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Recent teacher evaluation reforms across the globe can improve student outcomes, though doing so depends on implementation by school leaders. This study aims to describe how teacher reports about classroom observation processes (TROPs) vary across within-teacher observations, teachers and schools and depend on contextual, teacher and school characteristics.

A researcher–practitioner partnership collected TROPs using surveys administered multiple times during one semester and linked results to Tennessee administrative data. Random effects quantify TROP variation within examined clusters and estimate relationships between TROPs and the examined characteristics.

Although observation processes are well implemented on average, TROPs vary considerably across teachers and observations within teachers over a short period. TROPs also depend on several examined characteristics, but not necessarily in ways predisposed toward teacher development.

The study extends the understanding of the degree and extent to which teacher evaluation implementation by school leaders varies. Leadership preparation programs and in-service support providers might use the evidence herein to improve the extent to which evaluation-related observation processes are implemented consistently and in ways supporting teacher development.

The purpose of this paper is to test and develop a new tool for lesson observation and feedback within the context of initial teacher education. The tool was designed to align with the practitioner enquiry model of teacher learning underpinning the course, and as such it drew mentors into the mode of responding to their students’ questions.

The research was undertaken as a Design Study. The design of the tool led to an iterative, collaborative, process‐focused approach to the development of the observation tool. Students and their mentors were encouraged to experiment with and report on their observation experience.

The observation tool altered the quality of the mentoring relationship through focusing on enquiry as its foundation. Feedback from student teachers and their mentors helped us to define the role of observation in the process of professional learning and to review the nature of the mentoring relationship which emerged.

Significant professional development and learning can be triggered by crossing both real and metaphorical boundaries and as such it is essential that the tools offered to students and their mentors are supportive of divergent learning outcomes, through which each student teacher has the opportunity to transform teaching practices, not simply replicate existing ones.

Observation and feedback in the classroom can be viewed as a “boundary” practice. This new tool can be regarded as a “boundary object” which promotes the use of questions to support the “framing and reframing” necessary for the professional learning and development of the beginning teachers.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a structured review of literature on lesson study (LS) in initial teacher education (ITE). The focus was on how learning and observation were discussed in studies of LS in ITE.

Each national team (in Norway and Britain) undertook independent searches of published peer-reviewed articles. The resulting articles were then combined, screened and collaboratively reviewed, the focus being on two areas of enquiry: how learning is represented and discussed; and the extent to which observation is described and used to capture evidence of learning.

The literature review indicated that there was no universally held understanding of, or explanation for, the process of observation, how it should be conducted, and who or what should be the principal focus of attention. There was also a lack of clarity in the definition of learning and the use of learning theory to support these observations.

This study was limited to a review of a selection of peer-reviewed journal articles, published in English. It arrives at some tentative conclusions, but its scope could have been broadened to include more articles and other types of published material, e.g. theses and book chapters.

Research that investigates the use of LS in ITE needs to be more explicit about how learning is defined and observed. Furthermore, LS research papers need to assure greater clarity and transparency about how observations are conducted in their studies.

This literature review suggests that discussion of both learning and observation in ITE LS research papers should be strengthened. The review highlights three principal challenges that ITE LS researchers should consider: how to prepare student-teachers to observe (professional noticing being a promising option), the wide variation in the focus of classroom observation in ITE lesson studies, and discussion of what is understood by learning needs to stand at the heart of preparation for lesson studies in ITE.

This article offers practical advice to ethnographers venturing into doing participant observations through, but not about, videoconferencing applications such as Zoom, for which the methods literature offers little guidance.

The article stems from a research project about a BioMedical Design Fellowship. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Fellowship converted all teaching activities to online learning via Zoom, and the participant observations followed along. Taking an autoethnographic approach, the authors present and discuss concrete examples of encountered obstacles produced by the video-mediated format, such as limited access and interactions, technical glitches and changing experiences of embodiment.

