Each year, Austin Independent School District Department of Research and Evaluation (DRE) staff develop a plan of work to describe the scope of work for the coming year. The plans that make up this document identify programs to be evaluated and services to be provided by DRE staff and provide the blueprints for evaluation that staff will follow…

Graduate students aspiring to become faculty members should be provided with meaningful opportunities to explore the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and to formulate questions about student learning and effective teaching. To this end, teaching and learning centres should incorporate SoTL-oriented components within the framework of…

This paper describes a major initiative in the Commonwealth of Kentucky to develop a statewide, standards-based, student report card for reporting the learning progress of individual students at all grade levels (K-12). Led by a team of researchers with expertise in grading and reporting, 36 educators from three diverse school districts created…

The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) has been providing Western residents with "affordable access to the healthcare professions" for more than 55 years through its Professional Student Exchange Program (PSEP). If an individual enrolls through WICHE's PSEP, he pays reduced tuition at out-of-state public and…

Effective state policy for new teacher mentoring stipulates program elements that increase the likelihood that district programming will be implemented and, thus, defines for districts what is important about mentoring support. Although most state policies do not differentiate programs for novice special education teachers, there are particular…

This article explores the developing role of mediation as a conflict resolution process in schools. It gives an accepted definition and clarifies the purposes of mediation, outlining the range of contexts in and beyond schools in which mediation is already offered as a formal intervention. The typical process of mediation itself is described. The…

In 1998 a group of American adoptive parents led by Jenny Bowen created Half the Sky Foundation (HTS) to provide nurturing care and education for children living in Chinese orphanages (known as children's welfare institutions). Jenny, a former screenwriter and film director, and her husband Richard wanted to ensure that the children still waiting…

Programs preparing teachers of the deaf and hard of hearing are typically housed in schools of education and are subject to university requirements as well as state and national accreditation requirements. This article describes how one program to prepare teachers of the deaf, founded in 2007, navigated those requirements and became part of a…

Many schools in South Africa are dysfunctional, or at least do not function optimally. This statement could be substantiated by just citing statistics about failure rates, school drop-out rates, school violence, matric pass rates, learner absenteeism, educator absenteeism or the incidence of discipline problems and the effect thereof on educators.…

Libraries have limited budgets and Collection Development Librarians can be faced with difficult decisions in the spending of their allocated funds. This paper discusses how the Tasmanian Polytechnic Launceston Campus Library discovered a gap in their collection and addressed this situation without funding. The Library wished to purchase fiction…

Data-driven planning or evidence-based decision making represents nothing new in its concept. For years, business leaders have claimed they have implemented planning informed by data that have been strategically and systematically gathered. Within higher education and student affairs, there may be less evidence of the actual practice of…

In this article, the author describes the ASE Annual Conference 2010 which was held at Nottingham after a gap of 22 years. As always, the main conference was preceded by International Day, an important event for science educators from across the world. There were two strands to the programme: (1) "What works for me?"--sharing new ideas…

Health literacy, the ability to obtain and understand information and services to make good health decisions, has received much attention recently. Literacy is a stronger predictor of health status than age, income, race, ethnicity, employment status, or educational level. Inadequate health literacy costs the United States an estimated $100-$236…

Despite recent research suggesting that relationally aggressive behaviors occur frequently and may lead to physically aggressive actions within urban school settings, there has been little prior research to develop and evaluate relational aggression prevention efforts within the urban schools. The current article describes the development and…

To become full and active participants in today's technologically saturated society, young people need to become creators (and not just consumers) of interactive media. Developing the requisite abilities and capacities is not a wholly individual process; it is important for young people to have access to communities where they can collaborate and…