A public relations director and a principal have mostly the same goals in helping students achieve at high levels. While each might go about impacting student learning in different ways, they both work to make education better. In Having an Impact on Learning, the husband and wife team of Matt and Kelly Wachel, help show how both the principal and the public relations director can propel education forward. Whether it's through perception, teaching and learning, communication, social media, events, student achievement, or working with the community, principals and public relations professionals have to understand their roles in contributing to each of those areas. While the topics of conversation between these two professions sometimes cause disagreement, in the end, the principal and the public relations professional agree that their two views must ultimately mesh to help do what's best for kids. In this book, get insight into these areas of education and learn about ways principals and public relations directors can work in harmony. School leaders and communicators have to be on the same page when it comes to telling the story of education. We are all storytellers and we have to be able to tell the story together.

The Question is the Answer is a teacher's guide to helping young readers generate text-based questions. The purpose of this book is to help teachers and parents value and promote student-generated questions to facilitate motivation, engagement, and cognitive development.

Information we receive from and create together with our social networks is becoming increasingly important. Social information has a great impact on our information behaviour and there are many possible angles and layers in studying social aspects in information science. This book presents some of these angles. Social Information Research, co-edited by Gunilla Widen and Kim Holmberg communicates current research looking into different aspects of social information as part of information behaviour research. There is a special emphasis on the new innovations supporting contemporary information behavior and the social media context within which it can sit. As a concept, social information has been studied in biology, psychology and sociology among other disciplines. This book is relevant for various actors in the library and information science field and will be useful for researchers, educators, and practitioners while coordinating empirical research on social information and providing an overview of some of the present research about social information.

Risk and danger are culturally conditioned ideas. They are shaped by pressures of social life and accepted notions of accountability. The risk analyses that are increasingly being utilised by politicians, aid programmes and business ignore the insights to be gained from social anthropology which can be applied to modern industrial society. In this collection of recent essays, Mary Douglas develops a programme for studying risk and blame that follows from ideas originally proposed in Purity and Danger. She suggests how political and cultural bias can be incorporated into the study of risk perception and in the discussion of responsibility in public policy.

RIGOROUS DAP in the Early Years: From Theory to Practice provides teachers with a roadmap for teaching that helps children meet academic expectations and maintains focus on the appropriate development of the whole child. A construct of eleven practices, RIGOROUS DAP supplies teachers with strategies for 1) making instructional decisions that meet the needs of the individual child; 2) sustaining culturally relevant practices; 3) engaging stakeholders in conversations about educating young children for school success through practices that attend to their individual, sociocultural, and developmental needs; and 4) ensuring all children experience high-level learning and succeed in school. The eleven practices comprising the construct are: 1. Reaching all children 2. Integrating content areas 3. Growing as a community 4. Offering choices 5. Revisiting new content 6. Offering challenges 7. Understanding each learner 8. Seeing the whole child 9. Differentiating instruction 10. Assessing constantly 11. Pushing every child forward An academically rigorous learning environment allows all children to learn at high levels through hands-on learning experiences that address the whole child and connect to the child's world in and out of school. A developmentally appropriate learning environment considers the children's developmental, cognitive, social, emotional, linguistic, and physical development, as well as the sociocultural worlds in which they live.

A Toolkit for Department Chairs is designed to give academic administrators the skills they need in order to do their jobs more effectively. Combining case studies, scenarios, practical advice, and problem solving activities, the book offers chairs a valuable resource for negotiating the real-life challenges they face as academic leaders. Many of the case studies and scenarios included in this book have been field tested by the co-authors in over thirty years of administrative training workshops. Current and aspiring department chairs will discover many new tools that they can include in their administrative toolkits from this practical, accessible book. A Toolkit for Department Chairs works well as a personal resource as well as a training manual for leadership programs and textbook for pre- and in-service education for department chairs. Some additional key features of this book include: *Practicality in that it offers specific strategies to address the many challenges faced by department chairs. *Adaptability for use as an individual study guide, textbook for leadership programs, or discussion guide for groups of academic administrators. *Utility in that it fills a demonstrated need in the field of higher education since 96-97% of current department chairs have received no formal training in their administrative responsibilities. *Easy of use through short, sometimes humorous scenarios and case studies that cause readers to reflect on their own administrative approaches.

