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Repeated measurements of student ability (i.e., progressing monitoring) is an essential element of informed decision-making when adjusting instruction. An important characteristic of progress monitoring measures is frequent administration to identify areas of concern and to evaluate academic growth. The purpose of this study was to determine if STAR Math is sensitive to small incremental growth across a semester. Within two southern school districts, 114 fifth grade students' progress monitoring data were collected weekly, and a latent growth curve was used to estimate students' change in math ability. Results indicated STAR Math is sensitive to small incremental growth, with a statistically significant and positive slope, suggesting students using STAR Math showed improvement in ability over the semester. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employee engagement research to date has proliferated on the conceptualization that engagement is driven by mutable job design characteristics and related socioemotional resources. This essay explores concerns with that conceptualization. For instance, modern engagement research has defined a "work role" with an almost exclusive focus on employees occupying professional roles, largely ignoring broad swaths of population who hold blue- or pink-collar jobs. These concerns are set forth in a discussion of broadening the definition of engagement. We start by describing the key components of the construct of engagement, followed by a discussion of how changes in the modern work role restrict engagement in ways that do not comport with the traditional view. Next, this essay explores three assumptions inherent in engagement's research stream: possibility, availability, and directionality. Finally, key research directions and questions are presented in an attempt to focus research attention on studying engagement from a more inclusive lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research to date has assumed that politics perceptions lead to uniformly negative outcomes. Recent studies, however, advocate examining theoretically relevant dispositional factors capable of differentially predicting politics perceptions-work outcome relationships. One individual difference factor possessing considerable scholarly merit in this regard is optimism. Building on recent research, the politics perceptions-optimism relationship was examined in a series of three studies. In particular, our objective was to determine whether optimism intensified or neutralized the potentially negative effects of perceived politics on job satisfaction and tension. Across samples, findings confirmed a moderating effect; notably, politics triggered increased stress and lower satisfaction for individuals with higher levels of optimism. In contrast, stress and satisfaction remained largely unaffected for less optimistic individuals reporting elevated levels of politics. These findings, which suggest that optimism may be associated with undesirable effects in threat situations, contradicts the preponderance of research affirming favorable stress reactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It can be argued that, in the light of the 'cultural turn' in sociology, the search for new sources of critical theory, might profitably begin by considering the contributions of the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies, particularly the lessons to be learned from the Frankfurt School and then from British cultural studies in dealing with the problem of reconciling radical critical theory with the demands of cultural policy and administration. The contributions of these two traditions in cultural theory to debates about cultural governance are used to illustrate the dilemma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the relation between academic disciplines and of disciplines to their social context. Even those sociologists who are aware of the once closer relations between sociology/social anthropology and Folklore tend to assume that current distant relations are due to the evaporation of folklore itself from urban-industrial society. Sociologists with an interest in folklore are most likely to be found working in fields which emphasize the comparative analysis of "underdeveloped" and "developed" societies, and there has been a strong tendency for them to eliminates folklore. The almost moribund state of folklore studies in Great Britain might seem to confirm their assumption were it not for the fact that the few studies carried out on folklore in urban Britain show that it is far from dead or dying. And in the United States of America, the flourishing academic discipline of Folklore has no difficulty in discovering a flourishing crop of urban folklore.

