Colleges implement success courses to improve student outcomes. Since expanding its curriculum to include nine success courses, Illinois Eastern Community Colleges (IECC)--a multi-college community college district in rural, southeastern Illinois--has not determined the efficacy of these courses on student success. The purpose of this study was to…

Engineering curriculum often fails to connect content and decisions to impacts on diverse, particularly marginalized, communities. Given that integration of social justice ideas into curriculum is currently uncommon among most faculty, we provide resources in the form of a workshop to help catalyze these efforts by teaching faculty how to…

This article highlights two competency-based coaching and mentoring models for the incumbent infant-toddler workforce, designed and implemented at two Illinois institutions of higher education. Each model has been intentionally developed with an antibias and equity lens, focused on cultivating a diverse workforce of practitioners through…

The advent of electronic health records (EHRs) has led to significant changes in the role of those who managing patient health information, Health Information Management (HIM) professionals. These changes have further led to significant changes in the educational training required for HIM professionals, leading to new curriculum requirements.…

Teachers present their perceptions when designing and mapping curriculum to implement standards-based instruction and assessment. It appears that teachers are willing but not always able to make curriculum and instructional decisions. Participation of teachers varies from district to district. When curriculum is given to teachers as part of their…

As faculty continue to become generations removed from production agriculture, it may be difficult for some instructors to determine the production experience of students in their classrooms. This presents a unique issue in the broader field of agriculture education across disciplines in areas such as curriculum development and teaching…

To assess the relationship between the training/preparation of physical education teachers and their perceived instructional confidence levels across major topic areas established by the Illinois State Board of Education as critical content areas. In total, 283 individuals participated and were included in the data analysis. The participants…

All disciplines have particular ways of knowing, common practices, and means of using language that mediate and potentially support engagement with the discipline. For multilingual learners, language demands of a discipline can be a closed door or a facilitated entryway. Drama and theater arts, the focus of our article, are often marginalized in…

All Catholic colleges and universities share in the Catholic Church's rich history of Catholic Social Teaching (CST). This article explores two key research questions that focus on that grounding in today's world: First, how strongly is CST woven into the institutional fabric of those institutions; second, is that done implicitly or explicitly? We…

This essay presents infrastructuring as a useful construct for guiding efforts to support more equitable implementation and sustainability of resources developed to support student learning in design-based research. "Infrastructuring" refers to activities that aim to redesign components, relations, and routines of schools and districts…

Increasingly, state departments of education, school districts, and high schools are recognizing that many students graduate from high school underprepared for college-level coursework in mathematics. Many are referred to remedial education when they arrive at college. To help students become better prepared for college and avoid remedial courses…

Can an academic institution be truly free if it relies on government funding? Federal dollars mean federal mandates, and those mandates grow increasingly draconian. More and more, they stifle debate on open questions, demand denial of verifiable scientific truths, eliminate due process for students accused of misdeeds by other students, or insist…

This issue of "Assessment Update" presents the following articles: (1) University of North Carolina at Charlotte: Using the EIA [Excellence in Assessment] Application as a Catalyst for Intentional Improvement (Christine Robinson and associates); (2) Editor's Notes (Stephen P. Hundley); (3) Northern Arizona University's Journey to…

Since the creation of Pathways to Results (PTR) in 2009, Illinois Central College (ICC) has participated in all but one year, working to improve outcomes across a number of different pathways. ICC has been innovative in its use of PTR over the years, and the 2014/2015 PTR project was no different. The ICC team worked to identify parallels between…

While federal policies such as NCLB, IDEA, and ESSA have placed increased accountability on states to deliver instruction aligned to the grade-level mathematics standards for all students, teaching functional skills to students with significant intellectual disabilities remains a predominant practice. The purpose of this study was to explore…