A Toolkit for Department Chairs is designed to give academic administrators the skills they need in order to do their jobs more effectively. Combining case studies, scenarios, practical advice, and problem solving activities, the book offers chairs a valuable resource for negotiating the real-life challenges they face as academic leaders. Many of the case studies and scenarios included in this book have been field tested by the co-authors in over thirty years of administrative training workshops. Current and aspiring department chairs will discover many new tools that they can include in their administrative toolkits from this practical, accessible book. A Toolkit for Department Chairs works well as a personal resource as well as a training manual for leadership programs and textbook for pre- and in-service education for department chairs. Some additional key features of this book include: *Practicality in that it offers specific strategies to address the many challenges faced by department chairs. *Adaptability for use as an individual study guide, textbook for leadership programs, or discussion guide for groups of academic administrators. *Utility in that it fills a demonstrated need in the field of higher education since 96-97% of current department chairs have received no formal training in their administrative responsibilities. *Easy of use through short, sometimes humorous scenarios and case studies that cause readers to reflect on their own administrative approaches.

At no time in the history of public education has there been such a dramatic discrepancy between accelerated standards and expectations and adequate funding for our schools. Much has been written about how to achieve new expectations in the realm of student achievement and the need for accountability and the restructuring of how education dollars are spent. Unfortunately, most of the input regarding the need for "belt-tightening" is unaccompanied by tangible solutions or suggestions and results only in hollow rhetoric or convenient political sound bytes. This journey into meaningful avenues for cost-savings in public education is clearly an exception. Any school official who reads this book will find a number of viable possibilities for saving money. The authors offer time-tested, practical ideas, which are proven to work. Features cost-saving tips for: * District and school-level administration * Curriculum, instruction, vocational and special education, student services, and media * Building and grounds, maintenance, pupil transportation, and food services * Community colleges The authors briefly review the literature for: * Managing decline in resources and discuss the problem of declining funds for schools and solution strategies * Generating alternative revenue sources in education Samples of strategic plans are also included. For educational administrators, state governors and senators, school boards, and school business officials.

The second volume of companion books on comparative student discipline identifies the best practices in dealing with student misconduct, on six continents, in a legally sound manner. It is essential for educators to examine national as well as international practices addressing student misconduct in schools because learner misbehavior often has a detrimental effect on the quality of teaching and learning in elementary and secondary schools. The countries covered are Brazil, China, Malaysia, Turkey and South Africa.

A Guide to Organizational Strategies for Thinking and Writing offers teachers and students ten patterns for arranging ideas that will expand their repertoire of organizational skills. Each pattern is illustrated by passages that model the strategy, and each is accompanied by an assignment that invites application and practice. Models that encompass a wide range of subjects-literature, history, science, mathematics-are provided for students in the early grades, in middle school, and in high school or college. Teachers will find the first part of the book helpful in planning writing instruction, not just for language arts but for any subject that requires English exposition. Students, from emerging to accomplished writers, will benefit from reading the passages and completing the assignments. The strategies include six basic approaches-chronological, spatial, topical, comparison, contrast, comparison contrast-and four less well-known patterns-traditional narrative, point counterpoint, question-answer, and extended analogy. The book concludes with a lesson in modeling rhythm and rhyme in poetry. Some other key features of this book include: *Ready-to-use assignments *A bonus lesson on modeling rhythm and rhyme *Leads to additional resources *An introduction to modeling prose passages

Every day decision making in complex human-centric systems are characterized by imperfect decision-relevant information. The principal problems with the existing decision theories are that they do not have capability to deal with situations in which probabilities and events are imprecise. In this book, we describe a new theory of decision making with imperfect information. The aim is to shift the foundation of decision analysis and economic behavior from the realm bivalent logic to the realm fuzzy logic and Z-restriction, from external modeling of behavioral decisions to the framework of combined states.This book will be helpful for professionals, academics, managers and graduate students in fuzzy logic, decision sciences, artificial intelligence, mathematical economics, and computational economics.

Existing research methods textbooks emphasize the mechanics of HOW to conduct research studies. However, many students fail to see WHY it is important to learn about research because they will never conduct research studies. These students do not become engaged in learning and believe that research courses and textbooks are useless. They do not see the need of developing "research literacy" to understand the applications and limitations of research to their daily lives. This book engages students with a nonmathematical presentation that includes real examples of the consequences of research errors in daily life. The organization facilitates learning with objectives, concepts, description of errors, best practices, and examples. This is a research methods textbook for students who fear research textbooks. The diversity of topics in this book permits application to research methods courses in these academic fields: Economics, Education, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology. This should be the first book for all students to introduce research and develop "research literacy".

In the last two decades there has been a flourishing research carried out jointly by economists, psychologists and neuroscientists. This meltdown of competences has lead towards original approaches to investigate the mental and cognitive mechanisms involved in the way the economic agent collects, processes and uses information to make choices. This research field involves a new kind of scientist, trained in different disciplines, familiar in managing experimental data, and with the mathematical foundations of decision making. The ultimate goal of this research is to open the black-box to understandthe behavioural and neural processes through which humans set preferences and translate these behaviours into optimal choices. This volume intends to bring forward new results and fresh insights into this matter.

