This special issue of "Research in the Schools" ("RITS") was developed by three incredible editors: Elena Forzani, Sandra Schamroth Abrams, and Tony Onwuegbuzie. Each of these editors brought her or his own experiences with writing, publishing, and reviewer/editorial work to the work of putting together this special issue. Most…

For years, financial aid administrators and others have debated the nature and structure of need analysis. As it developed, need analysis was based on commonly accepted definitions and basic principles of economics. Beyond the fundamentals of need analysis, there also developed expertise about exercising professional judgment (PJ) in reviewing…

"The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for" (Wittgenstein). When learning something completely new, we connect the unknown term to an already existing part of our knowledge. We can only build new ideas and insights upon an existing conceptual foundation. In the field of statistics, we…

Team-taught courses have the potential to enrich experiences for both students and instructors. While the exact motivations for team teaching vary, these courses often share important goals for the students who enroll in them. For example, many team-taught courses seek to promote students' development of higher-order thinking skills by enabling…

The purpose of this paper is to describe the school-based contextual constraints perceived by beginning elementary teachers as they attempted to enact their visions of effective mathematics teaching and the components of a mathematics-specific, university-based induction program designed to support elementary teachers in their teaching of…

Teaching English language learners, referred to as emergent multilingual students here, is a complex endeavor including ESL and bilingual teachers, content teachers, and paraeducators, among others, for example special education teachers and reading specialists, to name a few. As a result, the Illinois State Board of Education's (ISBE) guidance…

In 2006, our School of Management began the serious path of assessing both the "hard skills" (such as accounting, finance, and strategy) and the "soft skills" (such as leadership, team work, and ethics) of our MBA Program. The data generated from examining the "soft skills" that we want students to learn within our…

Although expectations for graduate students' writing abilities are high, their actual writing skills are often subpar (Cuthbert & Spark, 2008; Singleton-Jackson, Lumsden, & Newson, 2009), even though academic writing is considered integral to graduate education and necessary for career preparedness (e.g., Mullen, 2006; Stevens, 2005).…

Manicules are hand-drawn symbols used by medieval readers to mark important parts of a text. Knowing where to place manicules is one characteristic of an expert reader. A meta-cognitive theory of expert reading helps to account for what readers know that allows them to place manicules appropriately. This theory proposes that expert readers are…

One objective of the U.S. Department of Education's (ED) School Improvement Grants (SIG) and Race to the Top (RTT) program is to help states enhance their capacity to support the turnaround of low-performing schools. This capacity may be important, given how difficult it is to produce substantial and sustained achievement gains in low-performing…