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This paper argues that in a well-organised school with strong leadership and vision coupled with a concerted effort to improve the teaching performance of each teacher, student achievement can be enhanced. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that while macro-effect sizes such as “whole of school” metrics are useful for school leaders in their professional development roles, there are important micro-conditions that can be uncovered in a more detailed analysis of student achievement data.

Evidence of student achievement in a variety of standardised and non-standardised assessment tasks was subjected to examination in a post hoc, case study design. The assessment tasks were the South Australian Spelling Test Waddington Reading Test, a school-wide diagnostic writing task, teacher running records and National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy. Performance in selected classrooms was compared on these tests utilising a variety of parametric quantitative statistics.

School-based reform initiatives require external criteria on which to base decision making. Without such criteria based on data and the capacity to interpret it, interactions in the school culture have unanticipated consequences that have the potential to neutralise school improvement strategies. Further, findings suggest that fewer but sharper and quicker data collection tools are more valuable in such teacher decision making, but these require expertise to produce and interpret them.

This paper provides insights from one school, but the reported data are embedded in a sustained five year school reform programme.

This paper documents a whole school organisational reform model devised by a school head and leadership team to improve student academic performance. The paper offers a process for developing a data-based school reform strategy for professional development to enhance both student achievement and school outcomes.

The paper outlines a model for school reform that is focused on all students increasing their academic outcomes. By emphasising collaborative teacher work based on research-justified teaching approaches, the model shows that social inequalities can be reversed.

The paper outlines a whole of school reform model focused through a combination of distributed leadership, data-driven decision making, within a context of a coaching, mentoring and feedback regime for teachers. Together this model is an application of theoretical ideas to school reform.

This paper aims to investigate how the current size and structure of a branded product portfolio impacts new product performance for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), testing the long-standing proposition that extending a firm’s brand and product portfolio too far is a dangerous proposition that may damage the market performance of the firm’s new product launches.

Aspects associated with brand size and structure that may impact new product performance are operationalized along two key dimensions: within-category (scale) and cross-category (scope). The impact of the brand’s scale and scope on the sales performance of newly commercialized products by the brand is empirically investigated in the context of FMCG. Over 2,000 new products launched in 2009 and 2010 across 31 food and non-food FMCG product categories in the USA are included in the regression-based analysis.

The authors find strong evidence that brands with broader within-category scale and cross-category scope overall are associated with more successful new product introductions, and that these influences generally are driven more by increased product trial than by repeat or persistence. The authors argue that the higher new product performance observed for more established and proliferated brands may be attributed to advantages of firm product development abilities and product acceptance by the marketplace.

The current results serve to temper the strong cautions set forth in much of the marketing literature about the dangers of overextending the firm’s brand and product portfolio. These results also suggest that future research should be conducted to further understand more nuanced implications of how best to grow the scale and scope of the firm’s brand and product portfolio.

This paper aims to document changes in values of young Indian consumers over a 10-year period from 2004 to 2014. Given increases in per-capita income and living standards and, particularly, the tremendous increase in exposure to global products and ideals via media advertising, and greater one-to-one interaction with Americans and other English-speaking people from individualistic cultures (India has over 250 million Internet users who communicate in the English language), it was proposed that young Indian consumers would adopt values associated with self-enhancement and individualism, forsaking self-transcendence-related ideals such as benevolence and universalism.

Data pertaining to the Rokeach value scale (RVS) were collected in New Delhi in 2004 and 2014 and tested using MANOVA.

The results strongly support the contentions, save a couple of surprises. Implications of this dramatic change in values in a relatively short period are discussed from a marketing perspective.

This is the first paper that empirically measures changing consumer values in India.

Anthropomorphized brands have been widely used as marketing communication tools to engage consumers on social media, especially on Twitter. Guided by the social exchange theory (SET) and the dialogic theory, this study aims to investigate how anthropomorphized brands leverage different communication strategies on Twitter and how these strategies are related to consumer engagement.

Supervised machine learning was used to identify the communication strategies (i.e. message types and dialogic principles) of 125,887 tweets from 21 brand characters. Some statistical analyses (e.g. frequency analysis, Chi-square analysis and Poisson regression analysis) were performed to explore the relationships between communication strategies and consumer engagement (i.e. retweets and replies).

The majority of anthropomorphized brands’ tweets belonged to the socioemotional category and the most adopted dialogic principles were generation of return visits and conservation of visitors. Consumers engaged more with socioemotional tweets as well as the tweets that adopted the principles of dialogic loop and conservation of visitors. There were clear relationships between message types and dialogic principles in anthropomorphized brands’ tweets, and certain dialogic principles were found to effectively improve consumer engagement with certain message types.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the communication strategies of anthropomorphized brand characters on Twitter using computational research methods. It not only provides brand managers a systematic review of how current anthropomorphized brands communicate with consumers on Twitter and what strategies work more effectively to trigger consumer engagement but also contributes to theory building in brand management by integrating the SET and the dialogic theory in brand anthropomorphism research.

The purpose of this case study is to discuss the creation of robust preservation functionality within PURR. The study seeks to discuss the customization of the HUBzero platform, composition of digital preservation policies, and the creation of a novel, machine-actionable metadata model for PURR's unique digital content. Additionally, the study will trace the implementation of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model and track PURR's progress towards Trustworthy Digital Repository certification.

This case study discusses the use of the Center for Research Libraries Trusted Repository Audit Checklist (TRAC) certification process and ISO 16363 as a rubric to build an OAIS institutional repository for the publication, preservation, and description of unique datasets.

ISO 16363 continues to serve as a rubric, barometer and set of goals for PURR as development continues. To become a trustworthy repository, the PURR project team has consistently worked to build a robust, secure, and long-term home for collaborative research. In order to fulfill its mandate, the project team constructed policies, strategies, and activities designed to guide a systematic digital preservation environment. PURR expects to undertake the full ISO 16363 audit process at a future date in expectation of being certified as a Trustworthy Digital Repository. Through its efforts in digital preservation, the Purdue University Research Repository expects to better serve Purdue researchers, their collaborators, and move scholarly research efforts forward world-wide.

PURR is a customized instance of HUBzero®, an open source software platform that supports scientific discovery, learning, and collaboration. HUBzero was a research project funded by the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) and is a product of the Network for Computation Nanotechnology (NCN), a multi-university initiative of eight member institutions. PURR is only one instance of a HUBzero's customization; versions have been implemented in many disciplines nation-wide. PURR maintains the core functionality of HUBzero, but has been modified to publish datasets and to support their preservation. Long-term access to published data are an essential component of PURR services and Purdue University Libraries' mission. Preservation in PURR is not only vital to the Purdue University research community, but to the larger digital preservation issues surrounding dynamic datasets and their long-term usability.