Teacher training, teacher quality and student achievement

Authors: Douglas N. Harris and Time R. Sass

Published: August 2011 in the Journal of Public Economics
http://0www.sciencedirect.com.library.uark.edu/science/article/pii/S0047272710001696
The article begins by stating that the idea that the quality of teacher is key to
improving both primary and secondary education in the United States. The debate,
however, is what factors measure and improve the quality of a teacher. Throughout
the course of the paper, the authors address the challenges of measuring the
effects of teacher training and the quality of teachers it produces. The first
challenge that is addressed is the difficulty to measure the productivity of a teacher.
This difficulty comes from the fact that teachers who are usually more trained and
experienced are placed with higher achieving students, while newer and less
trained teachers are assigned to the lower performing students. Since these studies
lack the unobserved student characteristics controls, the studies tend to produce
results that are biased towards teachers with more experience and training. This
study yielded the results that with elementary and middle school teachers, learning
by doing (experience in the classroom), was what increased the productivity of the
teacher, and formal training outside of the classroom did not increase tend to
increase the teachers ability to enhance the students achievements. This
conclusion came from randomly assigning teachers to students, and it did not take
into account the amount of previous training and the students academic abilities.
The another challenge this study addresses is the difficulty of obtaining data on the
types of training that teachers receive and then linking that type of training to the
performance of the students. The authors of this paper examine formal training and
concluded that it appears to be ineffective due to the productivity of teachers being
context-specific. They speculated that formal training of teachers is too
standardized to cover the specificity of curriculum and types of students that a
teacher may receive. This speculation agrees with the findings that in class
experience produced greater productivity among teachers due to being less
standardized. The authors did, however, find the amount of formal training received
by middle school math teachers did positively impact the students performance.
These findings were produced by examining the amount of training, experience, and
student performances for all public schools in the state of Florida.

Applications of conducting polymers and their issues in biomedical

engineering
Authors: Rajeswari Ravichandran, Subramanian Sundarrajan, Jayarama Reddy
Venugopal, Shayanti Mukherjee, and Seeram Ramakrishna
Published: October 6, 2010 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2952180/?tool=pmcentrez
The purpose of this article is to evaluate the use of conducting polymers in the field
of biomedical engineering and how they can be used to enhance the use biomedical
devices. Recently, conducting polymers have been used more in the biomedical
field because of their low cost, ability to be reproduced easily, and their ability to
make biomedical devices more stable. Conducting polymers have also bene used
for biomedical purposes due to their ability to be used in the body without rejection.
Conducting polymers are different than that of other polymers due to their ionic and
electronic conductive nature and their ability to be used either dry or wet. After
testing in vivo, in a living organism, the conducting polymer resulted in very little
inflammation, meaning that these polymers are low in toxin levels and are
biocompatible with tissues found in the human body. When scaffolds were made
with this polymer, it was also found to be biodegradable. The biocompatibility and
biodegradable aspects of conducting polymers is important when it comes to tissue
engineering and drug delivery applications, which is the main focus of this paper.
In regards to drug delivery applications, the use of conducting polymers could
replace or enhance drug delivery systems that are already in use today. Since they
are biocompatible with the body, using the polymers in vivo to monitor the flow of
drugs throughout biological fluids can now be explored by researchers.