The School District of Philadelphia's tiered system of selective, nonselective, and charter high schools, and the process for high school choice, has created real variation in the degree to which high schools can successfully meet the needs of ninth graders. Research has shown that the ninth grade year is critical in determining a student's…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explain the emergent nature of leadership in a university-based learning network of mature-aged practitioner-scholars. Design/methodology/approach: The paper draws on previously published work, interviews, and current research. Findings: The paper finds that once initial structures have been established,…

Through a grant received from the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA), Health Libraries Australia (HLA) is conducting a twelve-month research project with the goal of developing a system-wide approach to education for the future health librarianship workforce. The research has two main aims: to determine the future skills,…

Increasingly, there is a growing realization in alumni relations that successful alumni programs, benefits, and services are not ends in and of themselves. Rather, alumni engagement is ultimately all about the institution. Success in alumni relations ideally advances an institution's overall forward progress. Twenty years ago, alumni strategic…

The purpose of this article is to present a systems-based mentoring model of technology integration that follows a research-based path. The model moves teachers through four specific stages of technology adoption toward using technology to support learning in more student-centered ways. The model describes how a mentor can negotiate the interplay…

This article aims to analyse how structural decoupling, which is an especially relevant problem for school-based vocational education and training (VET) systems, reveals itself in the assessment of practical training. Niklas Luhmann's social system theory has been applied to the analysis of assessment practices as a communication act between the…

Large-scale educational reform--systemic approaches to changing the way schools operate--helps to meet students' learning needs more effectively. These approaches focus on reorganizing entire school systems, rather than implementing individual school-improvement initiatives. Such reforms require a significant investment of resources and--if…

The purposes of this study were to determine preservice physics teachers' instructional beliefs and to investigate the relationship between their beliefs and practices. The theoretical framework was based on the combination Haney & McArthur's ("Science Education," 86(6):783-802, 2002) research and Ford's (1992) motivation systems theory. A…

This article explores two separate traditions that educational psychologists (EPs) in the UK have for working with systems. One of these is "systems work" with organisations such as schools. The other is "systemic thinking" for working with families. Over the years these two traditions, systems work and systemic thinking, have…

Mental health problems among children in schools are on the increase. To exercise due diligence in their responsibility to monitor and promote mental health among our nation's children, school counselors may learn from triage systems employed in hospitals, clinics, and mental health centers. The School Counselor's Triage Model provides school…

The paper explores the changing forms of governance currently being applied to the English further education sector--changes that emphasise the importance of locality. The paper sets the sector within its socio-economic and policy context, examining current policy changes that intend to alter the way in which the sector is managed. It relates…

The authors developed a framework of empirically grounded curricular goals for water-science literacy and documented the challenges that students face in achieving these goals. Water-related environmental science literacy requires an understanding of connected natural and human-engineered systems at multiple scales ranging from atomic-molecular…

The objective of this research was to explore the relationship between information access and design solution quality of high school students presented with an engineering design problem. This objective is encompassed in the research question driving this inquiry: How does information access impact the design process? This question has emerged in…

Having computer skills, let alone access to a personal computer, has become a necessary component of contemporary Western society and many parts of the world. Digital media literacy involves youth being able to view, participate in, and make creative works with technologies in personal and meaningful ways. Games, defined in this study as…

Through special funding by the Ministry of Education and Science in 2008, the Research Institute for Higher Education (RIHE) at Hiroshima University has been able to implement a new research project on the reform of higher education in the knowledge-based society of the 21st century. RIHE hosted the third International Workshop on the Higher…