The master of arts in teaching (MAT) program is a 39-credit graduate program leading to initial teacher certification at the elementary or secondary level in specific content areas. The goal of the program is to provide candidates with the foundational pedagogy and knowledge base necessary to become successful teachers. The digital portfolio…

School program evaluation researchers face a set of overlapping questions concerning our roles in the field: For the sake of "the data" and in quest of "the truth," am I a shrewd researcher before all else? For the sake of community-building and establishing respectful, reciprocal relationships with my school partners, am I first a gracious school…

Although virtual worlds offer teachers the potential to enhance the K-12 curriculum in novel ways, there have been few systematic attempts to instruct teachers about virtual worlds, research their reactions, or track their explorations of these three-dimensional environments. Therefore, this study was designed to respond to the call to help…

The objective of this self-study is to expand the emerging scholarship on meaningful integration and scaffolding of SNSs and the new literacies requisite for their effective use in higher education environments. As a teacher educator, the first author describes the successes and challenges she experienced introducing Twitter into her college…

This article outlines the implementation of a journal club for master's and doctoral social work students interested in mental health practice. It defines educational journal clubs and discusses the history of journal clubs in medical education and the applicability of the model to social work education. The feasibility of implementing…

The aims of this paper are twofold: to investigate how Taiwanese teachers of English as a Foreign Language turned experiences into critical reflections via journal writings and to describe how they gauged critical reflections as teaching inquiry. The participants were 12 Taiwanese in-service teachers enrolled in an elective course entitled…

This brief summarizes the findings of an annual poll of new business school alumni conducted each September by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC). The September 2013 follow-up study gathered data from students who responded to the Global Management Education Graduate Survey--the GMAC exit survey of graduating management students in…

The study examined the relationship between secondary public school principals' emotional intelligence and school performance. The correlational study employed an explanatory sequential mixed methods model. The non-probability sample consisted of 105 secondary public school principals in Texas. The emotional intelligence characteristics of the…

This study investigates the impact of teacher characteristics and instructional strategies on the mathematics achievement of students in kindergarten and first grade and tackles the question of how best to use longitudinal survey data to elicit causal inference in the face of potential threats to validity due to nonrandom assignment to treatment.…

In previous decades, researchers have identified a gender gap in the careers and academic achievement of men and women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Recently, it has been suggested that some of these gender gaps no longer exist; however, the picture is more nuanced, for women are represented well in some STEM fields…

A growing emphasis exists in higher education and corporate America on the importance of interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, and ability to resolve conflict in the workforce. As MBA schools across the country seek to prepare students for prominent business careers, the concern is that the general graduate level curriculum does not…

We describe the construction and performance of an inexpensive modular Raman spectrometer that has been assembled in the framework of a fourth-year undergraduate project (costs below $5000). The spectrometer is based on a 4 mW 532 nm green laser pointer and a compact monochromator equipped with glass fiber optical connections, linear detector…

Many universities are struggling to meet student demand for quality online course offerings. As an online program grows, it can become more difficult to manage information, resources, and people. Adopting useful knowledge management tools, such as wikis, could help better position an online program in a competitive marketplace. Wikis promote…

This essay contends that America's economic and social prosperity depends on nurturing and improving graduate programs, and that both universities and policy makers need to act in some very specific ways to secure future success. It first looks at the relationship between graduate training and prosperity, next considers the vulnerabilities in…

This paper is concerned with improvements in some exact formulae for the period of the simple pendulum problem. Two recently presented formulae are re-examined and refined rationally, yielding more accurate approximate periods. Based on the improved expressions here, a particular new formula is proposed for the period. It is shown that the derived…