The face of teacher education is rapidly changing. Teacher shortages, legislative changes, and adult career changers have prompted colleges and universities across the nation to develop new programs or redesign existing programs for teacher preparation. For universities, the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program has emerged as the panacea for…

During the past five years the authors built a sizeable online program in the Psychology Department at the University of Minnesota Duluth. During that time they learned a great deal about how to administer such a program. Their experience also led to a proposal for creating an infrastructure to support online programming in a traditional…

In this paper, the authors describe their experience of establishing an action research/learning-based doctoral program in Singapore by an Australian university, which was designed to help managers get academic accreditation while solving workplace problems. The program was designed by four managers working in Singapore and their supervisors.…

Developments in higher education are taking place in the wider context of globalisation, the Lisbon strategy and within the framework of the Bologna Process. Designing and developing Bologna programmes by taking into account the needs of the economy is a tool for successful quality assurance in higher education and for close cooperation with the…

The Rehabilitation Act of 1973, together with the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, set in motion policy changes that have allowed many thousands of children and youth with disabilities in the United States the opportunity to gain the educational and vocational skills needed to transition to living, working, and participating as…

Between 1999 and 2003, the Western Massachusetts Writing Project experienced a series of changes that made it question whether it could survive as a writing project site. The convergence of retirement, unexpected death, and withdrawal of long-term financial support forced the existing leadership to develop a process to look deeply into the work of…

This study investigated the impact of a Professional Development School (PDS) on student learning by comparing student achievement in a PDS and a control school. Student achievement data were collected from an elementary PDS and a matched control school over a 6-year period. The results indicate that the PDS moved more students up to mastery level…

If professional learning communities offer opportunities for improving the teaching and learning process, then developing strong professional development school (PDS) partnerships establish an appropriate framework for that purpose. PDS partnerships, however, can be less than effective without proper planning and discussion about the aims of those…

Women farmers are underserved in agricultural education and technical assistance. Long held social constructions of farming women as "farmwives" and in some cases "the bookkeepers" rather than farmers or decision-makers influence the direction of most educational programming delivered through extension programs in land-grant…

Family support programs have proliferated in many different settings in response to an increasing emphasis in the public policy arena on a family support strategy. These guidelines for effective family support practice represent the consensus of family support practitioners as assessed in focus groups with over 2,000 staff and parent participants.…

Two elementary schools in White Plains, New York, have been involved in the Child Development Project (CDP) since 1991. This paper describes how the staffs and administrators built caring communities into their schools. The paper is written from the perspective of a staff developer who became a district coordinator for staff development. The paper…

Public/Private Ventures Inc. conducted a 30-month study of AmeriCorps, the signature program of the National and Community Service Trust Act of 1993. The central emphasis of this study was to examine the role of the states in implementing the new AmeriCorps program. The experience of 20 programs in 9 study states was documented through 4 visits to…

The work done by the Validation Panel that was commissioned by the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation (Joint Committee) to monitor the development of "The Program Evaluation Standards: How To Assess Evaluations of Educational Programs" is described, and its conclusions summarized. This report focuses on the…

This guide, which is organized in a question-and-answer format, is designed to answer questions commonly asked by employers interested in establishing workplace literacy training programs. The questions and answers have been grouped in sections on the following topics: the extent of the employer commitment required to establish a workplace…

The passage of Public Law 94-142 (Education for All Handicapped Children Act) in 1975 had a great impact on the role of school psychologists. One of the controversial requirements of Public Law 94-142 alluded to the involvement of school psychologists in Individualized Education Program (IEP) development. This study was undertaken to obtain…