This is an introduction to a flexible tool for use in strategic management within a competitive environment. Based upon ideas from both graph theory and game theory, the method offers several distinct advantages. It can handle a finite number of decision-makers, each of whom controls a number of actions. The graph model can describe and distinguish reversible and irreversible moves. Most importantly, the graph model forms a solid framework upon which solution concepts for describing human behaviour can be defined, assessed and compared This book is accompanied by a computer disk, which is explained and illustrated in the appendix. In addition, the text provides a summary of how to apply the graph model to practical problems Each chapter concludes with a set of problems, which serve to clarify important points and ensure comprehension

Multi-objective programming (MOP) can simultaneously optimize multi-objectives in mathematical programming models, but the optimization of multi-objectives triggers the issue of Pareto solutions and complicates the derived answers. To address these problems, researchers often incorporate the concepts of fuzzy sets and evolutionary algorithms into MOP models. Focusing on the methodologies and applications of this field, Fuzzy Multiple Objective Decision Making presents mathematical tools for complex decision making. The first part of the book introduces the most popular methods used to calculate the solution of MOP in the field of multiple objective decision making (MODM). The authors describe multi-objective evolutionary algorithms; expand de novo programming to changeable spaces, such as decision and objective spaces; and cover network data envelopment analysis. The second part focuses on various applications, giving readers a practical, in-depth understanding of MODM. A follow-up to the authors' Multiple Attribute Decision Making: Methods and Applications, this book guides practitioners in using MODM methods to make effective decisions. It also extends students' knowledge of the methods and provides researchers with the foundation to publish papers in operations research and management science journals.

The changing demographics of students and educators in schools today suggest that much of what we do as educational leaders revolves around the complex issues related to our various cultural understandings. In this book the authors discuss the relationship between culture and conflict and provide a continuum to better understand the basis for much cultural conflict. Authors emphasize a systematic framework that can be used to guide the practitioner in resolving conflicts rooted in cultural issues - from less difficult issues such as the cultural conflicts that occur on a campus between academic cultures and athletic cultures, to the more complicated and delicate issues rooted in racial or sexual identity issues.

The changing demographics of students and educators in schools today suggest that much of what we do as educational leaders revolves around the complex issues related to our various cultural understandings. In this book the authors discuss the relationship between culture and conflict and provide a continuum to better understand the basis for much cultural conflict. Authors emphasize a systematic framework that can be used to guide the practitioner in resolving conflicts rooted in cultural issues - from less difficult issues such as the cultural conflicts that occur on a campus between academic cultures and athletic cultures, to the more complicated and delicate issues rooted in racial or sexual identity issues.

If you aren't using the term "naturalistic decision making, " or NDM, you soon will be. Even as a very young field, NDM has already had far-reaching applications in areas as diverse as management, aviation, health care, nuclear power, military command and control, corporate teamwork, and manufacturing.
Put simply, NDM is the way people use their experience to make decisions in the context of a job or task. Of particular interest to NDM researchers are the effects of high-stake consequences, shifting goals, incomplete information, time pressure, uncertainty, and other conditions that are present in most of today's work places and that add to the complexity of decision making. Applications of NDM research findings target decision aids and training that help people in their decision-making processes.
This book reports the findings of top NDM researchers, as well as many of their current applications. In addition, the book offers a historical perspective on the emergence of this new paradigm, describes recent theoretical and methodological advancements, and points to future developments. It was written for people interested in decision making research and applications relative to a diverse array of work settings and products such as human-computer interfaces, decision support systems, individual and team training, product designs, and organizational development and planning.

In the last two decades there has been a flourishing research carried out jointly by economists, psychologists and neuroscientists. This meltdown of competences has lead towards original approaches to investigate the mental and cognitive mechanisms involved in the way the economic agent collects, processes and uses information to make choices. This research field involves a new kind of scientist, trained in different disciplines, familiar in managing experimental data, and with the mathematical foundations of decision making. The ultimate goal of this research is to open the black-box to understandthe behavioural and neural processes through which humans set preferences and translate these behaviours into optimal choices. This volume intends to bring forward new results and fresh insights into this matter.

