In the previous two issues of "About Campus," the author has described the national study of college-student thriving that she has conducted with her doctoral students at Azusa Pacific University over the past several years. Their validated and reliable 35-item Thriving Quotient has been administered to over 15,000 college students…

Throughout the 1980's, the notion of standards came to the forefront throughout the education world. Groups questioned how to define quality teaching. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards was developed to meet this need providing a voluntary national certification to identify accomplished teachers. Since its inception,…

Generally, the Global Tibetan Professional Network of North America (GTPN-NA) considers lack of skills a problem among adult Tibetan immigrants. The GTPN-NA is a non-profit, volunteer-based networking forum focusing on Tibetan professionals and students from North America. By skills education, it means skills that may help support the transition…

This study investigates how shared mental models (SMMs) change over time in teams of students in a manufacturing engineering course. A complex ill-structured project was given to each team. The objective of the team project was to analyze, test, and propose ways to improve their given manufactured product. Shared mental models were measured in…

The authors examined changes in the profession of counseling psychology by comparing results of similar surveys of Society of Counseling Psychology (SCP) members administered 15 years apart (in 1985 and 2000). The authors found the roles and settings of SCP members were relatively stable across this period but observed that notably fewer…

This publication is part of an Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB) series devoted to strengthening the role of key standing committees of governing boards. While there is no optimum committee system for institutions of higher education, certain principles, practices, and procedures prevail. The best practices…

The purposes of this qualitative study were to determine the contribution of 4-H experiences to leadership life skill development of college-level 4-H alumni and to determine the effect of those skills on collegiate alumni's desire to continue involvement in 4-H. The research methods included semi-structured interviews. Major findings of the study…

Few studies have examined risk factors of childhood and early adolescent depressive symptomatology trajectories. This study examined self-report depressive symptomatology across a 6-year time period from 2nd to 8th grade to identify latent groups of individuals with similar patterns of depressive phenomena in a sample of 951 children (440 girls,…

The practice of requiring others to engage in activities that humiliate, degrade, abuses, and/or endangers them in order to join an organization is becoming increasingly prevalent on college campuses and beyond. These activities have resulted in physical and emotional scars are well as lead to deaths. Using Racial Identity Theory and Social…

In this narrative, five adult siblings bring their voices together to tell the stories of their interwoven college experiences--how they influenced, supported, and relied on one another and other family members. As the stories unfold, they reveal the strengths of the familial ties that provide meaning and purpose to the college experience, the…

Mainland Chinese college students majoring in English language studies completed new measures of independent self-construal and interdependent self-construal. Participants completed these in English or in Chinese, after having engaged in either a self-priming task in which they wrote about unique features of the self or their memberships in social…

This study was designed to predict middle school sixth graders' group membership in band (n = 81), chorus (n = 45), and as non-participants in music performance ensembles (n = 127), as determined by gender and factors on the Attraction Toward School Performance Ensemble (ATSPE) scale (alpha = 0.88). Students completed the ATSPE as elementary fifth…

The influence of choice on individuals' social identification and psychological sense of community (PSOC) with their group memberships is a seldom examined area. The current study examined participants' (N = 219) level of social identification and PSOC across multiple group memberships that differ in the degree of choice associated with…

Social capital theory has developed over the past two decades and has become increasingly popular among youth studies scholars, as well as among policy and program researchers. Despite its wide usage, the theory's utility is limited and largely unknown because researchers typically only test one of the theory's core dimensions: whether social…

Recent research has suggested that bullying behaviour may be understood as a group process, where those involved act in ways predicted by social identity theory (Ojala & Nesdale, 2004). One relevant phenomenon is the black sheep effect, whereby individuals evaluate deviant members of their in-group more negatively than that of an out-group. To…