Objective: The ability to form a strong therapeutic alliance is considered a foundational skill across psychotherapies. Patient-rated measures of the alliance are now being used to make judgments about a therapist's tendency to build alliances with their patients. However, whether a patient-rated alliance measure provides a useful index of a…

Mentoring has been studied extensively as it is linked to protege career development and growth. Recent mentoring research is beginning to acknowledge however that mentors also can accrue substantial benefits from mentoring. A meta-analysis was conducted where the provision of career, psychosocial and role modeling mentoring support were…

Rubrics have been widely recognized by writing teachers for its efficiency in facilitating grading and its potential to be instructive. However, its use and value in oral production assessments still remain to be proven. Thus, this qualitative study was designed to explore the students' perceived uses of rubrics and their actual use of rubrics in…

The purpose of this research is to evaluate the impact of firm strategies and corporate performance on enterprise software market growth in emerging regions. The emerging regions of Asia Pacific, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Latin America, currently represent smaller overall markets for software vendors, but exhibit high growth…

Extant research indicates that, in face-to-face settings, cooperative learning and game-based learning strategies can be effective. However, in online settings (e.g., in distance education), there is a paucity of research in this area. This study was designed to investigate performance and attitudes of university students who played an educational…

Teaching effectiveness is the most important in-school factor for improving student achievement. In order to attract, retain, develop, and motivate the most effective teaching force possible, many argue that teacher salaries should be elevated to compete with other professions that attract and retain strong talent. This paper explores how to…

Researchers have connected student achievement to teacher collaboration; however, there is a paucity of studies conducted on how teachers use identified advantages and disadvantages of cross grade level collaboration to improve collegial interactions to achieve better student performance, professional development, teacher effectiveness, and job…

This paper provides an expanded Web-based "Facilities Performance Indicators (FPI) Report." The purpose of APPA's Facilities Performance Indicators is to provide a representative set of statistics about facilities in educational institutions. APPA's Information and Research Committee's goal for this year was to enhance the…

The Student Achievement Initiative (SAI), adopted by the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges in 2007, is one of a growing number of performance funding programs that have been dubbed "performance funding 2.0." Unlike previous performance funding models, the SAI rewards colleges for students' intermediate…

The purpose of this case study was to investigate what impact the child development associate (CDA) credential has on the performance of childcare providers in the 6 CDA competency areas. Each participant was interviewed using 9 open-ended questions regarding their experience. Over the past few years, a number of studies have examined the effects…

Principals that work with instructional coaches need to understand the conditions necessary to maximize their impact on teacher effectiveness. With any school improvement initiative, the positive presence and explicit support provided by the principal is critical to its overall success (Leithwood & Riehl, 2003; Leithwood et al, 2008; Waters,…

This paper reports the findings of a study which seeks to identify the information and communications technology (ICT) literacy levels of trainee teachers, by investigating their ICT proficiency using a task-bask assessment instrument. The Delphi technique was used as a primary validation method for the new assessment tool and the ICT literacy…

Computer Aided Instruction (CAI) has been used for many years in an attempt to increase student achievement. Districts have spent millions of dollars implementing different forms of CAI that may or may not be working. This study was an attempt to describe one such district and its CAI implementation. The study sought to complete three tasks. The…

In transforming education, well-designed leadership coaching and mentoring can make a critical difference in effectively building capacity for systemic change. Both internal and external coaches and mentors play key roles. Over time, the aim is to prepare a cadre of internal leaders so they become the primary system change agents and capacity…

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact demographic variables of gender and sales experience have on the performance of business-to-business (B2B) sales professionals. If a deeper understanding can be established of how gender and sales experience variables relate to B2B sales performance, human resource development (HRD) and human…