Examining traditional and contemporary professional development practices of youth-serving organizations can inform practices across Extension, particularly in light of the barriers that have been noted for effectively developing the professional competencies of Extension educators. With professional development systems changing quickly,…

Families with children who are deaf face many important decisions, especially the mode(s) of communication their children will use. The purpose of this focus group study was to better understand the experiences and recommendations of families who chose American Sign Language (ASL) as their primary mode of communication and to identify strategies…

This article begins by reviewing developments in the field of public administration over the past 50 years and identifying factors that have served, in some cases unintentionally, to undermine public confidence in the actual practice of public administration. It then examines a number of important conditions that must be addressed in the…

The United States is becoming more racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse, yet the educational attainment of various student groups has been very uneven. For decades, educators and policymakers have been focused on minimal competencies rather than advanced achievement. Specifically, federal and state education policies have focused on…

The purpose of the study reported here was to examine the educational resources used by Montana State University Extension county agents. An online survey was administered to evaluate agents' informational needs. Agents reported client questions (93.8%) and program/workshop planning and presentations (91.7%) as the main reasons for seeking…

This study examined the overview of how individuals in their respective teams operated and contributed to their organization. This study also identified the salient characteristics of how the respondents made progress as leaders in their respective faculties or departments towards identifying directions for innovative future practice through…

Knowing that paraprofessionals can be prepared to work effectively with students is an important finding, yet, how do teachers prepare paraprofessionals to work most effectively with students with disabilities? Teachers who supervise paraprofessionals must use basic communication skills, which is the first step in both the preparation of and the…

The current study seeks to introduce a new pedagogical design for geo-informatics courses using an e-training support system. Laurillard's conversational approach based on conceptual representation for both instructor and learner was used to form the framework. As the current study specifically interested in training as a special form for…

This study aims to discover how social studies teachers' personal and professional values can be improved by having a basis in Mevlana's global messages "love-respect-tolerance" in terms of "Personal and Professional Values-Professional Development", which is the first component of general efficacies of teaching profession. The…

This qualitative study provides a theoretical framework for understanding faculty members' motivation to persist in utilizing academic service-learning pedagogy. Twenty-four faculty members from a private liberal arts university in the southeastern United States were interviewed about the benefits and challenges of teaching academic…

This article introduces the "Data First" approach and shows how the observation and analysis of scientific data can be used as a scaffold to build conceptual understanding in chemistry through inductive reasoning. The "Data First" approach emulates the scientific process by changing the order by which we introduce data. Rather…

The purpose of this qualitative case study is to investigate the common issues and factors associated with organizational identity from the viewpoint of faculty members employed during the 2011-2012 academic year in the Faculty of Education at Mersin University in Mersin, Turkey. The sample of this study consisted of 14 faculty members, including…

This qualitative inquiry explores perceptions and experiences of three urban educators who had been involved in PDS initiatives both from the school perspective as classroom teachers and mentors to interns and from the university perspective as urban teacher-educators. These ''boundary spanners'' provided insight into and appreciation for the…

The study of a middle school social studies project this article addresses occurred in the national capital region of the United States, where perceptions of ''patriotism'' and xenophobic immigration policies were the subjects of frequent media reports. With this examination the authors considered the overarching research question ''How do middle…

This article builds on the key findings of the UK Higher Education Academy study "Transnational Education Learning and Teaching" to explore the way in which Wenger's characteristics of communities of practice could help provide a theoretical framework for improving communication and creating more effective transnational education (TNE)…