The purpose of this compendium is to catalog NCER's and NCSER's contributions to social-behavioral research. Research undertaken as part of these projects is contributing to a knowledge base that ultimately aims to improve academic outcomes for students via improvements in students' social-behavioral competencies, teachers' practices, and the…

This Annual Plan presents the major initiatives and priorities the U.S. Department of Education (Department) Office of Inspector General (OIG) intends to undertake to assist the Department in fulfilling its responsibilities to America's taxpayers and students. The Department continues to face significant challenges in FY 2017 that impact its…

Community collaboration models expand conventional school improvement planning, which tends to be walled in, building centered, and bracketed by school and district boundaries. These community models enable educators, social workers, and other school professionals to form sustainable, strategic partnerships with families, community agencies,…

This column provides brief summaries of transition-related articles published in 2011 in other professional journals. The 27 articles included descriptive, experimental, and qualitative research as well as program descriptions, conceptual papers, and practitioner pieces. All areas of Kohler's Taxonomy for Transition Programming were addressed:…

In each state, between 41 percent and 91 percent of the homeless students identified by the U.S. Department of Education (ED) are not considered homeless by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Nationwide, as many as 715,238 homeless students fall into a bureaucratic gap between HUD and ED. This is because ED, HUD, and other…

Much of the governing process in the United States (U.S.) today depends on a reliable and well protected public information technology (IT) infrastructure. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is tasked with the responsibility of protecting the country's IT infrastructure. Critics contend that the DHS has failed to address planning and…

Generalized trust varies across individuals and countries. Past studies on trust have demonstrated that voluntary association membership, inequality and ethnic homogeneity at country level are important. However, those studies examined either individual-level or country-level factors separately. In this paper, we conceptualized the emergence of…

Twelve clients attending a voluntary agency, a local Council on Alcohol in a Scottish Community, were interviewed individually over a period of up to 1 year. The aims of this study were to explore clients' perceptions of their experiences during the year and their perceptions of help received from the agency. A qualitative approach was used.…

This paper explores the factors which influence the effectiveness of formal development programmes targeted at multi-agency teams in children's services. It draws on two studies of the National College for School Leadership's Multi-Agency Teams Development programme, reporting key characteristics of the programme, short-term outcomes in terms of…

The user perspective is an important contextual factor for Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs). This article provides examples from performance audits in Norway and explores why the user perspective has become important in performance audit practices. It shows that user satisfaction can be employed as a key performance indicator of effectiveness of…

There is a gap in the literature on the experiences of Aboriginal adults who have made the transition into education and employment after moving to an urban community. Staff of three Aboriginal inner-city family services agencies participated in an interview that included the question: What changes do you see in your employment and education?…

On the surface, a gathering held for young research faculty last week at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was a clear expression of determination by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to help them compete for grants. The agency fears that continued Congressional budget cuts, combined with the growing number of scientists who work later into…

Bullying in schools has become widely viewed as an urgent social, health, and education concern that has moved to the forefront of public debate on school legislation and policy. The Columbine High School shooting in 1999 was the first of many high-profile incidents of violent behavior that appeared to implicate bullying as an underlying cause…

National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA) is the authority on state arts agency funding and grant making. NASAA publications provide extensive information on strategic planning, needs assessment and program evaluation methods specifically adapted to public arts agencies. This document presents the total number of arts education grant awards…

Open Stages is Britain's biggest amateur theatre project, a hugely ambitious scheme to bring the professional and amateur theatre worlds together. It is a learning project but, as the Royal Shakespeare Company's Ian Wainwright tells this author, it is not only the amateurs who are learning. Wainwright states that the amateur and professional…