differences: proposals that vary both in terms of their assessment of the current quality of teacher education programs as well as in terms of how they should be changed (Howey & Zimpher, 1989, p. 1). No one, however, has systematically identified areas of agreement and disagreement across the major proposals or the strength of the consensus. Because all proposals have their unique institutional and political histories, varying assessments of problems and reform strategies are understandable (Tom, 1997). Reform proposals are written for different purposes, constituencies, and contexts. The Holmes Group, for example, began as a commission of deans from major research-oriented schools of education, whereas the Carnegie Forum was a task force of education, business, and government leaders. Both the Holmes Group and the Carnegie Forum helped set the terms for the initial debate on teacher education reform, pressing for the abolition of the undergraduate education major and the implementation of rigorous academic and performance-based standards for students and teachers. National organizations such as the Project 30 Alliance (1991) and the Renaissance Group (1996) have brought together university faculty and administrators from arts and sciences and faculty and administrators from education units to advocate for their conception of quality teacher education. These groups have published both reform recommendations and descriptions of programs at their participating institutions. The reform ideas advocated by the Center for Educational Renewal (CER) draw on empirical data, although the postulates themselves derive more from core members' judgments of the proper role of schools and teachers than from the empirical base (Goodlad, 1990, 1994). Most recently, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF, 1996), composed of business, education, and political leaders, has occupied the focal point for discourse about teacher education. The first of NCTAF's two major publications, What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future (NCTAF, 1996), has detailed necessary steps in preparing knowledgeable, skillful, and committed teachers; it argues for policies and practices to support quality teachers. The second report, Doing What Matters Most: Investing in Quality Teaching (1997), summarizes national progress toward the goals outlined in the first report and reframes some of its previous recommendations in light of policy changes and data on both the conditions of teaching and the characteristics of effective teacher education programs. …

RESEARCH PRODUCTIVITY OF THE ECONOMICS PROFESSION IN EAST ASIA

I. INTRODUCTION Research productivity is often ranked for economics departments based on page of journal publications (for example, Graves, Marchand, and Thompson [1982]), while others rate the departments by the number of citations attributed to their faculty (for example, Davis and Papanek [1984]). Recently, Scott and Mitias [1996] used and concepts in their departmental rankings. While the flow of research can be counted to give credit to the department where authors are affiliated at the time of publication, the stock ranking a currently affiliated faculty's stock of past and current research. The alternative rankings also use different sets of journals as well as varied weighting schemes to standardize the length of journal pages and to adjust for journal quality. While several different methods have been used to rank economics departments in the United States, no such assessment has been done for East Asian universities. This article aims to fill this gap by ranking economics professions in East Asia based solely on research productivity. For the purpose of comparison with U.S. universities, our methodology closely follows that of Scott and Mitias [1996] with some variations in the sample length. First, the ranking the of past and current research (for example, Hogan [1984], Laband [1985], Conroy and Dusansky [1995], Scott and Mitias [1996], and Dusansky and Vernon [1998]). Fine research scholars move from one university to another, a phenomenon that sometimes leads to dramatic changes in school performance. However, labor mobility depends to some extent on the degree of importance of research to which a university is attached; more open and research-oriented schools often hire researchers (and their accompanying stock of published research) from other institutions in the region or more often from abroad, while others more or less insulate themselves from inflows of new research. A more accurate reflection of current reality is, therefore, to know who is at a particular university today, not who was at it in the past. Thus, economics faculty affiliated with East Asian universities during the autumn 1997 semester are counted for the stock ranking in East Asia. The economics faculty include all economists in business schools as well as all in economics departments.(1) Faculty names were obtained directly from department chairs and each school's home page on the internet. Second, the basic ranking relies on page of articles published in a set of 36 quality journals over the period 1990-96. Page are employed to capture many variations in the length of articles across journals. The EconLit CD-ROM (September 1997) includes all international journals that have appeared in the Journal of Economic Literature. The choice of a set of quality journals is, however, open to question. Graves, Marchand, and Thompson [1982], for example, examined publications in a set of 24 journals, Hogan [1984] looked at a set of 4, Laband [1985] a set of 27, Bairam [1994] a set of 5, and Conroy and Dusansky [1995] and Dusansky and Vernon [1998] each a set of 8 journals. The criterion employed here for top-36 journals relies on the choice in Scott and Mitias [1996] in which the original set of top-24 journals in Graves, Marchand, and Thompson, [1982] was updated.(2) To check the sensitivity of our findings with alternative sets of journals, we ranked these schools based on top-24 and top-42 journals. The list of 42 top journals was provided to us by Dusansky and Vernon [1998].(3) Third, page counts are employed (for example, Graves, Marchand, and Thompson [1982], Hirsch, Austin, Brooks, and Moore [1984], Conroy and Dusansky [1995], Scott and Mitias [1996], and Dusansky and Vernon [1998]). The Scott-Mitias [1996] conversion factors are used for the basic ranking, in which the number of pages published in 36 journals were standardized to the average length of a page in the AER. …

THE MATHEMATICAL CONTEST IN MODELING: SUCCESS AT A SMALL REGIONAL UNIVERSITY

ABSTRACT The Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) was started in 1985 by Ben Fusaro while at Salisbury State University, and the Consortium on Mathematics and its Applications has sponsored the MCM from the beginning. The MCM is a contest in which teams of three undergraduate students compete with other undergraduate teams from schools all over the world. A key attraction of this competition is the emphasis on practical applications of mathematics to solve real—world problems. The authors implemented a successful MCM program at Eastern Oregon University which can serve as a model from which to build or enhance your own program. We have found that the MCM program promotes teamwork, generates enthusiasm in the students, and provides a forum in which small public or private schools can advantageously compete with larger research-oriented schools.

An analysis of contributions and contributors to Public Choice and the Journal of Law and Economics; 1973?1987

Several conclusions may be drawn from the information we have presented here. First and without doubt, the University of Chicago is by far the most dominant force overall, and is particularly so with respect to the production of pages and papers published in the Journal of Law and Economics. The George Mason-Virginia Tech influence is strong with respect to Public Choice, but is not, in our opinion, dominant. One does not necessarily need to be located at a large, research-oriented school in order to publish in either journal, but these schools are the source of most contributions. This is particularly true of the JLE but significantly less so for PC. The source of contributions is very broad, but top 50 institutions account for the lion's share. Contributions by persons employed at foreign institutions are important, particularly for PC. The analysis of papers and pages by degree schools of authors reveals that, while economists dominate, other disciplines are important, especially political science with respect to PC; law and business-related disciplines for JLE. These data also show that, while Chicago faculty contribute only marginally to PC, Chicago graduates exert a very strong influence. The influence of Chicago on the JLE is really notable when we rank institutions by the total contributions of both faculty and graduates, and when we rank the top 25 contributors to each journal. We hope that this paper will provide information useful to those interested, for whatever reason, in institutional and individual publishing performance with respect to the two journals. For us, the process has been difficult and time consuming, but also greatly interesting and rewarding.