Despite ongoing debates over the adequacy of teacher compensation, the design of merit pay systems, and the structure of pension benefits, there is broad agreement that teacher pay should be designed to recruit--and retain--the highest-quality teachers in a cost-effective manner. Policymakers should avoid across-the-board pay increases, and focus…

Online learning continues to be a growing frontier in higher education with increased demand and enrollments reported annually (Allen & Seaman, 2010, 2011). Discovering best practices and methods of instruction as well as assisting students in determining their highest possible level of success in this type of learning environment has been the…

The author is a site manager employed by a small community-based organization (CBO) that provides afterschool programming at a number of school-based sites scattered throughout southern King County in Washington State. As such, he belongs to one-half of the afterschool youth development (AYD) workforce: the (for the most part) full-time, salaried…

Teachers know that establishing a robust independent reading program takes more than giving kids a little quiet time after lunch. But how do they set up a program that will maximize their students' gains? Teachers have to know their students' reading levels inside and out, help them find just-right books, and continue to guide them during…

As a way to achieve better alignment of the ongoing teaching-research activity gap in business schools, David Balkin and Jeff Mello suggest that schools need to hire academic administrators with significantly developed management skills. The author responds to this recommendation with two concerns. First, many of the causes of the…

Several years ago, when the author was associate dean in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, a new senior administrator on campus expressed the view that one of their premier first-year experience programs in the college was too expensive and that a different model, based on an approach taken at the administrator's previous…

Granted, it might be a bit of a stretch to find comparable attributes between an ice hockey team and facilities management organizations. However, if you are open-minded to the possibility and begin to analyze each of these entities, you will find there are some distinct similarities. Ice hockey is a fast-paced and ever-changing game, much like a…

This paper focuses on widening participation in higher education and the low recruitment of students from diverse backgrounds within sport-related programs. The purpose of the study has been to describe and increase the understanding of how the preconditions and premises for choosing to study "sport" appear to students from diverse…

It is well documented that studies reporting statistically significant results are more likely to be published than are studies reporting nonsignificant results--a phenomenon called "publication bias". Publication bias in meta-analytic reviews should be identified and reduced when possible. Ferguson and Brannick (2012) argued that the inclusion of…

This article focuses on power, difference and knowledge, areas critical to adult education. It conveys insights into how educators and curators in an art museum imagined and engaged with difference, and particularly the black subject, when working within a collaborative project that included the acquisition of art objects (fine art photography).…

The author's journey as a strategic staffing principal in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has been one of ups and downs, scary turns and some great success for students. It began in May 2008 when she was asked to move to Devonshire Elementary School with marching orders to "turn the school around." Because of its failure to meet annual…

Creating experiential learning opportunities that engage students, meet marketing curricula objectives, and fit the application in a traditional semester course is extremely challenging. This paper describes a role-playing simulation offered concurrently to the professional selling and sales management classes in which the selling students act as…

This paper focuses on two likelihood-based indices of person fit, the index "l[subscript z]" and the Snijders's modified index "l[subscript z]*". The first one is commonly used in practical assessment of person fit, although its asymptotic standard normal distribution is not valid when true abilities are replaced by sample…

When tests consist of multiple-choice and constructed-response items, researchers are confronted with the question of which item response theory (IRT) model combination will appropriately represent the data collected from these mixed-format tests. This simulation study examined the performance of six model selection criteria, including the…

Chinese learners of Dutch and a control group of native speakers of Dutch were presented with 26 sentences in the order they come in a story, visually as well as auditorily as spoken with four intonation contours. Participants were instructed to select the most appropriate intonation contour for each sentence in a forced choice task. Chinese…