Childhood is a universal aspect of the human condition. Yet the landscape of childhood is changing rapidly. On playgrounds young children carry cell phones, and in classrooms children are more sophisticated in their use of computers and digital media than the adults in their lives. Most young adolescents are prolific communicators via text and…

Drawing on the insights of critical disability studies, this article addresses anxieties frequently articulated by academic staff around the implementation of the United Kingdom's Disability Discrimination Act: how to accommodate the needs of students with "hidden" impairments. Following the social model of disability, it argues that…

Debate continues regarding the nature and desirability of graduate attributes, driven partly by stakeholder expectations that universities will prepare employees for the knowledge economy and partly by higher education academics and learning specialists. While universities appear to have accepted their new vocational role, there is considerable…

Nearly every high-priority item in national, federal, state, and local discussions about education--and policy proposals across the political spectrum--requires high-quality longitudinal data to inform its design, implementation, and evaluation. This factsheet shares Data Quality Campaign's (DQC's) analysis of what "Data for Action 2011:…

Response to Intervention (RTI) is an instructional framework through which schools can provide early intervention for students experiencing academic and behavioral difficulties. It is also promoted as an alternative to the IQ-discrepancy model for identifying students with learning disabilities. Most states have developed, or are developing,…

High-quality teaching is the most significant school-related factor in helping students make significant gains in learning or achievement. Students who have effective teachers year after year routinely make more progress than other students. This is why every child must experience great teaching every day. For this to occur, teachers must have…

We outline the project management tactics that we developed in praxis in order to manage elearning projects and show how our tactics were enhanced through implementing project management techniques from a formal project management methodology. Two key factors have contributed to our project management success. The first is maintaining a clear…

The first set of international recommendations to guide environmental education (EE) was developed in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1977. Ten years later, in 1987, a conference in Moscow, Russia, reviewed progress and focused on institutional strategies and action plans to strengthen environmental education. A third international environmental education…

The University of Denver's Penrose Library's Stacks Maintenance unit is a separately managed unit that works in collaboration with all library departments to ensure complete access to the library's print collections. This unit takes advantage of a variety of techniques and tools to fulfill its mission, including a fine-tuned tracer system for…

Design-Based Research (DBR) has been a tool of the learning sciences since the early 1990s, used as a way to improve and study learning environments. Using an iterative process of design with the goal of reining theories of learning, researchers and educators now use DBR seek to identify "how" to make a learning environment work. They then draw…

Implementing a complex business intelligence (BI) system at a small school or one with limited resources can seem daunting. For small to midsize schools and community colleges, a strategic BI initiative may still be an elusive goal. This article discusses how schools with limited resources are making the dream a reality.

In this essay, we describe our experiences working with a rebellious primary stakeholder, Sylvia, as evaluators of a district-wide safe schools program. Given the breadth of the program and its multiple target constituencies, we were confronted with the challenges of managing a large number of stakeholders, or those individuals and groups that…

Providing child-centred play opportunities and re-creating early attachment experiences facilitates a child's social and emotional development, as well as giving time and space for self-expression and relaxation. Play therapists provide these conditions after lengthy and intensive training. Para-professionals are now being trained and supported in…

The article is an epistemological analysis of quality, standards and quality assurance. A positivist, phenomenological and critical epistemological framework is used to explore the interrelationships between quality, standards and purposes and approaches to quality assurance. The article concludes with an embryonic analysis of the implementation…

Community schools, or full-service schools, address the barriers to learning created by social problems, such as poverty, that affect students' home life and well-being. These schools do this by partnering with community services and agencies to offer students and their families the supports and services they need to remedy the life problems that…