This article extends the work of Kellam, Ling, Merisca, Brown and Ialongo (1998) by applying a mathematical model of competition between children to peer contagion in the aggressive behaviors of elementary school students. Nonlinearity in the relationship between group aggression and individual aggression at 2-year follow-up is present. Consistent…

This article describes current evolutionary research on adolescent sexual and romantic behavior. It first reviews functional explanations for basic sex differences in behavior. As in other pair-bonding mammals, women seek dominant males, and men seek and guard young, fertile females. Recent work is then described on adolescent competitiveness,…

Higher educational institutions face fundamental challenges as they adapt to increasingly competitive markets. This literature review provides a context on markets, failure, and turnarounds, and discusses the literature on the shift of the higher educational industry into competitive markets. The literature on turnarounds in the corporate…

Public management scholars often claim that agency competition provides an effective institutional check on monopoly authority, and hence, leads to improvement of administrative performance in public sector agencies. This logic was central for creating the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in 1975 to challenge the policy information provided by…

This chapter describes techniques and projects that most institutions need if they are to be viable in an increasingly competitive labor market. The authors assert that institutional researchers who increase their involvement in workforce development initiatives can become more valuable to their institution.

The fresh vegetables commodity chain linking Kenyan producers with United Kingdom (UK) consumers employs significant numbers of workers in production and processing. This chain is dominated by UK retailers that determine the production imperatives of Kenyan firms upstream in the chain and, indirectly the employment strategies they adopt. This…

An evolutionary analysis of the dynamics of one-on-one and coalitional male-male competition provides a theoretical frame for conceptualizing the evolved functions and proximate developmental forms of the social behavior of boys, and for appreciating why the behavior of boys differs from that of girls. We propose the accompanying selection…

The benefits of weather forecasting contests within geography departments are reaffirmed. The greatly increased ease of conducting such contests in the new millennium is stressed. Some of the specifics of the forecasting contest at Salisbury University are discussed. In addition, the advantages of a departmental contest over a national contest are…

For the past 16 years, the blue-collar city of Huntington, West Virginia, has rolled out the red carpet to welcome young wrestlers and their families as old friends. They have come to town chasing the same dream for a spot in what many of them call "The Show". For three days, under the lights of an arena packed with 5,000 fans, the…

This study explores the experiences and initiatives of vocational education and training (VET) providers in three areas: (1) Income sources and mixes; (2) "Thin markets" in VET; and (3) Research and development. Practices and policies are evolving in these three areas. The report contributes to a deeper understanding of the scope and…

This report summarizes the discussion from an invitational roundtable that engaged fifteen leaders in higher education. The essay finds that colleges and universities have become preoccupied with advancing their prestige instead of achieving publicly-defined purposes, and calls for the restoration of a greater sense of public purpose to learning…

This paper describes classroom experiments in cooperative behavior as examples of experiential learning in economics classes. Several games are briefly discussed and a new game in cartel behavior is presented. In this game, Students make production decisions as a cartel and earn revenues based on their own output decision and the output decision…

In this era of global competition, human resources will play a decisive role in the battle for efficiency and competitive advantage, where nations and organisations with superior and quality-oriented human capital will soon outperform those with inefficient and quantity-oriented labour force. Rate of human capital formation will be more important…

This study investigated the effects of the cooperative and competitive learning on academic performance of students in mathematics in order to find out which one of them is the more effective learning strategy. The sample of the study was 400 Senior Secondary Schools III, Mathematics students made up of 240 boys and 160 girls randomly selected…

The ecological paradigm has become a powerful framework for understanding how teachers and students negotiate the learning environment. This article articulates the ecological paradigm into a more cohesive framework and expands it using influential work from the sociology of physical education. First, we explain several core concepts of ecological…