This book gathers together research from three key application themes of modelling in operational research - modelling to support evaluation and change in organisations; modelling within the development and use of organisational information systems; and the use of modelling approaches to support, enable and enhance decision support in organisational contexts. The issues raised provide valuable insight into the range of ways in which operational research techniques and practices are being successfully applied in today's information-centred business world. Modelling for Added Value provides a window onto current research and practise in modelling techniques and highlights their rising importance across the business, industrial and commercial sectors. The book contains contributions from a mix of academics and practitioners and covers a range of complex and diverse modelling issues, highlighting the broad appeal of this increasingly important subject area.

Value-added methods refer to efforts to estimate the relative contributions of specific teachers, schools, or programs to student test performance. In recent years, these methods have attracted considerable attention because of their potential applicability for educational accountability, teacher pay-for-performance systems, school and teacher improvement, program evaluation, and research. Value-added methods involve complex statistical models applied to test data of varying quality. Accordingly, there are many technical challenges to ascertaining the degree to which the output of these models provides the desired estimates. Despite a substantial amount of research over the last decade and a half, overcoming these challenges has proven to be very difficult, and many questions remain unanswered-at a time when there is strong interest in implementing value-added models in a variety of settings. The National Research Council and the National Academy of Education held a workshop, summarized in this volume, to help identify areas of emerging consensus and areas of disagreement regarding appropriate uses of value-added methods, in an effort to provide research-based guidance to policy makers who are facing decisions about whether to proceed in this direction.

Now available in paperback, with an all new Reader's guide, The New York Times and Business Week bestseller Co-opetition revolutionized the game of business. With over 40,000 copies sold and now in its 9th printing, Co-opetition is a business strategy that goes beyond the old rules of competition and cooperation to combine the advantages of both. Co-opetition is a pioneering, high profit means of leveraging business relationships. Intel, Nintendo, American Express, NutraSweet, American Airlines, and dozens of other companies have been using the strategies of co-opetition to change the game of business to their benefit. Formulating strategies based on game theory, authors Brandenburger and Nalebuff created a book that's insightful and instructive for managers eager to move their companies into a new mind set.

Since passage of the of No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, academic researchers, econometricians, and statisticians have been exploring various analytical methods of documenting students‘ academic progress over time. Known as value-added models (VAMs), these methods are meant to measure the value a teacher or school adds to student learning from one year to the next. To date, however, there is very little evidence to support the trustworthiness of these models. What is becoming increasingly evident, yet often ignored mainly by policymakers, is that VAMs are 1) unreliable, 2) invalid, 3) nontransparent, 4) unfair, 5) fraught with measurement errors and 6) being inappropriately used to make consequential decisions regarding such things as teacher pay, retention, and termination. Unfortunately, their unintended consequences are not fully recognized at this point either. Given such, the timeliness of this well-researched and thoughtful book cannot be overstated. This book sheds important light on the debate surrounding VAMs and thereby offers states and practitioners a highly important resource from which they can move forward in more research-based ways.

Strategic analytics is a relatively new field in conjunction with strategic management and business intelligence. Generally, the strategic management field deals with the enhancement of the decision-making capabilities of managers. Typically, such decision-making processes are heavily dependent upon various internal and external reports. Managers need to develop their strategies using clear strategy processes supported by the increasing availability of data. This situation calls for a different approach to strategy, including integration with analytics, as the science of extracting value from data and structuring complex problems. Using Strategy Analytics to Measure Corporate Performance and Business Value Creation discusses how to tackle complex business dynamics using optimization techniques and modern business analytics tools. It covers not only introductory concepts of strategic analytics but also provides strategic analytics applications in each area of management such as market dynamics, customer analysis, operations, and people management. It unveils the best industry practices and how managers can become expert strategists and analysts to better measure and enhance corporate performance and their businesses. This book is ideal for analysts, executives, managers, entrepreneurs, researchers, students, industry professionals, stakeholders, practitioners, academicians, and others interested in the strategic analytics domain and how it can be applied to complex business dynamics.

Added Value in Design and Construction takes a holistic, student-centred approach to offering public and private sector clients the ultimate reward; doing more for less. The Latham Report was a call to action and this book provides students of construction with the theoretical and practical knowledge to deliver the recommendations of the report. It describes the principles and techniques crucial to adding value and reducing costs in design and construction in the twenty first century. This book examines in detail a wide range of strategies that can be applied during the design and construction process to add value and bring the best interests of the client sharply into focus.

Modeling student growth has been a federal policy requirement under No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In addition to tracking student growth, the latest Race To The Top (RTTP) federal education policy stipulates the evaluation of teacher effectiveness from the perspective of added value that teachers contribute to student learning and growth. Student growth modeling and teacher value-added modeling are complex. The complexity stems, in part, from issues due to non-random assignment of students into classes and schools, measurement error in students’ achievement scores that are utilized to evaluate the added value of teachers, multidimensionality of the measured construct across multiple grades, and the inclusion of covariates. National experts at the Twelfth Annual Maryland Assessment Research Center’s Conference on “Value Added Modeling and Growth Modeling with Particular Application to Teacher and School Effectiveness” present the latest developments and methods to tackle these issues. This book includes chapters based on these conference presentations. Further, the book provides some answers to questions such as what makes a good growth model? What criteria should be used in evaluating growth models? How should outputs from growth models be utilized? How auxiliary teacher information could be utilized to improve value added? How multiple sources of student information could be accumulated to estimate teacher effectiveness? Whether student-level and school-level covariates should be included? And what are the impacts of the potential heterogeneity of teacher effects across students of different aptitudes or other differing characteristics on growth modeling and teacher evaluation? Overall, this book addresses reliability and validity issues in growth modeling and value added modeling and presents the latest development in this area. In addition, some persistent issues have been approached from a new perspective. This edited volume provides a very good source of information related to the current explorations in student growth and teacher effectiveness evaluation.