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CHANGE has always characterised industrial societies. To speak of it as a mid‐twentieth century phenomenon, a violation of the established order, is unrealistic. Manufacturing operations have always been reviewed, sporadically or systematically, in industry to find new methods in order to secure greater output or lower costs. Usually the worker continued at his job with altered duties and different demands upon him, adjusting fairly easily to changed conditions in a routine way.

In pursuit of achieving Education‐For‐All goals of universal primary education and improving quality of education, the Indian Government has been providing substantial resources to Indian states. The responsibility of providing access and quality remains the states' responsibility. Assessment of educational development will therefore become a focal point of the Center for Education Policy & Guidelines Formulation. While educational development indices help in ranking states, they do not help in capturing best practices and assessing the efficient utilization of resources. Assessment of the Educational Development Efficiency can augment educational development indices in vogue. The purpose of this paper is to develop an Educational Development Efficiency (EDE) model to benchmark the Indian states.

This paper uses an input‐process‐output conceptual framework to identify the dimensions of educational development. This paper employs Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to compare relative efficiency of 28 states and seven Union territories in India and benchmark them. In order to strengthen the discriminatory power of DEA, cross‐efficiency model was used. Factor analysis was performed to determine the inter‐relationships between variables. The efficiency impacting variables were identified using multiple regression analysis.

This paper benchmarked Indian states on educational development based on their performance. Gross enrolment ratio, students' academic performance and infrastructural investments were identified as the three key variables impacting states' EDE. This paper has shown that the educational administrators can use the EDE model to identify the best practices from efficient states. Insights into utilization of input resources to enhance educational development and consequent improvement of state efficiencies are presented. Four components have been identified to analyze the states' educational development progress – namely, financial adequacy, school resource strength, educational quality and educational access.

Contributions of this paper pertain to evolving a decision support model for national education policy planners, besides providing analytic support to the administrators of the states to benchmark and emulate the efficient educational programs.

This paper is one of the few published studies concerning the evaluation of educational development programs launched in the Indian schools and providing a cross‐comparison of the Indian states for the purposes of performance benchmarking as well as exploring the influencing factors.

THE contents of this issue incline very much towards the sphere of building and construction. There is a particular reason for this. The Advisory Service for the Building Industry, under its new director, Edwin Wilde, has organized a seminar for directors and chief executives of leading firms in that industry. For two days, on 9 and 10 January, they will be subjected to an intensive educational course in work study from experts.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the situation of performance management, to be more precise, the usage and attitudes towards pay‐for‐performance on the example of Estonian schools and brings out practical implications for implementing pay‐for‐performance in Estonian general educational schools.

Altogether 298 headmasters and 2,165 teachers participated in this research. The goal of the research was to map the situation of the usage of pay‐for‐performance in Estonian schools and to find out teachers' and headmasters' opinions about the most effective pay‐for‐performance system.

Despite the great expectations of performance management and pay‐for‐performance, it is not being used in many Estonian general educational schools. However, the findings of this research show that both headmasters and teachers have quite positive attitudes towards pay‐for‐performance that gives a favourable platform for implementing pay‐for‐performance in the Estonian educational sector.

The study was mainly quantitative with only a few open questions, which raises limitations for finding complete answers and explanations to questions raised. Therefore, case studies need to be done to find answers to some interesting research questions.

With the view to raising the performance of the Estonian educational system and to guarantee its sustainability, a new course concerning schools' and pupils' individual development must be taken. It can be achieved through performance management and pay‐for‐performance, which also helps to raise teachers' motivation. A central feature of the pay‐for‐performance is that pay must be in accord with performance and must provide an incentive to promote the success of the organisation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether learning communities (LCs), defined as a cohort of students jointly enrolled in two distinct courses, increase “deep learning” in either or both courses. This study focuses on the impact of learning communities in quantitative courses.

The hypothesis is tested using a unique data set including individual student performance and characteristics collected from students enrolled in an LC of Principles of Microeconomics and Elementary Statistics. The sample also includes students enrolled in each course separately which allows for testing between groups. The final exam in each course contained questions designed specifically to test deep learning. The design facilitates the use of multivariate regression analysis to examine the correlation between learning in communities and deep learning, holding constant other possible elements of student success.

Despite perceptions among the sample student population that learning increases in both courses as a result of the LC format, the empirical evidence does not reveal any statistically significant increase in deep learning as a result of learning in community. However, the sample is more introverted than the average college student which may meaningfully impact the results.

There are a number of important motivations for implementing an LC program that are not measured here. These include an increased sense of community among students, breadth (rather than depth) of knowledge, and awareness of the interconnectedness of learning across disciplines. However, to the extent that university instructors are motivated to ensure learning in their own discipline, this resource-intensive strategy may not be the most suitable approach in quantitative courses.

Learning communities continue to be a popular pedagogical technique and curriculum requirement, particularly at teaching-focused universities. This research offers an empirical approach to measuring one aspect of their value which is typically left to conceptual or qualitative study.

This paper aims to discuss research and design of learning activities involving activity tracking and wearable activity tracking technology.

Three studies are summarized as part of a program of research that sought to design new learning activities for classroom settings. The first used data from a qualitative interview study of adult athletes who self-track. The second used video excerpts from a designed learning activity with a group of fifth grade elementary students. The third study draws largely on quantitative assessment data from an activity tracking unit enactment in a rural sixth grade class.

Activity tracking appears to provide opportunities for establishing benchmarks and calibration opportunities related to intensity of physical activities. Those features of activity tracking can be leveraged to develop learning activities where elementary students discover features of data and how data are affected by different distributions. Students can show significant improvement related to statistical reasoning in classroom instructional units that centralize the use of self-tracked data.

As activity tracking is becoming a more ubiquitous practice with increased pervasiveness and familiarity with mobile and wearable technologies, this paper demonstrates a topical intersection between the information and learning sciences, illustrates how self-tracking can be recruited for instructional settings, and it discusses concerns that have emerged in the past several years as the technology related to activity tracking begins to be used for educational purposes.