In a recent "Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education" article, the author reported on a single case of a successful mentor-beginning teacher pairing that was derived from a larger qualitative study (Certo, 2005). The purpose of this article is to report findings from that larger investigation. Three Virginia elementary 1st-year…

This article examines the effectiveness of a facilitated group mentoring program for university women. Content analysis across existing sources of data (questionnaires, a focus group, and interviews), collected over the five years of the program's operation (1999-2003), suggested the program helped women to develop three ways of…

Assessment requirements often raise great concerns among departments and faculty: fear of loss of autonomy, distraction from primary departmental goals, and the creation of alien and artificial external standards. This article demonstrates how one political science department directly responded to their own unique circumstances in assessing their…

Purpose: The first Elder Abuse Forensic Center (EAFC) in the United States was instituted in 2003. People from a variety of disciplines, including Adult Protective Services social workers, law enforcement, the district attorney's office, a medical response team, public guardian deputies, ombudsmen, mental health services, a victim advocate, and a…

This article focuses on the challenges facing middle level professors who desire to practice what they preach by using an approach to teaching and learning called problem-based learning. Problem-based learning is a means by which prospective middle grades teachers can design interdisciplinary units and gain familiarity with using them in…

Middle level experts agree on the need for specialized teacher preparation and are continually advocating for all states to require a middle grades teaching certificate. Research on the effectiveness of the middle grades programs on teaching continues to show positive results. This article focuses on how Berry College redesigned the teacher…

This paper is concerned with identifying how the early student experience can be enhanced in order to improve levels of student retention and achievement. The early student experience is the focus of this project as the literature has consistently declared the first year to be the most critical in shaping persistence decisions. Programme managers…

How can families and early childhood professionals provide quality, inclusive early childhood education for young children with and without disabilities? That's the question posed in this "Impact "issue. In its pages, parents reflect on their experiences with early childhood education and inclusion for their children--what was helpful, what was…

To give states the information they need to sustain hard-fought education reform effectively, Achieve conducted research on state education reforms that have been sustained successfully for over a decade or more. Funded by the GE Foundation, Achieve hopes this work will help other state leaders, wherever they may be on their road to reform,…

The leadership of Qatar is greatly invested in its K-12 education reform, "Education for a New Era," because it views education as the key to the nation's economic and social progress. This study, one of a number of RAND studies that trace and document the reform process in Qatar, was designed to assess progress made in the first years…

The Academy for Educational Development (AED) sent a research team to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) on October 23-24, 2008, to conduct interviews with individuals who play important roles in the university's teacher preparation program. These interviews, along with additional documentation provided by UNCG and identified by…

This paper describes a multi-user role-playing environment, referred to as "e-drama", which enables groups of people to converse online, in scenario driven virtual environments. The starting point of this research, is an existing application known as "edrama", a 2D graphical environment in which users are represented by static…

School finance adequacy litigation has become a widely-used means in the efforts to improve educational outcomes for children. This form of litigation has been attempted in nearly every state over the past two decades. Despite its prevalence, its effectiveness remains questionable due to a lack of study relating finance litigation to student…

Many students who are deaf or hard-of-hearing are eligible for a signing accommodation for state and other standardized tests. The signing accommodation, however, presents several challenges for testing programs that attempt to administer tests under standardized conditions. One potential solution for many of these challenges is the use of…

In addition to experiencing the generic quality and cost problems faced by all colleges and universities, community colleges face problems particular to their student populations. They need to design more flexible schedules for working adult students, create a greater sense of community or engagement for commuting students, address the special…