Faculty development efforts have had varying success in changing the culture of a department or institution. In this paper, we describe a faculty development program using a residents as teachers (RATS) curriculum that we believe effected educational change in a department with a history of suboptimal student evaluations on the clerkship and an…

School-Wide Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS) is a systems approach to supporting the social and emotional needs of all children utilized by more than 21,000 schools across the nation. Data from numerous studies and state projects' evaluation reports point to the impact of SWPBIS on student outcomes (office discipline referrals…

Secondary students are often challenged to make sense of conceptually complex content area texts. Text-based discussion has the potential to facilitate comprehension by engaging students in collaboratively constructing their understanding of important ideas and relationships among ideas while interacting with a demanding text. However, teachers…

A full-scale oral communication assessment was conducted by the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) during the academic year 2013-14. Key components of this assessment included faculty involvement at all stages of assessment and collaboration with assessment coordinators and lead staff personnel. The VCCS Office of Institutional Research and…

As the role of information technology increases throughout the world, healthcare providers in the United States face industry and governmental pressures to implement health information technology (HIT) as a tool to improve healthcare costs, quality, and safety. The problem addressed in this study was the relatively low HIT implementation success…

In an effort to meet the needs of special education students in inclusion classrooms co-teaching is typically utilized as a service delivery model. Research has identified a number of benefits to co-teaching however, a number of obstacles have been found to inhibit its effective implementation in secondary schools. High school special education…

School districts have spent millions of dollars implementing student information systems that offer family portals with web-based access to parents and students. One of the main purposes of these systems is to improve school-to-home communication. Research has shown that when school-to-home communication is implemented effectively, parent…

The purpose of the case study was to explore how one rural elementary school implemented a one to one (1:1) iPad initiative with a focus on leadership. The distributed leadership model provides the framework for this research. The idea that the transformation of schools falls on one leader is impractical and unattainable (Elmore, 2004; Gronn &…

Evidence-based prevention and wellbeing programs offer a great deal of promise to support the health and wellbeing of North Carolina children, youth, families, and communities. In fact, many funders and service providers in North Carolina are shifting towards models that have demonstrated positive impact through rigorous evaluations. However,…

The social sector's hottest "impact investing" product--the social impact bond (SIB)--has generated a range of reactions, from excitement to angst. An SIB uses private funds to pay for a social, educational, or health program, and the government repays investors (plus a return) only if the program achieves prespecified results. The…

The work described in this report is the first phase of a project to provide easy-to-use tools for authoring and rendering secondary-school algebra-level math expressions in synthesized speech that is useful for students with blindness or low vision. This report describes the initial development, software implementation, and evaluation of the…

This brief provides an overview of the implementation and impact of near peer mentoring programs in Alaska and Idaho from the standpoint of both existing research and the near peers themselves. While progress is being monitored as part of state College Access Challenge Grant (CACG) program implementation and activity, only limited data on the…

The purpose of this multiple case study was to learn about how secondary English language arts (ELA) teachers help students to make meaning with multimedia. The study focused on how and why teachers plan and implement meaning-making learning experiences. The cases represent the experiences and perspectives of five ELA teachers who use digital and…

In their seminal 1995 article, Barr and Tagg encouraged higher education to think differently about undergraduate education and suggested that a new paradigm be adopted that focused less on what is taught and more on what is learned. Dubbed the learner-centered paradigm, this reframing of education challenges long standing practices and removes…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe secondary teachers' perceptions of online learning in Washington. This was done by distributing a survey to three districts in the State of Washington to identify the advantages and challenges of online learning according to participating secondary teachers. In addition, the teachers provided…