This paper outlines ongoing research that is investigating ways to increase the supply of high quality planting materials for smallholder forestry in the Philippines. A Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) of the nursery sector that had been developed previously by one of the authors was further refined during a planning and implementation workshop for the ACIAR Smallholder Nursery project. The refine...

The present study examines the achievement goals of university instructors, particularly the structure of such goals, and their relationship to biographic characteristics, other aspects of instructors' motivation, and teaching quality. Two hundred and fifty-one university instructors (184 without Ph.D., 97 with Ph.D., thereof 51 full professors; 146 males, 92 females) answered a questionnaire m...

In this study, we used a case study approach to obtain an in-depth understanding of the change process of two university instructors who were involved with redesigning a biology course. Given the hesitancy of many biology instructors to adopt evidence-based, learner-centered teaching methods, there is a critical need to understand how biology instructors transition from teacher-centered (i.e., ...

We developed and analyzed a videotaped corpus of Japanese and English instructors who taught a high school English language class together over a 6-month period. Distributions of lexical items spoken by native and non-native speakers show they are (1) both concentrated within the 2000 most common words found in written language, (2) both skewed towards classroom context, but (3) unequal with re...

This study investigates the preferences of instructors and students for design and pedagogy features of online instruction at the post-secondary level. Participants included 60 instructors and 200 students at a comprehensive research university. Correlation coefficients of .95 on the design item rankings and .87 on the pedagogy item rankings were found between instructors and students. An indep...

SUMMARY This study comprises 732 newborns in the period from Dec. 15 1992 to June. 15 1993 in the neonatal ward, Bou Ali Medical Center. Of the newborns, 367 were cared for with rooming-in facilities and 365 in the nursery. Physical examinations performed at the first week, second week and the end of the 4th week showed that incidence of skin and ophthalmic infections were high in these newbor...

Despite many calls for undergraduate biology instructors to incorporate active learning into lecture courses, few studies have focused on what it takes for instructors to make this change. We sought to investigate the process of adopting and sustaining active-learning instruction. As a framework for our research, we used the innovation-decision model, a generalized model of how individuals adop...

Recent interest in online course design has prompted concern in issues relating to assessment of student contributions in computer-mediated communication (CMC) environments. A current focus of discussion in CMC research is to look into how instructors could move away from looking at the quantity (i.e., the number of postings) to assessing the quality (i.e., the usefulness and meaningfulness of ...

With a growing number of courses offered online and degrees offered through the Internet, there is a considerable interest in online education, particularly as it relates to the quality of online instruction. The major concerns are centering on the following questions: What will be the new role for instructors in online education? How will students' learning outcomes be assured and improved in ...

Streptococcus mutans strains were isolated from cohorts of Brazilian nursery school children and genotyped by arbitrarily primed PCR and restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis. Of 24 children with two to five S. mutans isolates, 29% carried two or more genotypes. The presence of matching genotypes of S. mutans among children attending one nursery suggests horizontal transmission.