The overarching goal of this impact project is to make mycology accessible to more agriscience educators and students. Lesson plans were prepared to link core competencies and science standards to the Wild-Foraged Mushroom certification. Incorporating mycology into the classroom has many benefits, including discussions on food safety and…

School leaders, specifically principals, play a pivotal role in shaping student learning outcomes. The benefits of strong leaders extend beyond academic achievement, such as reductions in absenteeism and exclusionary discipline. While quality principals are critical for creating and sustaining quality schools, the staffing pipeline is facing…

Seeking to better understand the longitudinal association between online usage of library-licensed content and short- and long-term student performance, we linked EZproxy logs to institutional university data to study how library usage impacts semester and cumulative GPAs. Panel linear mixed effects regression models indicate online library usage…

Faced with national shortages of school psychologists, it is important that graduate educators explore different service delivery options to educate the greatest number of potential candidates to meet this need. One of the greatest areas of practitioner shortages is in the rural and less populated regions of the country, where a university can be…

Oakland University (OU) in Rochester, Michigan, was experiencing growing pains. The good news was that OU had experienced 23 years of continuous enrollment growth, with student enrollment exceeding 20,000 in 2015 for the first time ever. The downside was that various administrative processes throughout the university were straining to keep up. One…

Increasingly, graduate and professional students arrive at institutions of higher education with personal and professional commitments to make the world a better place through community engagement; however, departments often do not incorporate outreach and engagement into graduate curricula (Austin & McDaniels, 2006; O'Meara & Jaeger,…

Over the past 50 years, an evolution has occurred in the instruction of wilderness professionals and practitioners within the higher education realm. The National Wilderness Conference, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, provided a timely opportunity to discuss the current and future role of higher education and wilderness…

This resource was prepared in response to a request for information from a Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) State about the innovative work with family child care providers that is being done in RTT-ELC Phase 2 States (Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon, and Wisconsin) and Phase 3 States (Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, New…

This report provides a survey of existing workforce development efforts in Michigan, both public and private. It includes a review of career and technical education provided by K-12 school districts, occupational training programs provided through community colleges, as well as job training offered by for-profit entities, unions, industry…

We examine the relative labor market gains experienced by first-time college students who enrolled in five community colleges in Michigan in 2003 and 2004. We track credentials, credits, earnings, and employment for these students through 2011. We compare labor market outcomes of those who earned a credential (associate degree or certificate) to…

Michigan policymakers have a long history of leadership in addressing the social-emotional needs of the state's infants and young children so that they can learn and thrive in their homes and in early care and education programs. Michigan leaders and stakeholders are now working to further strengthen a system of supports for young children's…

This paper was prepared as a response to: (1) A national trend towards lessening the requirements to become a public school superintendent and hiring non-traditional superintendents. State and national approaches to alternative licensure for public school superintendents are reviewed, including the lessening or abolition of standards. This is of…

The purpose of this research is to determine the requirements of being a school principal and investigate the pre-service trainings of primary and middle school principals in the United States. In accordance with this aim, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 primary and middle school principals from the state of Michigan. In this…

Although growing numbers of graduate students nationwide express interest in developing and documenting boundary-spanning skills in community-engaged research, teaching, and outreach, formal opportunities to do so are often limited, especially at the large research institutions producing most future faculty members. This article focuses on initial…

Massive open online courses ("MOOCs") provide free access to higher education for anyone with Internet access. MOOCs are considered a means for democratizing education. These courses will hopefully provide an opportunity for individuals to learn from the best educators in the world, as well as help expand their personal networks, and…