Part-time faculty teach approximately 58% of U.S. community college classes and thus manage learning experiences for more than half (53%) of students enrolled in community colleges (JBL Associates, 2008). Often referred to as "contingent faculty," their work is conditional; the college typically has no obligation to them beyond the…

Notwithstanding broad utility of COPs (classroom observation protocols), there has been limited documentation of the psychometric properties of even the most popular COPs. This study attempted to fill this void by closely examining the item and domain-level IRR (inter-rater reliability) of a COP that was used in a federally funded striving readers…

The current study aims investigate the relationship between participants' neighbourhood perceptions and social capital and resident well-being using data from the Neighbourhood Renewal Project (NRP; n = 7855). Resident well-being was positively associated with the quality of the physical environment and safety of the neighbourhood, but negatively…

Technological infrastructure is often taken for granted in our day to day lives until it breaks down, usually because it invisibly supports tasks otherwise. Previous work in HCI has focused on how people react and deal with breaks in infrastructure as well as how to help people to fix or exploit these breaks. However, few have sought to understand…

Objective: To examine the role of music and social contact on exercise benefits. Methods: Two hundred twenty-nine (n229) students were randomly assigned to one of 6 conditions: biking alone with iPod or friend in a laboratory, walking alone with iPod or friend outdoors, or biking or walking alone in control conditions. All participants completed…

Over the last 40 years, researchers and educational facilities professionals have learned more about the ways in which the built environment of the school serves as a place where students construct their identities, where occupants create communities for learning, and where the outside community provides both context and support for the schools…

There is an extensive and well-developed body of literature on the nature of faculty work (e.g., Blackburn & Lawrence, 1996; Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006) that has examined numerous aspects of faculty work and sources of influence on that work (e.g., intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, personal characteristics, disciplinary affiliation,…

This paper aims to discuss how science and technology studies (STS) can inform disability studies and challenge dominant approaches, such as the medical and the social models, in the ordering and representation of disability. Disability studies and STS have followed somewhat parallel paths in the history of ideas. From a positivist approach to…

For the past three decades, the "Healthy People" initiative has represented an ambitious yet achievable health promotion and disease prevention agenda for the nation. The recently released fourth version--"Healthy People 2020"--builds on the foundations of prior iterations while newly embracing and elevating a comprehensive "social determinants"…

Learning is important to sustainability--but how? On the dominant sustainable development picture, various kinds of learning are seen as instrumental to one's behaving responsibly towards future generations, within a framework of present actions and ecological consequences. This whole picture of future-oriented responsibility is radically flawed,…

The American Institute of Architecture's Committee on Architecture for Education (CAE) held their annual fall conference in Helsinki, Finland. Several international studies have rated Finland among the world's best in student achievement, largely due to the country's main principles for comprehensive education. This stands in sharp contrast to…

Throughout a lifetime of interaction with the physical environment, people develop a strong bias to respond on the same side as the location of a target object, even when its location is irrelevant to the task at hand. Recent research has shown that this compatibility bias can be overridden with relatively brief but focused training. To better…

Wellness is now seen as central to redefining the National Health agenda. There is growing evidence that contact with nature and physical activity in nature has considerable positive effects on human health. At the most basic level humanity is reliant on the natural world for resources such as air and water. However, a growing body of research is…

Integrating livestock into a cropping system by allowing ruminant animals to graze cover crops may yield economic and environmental benefits. The effects of grazing on soil physical properties, soil organic matter, nitrogen cycling and agricultural production are presented in this literature review. The review found that grazing cover crops…

Consideration of the physical environment in which learning takes place has become a growing area of academic interest over the past decade. This study focuses on the experiences and perceptions of academic staff and students who used three refurbished, and innovative, learning spaces at the University of Leicester. The results suggest that the…