Federal second chance Pell grants were recently made widely available to incarcerated students in the United States to fund undergraduate education. Piedmont Virginia Community College was a pilot site for this expansion and began full scale implementation of transfer-oriented associate degrees at three correctional centers in its service area.…

The author interviewed Dr. Carolyn Callahan, an eminent scholar in gifted education. The interview focused on Dr. Callahan's work on implementing gifted program in rural areas, and illustrated her suggestions for teachers, researchers, and parents on how to advocate for gifted students.

National initiatives to raise K-12 standards and align them to postsecondary entrance requirements have prompted states and/or state postsecondary systems to enact policies to improve alignment among postsecondary readiness standards, postsecondary placement and diagnostic exams, and developmental education curricula. This report examines how six…

In this paper, the authors draw on empirical data from CCRC's Scaling Innovation project to examine trends in developmental education instructional reform and outline a framework for reform adoption and adaptation. The paper's findings are based on two qualitative data sources: a scan of developmental education reforms that involved changes to…

Inquiry-guided learning (IGL) has widespread appeal in higher education as a suite of teaching strategies that promotes learning through students' increasingly independent investigation of questions, problems, and issues using the methods of inquiry of the disciplines. Framed as especially appropriate for research universities, IGL has been…

The term "assessment" sends shivers down academic spines. For faculty, it signals marching orders from external parties who may or may not appreciate the subtle and not always quantifiable value of faculty efforts. For administrators, it means the dual challenge of recalibrating internal measures to meet external mandates but also…

The WAC director, composition director, director of Institutional Assessment (OIA), and WAC/OIA liaison describe the programmatic "needs" and "wants" they balanced in the plan they collaboratively designed to respond to a state mandate for "value-added" writing assessment. To satisfy this mandate, as they explain,…

This article introduces a planning framework for designing that part of an MBA program during which students take the bulk, if not all, of their required courses. The framework highlights three student venues that can be jointly leveraged for enhanced student learning. Those venues are the required curriculum, students' affinity groups, and the…

The purpose of this sample guide is to assist teachers and curriculum specialists in developing instructional materials that are competency based and that meet Virginia standards for competency-based education (CBE) programs. The sample deals with the occupation of welding, but it is the format that is of interest here, not the subject matter.…

This document reports on sexual assault and rape on campuses in Virginia and on efforts to address these types of violence at colleges and universities. Part I looks at state-wide activities in 1991-1992 which included eight focus groups on campuses, a state-wide campus sexual-assault conference, the establishment of five regional consortia to…