For the past decade, MDRC has evaluated a number of interventions designed to improve the outcomes of community college students, including enhanced counseling, learning communities, and financial incentives. Encouragingly, many of these strategies have produced positive effects, affirming that changes in institutional practices and policies can…

This report offers California college faculty a closer look at contextualized teaching and learning (CTL) as a promising set of strategies and practices that can be expanded through the state's Basic Skills Initiative. The report is relevant to a range of instructional and counseling faculty, including academic and career and technical education…

Provides advice on marketing campus events to the local community at large, using the experiences of the programming board at Eastern Oregon State University. Focuses on the development of a marketing team, interviews with community organizations and the media, a market survey snapshot, marketing strategies for various local media, and examples of…

The impact of individual learning accounts (ILAs) on the success of learners in post-16 education sector in the United Kingdom was explored through an examination of available research on ILAs. The following were among the study's 12 messages for providers, the Department for Education and Skills, and the Individual Learning Account Centre: (1)…

A college advanced speaking course designed with the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines is described. Students prepared and performed many communicative tasks, including narrating, describing, hypothesizing, supporting an opinion, debating, and interviewing for a job. Other components include pair and small-group work, audio and videotaping, and pre-…

The commonly-occurring mismatch between second language student and course level, resulting in student boredom or intimidation, is due to overreliance on standardized language tests. These tests emphasize passive skills, such as recognition of grammatical structures and translation, and they ignore the element of communicative competence. As a…

Communication-based teaching techniques are described that lead German language students from input to output in a stimulating and motivating learning environment. Input activities are most useful for presenting speech acts, vocabulary, and grammar; output activities, for fine-tuning those areas as well as for expanding students' productive…

Despite a common attitude that it is very difficult, and possibly unwise, to try to teach Mandarin Chinese to speakers of other dialects, there is a social and academic need for this kind of course, and it is possible to teach it successfully to most students. In the University of Alberta's program the likely candidates are the large group of…