There's no mystery in turning around low-performing or failing schools, but there are also no recipes. In Turnaround Principals for Underperforming Schools Rosemary Papa and Fenwick English identify the essential ingredients for success. The causes of failure are complex and interactive. Schools are not inert structures but living organisms. Putting schools back together is a collaborative venture. It takes a team to turn around a school, but it all begins with the leadership. The key to success rests in a school leader who has a fundamental understanding of the dynamics of schooling, human motivation, and possesses the resiliency and energy to engage in altering the internal landscape of an unsuccessful school. Two veteran educators have put together a work based on their research and experience for the past half-century. They pull no punches. The challenge is not only to turn low-performing or failing schools around, but to enable them to become more socially just places for all students.

There's no mystery in turning around low-performing or failing schools, but there are also no recipes. In Turnaround Principals for Underperforming Schools Rosemary Papa and Fenwick English identify the essential ingredients for success. The causes of failure are complex and interactive. Schools are not inert structures but living organisms. Putting schools back together is a collaborative venture. It takes a team to turn around a school, but it all begins with the leadership. The key to success rests in a school leader who has a fundamental understanding of the dynamics of schooling, human motivation, and possesses the resiliency and energy to engage in altering the internal landscape of an unsuccessful school. Two veteran educators have put together a work based on their research and experience for the past half-century. They pull no punches. The challenge is not only to turn low-performing or failing schools around, but to enable them to become more socially just places for all students.

For decades schools have invested substantial resources in boosting educational outcomes for disadvantaged students, but those investments have not always generated positive outcomes. Although many communities have expanded school choice, for example, families often choose to keep their children in failing schools. And while the federal government has increased the size of Pell Grants, many college-bound students who would be eligible for aid never apply. Then there is the troubling trend of "summer melt," in which up to 40 percent of high school graduates who have been accepted to college, mostly from under served communities, fail to show up for the fall semester. In The 160-Character Solution, Benjamin L Castleman shows how insights from behavioral economics-the study of how social, cognitive, and emotional factors affect our decisions - can be leveraged to help students complete assignments, perform to their full potential on tests, and choose schools and colleges where they are well-positioned for success. By employing behavioral strategies or "nudges," Castleman shows, administrators, teachers, and parents can dramatically improve educational outcomes from preschool to college. Castleman applies the science of decision making to explain why inequalities persist at various stages in education and to identify innovative solutions to improve students' academic achievement and attainment. By focusing on behavioral changes, Castleman demonstrates that small changes in how we ask questions, design applications, and tailor reminders can have remarkable impacts on student and school success.

Decision makers are often faced with several conflicting alternatives. How do they evaluate trade-offs when there are more than three criteria? To help people make optimal decisions, scholars in the discipline of multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) continue to develop new methods for structuring preferences and determining the correct relative weights for criteria. A compilation of modern decision-making techniques, Multiple Attribute Decision Making: Methods and Applications focuses on the fuzzy set approach to multiple attribute decision making (MADM). Drawing on their experience, the authors bring together current methods and real-life applications of MADM techniques for decision analysis. They also propose a novel hybrid MADM model that combines DEMATEL and analytic network process (ANP) with VIKOR procedures.

The first part of the book focuses on the theory of each method and includes examples that can be calculated without a computer, providing a complete understanding of the procedures. Methods include the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), ANP, simple additive weighting method, ELECTRE, PROMETHEE, the gray relational model, fuzzy integral technique, rough sets, and the structural model. Integrating theory and practice, the second part of the book illustrates how methods can be used to solve real-world MADM problems. Applications covered in the book include:

• AHP to select planning and design services for a construction project
• TOPSIS and VIKOR to evaluate the best alternative-fuel vehicles for urban areas
• ELECTRE to solve network design problems in urban transportation planning
• PROMETEE to set priorities for the development of new energy systems, from solar thermal to hydrogen energy
• Fuzzy integrals to evaluate enterprise intranet web sites
• Rough sets to make decisions in insurance marketing

Helping readers understand how to apply MADM techniques to their decision making, this book is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students as well as practitioners.

Parents, lawmakers, supervisors, and unions are among the many constituencies that demand influence, if not control, of the educational process. How does the school administrator balance all the needs of the various groups and still remain true to the ultimate, though most powerless constituency: the students? Through case studies and anecdotes based on real-life experiences, the authors share the ups and downs of the educational world, seeking to find the balance that is most effective in ensuring success. School Leadership: Case Studies Solving School Problems details decision making and actions taken that dramatically affect the success of students and schools as well as school systems. This second edition continues and improves on the first edition with a series of new and timely school leadership case studies that require the reader to reflect on the variety of issues that cross the principal's desk every day. The reader will find the case studies and anecdotes highly absorbing. They are so real, fraught with complexity, and will require the reader to use a sophisticated decision-making process.