This study reports the results of an effort to gather information for a bus firm located in the southwest United States about individuals who actually purchased bus tours offered by the firm (patrons), as well as about individuals who had merely inquired about the firm's tour program (non-patrons). The study indicates that distinct differences do exist between patrons and non-patrons. These differences are most evident in terms of some travel habits and preferences, somepsychographic and demographic characteristics, automobile ownership characteristics, and the sources of information used in vacation planning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The instructional benefits and limitations of using note-taking guides in mass lecture sections are outlined, and suggestions for developing and using note-taking guides are provided. For instructors willing to make the time investment to construct a note-taking guide, the payoff in terms of enhanced classroom effectiveness is dramatic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This field study examined the effects of MBO on measures of quantity and quality of performance and satisfaction with the work and supervision among employees in a human services agency. Although not all the quantity measures improved significantly, the combined measure for quantity of performance and one of two quality measures showed significant improvement following implementation of MBO. Satisfaction with supervision also significantly improved but not satisfaction with work. The study lends support to the use of MBO in public sector organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies concerned with variables involving an individual's decision to leave an organization are categorized into process and content aspects. Variations in previous tests of causal content models are discussed. It was hypothesized that job type acts as a moderating factor affecting the variables indicated as important in the intention-to-leave decision. The results of this study support the hypothesis. Implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to examine the relationship between the sacred and the secular in the United States historically and in the present. It probes what the founding fathers intended and how church-state relations have changed over time. The tendency of contemporary leaders to inject their religious views into public policy positions is analyzed in some detail, and perils of abridging the principles of church-state relations that are enshrined in the Constitution are reviewed. Also treated is the perception of leaders and opinion makers at home and abroad. An effort is made to draw on the thought of both classical and recent interpreters of the problem. The shifts in the positions of American leaders in response to the demands of partisan politics are noted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The binomial effect size display (BESD) has been proposed by Rosenthal and Rubin (1979, 1982; Rosenthal, 1990; Rosenthal & Rosnow, 1991) as a format for presenting effect sizes associated with certain experimental and nonexperimental research. An evaluation of the BESD suggests that its application is limited to presenting the results of 2 2 tables where ? is employed as the index of effect size. Findings indicate that the BESD provides little added information beyond an examination of the raw percentages in the 2 2 table and dramatically distorts effect sizes when binomial success rates vary from .50. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

That upward social mobility has a different effect on the political orientations of Europeans than of Americans Is commonly accepted. Several scholars have concluded that upwardly mobile Europeans are less conservative than middle-class stables. The contrasting conclusion that in the United States upwardly mobile people become even more conservative than middle-class stables is based on a single study completed some years ago. Here, this relationship is re-examined by analyzing data from five nationally-representative American samples over .14 years. In these samples, the upward mobiles are consistently less likely to be conservative than the middle-class stables and more likely to be conservative than the working-class stables. However, analysis of the joint effects of sex and social mobility indicates that American upwardly mobile males are more likely to approximate the politics 0/the class to which they have risen than are upwardly mobile females. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quincy Wright was unique among major international relations theorists in that his theoretical works were informed by insights from the social and physical sciences and from practical experience as a State Department consultant as well as from his professional legalistic and institutional orientation. As a practitioner, Wright was able to influence policy through broad normative statements of the necessity for international organization. Like other legalists, Wright was prone to have overly idealistic expectations of the extent to which individuals and nations would hold to abstract codes of behavior. But this idealism was tempered by debates at the University of Chicago with members of the ‘realist’ movement, by his own temperamental eclecticism, and by close ties with the Merriam school of political science and other specialists in the Byzantine local politics of Chicago. As an historian (A Study of War) he tended to remain at the descriptive level although he was intrigued by others’ broad theories of history. He was a humane institutionalist concerned with the contributions which new and reformed organizations could make to the development of a genuine sense of national and international community. These facets of his experience helped him to keep theory and policy together rather than divorced, and thereby he offers a constructive alternative to much of present‐day scholarship in international relations. Journal Abstract [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reviews George Liska's essay on international equilibrium. He points out that Liska's study is an attempt to evolve a theory of international relations. He adds that Liska finds the concepts of power as too inclusive to be a sharp analytical tool, while morality as slightly too conventional. The author concludes that Liska's study is essentially critical and destructive, and his use of equilibrium theory is interesting but not conclusive.

This article highlights the symposium which is derived from the mid-term conference of the ISA Research Committee 16, Sociological Theory on "New Sources of Critical Theory," held at Cambridge University in Great Britain, in September 2000. The articles in the symposium tackle issues such as the possibilities for developing critical social theory that is utopian in spirit, but not totalizing; the assessment of potentialities in critical cultural theories for making a more useful contribution to the solution of practical problems of cultural policy-making and governance; the need for a critical theory of globalization that shows an awareness of plurality and accepts the challenge to eliminate Eurocentrism.