Community colleges face struggles in helping students meet their academic, career, and personal goals. Student affairs practitioners can be innovators by creating initiatives to engage students. Practitioners can act as a bridge between student and academic affairs. This article explores how a group of counselors redefined their roles by designing…

This article describes Hanover College's Early Alert Team, an early-alert program that seeks to identify students' academic, social, or personal troubles as soon as they surface. The team's five members gather information about students from all corners of the campus and then devise strategies to help them. The early-alert system has not only…

The preparation of culturally and linguistically responsive special educators requires planning, substantive collaboration, and valuing the perspectives of underrepresented groups. This article describes restructuring efforts of one special education preparation program that included coursework and field-based experiences designed to enhance…

A community school is a place and a set of partnerships connecting a school, the families of students, and the surrounding community. A community school is distinguished by an integrated focus on academics, youth development, family support, health and social services, and community development. The community school strategy is central to efforts…

Introduction: Children today are under much more stress than a few decades ago due to academic pressure, family financial hardship, competition with peers, and stressed parents. Consequently, stress-related health issues and behavioral problems, such as cardiovascular diseases, headaches, insomnia, anxiety, depression, violent or withdrawal…

Web 2.0 technologies create opportunities for distance learning with particular promise for students while they are on international exchange. The current generation of students departing for study abroad is electronically literate or "digital natives", who have thoroughly integrated internet and communication technologies into their…

In recent years policymakers have increasingly looked to Extended Learning Time (ELT) as a means of improving student outcomes. As a result, some school districts have increased academic time for students by adding time to the school day or days to the school year. In other communities, schools and community-based organizations have partnered to…

At Aalborg University (AAU) we are known to work with problem-based learning (PBL) in a particular way designated "The Aalborg PBL model." In PBL the focus is on participant control, knowledge sharing, collaboration among participants, which makes it interesting to consider the integration of social media in the learning that takes…

We conducted a series of summer workshops on bioinformatics to increase educators' knowledge of this new field of inquiry with the assumption that their knowledge will, in turn, impact student achievement. The workshops incorporated experiential learning and self-reflection (Loucks-Horsley et al. 1998). Educators demonstrated significant increases…

This paper describes the goals, pedagogical system, and educational outcomes of a three-semester curriculum in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). The sequence takes engineering students with no formal MEMS training and gives them the skills to participate in cutting-edge MEMS research and development. The evolution of the curriculum from…

Given complaints about preparation of international students for their writing-intensive courses, a director of first-year writing and an undergraduate researcher at a Midwestern research university conducted a needs assessment based on Kaufman's model. Instruments used included a survey, interviews, and analysis of commentary on sample papers.…

This paper brings task-based language teaching (TBLT) curriculum development principles into the blended learning context, presenting processes and outcomes from a project to develop a task-based thematic unit--asking and giving directions--in a hybrid web-based university-level class focused on listening and speaking skills in Mandarin Chinese.…

As the world economy continues to evolve, businesses and industries must adopt new practices and processes in order to survive. Quality and cost control, work teams and participatory management, and an infusion of technology are transforming the way people work and do business. Employees are now expected to read, write, and communicate…

"Building Your Program" is intended to help mental health authorities, agency administrators, and program leaders think through and develop Supported Education. The first part of this booklet gives you background information about the Supported Education model. Specific information about your role in implementing and sustaining Supported Education…

Findings from the ninth triennial administration of the National Survey of First-Year Seminars, describing the nature and extent of first-year seminars on American college campuses. Drawn from a broad sample of colleges and universities from every institutional type, control, and size, the survey addresses topics including seminar characteristics…