Matthew Manning

Feed-forward assessment, exemplars and peer marking: evidence of efficacy

The paper reports the findings of evaluative research that attempted to rigorously assess the efficacy of a feed-forward, formative assessment intervention. The aim was to improve participants’ conceptions of quality, and hence improve the quality of a complex piece of summative assessment, by asking them to mark exemplars produced by former students. Feed-forward assessment has theoretical support in the literature, but empirical confirmation has been slight. Research findings were encouraging. A statistical model incorporating feed-forward was developed which accounted for a large effect in the improvement of results for the summative item. Importantly, there was improvement across student ability levels. Students, in the main, made accurate judgements about different levels of exemplar quality, although they had some difficulty discerning different pathways to high-quality products. Qualitative analysis indicated improved student conceptions of coherence and integration in the summative piece.

Economic Evaluation of a Community Based Early Intervention Program Implemented in a Disadvantaged Urban Area of Queensland

Children raised in socio-economically disadvantaged regions have increased probabilities of school failure, delinquency, drug abuse, and juvenile crime. The Pathways to Prevention project attempts to reduce these risks in a disadvantaged community through the implementation of child-focused (school-based) and family focused (community-based) interventions. Preliminary results from an economic evaluation of the Pathways project are reported. Project costs are compared with the costs of a number of remedial interventions. It is not argued that preventive interventions should be favoured over remedial interventions. Rather, investing more in prevention may help alleviate the pressure on the overburdened remedial sector, resulting in potential cost-savings.

Valuing Developmental Crime Prevention

Developmental crime prevention programs produce positive returns on investment. Previous studies of such returns do not adequately quantify and weight impacts across multiple domains of quality of life (e.g., social-emotional development, family wellbeing) or provide a protocol for deciding between programs that recognizes these multiple domains (i.e. propose a method for the ranking of program alternatives). We adapted a multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) technique to address these deficiencies. Incorporating subjective decisions (a survey of those individuals who directly affect policy decisions) and objective evidence (the effect sizes from a meta-analysis of longitudinal intervention outcomes) allowed us to construct a common metric for making structured choices between diverse developmental crime prevention program options. Our results show that a structured preschool program which incorporates family intervention and support was the most preferred option to reduce youth crime.

Life Satisfaction and Individual Willingness to Pay for Crime Reduction

Manning M., Fleming C. M. and Ambrey C. L. Life satisfaction and individual willingness to pay for crime reduction, Regional Studies. This paper uses the life satisfaction approach to estimate the intangible cost of crime in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Results show that: (1) property crime is negatively associated with life satisfaction; (2) the implicit willingness to pay to decrease property crime by one offence per 1000 residents in the local government area (LGA) in the previous 12 months is A

The role of natural capital in supporting national income and social welfare

82 per household (A

Policing methamphetamine problems: a framework for synthesising expert opinion and evaluating alternative policy options

32 per person); and (3) the difference in implicit willingness-to-pay estimates when using restricted windfall income compared with household income is considerable. These results are robust to a significant number of controls.

Analysing pseudoephedrine/methamphetamine policy options in Australia using multi-criteria decision modelling

ABSTRACT Using life satisfaction as a proxy for social welfare, this study contributes to the extant literature by empirically demonstrating that natural capital contributes to social welfare, functioning in part through increasing national income and in part through its direct effect on life satisfaction; the direct effect is approximately 40% greater than the indirect effect. This suggests that the true welfare benefits of natural capital may not be adequately reflected in conventional economic data and, therefore, studies seeking to evaluate the contribution of natural capital to human well-being should consider employing data sets that capture subjective elements of welfare. The magnitudes of the reported marginal effects of natural capital on social welfare, however, are small. This is perhaps due to the fact that (1) there are shortcomings in the measure of natural capital; (2) life satisfaction effects are unlikely to reflect the poorly understood benefits that natural capital provides; and (3) keystone species (such as mosquitoes) and integral ecosystems (such as wetlands) may be negatively associated with life satisfaction, even though such components of natural capital are vitally important to sustaining ecosystems and human life

The welfare cost of terrorism

Increasingly, governments and police agencies require evidence of effectiveness and efficiency with respect to law enforcement policies. The existing what works literature, specifically on drug law enforcement, focuses mainly on the effectiveness question when making complex choices between drug policy alternatives, but fails when it comes to incorporating empirical evidence and the experience of key experts in the decision-making process. In addition, little attempt has been made to employ sophisticated techniques to assist in complex policy decision making with respect to funding competing policing policy alternatives. We use the methamphetamine problem in Australia to illustrate a way of evaluating, using multi-criteria analysis, alternative policy options for developing better drug policy.

Rationing access to protected natural areas: an Australian case study

BACKGROUND In this paper we capture and synthesize the unique knowledge of experts so that choices regarding policy measures to address methamphetamine consumption and dependency in Australia can be strengthened. We examine perceptions of the: (1) influence of underlying factors that impact on the methamphetamine problem; (2) importance of various models of intervention that have the potential to affect the success of policies; and (3) efficacy of alternative pseudoephedrine policy options. METHODS We adopt a multi-criteria decision model to unpack factors that affect decisions made by experts and examine potential variations on weight/preference among groups. Seventy experts from five groups (i.e. academia (18.6%), government and policy (27.1%), health (18.6%), pharmaceutical (17.1%) and police (18.6%)) in Australia participated in the survey. RESULTS Social characteristics are considered the most important underlying factor, prevention the most effective strategy and Project STOP the most preferred policy option with respect to reducing methamphetamine consumption and dependency in Australia. One-way repeated ANOVAs indicate a statistically significant difference with regards to the influence of underlying factors (F(2.3, 144.5)=11.256, p<.001), effectiveness of interventions (F(2.4, 153.1)=28.738, p<.001) and policy options (F(2.8, 175.5)=70.854, p<.001). CONCLUSION A majority of respondents believed that genetic, biological, emotional, cognitive and social factors are the most influential explanatory variables in terms of methamphetamine consumption and dependency. Most experts support the use of preventative mechanisms to inhibit drug initiation and delayed drug uptake. Compared to other policies, Project STOP (which aims to disrupt the initial diversion of pseudoephedrine) appears to be a more preferable preventative mechanism to control the production and subsequent sale and use of methamphetamine. This regulatory civil law lever engages third parties in controlling drug-related crime. The literature supports third-party partnerships as it engages experts who have knowledge and expertise with respect to prevention and harm minimization.

Forest fire danger, life satisfaction and feelings of safety: Evidence from Australia

Abstract Data from 117 countries over the period 2006 to 2011 are used to estimate a macroeconomic cross-country system of equations that examines the association between terrorism, self-reported life satisfaction, and national income. Results indicate that terrorism is negatively associated with life satisfaction, whereas no such association is found between terrorism and real GDP per worker. Stark contrasts are found, however, between OECD and non-OECD members. In all, our results suggest that the social costs of terrorism are potentially much higher than the economic costs, and measuring only the conventional economic costs of terrorism significantly underestimates the true costs.