1,721,123 research outputs found
Expanding school resources and increasing time on task : effects of a policy experiment in Israel on student academic achievement and behavior
Full text linkIn this paper, I examine how student academic achievements and behavior were affected by a school finance policy
experiment undertaken in elementary schools in Israel. Begun in 2004, the funding formula changed from a budget
set per class to a budget set per student, with more weight given to students from lower socioeconomic and lower
educational backgrounds. The experiment altered teaching budgets, the length of the school week, and the
allocation of time devoted to core subjects. The results suggest that spending more money and spending more time
at school and on key tasks all lead to increasing academic achievements with no behavioral costs. I find that the
overall budget per class has positive and significant effects on students' average test scores and that this effect is
symmetric and identical for schools that gained or lost resources due to the funding reform. Separate estimations of
the effect of increasing the length of the school week and the subject-specific instructional time per week also show
positive and significant effects on math, science, and English test scores. However, no cross effects of additional
instructional time across subjects emerge, suggesting that the effect of overall weekly school instruction time on
test scores reflects only the effect of additional instructional time in these particular subjects. As a robustness check
of the validity of the identification strategy, I also use an alternative method that exploits variation in the instruction
time of different subjects. Remarkably, this alternative identification strategy yields almost identical results to the
results obtained based on the school funding reform. Additional results suggest that the effect on test scores is
similar for boys and girls but it is much larger for pupils from low socioeconomic backgrounds and it is also more
pronounced in schools populated with students from homogenous socioeconomic backgrounds. The evidence also
shows that a longer school week increases the time that students spend on homework without reducing social and
school satisfaction and without increasing school violence
Alleviating transitory food crisis in Africa : international altruism and trade
Full text linkThis paper focuses on criticism about the use of emergency food aid in sub-Saharan Africa. More specifically, it examines the response of the donor community to unexpected or transitory drops in domestic food production in 26 countries. The study compares the role of food aid and commercial food imports in offsetting these shocks and covering the shortfall in food consumption. Several hypotheses that determine the tendency of donors to respond to the needs of different countries are tested. The results suggest that food aid and commercial food imports stabilize food consumption and neutralize the effects of random shocks to domestic production. Food aid compensates for up to 50 percent of the drop in food production; imports make up an additional 30 percent. This paper documents the stylized facts of food insecurity in Africa and shows the relative importance of emergency and total food aid to food production and food shortages. The paper includes an empirical framework for the estimation and analysis of the correlation between food aid and food production and presents the results. Lastly, the paper elaborates on the economic and political determinants that affect the global response to the emergency needs of countries in Africa.Food&Beverage Industry,Food&Nutrition Policy,Development Economics&Aid Effectiveness,Environmental Economics&Policies,School Health
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Does food aid depress food production? The disincentive dilemma in the African context
Full text linkFood aid averages only ten percent of total financial aid to developing countries, but in certain African countries - Botswana, Cape Verde, Mauritius, and Mauritania - it represents more than half the food available for consumption. The author applies vector auto-regression (VAR) analysis to data for sub-Saharan Africa to test these hypotheses. The issue is not whether food aid is good or bad but how it can be used to promote economic development and improve the nutrition of the food-insecure. The author found that food aid has a significant positive effect on food production. Any disincentive induced by the additional supply of food is offset by the positive effects. Food aid is also more likely to have a positive effect in countries that use fertilizer intensively. One possible explanation for this is that countries that enjoy a relative abundance of regular food aid can use the resources made available through reduced food imports to invest more in the agricultural sector - which is more likely when such an investment is a condition imposed by the aid donors.Food&Beverage Industry,Food&Nutrition Policy,Development Economics&Aid Effectiveness,Environmental Economics&Policies,School Health
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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