Raising the quality and profile of teaching and student learning is something universities across the UK are aspiring to achieve in order to maintain reputations. Currently, the UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF) provides a standard by which academic staff can gain professional recognition for their academic practice and many UK…

Cathy Sandeen is Vice President for Education Attainment and Innovation at American Council on Education, the nation's largest organization providing leadership and advocacy for all sectors of higher education. Within this role she develops and articulates ACE's attainment agenda and currently oversees a large research project on Massive Open…

This article describes and reflects upon efforts to generate greater support for media literacy and critical thinking within the strategies and programs of the Federal government in the early 1990s to about 2005 primarily among agencies with an interest in youth substance abuse prevention. Beginning with their personal reflections on discovering…

Elementary charter schools increasingly serve students who are at-risk for reading challenges, giving them a critical role in establishing literacy for young children. This article examines the complexities of starting early childhood literacy programs in charter schools. Specifically, the first year of K-3 literacy programs in a new and a…

First five years are identified as a critical period of child growth in scientific literature. In 1998, California voters passed Proposition 10 that appropriated a 50 cent per pack tax on cigarettes and other tobacco products to support early childhood development. As a result, Kern County Children and Families Commission administered over $10…

Participant perceptions of program effectiveness and impact are undoubtedly a popular focus of Extension program evaluations. However, the effects of participants' characteristics and contextual variables on program perceptions and how the resulting data can be used for program improvement are less explored in evaluation studies. Using data from…

Counselors frequently counsel clients who live in poverty. The authors describe the new CARE model that addresses the influence of multiple systems on poor clients' experiences. A social justice, humanistic intervention, the CARE model emphasizes cultivating a positive counseling relationship with poor clients, empathizing with their unique…

Although much has been written about the complexity of educational change and reform elsewhere, the educational reform movement in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a relatively recent phenomenon with little systematic documentation as yet; educators are still searching for a clear understanding of their roles. However, it is clear that the…

The University of Botswana (UB) is undergoing transformative changes in response to internal and external influences in higher education. These include attempts to transition towards institution-wide deployment of on-line learning strategies to enhance the educational experience. An external review consultancy commissioned in 2007, recommended…

To improve our understanding of the factors that influence persistence rates in STEM field majors, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation provided a grant to the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute in 2007 to study the question. The five papers in the symposium represent the output of the project. This introduction explains the motivation for…

Good evaluation requires that evaluation efforts themselves be evaluated. Many things can and often do go wrong in evaluation work. Accordingly, it is necessary to check evaluations for problems such as bias, technical error, administrative difficulties, and misuse. Such checks are needed both to improve ongoing evaluation activities and to assess…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the washback effects of the General English Proficiency Test (GEPT) on English teaching in two applied foreign language departments in Taiwan. One had prescribed its GEPT requirement to its day-division students whereas the other had not. Overall, the GEPT did not induce a high level of washback on…

The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) were developed as part of a broader effort coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers to develop common state standards in key subjects. Released in 2010, the CCSSM are intended to provide a blueprint for the…

The past year has demonstrated how vulnerable adult learning is to political intervention. In England, people are now living with the consequences of the Equivalent or Lower Qualifications (ELQ) policy, introduced in September 2007 by ministerial diktat. More recently, the consultation on informal adult learning intimates an overthrow of existing…

This article summarises research carried out between 2006 and 2008 by IPTS (Institution for Prospective Technological Studies) in collaboration with a consortium of experts from 10 member states, led by ICEGEC. The project gathered information on eLearning developments to assess drivers and barriers and to suggest implications for policy and…