Given the importance of a college education to entering and staying in the middle class and the high cost of obtaining a bachelor's degree, "Who Wins? and Who Pays?" are questions being asked today at kitchen tables and in the halls of government throughout the nation. Using publicly available data, the authors look at who wins and who pays…

This thesis deals with "large-scale" detection problems that arise in many real world applications such as sensor networks, mapping with mobile robots and group testing for biological screening and drug discovery. These are problems where the values of a large number of inputs need to be inferred from noisy observations and where the…

Urban school leaders have challenges in continually improving student achievement and making change as quickly as needed. To address this problem 37 non-Title I principals completed an on-line survey, Principal's Actions Survey (PAS), based on the seven responsibilities for second order change identified by Marzano, Waters, and McNulty (2005).…

A context-aware ubiquitous learning environment allows applications to acquire diverse learning behaviors of u-learners. These behaviors may usefully enhance learner characteristics analysis which can be utilized to distinguish group learners for further instruction strategy design. It needs a systematical method to analyze u-learner behaviors and…

Even as technology and globalization are changing the way one lives and views the world, colleges and universities have become increasingly interested in preserving historic campus buildings and sites. Heritage has become more important to students, faculty, and staff, as well as to alumni, who have often been its prime supporters. This article…

This paper attempts to contribute to a fuller understanding of the nature of language learner agency by considering it as a complex dynamic system. The purpose of the study was to explore detailed situated data to examine to what extent it is feasible to view learner agency through the lens of complexity theory. Data were generated through a…

Merchandising and consumer economics traditionally have been part of family and consumer sciences (FCS) within the ecosystems framework. The purpose of this article is to examine progress of this sub-system within FCS. Specifically, the authors explore the relevance of the systems approach for merchandising programs and conclude that this model is…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a very difficult, yet all important and ongoing research question--how do we best use online collaborative learning modalities (CLM) to supplement conversations in multicultural education courses? Design/methodology/approach: This qualitative study examined emergent themes in asynchronous…

This article outlines the rationale for an integrative perspective of self- and social regulation in learning contexts. The role of regulatory mechanisms in self- and social regulation models is examined, leading to the view that in real time collaborative learning, individuals and social entities should be conceptualized as self-regulating and…

In this paper, a pedagogical software for the design and analysis of loudspeaker systems is presented, with emphasis on training students in the interaction between system parameters. Loudspeakers are complex electromechanical system, whose behavior is neither intuitive nor easy to understand by inexperienced students. Although commercial…

This paper first provides an overview of the topics featured in China's "Educational Journal" in the period 1909-1948, in order to sketch briefly the history of that country's pattern of selection from among various modes of foreign educational thought. It becomes clear that, in each case, China absorbed from outside only those ideas…

Behavioral systems analyses typically address organizational problems in business and industry. However, to the extent that a behavioral system is an entity comprised of interdependent elements formed by individuals interacting toward a common goal, a scientific enterprise constitutes a behavioral system to which a behavioral systems analysis may…

The dynamics of braking of wheeled vehicles is studied using the Coulomb approximation for the friction between road and wheels. The dependence of the stopping distance on the mass of the vehicle, on the number of its wheels and on the intensity of the braking torque is established. It is shown that there are two regimes of braking, with and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze to which point collective intelligence (CI) concepts and ideas, as applied to organizations, can contribute to enlarge the conceptual basis for business sustainability (BS). Design/methodology/approach: The paper is written from an engineer-minded, systemic and cybernetic perspective. It begins by…

The organization of a school can best be understood as a loosely coupled set of overlapping systems: the student system concerned with student education and development, the faculty system concerned with maintaining professional standards and effective teaching, the parent system focused on the relationship between the school and the child, and…