The May/June 2009 issue of "Facilities Manager" introduced APPA readers to the Whole Building Design Guide (WBDG)--today's most comprehensive Internet-based depository of resources contributing to a systems approach for everything of a building nature. The emphasis in that article was on Operations and Maintenance (O&M) issues and procedures. In…

This article describes the use of problem-based learning to teach students about the scope and consequences of urban poverty through an innovative cross-curricular project. We illustrate the process, goals, and tasks of the Community Assessment Project, which incorporates community-level assessment, collection and analysis of public data, and…

This study's goal was to analyze various teaching approaches within the context of natural science lessons, especially in biology. The main focus of the paper lies on the effectiveness of different teaching methods in promoting systems thinking in the field of Education for Sustainable Development. The following methods were incorporated into the…

Steve Nelson, chief IT strategist for the Oregon Department of Education needed a new e-mail service that would provide security and privacy to users and found what he was looking for with Google Apps Education Edition. The Kentucky Department of Education wanted an improved capability to provide e-mail services to the more than 700,000 students,…

This study examines the perceptions of public school principals in New Orleans, Louisiana during the period of extensive decentralization in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Using the frameworks of systems theory and chaos/complexity theories, iterative interviews with 10 school principals form the core data which examines leaders' experiences…

This article provides a behavioral systems approach to improve operational performance in health and human service organizations. This article provides six performance truths that are relevant to any organization and a case study from a community mental health network of agencies. A comprehensive analysis, as described here, will help health and…

Aim: To investigate whether speech therapy using a speech systems approach to controlling breath support, phonation, and speech rate can increase the speech intelligibility of children with dysarthria and cerebral palsy (CP). Method: Sixteen children with dysarthria and CP participated in a modified time series design. Group characteristics were…

While the past two decades have seen significant expansion and harmonisation of quality assurance mechanisms in higher education, there is limited evidence of positive effects on the quality of core processes of teaching and learning. The paradox of the separation of assurance from improvement is explored. A shift in focus from surveillance to…

Decision-systems theory (DST) was developed from in-depth interviews with farming families and provides an interpretation of the processes farming families use in making strategic decisions in regard to the family members, the farm and the businesses the farming family run. Understanding the nature and justifications used for different decisions…

The Obama Administration has helped articulate the important role community colleges play in educating the nation's workforce and boosting the economy. With a large share of projected job openings requiring college education of less than a bachelor's degree and offering family-supporting wages, the nation's community colleges can make a huge…

In a flexible language learning system, developed at a French university and gradually improved through Action Research, different elements are combined: individual work on a virtual learning environment (VLE), pair-work and counselling appointments. One of the objectives of the system is to help the students involved progress towards…

In this case study the authors describe Pepperdine University Libraries' migration to OCLC's WorldShare Management Services. They elaborate on the rationale for the decision, review some of the challenges and lessons encountered along the way, and briefly discuss some effects of the new system on our libraries. The focus is on technical services…

In this article, we critically examine skills that are necessary for the effective learning of science in adolescent populations. We argue that a focus on twenty-first-century skills among adolescents within the context of science instruction must be considered in light of research on cognitive and social development. We first review adolescents'…

Management commonly engages in a variety of research designed to provide insight into the motivation and relationships of individuals, departments, organizations, etc. This paper demonstrates how the application of concepts associated with the analysis of complex systems applied to such data sets can yield enhanced insights for managerial action.

This study investigated instances of the term "systems thinking" among the websites of the Top 25 business schools as ranked by "U. S. News and World Report" in 2010. Since a greater number of instances of the term and its variants in a university's web documents may indicate an increased interest of the institution in the…