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A concern of the public and of local school districts is that of staffing well-qualified teachers for the education of America’s youth. Staffing, however, is a multistage process that involves attracting a viable candidate pool and retraining those selected. To determine if attraction and retention are sequential or related administrative processes and if reactions to these processes are moderated by those new to the profession or to the district, a structural modeling approach is used to analyze perceptions of recently appointed teachers in an urban school district. Results indicate that these processes are sequential and are moderated by the experience of teachers but only at the attraction stage of the staffing process.

This research evaluated the extent to which power functions can predict performance on a task when performance context has been altered. Since power functions reliably describe performance improvements during practice, an assumption implicit in some theories of skill acquisition and transfer is that transfer performance will continue to improve as an extrapolation of the practice power function. In the training phase of the current experiment, 120 participants practiced solving simple problems from the six times table. In the transfer phase, these same problems were presented again, intermixed with problems from one of six conditions differing in various respects to the target problems. With the exception of two of these six conditions, performance on the target problems was slower than was predicted by training phase power function extrapolations. These findings are discussed in relation to theories of skill acquisition and the role played by a task’s conceptual context in transfer performance.

New England vessels from trade with the British West Indies, their most valued pre-revolutionary customers. A limited trade, to be sure, was very soon permitted, at the insistence of the British colonists, between the United States and the British West Indies, but only in British bottoms and by British subjects.' This was no act of generosity to the new republic but a continuation of the old colonial system necessitated by the dependence of the island planters on American markets and produce. By this provision American foodstuffs, tobacco, livestock, and timber were admitted to the islands in exchange for West India rum and molasses. Boston shared the resentment of American shipping communities over the restrictions imposed, and in 1 785 the General Court of Massachusetts was induced to pass a discriminatory tariff against British imports;2 but this measure was ineffective to recover the lost trade. Occasional relief was offered at intervals when the number of British ships trading with the West Indian Islands became insufficient to supply and victual the colonists, so that a state of emergency would be declared by a provincial governor and