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Cooperative learning has gained popularity in higher educational settings. However, assigning grades equitably to all team members in a way that rewards them for their contributions remains challenging. In this paper, we ask whether having free riders on a team lowers the quality of submitted work, and whether students' course performance correlates with peer evaluations. In an introductory sociology course, 101 students were organized into 20 teams; each team completed a set of three papers. Students were evaluated by the quality of work submitted and peer evaluations. For statistical analysis, we organized the teams into one of three groups, among which we compared average paper grades: group one contained teams with free riders, group two contained teams that may have free riders, and group three contained teams with no free riders. We found that teams with free riders did not submit significantly lower quality work than teams without free riders. We also statistically analyzed the relationship between student course performance and their peer evaluation, and found that students' performance in the course showed little correlation with their peer evaluations. Our results indicate that free riders do not depress the grades of non-free rider students. We also found that students' peer evaluations do not correlate with their course performance, a finding which warrants further research. (Contains 3 tables, 3 footnotes, and 3 figures.)

Addressing critical global health issues, such as antimicrobial resistance, infectious disease outbreaks, and natural disasters, requires strong coordination and management across sectors. The One Health approach is the integrative effort of multiple sectors working to attain optimal health for people, animals, and the environment, and is increasingly recognized by experts as a means to address complex challenges. However, practical application of the One Health approach has been challenging. The One Health Systems Mapping and Analysis Resource Toolkit (OH-SMART) introduced in this paper was designed using a multistage prototyping process to support systematic improvement in multi-sectoral coordination and collaboration to better address complex health concerns through an operational, stepwise, and practical One Health approach. To date, OH-SMART has been used to strengthen One Health systems in 17 countries and has been deployed to revise emergency response frameworks, improve antimicrobial resistance national action plans and create multi agency infectious disease collaboration protocols. OH-SMART has proven to be user friendly, robust, and capable of fostering multi-sectoral collaboration and complex system-wide problem solving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the measurement in sociology. In addition to measurements which might derive from respondents' reports, there is the possibility of measurement which might be derived from an investigator's own observations of verbal or non-verbal behavior of the persons concerned. The Hawthorn studies of role behavior in an electrical plant were able to measure the range in individual output tolerated by members of a small work group which set its own restrictions on production even though members might at least in the short run profit more higher productivity. Such observations often are difficult to make and costly if an observer has to be on the spot more or less! continually for a long time. Moreover, actual behavior as observed may bear little or no relation at times to ideal behavior, which still may have to be ascertained from questioning respondents. Techniques for systematic recording of on-going behavior an themselves a complex of many ideas. Time sampling procedures for observing children in play groups were introduced at Minnesota a generation ago by sociologists and developed further by scholar Dorothy Thomas and associates at Yale.

This article presents a reply to professor William L. Kolb of the Department of Sociology, Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. The reply came in response to Kolb's views on the evaluation of his article "Images of Man and the Sociology of Religion," by the author. According to the author, his reaction to Kolb's criticism must remain a complex combination of agreement and disagreement. Kolb's response to the author's earlier comment strengthens the impression that Kolb is more concerned with a personal position than with one which he insists, is an indispensable frame of reference for the social scientist in the role as a student of the relations between religion and society. A secondary indication of this is included in Kolb's withdrawal of the term "orthodoxy" as describing the position he is objecting to. However, Kolb still speaks of the "neo-positivism," which places values within the framework of a total socio-cultural determinism and which treats values solely in terms of a socially integrative function rather than treating society as a value-realizing system. The author flatly refuses to accept this as an accurate characterization of his own position.