Universities can benefit from the experiences of corporations that have "reinvented" themselves in the past decade. Corporations did this by identifying their basic missions, disposing of or deemphasizing activities not essential to those missions, paring down institutional bureaucracies, and forming alliances with other corporations to share…

Examines whether private school vouchers would increase educational quality in public and private schools. Even in models featuring X-inefficient (budget-maximizing) administrators, vouchers' effects on quality are ambiguous. Vouchers may reduce the enrollment response to changes in public-school quality by placing different households on the…

Discussion of fiscal management in the reformed higher education systems of Eastern/Central Europe begins with analysis of reform attempts in two British universities and relates them to Eastern and Central European issues. It is argued that institutions must adopt a holistic approach to managing change and for addressing various staff, structure,…

Argues that the rising tide of "efficiency" in contemporary education often masks reductions in educational quality and equity and efforts to reduce public investments in education. Analyzes historical and comparative examples in U.S., U.K., and Australian reform movements; the methodology of comparative education; and ongoing reforms in…

Provides a conceptual basis and data strategy for developing and selecting staffing indicators, focusing on teachers and embracing other educator categories. Discusses policy relevance and state of the art. Presents three selection/development rationales: macro-level descriptions, system-level conditions affecting teachers' motivation, and the…

Reports on a usability evaluation of the wide area networked database used in the library system of the City University of New York (CUNY). Describes use of the Software Usability Measurement Inventory (SUMI) criteria in student surveys and interviews that considered affect, efficiency, learnability, control, and helpfulness. Survey is appended.…

Decentralization has been a popular theme in school districts for a long time. Indeed, most districts claim that they are decentralized, having latched onto the "site-based management" movement of the 1980s. Superintendents and central-office personnel point to their local school councils, staffed by parents, teachers, and school…

The differential effects of four task selection methods on training efficiency and transfer in a computer-based training for Air Traffic Control were investigated. Two personalised conditions were compared with two corresponding yoked control conditions. The hypothesis that personalised adaptive task selection leads to more efficient training than…

Older and younger adults' abilities to use context information rapidly during ambiguity resolution were investigated. In Experiments 1 and 2, younger and older adults heard ambiguous words (e.g., fires) in sentences where the preceding context supported either the less frequent or more frequent meaning of the word. Both age groups showed good…

Realizing the importance of teaching efficiency at early stages of the program of study in computer science (CS) on one hand, and the difficulties encountered when introducing this concept on the other, we advocate a different didactic approach in the introductory CS course (CS1). This paper describes the approach as it is used at the Open…

This study proposes a methodology to serve as a guiding mechanism for the allocation and management of university financial resources taking efficiency as its objective. Specifically, an aid model is provided for decision making, so that the planning of staff policy within a university guarantees an equal treatment of all the teaching and research…

This study represents an attempt to determine the nature and efficiency of the strategies used by prelingually deafened individuals for the recognition of written words with reference to an orthographic self-teaching concept (D. L. Share, 1995). A research paradigm asking the participants to make categorical judgments for real words and…

Character education, the instruction of core ethical values and cultivation of good conduct in the classroom, is increasingly being incorporated in public school curricula across the country. Over the last few years, schools in 48 states have introduced programs in character education as a means to nurture moral behavior among the youth. Public…

Mergers have been a frequent phenomenon in higher education in the last quarter century. The conventional wisdom is that mergers are undertaken mainly for economic reasons, either to expand markets or to reduce costs. About four out of five college or university mergers survive. In the for-profit sector the comparable rate is closer to two out of…

External inefficiency in education--inequity between the characteristics of graduates and the job market--is a problem in Indonesia and many other countries. Job markets at the junior secondary level are very tight in Indonesia with low levels of unemployment at all ages, short job-search times, and high real rates of return. Unemployment,…