This article presents Norwegian and Croatian students' perspectives on conditions for their professional growth during undergraduate kindergarten teacher education. The data gathered through focus group interviews are theorized using the cultural-historical wholeness approach that identifies institutional conditions for the development of certain…

Prior work has shown that levels of self-reported student social-emotional learning (SEL) predict student achievement levels--as well as student achievement gains--but little has been done to understand if within-student changes in student reports of SEL are predictive of changes in theoretically related academic and behavioral outcomes. We use…

The current paper explores how students' relationships with their teachers, parents, and friends might differentially impact their academic experience and success, by presenting and integrating the results of two related studies. In the first study, survey methods and structural equation modeling are used to describe the similar and different…

There are sweeping changes facing higher education institutions today that have resulted in diminished power, privilege, and prestige that the professorate have had in the past. Higher education institutions are faced with many challenges that often demand radical changes in the reconceptualization of the professorship and adversely preservation…

The purpose of the study was to examine the differences among significant changes in the practice of individual teachers. Seventeen US teachers were interviewed about the most successful change in their teaching career. The differences in teacher change were based primarily on the source and impact of the change. The sources of change were divided…

The purpose of this case study was to explore the association between implementing the competency-based approach (CBA) in graduate programs and the student's perception about the aforementioned approach. The research was conducted with 504 graduate students from Universidad Tecnologica de Panama and Universidad Tecnologica Oteima in the Republic…

Globally, the effects of Facebook® as a social media instrument are far-reaching for all, but more so for the 21st-century adolescent. Although most adolescents spend time on Facebook, this form of social media is inadequately used to enhance their teaching, learning and counselling experiences. Schools increasingly use Facebook for social…

This article describes a course taught at a U.S. Christian college located in Pennsylvania that uses "high impact practices," as described by Kuh and O'Donnell (2013), to educate students about calling. The course, titled "Created and Called for Community," is required for all incoming first-year students in their second…

This paper explores the notion of impact in the context of academic development programs and considers how it can be described and understood. We argue that impact has a range of meanings and academic development programs such as graduate certificates have a broad group of stakeholders and hence the impact is different for each group depending on…

China is becoming an increasingly polarized society, in large part due to the inaccessibility of basic education for minority children. Schools can be vehicles for social change and community building, and teachers can be agents of transformation and hope. The PRC, however, is experiencing a critical shortage of trained teachers willing to serve…

University employability awards, in the UK particularly, aim to assist students to develop career related skills and attributes and thus increase their potential to achieve graduate level employment. Self-report quantitative and qualitative data were collected at intervals via questionnaires, interviews and focus groups from two cohorts (N = 212)…

This qualitative study addressed the formation of student identity (servant and civic) as well as how students formed community through experiencing difference in a service-learning classroom. An interpretive qualitative study of five high school students was conducted in a service-learning program at Willow Falls High School, a public high school…

Given the call for schools to enhance equity of opportunity, the Center for Mental Health in Schools and Student/Learning Supports at UCLA sent out an inquiry across the country asking "Which Schools are Taking Equity Seriously?". The received a variety of responses including: (1) One response which focused on "Colorado's Equity…

Identifying effective instructional practices and effective teachers is an important issue in educational research, policy, and practice. However, many schools have resorted to measuring these constructs with student test scores, ignoring the instructional context. In this introductory article to the special issue, we highlight the importance of…

The author, chairman of the Department of Sociology and Social Work at Casper College in Casper, Wyoming, examines how the proportion of students who participate in schooling as a real--as opposed to a virtual--undertaking has shrunk through the growth of online courses. This situation could be a tragedy or it could be acceptable. At the moment,…