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The purpose of this paper is to examine the characteristics of teacher incentive pay programs used by midsize to large school districts in Missouri.

This study primarily used the Teacher Compensation Programs (TCP) survey data. The TCP survey was developed by the authors to understand the nature and characteristics of financial incentives that Missouri districts used to recruit, reward, and retain quality teachers.

The data showed that, during the 2009-2010 academic year, 32 percent of the districts offered at least one financial incentive to recruit or retain teachers. Districts were more likely to reward teachers for obtaining National Board certification and for assuming extra duties than for teaching in the subject areas of shortage or in hard-to-staff schools. Larger districts with higher teacher salary were more likely than small districts to offer a larger number of incentive pay programs.

The findings of this study advance our knowledge of local incentive pay policies. It also contributes to the global discourse of teacher compensation and incentives and can be informative to policymakers in the USA and around the world when designing and implementing incentive pay programs to teachers. Further, it sheds light on the important policy question of whether disadvantaged local educational agencies are more likely to use incentive pay programs to recruit and retain teachers and promote an equitable distribution of the teacher workforce. This informs the decision making of providing targeted support to those in need.

Purpose – The author examines the implementation and characteristics of teacher evaluation and explores their associations with improvement in teachers’ practice of constructivist instruction.Methodology – This quantitative study uses statewide longitudinal Teachers’ Opportunity to Learn survey data collected in 2009 and 2010 from middle school mathematics teachers in Missouri and estimates a series of value-added models with two-level Hierarchical Linear Modeling.Findings – Teachers in this study were mainly evaluated by principals who conducted classroom observations and held face-to-face meetings to evaluate teaching practice and professional development activities. The study provides empirical evidence and support for the use of multiple evaluators with multiple evaluation data and outcomes in teacher evaluation. Additionally, it highlights the potential benefits of focusing on teachers’ instructional data instead of student achievement in teacher evaluation in order to improve their teaching practice.Research limitations – This study focused on middle school mathematics teachers in a single state in the United States. Whether these findings can be generalized to teachers of other subject areas or grades, or to states with different policy contexts, or to countries with country-specific structural, cultural, and social differences is unknown.Value – This study is the first effort to systematically examine teacher evaluation practices across a single state and provide empirical evidence on the relationships between the implementation characteristics of teacher evaluation and improvement in teachers’ instructional practice. Findings of this study provide school, district, state, federal, and international policymakers and administrators with important, up-to-date information on teacher evaluation at the middle-school level in the United States.

These are headlines of news articles in a national newspaper in a country outside of the United States. The media coverage of teacher scandals increased since 2001, reaching the highest 89 cases in 2004. The teachers in this country, the readers would conclude, have serious problems. They would wonder what is wrong with these teachers and speculate that teaching is not a well-respected or well-paid occupation in this country.

Motoko Akiba is an Associate Professor of Education Policy in the Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Studies at Florida State University. Dr. Akiba received her B.A. from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, and a dual-title Ph.D. in Educational Theory & Policy and Comparative & International Education from Pennsylvania State University-University Park. Her research focuses on teacher policy and reform topics, such as professional development, compensation and performance-related pay, and multicultural teacher education. She is an author of the book, Improving teacher quality: The U.S. teaching force in global context (Teachers College Press, 2009). Her published journal articles appear in Educational Researcher, American Educational Research Journal, Education Policy, and Comparative Education Review, and Compare among others. Dr. Akiba is serving as an Associate Editor of Educational Researcher from 2012 to 2015. She is also a recipient of the NSF Early Career Award Grant, NAEP secondary analysis grant, and AERA dissertation and research grants.

The purpose of this study is to identify the causative factors of metro construction safety accidents, analyze the correlation between accidents and causative factors and assist in developing safety management strategies for improving safety performance in the context of the Chinese construction industry.

To achieve these objectives, 13 types and 48 causations were determined based on 274 construction safety accidents in China. Then, 204 cause-and-effect relationships among accidents and causations were identified based on data mining. Next, network theory was employed to develop and analyze the metro construction accident causation network (MCACN).

