scholarly journals Field Experiments in Class Size from the Early Twentieth Century

2009 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 211-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonah Rockoff

A vast majority of adults believe that class size reductions are a good way to improve the quality of public schools. Reviews of the research literature, on the other hand, have provided mixed messages on the degree to which class size matters for student achievement. Here I will discuss a substantial, but overlooked, body of experimental work on class size that developed prior to World War II. These field experiments did not have the benefit of modern econometrics, and only a few were done on a reasonably large scale. However, they often used careful empirical designs, and the collective magnitude of this body of work is considerable. Moreover, this research produced little evidence to suggest that students learn more in smaller classes, which stands in contrast to some, though not all, of the most recent work by economists. In this essay, I provide an overview of the scope and breadth of the field experiments in class size conducted prior to World War II, the motivations behind them, and how their experimental designs were crafted to deal with perceived sources of bias. I discuss how one might interpret the findings of these early experimental results alongside more recent research.

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 467-485
Author(s):  
Sanja Petrovic-Todosijevic

The paper is an attempt to point out the problems faced by the new communist authorities in Yugoslavia in the years after the victory in the War and the Revolution in the process of emancipation and additional feminization of the teaching vocation, with particular emphasis on the period until the adoption of the General Law on Education (1958). Particular emphasis will be placed on policy analysis as well as concrete measures that have led to a different profile of the role of the teacher in the post-war society. On the one hand, it will highlight the concrete measures taken by the state to motivate as many women as possible to opt for the teaching job. On the other hand, they will point out the many problems faced by many teachers whose professional and professional qualities, in assessing the quality of their work, are not so infrequently subordinated to their ?moral characteristics?.


Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow

This chapter focuses on education in middle America. Education fitting the needs and aspirations of its citizens was an important aspect of life in heartland states from the start. Country schools, private academies, public high schools, and colleges were founded in such numbers during the first few decades of the twentieth century that the region came to be known as the “education belt.” After World War II, state and county boards of education launched a massive campaign to improve and consolidate public schools. Officials promoted education, technological improvements, and research as means of advancing their communities and the region. Colleges and universities throughout the Middle West expanded. The chapter considers issues relating to education in the Middle West, including educational attainment, public funds for education, migration, literacy, racism, the quality of rural education, and inequality between wealthier and poorer school districts.


1994 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 105-128
Author(s):  
Susan M. Wolf

Writing in 1988, Arnold Relman heralded the dawning of the “third revolution“ in medical care. The first revolution, at the end of World War II, had inaugurated an Era of Expansion, with an explosion of hospitals, physicians, and research. Medicare and Medicaid were passed, and medicine experienced a golden age of growth. Inevitably, according to Relman, this yielded to an Era of Cost Containment starting in the 1970s. The federal government and private employers revolted against soaring costs, brandishing the weapons of prospective payment, managed care, and global budgeting. Yet these blunt instruments of cost-cutting eventually produced concern over how to evaluate the quality of health care, to promote the good while trimming the bad. Thus Relman announced the arrival of the Era of Assessment and Accountability.This chronology helps explain the current importance of quality. Quality assessment and more recently, quality improvement techniques, occupy a central place in this new era.


1990 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Reid

Since the end of World War II the study of Southeast Asia has changed unrecognizably. The often bitter end of colonialism caused a sharp break with older scholarly traditions, and their tendency to see Southeast Asia as a receptacle for external influences—first Indian, Persian, Islamic or Chinese, later European. The greatest gain over the past forty years has probably been a much increased sensitivity to the cultural distinctiveness of Southeast Asia both as a whole and in its parts. If there has been a loss, on the other hand, it has been the failure of economic history to advance beyond the work of the generation of Furnivall, van Leur, Schrieke and Boeke. Perhaps because economic factors were difficult to disentangle from external factors they were seen by very few Southeast Asianists as the major challenge.


Plant Disease ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 81 (5) ◽  
pp. 469-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Gamliel ◽  
A. Grinstein ◽  
Y. Peretz ◽  
L. Klein ◽  
A. Nachmias ◽  
...  

