The concept of teacher efficacy has received significant attention in educational contexts in the recent years and has been empirically probed at 2 levels: individual teacher efficacy and collective teacher efficacy. Having their origins in the social cognitive theory, teacher and collective efficacy perceptions are quite distinct constructs, each affecting educational decisions and student ach...

Causation is vital to the process of evaluating alternatives, particularly in multiagent, environments where a decision involves reasoning about others’ intentions. In these environments, agents do evaluate complex policy alternatives in terms of the consequences a particular choice would cause locally and globally. In this work, we propose a model which allows agents to reason on their causal ...

Analytical techniques are generally inadequate for dealing with interrelationships or causal-ities among a set of individual and social concepts. Usually, cognitive maps (or causal maps) are used to cope with this type of causalities. However, the classical view of cognitive maps is based on an intuitive view with ad-hoc rules and no precise semantics of the primitive concepts, neither a sound ...

We show that the statistical power of a single single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) score test for genetic association reflects the cumulative effect of all causal SNPs that are correlated with the test SNP. Statistical significance of a score test can sometimes be explained by the collective effect of weak correlations between the test SNP and multiple causal SNPs. In a finite population, weak...

Widespread public sector unionism emerged only in the 1960s, as individual states opened the door to collective bargaining for state and municipal workers. This study exploits differences in timing across states to construct estimates of the causal effects of public sector collective bargaining rights on pay, benefits, and employment for teachers, fire fighters, and police. Perhaps surprisingly...

Background: Social capital has been defined as norms, networks, and social links that facilitate collective actions. Social capital is related to a number of main social and public health variables. Therefore, the present study aimed to determine the factors associated with social capital among the residents of Tehran, Iran.   Methods: In this large cross-sectional population-based stud...

introduction: universities and their faculty members are responsible for educating students for social responsibilities. if the faculty members are to contribute to the attainment of university and societal goals, they should trust their dean, colleagues, and students. this will facilitate the collective efficacy of faculty members. if faculty members believe in their collective abilities, the ...

Introduction To develop a foundation of scientific understanding, undergraduate biology students need to integrate ideas about individual concepts into thinking complex biological systems. Methods investigate the extent which engage in systems thinking, we conducted pre-post study with required botany course at small liberal arts college Midwest. All completed causal map beginning and end cours...