The topological characteristics of MCACN were obtained, it is both a small-world network and a scale-free network. Controlling critical causative factors can effectively control the occurrence of metro construction accidents. Degree centrality strategy is better than closeness centrality strategy and betweenness centrality strategy.

In practice, it is very difficult to quantitatively identify and determine the importance of different accidents and causative factors. The weights of nodes and edges are failed to be assigned when constructing MCACN.

This study provides a theoretical basis and feasible management reference for construction enterprises in China to control construction risks and reduce safety accidents. More safety resources should be allocated to control critical risks. It is recommended that safety managers implement degree centrality strategy when making safety-related decisions.

This paper establishes the MCACN model based on data mining and network theory, identifies the properties and clarifies the mechanism of metro construction accidents and causations.

As entrepreneurial top management teams in multidivisional forms are typically treated in pertinent literature as the default organizational solutions for developing dynamic capabilities, the emerging innovative organizational forms tend to be overlooked, even though they could be a viable means of transforming established enterprises. The present case study examines how Haier's microenterprise and platforms influenced the firm's dynamic capabilities development.

The paper presents a qualitative case study of Haier Group Corporation in China.

The findings indicate that Haier employed a loosely coupled relationship between its headquarters and the microenterprises, developed quasi market-based exchange relationships and established peer-to-peer learning opportunities and coordination among its microenterprises. Data analyses further revealed that Haier has adopted three-step routines to capture market opportunities and enhance operational efficiency. This research extends the sensing-seizing-reconfiguration model typically recommended in the existing literature. It also demonstrates that organizational configuration is an important aspect of dynamic innovation. In summary, the study results showcase microdivisionalization as a new way for developing dynamic capabilities to better adapt to the ever-changing market environments.

In summary, our study showcased microdivisionalization as a new way for firms to change the organization structure and business strategies to better adapt to the ever-changing market environments.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the correction mechanism of resilient safety culture on new generation of construction workers (NGCWs)' unsafe behavior and test the multiple mediation effects of job crafting and perceived work meaningfulness based on the context of Chinese construction industry in order to find a new way to effectively correct the NGCWs' unsafe behavior.

A theoretical model of correction mechanism was established based on literature research and theoretical deduction. An empirical study was employed based on confirmatory factor analysis and regression analysis with a sample of 404 NGCWs in China.

The results indicated that resilient safety culture can effectively correct NGCWs' unsafe behavior through job crafting and perceived work meaningfulness. Job crafting and perceived work meaningfulness can play independent and serial mediating roles between resilient safety culture and unsafe behavior.

Research results only represent a short-term law about the correction mechanism of NGCWs' unsafe behavior based on a questionnaire study from China's construction industry. It is necessary to continue to implement a longitudinal study to test it in a relatively long period in future research. The findings also need to be verified based on the young construction workers in other countries.

This study provides a theoretical basis and feasible management reference for construction enterprises in China to correct NGCWs' unsafe behavior from the perspective of resilient safety culture. Furthermore, the construction of resilient safety culture in construction enterprises can help NGCWs better carry out job crafting and perceive the meaning of work.

This paper clarifies the correction mechanism of resilient safety culture on unsafe behavior of NGCWs, and further tests the independent mediating roles and a serial mediating role of job crafting and perceived work meaningfulness between resilient safety culture and unsafe behavior, which fills the research gap about the influence mechanism of resilient safety culture on young construction workers' unsafe behavior and enriches the theoretical system of unsafe behavior correction of construction workers.

This paper aims to present a modular multimodal flexible electronic skin that can be used for robot collision detection in human–robot interactions. This type of electronic skin will meet the requirements of performance indicators such as sensing mode, sensing domain coverage and dynamic data update rate in human–robot interactions.

The electronic skin uses a modular architecture, and the sensing module is designed to be adjustable in size so that it can be easily deployed on complex robot surfaces, increasing area coverage, reducing power consumption, and improving data update rates.

The authors evaluated electronic skin through experiments using a UR5 robot. Electronic skin has high static scene perception differentiation and dynamic scene perception abilities. Moreover, the robot realizes a high-speed collision response based on the electronic skin proposed in this study.

The proposed electronic skin provides crucial technical support for advancing robotic technologies, and holds promising prospects for industrial applications.