Changing embodiment in particular initially led the authors to believe that the “messiness” of ethnography (i.e. misunderstandings, emotions, politics, self-doubts etc.) was lost online. However, over time the authors realized that the mess was still there, albeit in new manifestations, because Zoom shaped the interactions of the people the authors observed, the observations the authors could make and how the authors related to research participants and vice versa.

The article succinctly summarizes the key advice offered by the researchers (see Section 5) based on their experiences of converting on-site ethnographic observations into video-mediated observations enabling easy use by other researchers in relation to other projects and contexts.

The article positions video-mediated observations, via e.g. Zoom, which are distinctly characterised by happening in real time and having an object of study other than the online sphere itself, vis-à-vis other “online ethnography” methods. The article further aims to enable researchers to more rapidly rediscover and re-incite the new manifestations of the messiness of ethnography online, which is key to ensuring high-quality research.

The purpose of this paper is to study the optimal sequential information acquisition process of a rational decision maker (DM) when allowed to acquire n pieces of information from a set of bi-dimensional products whose characteristics vary in a continuum set.

The authors incorporate a heuristic mechanism that makes the n-observation scenario faced by a DM tractable. This heuristic allows the DM to assimilate substantial amounts of information and define an acquisition strategy within a coherent analytical framework. Numerical simulations are introduced to illustrate the main results obtained.

The information acquisition behavior modeled in this paper corresponds to that of a perfectly rational DM, i.e. endowed with complete and transitive preferences, whose objective is to choose optimally among the products available subject to a heuristic assimilation constraint. The current paper opens the way for additional research on heuristic information acquisition and choice processes when considered from a satisficing perspective that accounts for cognitive limits in the information processing capacities of DMs.

The proposed information acquisition algorithm does not allow for the use of standard dynamic programming techniques. That is, after each observation is gathered, a rational DM must modify his information acquisition strategy and recalculate his or her expected payoffs in terms of the observations already acquired and the information still to be gathered.

The purpose of this paper is to show that major reversals of an index (specifically BIST-30 index) can be detected uniquely on the date of reversal by checking the extreme outliers in the rate of change series using daily closing prices.

The extreme outliers are determined by checking if either the rate of change series or the volatility of the rate of change series displays more than two standard deviations on the date of reversal. Furthermore; wavelet analysis is also utilized for this purpose by checking the extreme outlier characteristics of the A1 (approximation level 1) and D3 (detail level 3) wavelet components.

Paper investigates ten major reversals of BIST-30 index during a five year period. It conclusively shows that all these major reversals are characterized by extreme outliers mentioned above. The paper also checks if these major reversals are unique in the sense of being observed only on the date of reversal but not before. The empirical results confirm the uniqueness. The paper also demonstrates empirically the fact that extreme outliers are associated only with major reversals but not minor ones.

The results are important for fund managers for whom the timely identification of the initial phase of a major bullish or bearish trend is crucial. Such timely identification of the major reversals is also important for the hedging applications since a major issue in the practical implementation of the stock index futures as a hedging instrument is the correct timing of derivatives positions.

To the best of the author’ knowledge; this is the first study dealing with the issue of major reversal identification. This is evidently so for the BIST-30 index and the use of extreme outliers for this purpose is also a novelty in the sense that neither the use of rate of change extremity nor the use of wavelet decomposition for this purpose was addressed before in the international literature.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the possibility of soft science measurement of motivation under strict hard science criteria from observations of individual animals and to suggest the conditions under which an observation can be classified as a measurement.

The methodology starts from reconciling second-order cybernetics/radical constructivism (SOC/RC) understanding of the central role of the observer with physical measurements, which accepts the existence of a mind-independent reality. As a result of the reconciliation, parallels were identified between the SOC/RC experiences of as_is and as_if, on the one hand, and the measurement concepts of accuracy and resolution, on the other hand. The scales of physical measurement are defined by criteria of varying strictness, and the scales that meet the strict criterion of concatenation are generally considered hard science and lead to well-defined accuracy and precision. The similarity between SOC/RC and physical measurement suggests that if accuracy and precision can be computed from observations, then the observations can be classified as measurements in a strict hard science fashion; otherwise, the observations are just observations.

