We sought to develop and psychometrically describe three new student engagement scales to measure college students' engagement with their faculty (studentfaculty engagement: SFE), community-based activities (CBA), and transformational learning opportunities (TLO) using items selected from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), a widely used, standardized student engagement survey. We used confirmatory factor analysis for ordered-categorical measures, item response theory (IRT), and data from 941 US college students' NSSE responses. Our findings indicated acceptable construct validity. The scales measured related but separable areas of engagement. IRT demonstrated that scores on the student-faculty engagement scale offered the most precise measurement in the middle range of student-faculty engagement. The CBA scale most reliably measured above average engagement, while TLO scores provided relatively precise descriptions of engagement across this spectrum. Findings support these scales' utility in institutional efforts to describe ''local'' student engagement, as well as efforts to use these scales in cross-institutional comparisons.
This paper analyzes an urban growth strategy revolving around port logistics. The growing significance of port economies is linked to the larger process of globalization and the increasing geographic distance between the points of production and consumption. Transportation and logistics emerge as a potential growth scheme for cities and regions that seek to develop ‘logistics clusters’. The analysis is based on the case of Jacksonville Florida, and the effort by public and private officials to identify and promote the maritime port as an engine of growth. This case study considers the efficacy of the growth machine model in understanding this urban development process as well as the limitations of this approach when applied to a development strategy based on the ‘strategic coupling’ of the urban economy with global supply chains under conditions of intense interport competition. The requirements of the port logistics sector for large-scale publicly financed infrastructure projects and the modification of the natural environment for commerce pose unique challenges and uncertainties for this development strategy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.