Across the U.S., an estimated 60% of incoming community college students require developmental courses to be ready for college-level work, according to estimates by experts. As these courses act as a gateway to further studies, those who fail are most often lost to higher education: Less than a quarter will earn a degree or certificate within…

Literature finds mentoring to be a substantive, enduring practice in widespread arena, and among the attributes associated with career success and satisfaction. This paper provides a tangible mentoring model that has been operational for several years, and which applies what the literature proscribes to higher education academic settings. The…

Recent federal and state education policy has targeted community colleges as an affordable venue to increase postsecondary attainment. We examined a state program aimed at increasing community college enrollment, the Missouri A+ Schools Program, which provided eligible graduates from participating high schools the opportunity to earn a scholarship…

In 2009, families nationwide were surveyed to see how many children are in afterschool programs, how many are unsupervised after school and how these numbers compare to five years ago. "America After 3 PM" provides the most comprehensive and accurate picture to date of what this nation's youth are doing each day after school. Overall,…

The Higher Learning Commission (HLC), a commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (NCA), accredits Wyoming's seven community colleges. Institutional accreditation is a voluntary process that serves the critical purposes of quality assurance and institutional and program improvement. Colleges that are accredited by the HLC…

The Higher Learning Commission (HLC), a commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (NCA), accredits Wyoming's seven community colleges. Institutional accreditation is a voluntary process that serves the critical purposes of quality assurance and institutional and program improvement. Colleges that are accredited by the HLC…

In 2004 the General Assembly of the State of Ohio (USA) enacted Senate Bill 2, which created the Educator Standards Board "to develop and recommend to the state board of education standards for entering and continuing in the teaching and principalship professions". Since that time the Ohio Department of Education has established a…

Functional behavior assessment and function-based support have increasingly been used in school settings in the past decade. This increased use has come under scrutiny from some experts who have argued in the past that function-based support has not yet been proven to be effective in typical school settings with students without severe…

This article discusses how to make process use an independent variable in evaluation practice: the purposeful means of building an organization's capacity to conduct and use evaluations in the long run. The goal of evaluation capacity building (ECB) is to strengthen and sustain effective program evaluation practices through a number of activities:…

In the case of higher education, the hills are more like mountains of data that "we're accumulating at a ferocious rate," according to Gerry McCartney, CIO of Purdue University (Indiana). "Every higher education institution has this data, but it just sits there like gold in the ground," complains McCartney. Big Data and the new tools people are…

The digitized collections of artifacts known as electronic portfolios are creating solutions to a variety of performance improvement needs in ways that are cost-effective and improve both individual and group learning and performance. When social media functionality is embedded in e-portfolios, the tools support collaboration, social learning,…

What does performance improvement look like in practice in today's organizations? As part of its commitment to the learning profession, the American Society for Training and Development annually judges the practices of organizations through a blind peer review process to determine what merits the best practice designation. This article contains…

No Child Left Behind (NCLB), with its emphasis on standards-based accountability, has put educators under considerable pressure to improve student academic outcomes. Much of the funding for after-school programs comes from education budgets and is administered by state and local education agencies. Consequently, after-school programs are often…

Successfully navigating early adolescence depends, in large part, on the availability of safe and engaging activities and supportive relationships with adults, yet many preteens have limited access to positive supports and opportunities such as high-quality after-school programs that could put them on a path to success. Funders, policymakers and…

Coalitions have key roles in helping their communities accomplish the following: (1) Track the level of literacy in the community; (2) Use that information to help identify what, and how much, literacy assistance is needed; (3) Assess the extent to which community literacy programs are meeting the need, including how well existing literacy…