Summer Youth Employment Programs (SYEPs) help connect youth to opportunities for career exploration, skill development, and mentorship. Despite heightened investment in SYEPs, research regarding positive impacts is limited. Most of the common SYEP evaluation strategies are rooted in deficit thinking and focus on outcomes such as reducing violent…

We developed a summer research experience program within a freestanding comprehensive cancer center to cultivate undergraduate students with an interest in and an aptitude for quantitative sciences focused on oncology. This unconventional location for an undergraduate program is an ideal setting for interdisciplinary training in the intersection…

From 2017-2021, Mississippi State University's Department of Chemistry has hosted a 10-week summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program, focused on research related to food, energy, and water security topics. The goals of this program were to train students by providing an intensive research experience, recruit minority and…

With support from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Merced Anomaterials Center for Energy and Sensing (MACES) was launched in the summer of 2015 at the University of California Merced (UC Merced). MACES is a research and education center, focused on creating innovative materials-enabled solutions for energy and…

"Rethinking School-University Partnerships: A New Way Forward" provides educational leaders in K-12 schools and colleges of education with insight, advice, and direction into the task of creating partnerships. In current times, colleges of education and local school districts need each other like never before. School districts struggle…

Supportive programming is frequently designed to increase reflection and amplify the effects of applied learning experiences. We have developed a supportive curriculum that integrates ePortfolio practice, brief psychological interventions, advising, mentoring, family engagement, and professional development into a highly successful summer research…

Professional development opportunities provide teachers with enhanced learning experiences, deeper subject knowledge, and improvement of their teaching practices, all for the goal of increasing student achievement (Nelson, 2009). Unfortunately, most rural teachers have much less access to professional development opportunities compared to their…

Undergraduate research (UR) experiences continue to proliferate across all higher education settings. Yet community-based research (CBR) experiences account for a small percentage of UR opportunities. This paper describes the pilot study results of a summer program that is intentionally expanding the paradigm for UR at a public research university…

This article details the experience of one Educational Technology program's efforts to use the Association of Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) as an integral part of the mentoring experience for its graduate students. Outlined is how the program has held the resident doctoral seminar at annual AECT conferences and at the Summer…

As a nation wrestles with the need to train more professionals, persons with disabilities are undereducated and underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The following project was proposed to increase representation of students with disabilities in the STEM disciplines. The program emphasizes an integrated…

This paper reports on a professional development initiative that targeted teams of teachers and librarians working with high school students on strengthening an inquiry approach to capstone projects. While much has been written about student-focused models for information search and use, little has been reported on how training for the…

As part of a geography-based minority recruiting program (MRP), teachers were asked to serve as mentors for teams of high school students interested in both postsecondary education and geography as a major discipline or career path. The goal was to determine whether teacher participation in MRP programs was an effective tool to mentor…

Few inquiries have investigated master's students in education as they mentor preservice teachers. In this embedded case study I explored the professional development of 15 master's students as they mentored 35 preservice teachers for eight weeks in a summer literacy camp. Data sources were e-mail exchanges, written reports, and transcriptions…

This inquiry applied an innovative sociocultural framework to examine transformations in preservice teachers' professional development as they worked with children at-risk in a summer literacy camp. The camp incorporated a community of practice model in which teams of masters and doctoral students mentored small groups of preservice teachers. The…

The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation sponsors rigorous summer residential institutes in math and science that reinvigorate secondary teachers and encourage lifelong learning. Laboratory and field experiences that model student-centered approaches allow teachers to develop strong content knowledge and research skills. Participants…