This paper examines the outcomes of four Australian schools' efforts to promote greater collaboration between teachers in each school. Teachers' responses to questions about the nature and extent of collaboration they experienced at school revealed that teaming arrangements were in place in the four schools studied. Collaborative ways of working helped most teachers feel better about themselves and their work, and provided them with opportunities to learn from each other. However, a minority of teachers were negative about the new teaming (...) arrangements claiming that the changes had led to an increase in their workloads, a loss of professional autonomy, and the emergence of damaging competition between teams for resources, recognition and power. The paper concludes with a call for further micropolitical work that problematises apparently self evident ?goods? like teacher collaboration. (shrink)

Environmental education aims to affect environmental knowledge and attitude to ultimately induce pro-environmental behavior. Based on 247 upper elementary school students, we tested the impact of an outdoor-based earth education program on environmental knowledge and attitude with a pre-post design. Both outcome measures were Rasch scales. Environmental knowledge is a composite of 27 system, action, and effectiveness knowledge items, and environmental attitude is a composite of 13 evaluative statements and 11 self-reported behaviors about nature preservation. Our analysis revealed gains in (...) environmental knowledge and attitude. The convergence between knowledge and attitude increased significantly from pre- to post-program, and attitude played a significant role in knowledge acquisition. (shrink)

RationaleThere are growing concerns over the occurrence of adverse physiologic events occurring in pilots during operation of United States Air Force and Navy high-performance aircraft. We hypothesize that a heightened inspiratory work of breathing experienced by jet pilots by virtue of the on-board life support system may constitute a “distraction stimulus” consequent to an increased sensation of respiratory muscle effort. As such, the purpose of this study was to determine whether increasing inspiratory muscle effort adversely impacts on attentional performance.MethodsTwelve, healthy (...) participants were recruited for this study. Participants completed six repetitions of a modified Masked Conjunctive Continuous Performance Task protocol while breathing against four different inspiratory threshold loads to assess median reaction times. A computer-controlled threshold loading device was used to set the inspiratory threshold loads. Repeated measures analysis of variances were performed to examine: the efficacy of the threshold loading device to impose significantly higher loading at each loading condition; the effects of loading condition on respiratory muscle effort sensation; and the influence of hypercapnia on MCCPT scores during inspiratory threshold loading. Generalized additive mixed effects models were used to examine the potential non-linear effects of respiratory muscular effort sensation, device loading, and hypercapnia, on MCCPT scores during inspiratory threshold loading.ResultsInspiratory threshold loading significantly augmented inspiratory effort sensation and the inspiratory pressure-time product. Our analyses also revealed that median hit RT was positively associated with inspiratory effort sensation during inspiratory loading trials.ConclusionThe findings of this work suggest that it was not increasing inspiratory muscle effort per se, but rather participant’s subjective perception of inspiratory “load” that impacts negatively on attentional performance; i.e., as the degree of inspiratory effort sensation increased, sotoo did median hit RT. As such, it is reasonable to suggest that minimizing inspiratory effort sensation during high-performance flight operations may prove useful in reducing pilot RTs during complex behavioral tasks. (shrink)

Property rights are important institutions that influence economic performance and reflect the historical, cultural, and political realities of particular societies. Drawing on a variety of concepts from legal and economic studies, a framework for explaining the origin and evolution of property rights is developed and applied to the specific case of changing ground water rights in Nebraska. The Nebraska case is an interesting example of reliance on local control in regulating water use. Despite the importance of local initiatives in ground (...) water management, this case also illustrates the need for external support from the judicial and legislative systems. The evolution of ground water property rights in Nebraska, as in other parts of the United States, has been conditioned by historical circumstances and changing values and attitudes as well as by economic and political forces. (shrink)