This article reflects on the assumptions we make in the design of faculty and graduate student orientations and on the implementation of redesigned orientations that foreground participant narrative. When educational developers purposefully make space for participant stories at their orientations, it is a way not only to share power with graduate…

This study addressed low graduation rates at Midwest Community College (MCC; a pseudonym) and explored factors affecting student success. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to delve into nontraditional students' perceptions of the influence of compressed courses and the effect the courses had on their academic success at MCC. Over the…

Personal best (PB) goal setting refers to the pursuit of individual improvement through striving to outperform a previous best level of performance or effort. Although promising evidence has been building, numerous empirical questions remain to be answered, including how PB goal setting may operate alongside various contextual predictors of…

The Mastery Performance-Goal Orientation Test (MP-GOT) assesses performance- and mastery-orientation along a single bipolar dimension. In Study 1 (n = 198) we explored its psychometric properties and determined whether its results were related to learning. In addition, we employed Latent Profile Analysis to explore goal orientation profiles. In…

School leaders have an important role in supporting implementation of inclusive education practices in schools. Therefore, it is necessary to understand how school leaders' attitudes towards inclusive education are formed. We used the Attitudes Toward Inclusive Education Scale that was developed to measure different facets of attitudes towards…

Being uncomfortable by choice as a means of personal growth has been touted for hundreds of years among scholars, philosophers, religious leaders, modern pop culture icons, and more. Yet, research pertaining to the benefits of being uncomfortable by choice is sparse. This qualitative, grounded theory study addressed the first step of…

Although teacher feedback and teacher support are believed as important predictors of student resilience, few studies have compared their effects on student resilience and explored how such effects are mediated by students' achievement goals. To address this gap, this study analysed the PISA 2018 student survey data on the four variables (i.e.,…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to understand how teachers who remained in the profession during the COVID-19 pandemic describe what it was about their self-perceived leadership qualities that influenced their decision to remain. Although literature regarding teacher retention exist, teacher description about their…

Background: According to Dweck's mindset theory, implicit beliefs (a.k.a. mindset) have an organizing function, bringing together mindset, achievement goals and effort beliefs in a broader meaning system. Two commonly described meaning systems are a growth-mindset meaning system with mastery goals and positive effort beliefs, and a fixed-mindset…

This design case describes a Welcome Academy for New Faculty in Engineering. To situate the design, this work is motivated by the documented need to make STEM education more inclusive. This need has prompted extensive research on best practices for inclusive teaching, but less is known about how to translate that research into actual teaching…

The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Higher Education Conference in Barcelona was an occasion for the authors of this article to reflect on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in general and SDG 4: education, specifically, pondering over its role and impact on student development in the Global South and…

Within South Carolina, many programs encourage and support teachers in their first year of teaching. In addition, extensive research describes the importance of support for alternatively certified teachers. However, alternatively certified teachers have received less educational training than teachers following a traditional pathway. Individual…

Onboarding in higher education is important because it acclimates new employees to their new work environment and integrates them into the institution's culture. Through employee surveys, focus groups, and open forums, Delaware Tech identified the need for a collegewide onboarding program to acclimate new employees to the culture. This study…

Despite research indicating that responding with self-compassion to lapses in goal pursuit can help people to achieve their goals, there is evidence that people often struggle to respond with self-compassion when it would benefit them. One reason is that people may not be familiar with the concept of self-compassion or may think negatively of…

Scholars in higher education have been researching to better understand adjunct faculty instructor experiences. One of the foci is the onboarding experience of adjunct faculty, as there are concerns about whether faculty are onboarded, given that adjunct faculty make up a sizable portion of the teaching population at higher-education institutions.…