Student wastage in higher education is a problem of great importance in our society. The time has come to try to start a service to give specialised help for redeployment in continued education or in suitable employment that carries further training prospects. This would be not only a humane social service, but a real component of the educational and economic system. At present, wastage in the ...

Early retirement incentives (ERIs) are increasingly prevalent in education as districts seek to close budget gaps by replacing expensive experienced teachers with lower-cost newer teachers. Combined with the aging of the teacher workforce, these ERIs are likely to change the composition of teachers dramatically in the coming years. We use exogenous variation from an ERI program in Illinois in t...

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We used a random-assignment experiment in Los Angeles Unified School District to evaluate various non-experimental methods for estimating teacher effects on student test scores. Having estimated teacher effects during a pre-experimental period, we used these estimates to predict student achievement following random assignment of teachers to classrooms. While all of the teacher effect estimates ...

Vol. 44, No. 6, 2015 We developed a classroom observation protocol for quantitatively measuring student engagement in large university classes. The Behavioral Engagement Related to Instruction (BERI) protocol can be used to provide timely feedback to instructors as to how they can improve student engagement in their classrooms. We tested BERI on seven courses with different instructors and peda...

Physical simulations have a proven record as a teaching tool. Concepts that are often hard to grasp are made easy by the use of physical simulation activities. The constructivism learning theory suggests that people learn better by actively participating in the process of learning. According to the Encyclopedia of Educational Technology, "Simulation-based learning involves the placement of a st...

In the last decade quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) have become the most widely used source of mid-infrared radiation, finding large scale applications because of their wide tunability and overall high performance. However far-infrared (terahertz) QCLs have lagged behind in terms of performance and impact due to the inability so far of achieving room temperature operation. Here we review recent re...