A nonlinear dynamic model of motivation is reintroduced as an example for reference in measurements of motivation. If there was an agreement on its use among observers (Ethologists), which in reality is not the case, then empirical data may be collected, and the averages and spreads of parameter estimations will define a reference for an animal species. Later, observers with their own data will calibrate with the reference model, so that new observers will have calculated values of accuracy and precision for their data.

Unlike hard science whose scales of measurement are practically unambiguous, measuring the purpose of behaviour of an animal has inherent ambiguity according to the reintroduced model. The ambiguity cannot be resolved from instantaneous readings. The necessary existence of ambiguity renders the criticism of hard science invalid, that of expecting to measure motivation with a static scale as if it were temperature.

Human observers can be treated as measuring devices of motivation from observing behaviour. Each observer can have characteristic accuracy/precision, or validity/reliability, calculated from empirical data.

This is an inductive, rather than deductive, study of individual animal behaviour; the author believes it is extensible to individual human behaviour and personality studies. However, group behaviour studies are beyond its scope.

The author believes that the suggestion of ambiguity of scales of animal motivation is original, and the suggested link between SOC/RC and a mainstream hard science is new.

In robot programming by demonstration (PbD) of small parts assembly tasks, the accuracy of parts poses estimated by vision-based techniques in demonstration stage is far from enough to ensure a successful execution. This paper aims to develop an inference method to improve the accuracy of poses and assembly relations between parts by integrating visual observation with computer-aided design (CAD) model.

In this paper, the authors propose a spatial information inference method called probabilistic assembly graph with optional CAD model, shorted as PAGC*, to achieve this task. Then an assembly relation extraction method from CAD model is designed, where different assembly relation descriptions in CAD model are summarized into two fundamental relations that are colinear and coplanar. The relation similarity, distance similarity and rotation similarity are adopted as the similar part matching criterions between the CAD model and the observation. The knowledge of part in CAD is used to correct that of the corresponding part in observation. The likelihood maximization estimation is used to infer the accurate poses and assembly relations based on the probabilistic assembly graph.

In the experiments, both simulated data and real-world data are applied to evaluate the performance of the PAGC* model. The experimental results show the superiority of PAGC* in accuracy compared with assembly graph (AG) and probabilistic assembly graph without CAD model (PAG).

The paper provides a new approach to get the accurate pose of each part in demonstration stage of the robot PbD system. By integrating information from visual observation with prior knowledge from CAD model, PAGC* ensures the success in execution stage of the PbD system.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the advantages, challenges and uncertainties of collecting and analyzing data using participant observation in logistics research.

Experiences from a participant observation study of an interorganizational radio frequency identification (RFID) implementation in an international environment are presented and reflected on. The RFID implementation included complex interactions between three leading companies.

The results appear to support an increased use of participant observation in qualitative logistics research, particularly when investigating interorganizational aspects. The analysis highlights values, general limitations and challenges of using participant observation in logistics. The paper illustrates that using participant observation results in significant and detailed findings, which would be difficult to achieve with other methods. Suggestions on how to take advantage of the method's benefits and overcome methodological challenges are provided.

Future research may address experiences from other studies regarding how to analyze and report data from a participant observation study. It may also clarify the role the method is given in case studies and extend the analysis of epistemological aspects conducted in this paper.

This paper may inspire logistics researchers to consider participant observation, either as sole method or as part of a multi‐methodical case study, in order to make use of its benefits and thus broaden the dimensions of logistics research.

A broad literature review indicates that participant observation studies are rather uncommon in logistics research. This paper thus highlights the potential of using this method in logistics research, particularly when investigating the overlooked, but essential, interorganizational aspects of logistics and SCM.

Adumbrates the positives of using effective observation by researchers and managers among others. Posits that looking and watching should be embedded in all psyches of all researchers, learners and managers, and it is a skill that needs to be acquired and honed. Sums up that although some of the hazards and opportunities have an association with observation, it is often overlooked as a data collection methodology.