The "IDRA Newsletter" serves as a vehicle for communication with educators, school board members, decision-makers, parents, and the general public concerning the educational needs of all children across the United States. The focus of this issue is "Opportunity." Contents include: (1) Students Deserve to Read Diverse Books --…

With changes to placement testing and many students being able to self-place into college-level courses, first-year community college students are often entering English composition classes without a strong academic skillset. Tutoring can be a way to support students, but many do not attend tutoring. At a rural community college, students in two…

Political theory lags behind other subfields in political science in rigorously testing what helps foster critical thinking (CT). Yet some of the greatest temptations to engage in motivated reasoning can be found in normative political contexts. This study uses multiple regression analysis to explore nine semesters of data from an introductory…

One of the free platforms made by IT companies in the education sector in Indonesia can be used to facilitate online learning at home during the "COVID-19" pandemic. The platform is called the "SEVIMA EdLink." This platform needs to be known by academics and the wider community of education in the world. This platform provides…

The purpose of this study was to determine students' perceptions of team-building activities within a university Latin dance course. Students (N = 30) completed an evaluation of the team-building activities and wrote reflective essays about their experiences in the course. The course consisted of twenty 90-minute classes. In the third class…

Chapters in this volume have reflected on the proPIC Europa project primarily through the experiences and views of the educators involved. This chapter combines extracts of student essays and includes a choice of vignettes that help examine the project from the perspective of the students themselves, exploring their reflections on their…

In this paper, I describe the design and evaluation of automated essay scoring (AES) models for an institution's writing placement program. Information was gathered on admitted student writing performance at a science and technology research university in the northeastern United States. Under timed conditions, first-year students (N = 879) were…

As early-career Extension educators challenged by societal, structural, agricultural, and fiscal trends, we designed a multiyear educational program to support the diverse needs of emerging specialty crop producers in northwest Michigan. This article presents outcomes of that program. We explore how Extension professionals can develop impactful…

Librarians at colleges and universities invested in graduate education must understand and incorporate adult learning theories in their reference and instruction interactions with graduate students to more effectively support the students' learning. After participating in a professional development program about adult learning theory, librarians…

In this paper, we provide an overview of psychometric procedures and guidelines Educational Testing Service (ETS) uses to evaluate automated essay scoring for operational use. We briefly describe the e-rater system, the procedures and criteria used to evaluate e-rater, implications for a range of potential uses of e-rater, and directions for…

This paper evaluates a strategy to promote the uptake of support services by international students (ISs) at an Australian university. As part of their assessment, ISs completed a so-called "University Service Reflection Task" (USRT) in a core first-year course. To complete the USRT, all ISs accessed one support service (e.g. language…

The authors describe how Southern Utah University has integrated the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Voluntary Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program as an experiential servicelearning activity for over a decade and a half. First, we describe the value of experiential servicelearning. Second, we detail the program, its oversight, its student…

Many universities have instituted global education programs to prepare their students for the demands of living in a global society; yet, little information exists about the effectiveness of these programs from the participants' perspectives. At the local level, a liberal arts university has not undertaken an assessment of its global learning…

This study describes the effects of a yearlong, multivisit teen program in a contemporary art museum on adolescents' reflections about art. Our purpose was to discover whether this program, focused on experiences with contemporary art and artists with its metacognitive approach, affected students' thinking about their own artmaking. The…

What kinds of ethical dilemmas do people who are new to the profession of evaluation face? Are they different from the challenges faced by more experienced evaluators? What strategies do they use to resolve them? These questions were the starting point for the essays included in this issue of the Ethical Challenges section. The essays were written…