Research-extensive land-grant institutions face the unique challenge of asking faculty to fulfill a historic mission of public service in a time of scarce resources. This article discusses the parallel between the effects of resource dependency and academic capitalism on the research enterprise and on public service endeavors through the…

Introduction: This article results from a qualitative study of 1) information behavior in community problem-solving framed as a distributed information use environment and 2) approaches used by a best-practice library to anticipate information needs associated with community problem solving. Method: Several approaches to data collection were…

A modified focus group approach was used to assess the perceptions of teachers involved in basic skills pilot site projects in Oklahoma after the second year. The two 5-year projects were implemented to develop, apply, evaluate, and advance approaches that strengthen basic competencies of students enrolled in vocational programs. Of the three…

This paper offers a focus group approach to the understanding of student perceptions of campus community. Using the Strange and Banning (2001) framework of community, the author argues that students' sense of campus community should be studied as it exists within the institutional environment. The results of the study include: 1) There is a strong…

This present study examined the intended and unintended consequences of Minnesota's high stakes graduation exam on students with disabilities. Historically, little empirical data have been collected and the scant data available suggest some significant unintended consequences for educational accountability systems (e.g., the retention of students…

The main finding from research conducted in 2005 into the critical issues in teaching, learning and assessment in vocational education and training (VET) was that "quality is the major issue." While the research identified many issues--such as the need for providers to be increasingly flexible and responsive in meeting the multiple…

There are differences between, and among, people in ethnic communities. This study seeks to provide a more nuanced snapshot of vocational education and training (VET) participation and completion rates among Arabic, Bosnian, Cantonese, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese communities. It investigates the effectiveness of English as a second language…

The goals of this "Action Research" study were to understand how to create an anti-bias curriculum project focusing on Native North Americans and how to teach children to recognize stereotypes in children's literature, while using "The Project Approach" (Helm & Katz, 2001) to do the formative curriculum development. The study weaves together three…

The paper represents a study of students' experience of interactivity in distance education programmes at the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). Through surveys and focus groups with students, facilitators, and administrative support staff, we found out that interactivity is a key determinant of student success rate. Majority of the…

Project Renaissance is a program offered to first-year students at the University of Albany (State University of New York). The purpose is to provide a multi-disciplinary integrated approach to curriculum, supporting a more cohesive environment that recognizes the individual student's cognitive and social needs. Participants are housed in the same…

This paper examines issues identified in a qualitative study in nine diverse local service systems as program administrators of early intervention programs for young children with disabilities sought to obtain United Way funding and other sources of philanthropy. Data are based on issues raised in nine focus groups conducted with community…

This qualitative study explored the evaluative criteria used by administrators at a southern, metropolitan university to define institutional effectiveness and to determine the congruency between those criteria and the institution's metropolitan mission. Four focus groups were conducted with 22 administrators (vice chancellors, associate and…

This paper describes how focus groups were used to assess the effectiveness of the University of Kentucky's Agricultural Information Center (AIC) in providing patron services. The AIC serves 1,100 undergraduate students, 370 graduate and postdoctoral students, and 1,700 faculty and staff in the College of Agriculture. In August 2000, the AIC…

The way in which public examinations influence teaching and learning is commonly described as "washback" or backwash. This study examined the nature and scope of the impact of a public examination on English teaching in Taiwan to add to the existing literature on testing washback in an English-as-a-second-language context. The relational…

In this study of 53 graduate students enrolled in an introductory course in educational research, the instructor employed strategies noted in the literature as effective in reducing anxiety in statistics classes: (1) addressing the anxiety; (2) using humor; (3) applying statistics to real world situations; (4) reducing fear of evaluation; and (5)…