Children develop within a context, and the nature or dynamics of a child's context can change the trajectory of their development. According to Bronfenbrenner (1979), children are affected and are impacted by individuals within various systems or environments. One of Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems is the microsystem, in which children…

Plausible competing developmental models show similar or identical structural equation modeling model fit indices, despite making very different causal predictions. One way to help address this problem is incorporating outside information into selecting among models. This study attempted to select among developmental models of children's early…

Background: Adolescent girls are at an increased risk of low physical activity and the associated health consequences. Girls Can Move!, an after-school intervention guided by social cognitive theory, was designed to increase physical activity. Purpose: To examine the feasibility and initial effectiveness of Girls Can Move! Methods The 8-week…

Hope is an important component that helps engage people in solving problems. Environmental educational resources addressing climate change effectively should ideally nurture hope as well as increase understanding about the issue. However, hopefulness about resolving climate change challenges is a relatively new construct in the literature and…

For more than 100 years, education communities have debated how best to educate the young adolescent. Proponents of both the junior high school model and the current middle school model have advocated for a specialized approach to educating adolescents that emphasizes the developmental needs of students. To accomplish this, various organizational…

This study examines how extracurricular activity experiences affect students' leadership development outcomes. Students' leadership development outcomes are analyzed depend on general characteristics and collegiate/pre-collegiate experiences of extracurricular activities. The correlation to the individual, group, and community values of leadership…

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education initiatives have placed pressure on teachers to bring technology tools into classroom, including three-dimensional (3D) printing. Yet, little research has examined what specific math skills are required for 3D printing technology. This article describes a follow-up analysis of…

Interdisciplinary research collaboration is needed to perform transformative science and accelerate innovation. The Science of Team Science strives to investigate, evaluate, and foster team science, including institutional policies that may promote or hinder collaborative interdisciplinary research and the resources and infrastructure needed to…

As localized assessments confirm national findings that undergraduates struggle to integrate resources into research-based compositions effectively, data at one comprehensive public university indicate library sessions improve students' ability to locate and evaluate information, but students continue to struggle with the "use" component…

In order to increase students' awareness for and comfort with mathematical modeling of biological processes, and increase their understanding of diffusion, the following lab was developed for use in 100-level, majors/non-majors biology and neuroscience courses. The activity begins with generation of a data set that uses coin-flips to replicate…

This research examines how public school principals in eight U.S. states perceive their teacher evaluation systems, which are based on Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching (FfT). States were selected to represent high, middle, and low scorers in the annual "Education Week" "Quality Counts" report (Education Week, 2016).…

Social work education has been greatly affected by ongoing technological advances in society at large and in the academy. Options for instructional delivery have been broadened tremendously. The University of Louisville is the first in Kentucky to put its master's of social work degree fully online, with a first cohort admitted in 2012. The…

This study examines concerns of early childhood teachers about inclusive education (IE) in infant through 3rd-grade classrooms in the United States and the associated role of teachers' background variables. The data consisted of the responses of 679 early childhood teachers on a survey about their concerns. The data analysis supported the presence…

The "Teacher Efficacy for Inclusive Practices" (TEIP) scale is designed to measure teacher-self efficacy to teach in inclusive classrooms. The original study identified three scale factors: "efficacy in using inclusive instruction" ("EII"), "efficacy in collaboration" ("EC"), and "efficacy in…

The recent data suggest that there has been a steady increase in the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD; Centers for Disease Control, 2012). This lifelong disorder has significant implications for families as they face the complexities of supporting their family members with ASD. Fortunately, the research literature suggests that…