The use of gas-impermeable films to reduce the dosage of methyl bromide (MB) required to control Verticillium wilt in potatoes was examined in field experiments, conducted in soils naturally infested with Verticillium dahliae. The incidence and severity of Verticillium wilt were significantly reduced (by 74 to 94%) by fumigation with MB at 50 g/m2 under standard low density polyethylene (LDPE) or at 25 g/m2 under gas-impermeable films. Fumigation at 25 g/m2 under LDPE was less effective. Disease severity was inversely correlated (r2 = 0.89 to 0.91) with chlorophyll content in the leaves. Fumigation also reduced (by 89 to 100%) stem colonization by the pathogen. Potato yield in the fumigated plots was significantly higher (26 to 69%), than in their nonfumigated counterparts, and was inversely correlated with disease index (r2 = 0.69 to 0.9). The percentage of high-value tubers (above 45 g) was 52 to 56% of total yield in the fumigated plots as compared with 32 to 40% in the nonfumigated controls. Thus, fumigation also improved the commercial quality of tuber yield. Effective control of V. dahliae and yield increases following MB fumigation at the recommended dosage or at a reduced dosage with gas-impermeable films was also observed in a consecutive crop. These results were verified in a large-scale field experiment using commercial applications, further demonstrating the feasibility of reducing MB dosages under farm conditions, without reducing its effectiveness in terms of disease control and yield improvement.


1987 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 376
Author(s):  
Holger H. Herwig ◽  
Martin K. Sorge
Keyword(s):  

1975 ◽  
Vol 157 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Throne

Studies by investigators at the University of Iowa Child Welfare Station before World War II demonstrated that the intelligence levels of the mentally retarded could be raised, often up to and beyond normalcy (IQ 100). Yet, the implications were never seriously followed up on anything approaching a broad-gauged scale. The juridical climate now supports the position that, because the evidence is that all the retarded can learn under proper conditions, they are all entitled to public schooling. It is suggested that the public schools may soon be confronted with an even more far-reaching educo-legal thrust based on the kind of evidence first reported by the Iowa investigators; that is, the public schools have a responsibility not only to educate or train the retarded to achieve their retarded potentialities, but to increase those potentialities, i.e., raise their intelligence levels.


Author(s):  
David R. Mayhew

This chapter considers three impulses of the post-World War II era. Two of them deal with the economy, bracketing its course from an inspiration flowing out of the war through an ideological and policy retake a generation later. The other impulse covers one of the major developments of American, not to mention transnational, history—the civil rights revolution of those times. In the three impulses detailed here, economic planning devices, energy supply, the cities, travel, infrastructure, the tax code, industrial structure, the workplace, immigration, demographic patterns, the electorate, rights standards, and relations among the races, gained lasting imprints from U.S. government participation, among others.


2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 521-535
Author(s):  
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

During World War II, the Soviet media depicted children suffering as well as children actively participating in the war effort and mothers making sacrifices for them. Such mixed messages served clear political purposes, publicizing Nazi atrocities while deflecting attention from the Soviet state’s failure to protect its children. Historians have tended to approach such images and stories within a framework of trauma that validates stories of children’s suffering, despite their political purposes, while also discounting wartime accounts and postwar (and post-Soviet) reminiscences that highlight children’s strength and recovery. The concept of resilience, as developed in psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology, however, allows historians to understand such material as authentic and vital components of survivors’ understandings and memories of the war.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Bień

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> A cartographic map of Gdańsk in the years of 1918&amp;ndash;1939 was very different from the other maps of Polish cities. The reasons for some differences were, among others, the proximity of the sea, the multicultural mindset of the inhabitants of Gdańsk from that period, and some historical events in the interwar period (the founding of the Free City of Gdańsk and the events preceding World War II). Its uniqueness came from the fact that the city of Gdańsk combined the styles of Prussian and Polish housing, as well as form the fact that its inhabitants felt the need for autonomy from the Second Polish Republic. The city aspired to be politically, socially and economically independent.</p><p>The aim of my presentation is to analyze the cartographic maps of Gdańsk, including the changes that had been made in the years of 1918&amp;ndash;1939. I will also comment on the reasons of those changes, on their socio-historical effects on the city, the whole country and Europe.</p>


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