The authors argue that the prospect of performance can motivate students to learn. He uses a study of the Above and Beyond program at a K-5 school, where students appeared to be more interested in their subjects and learn more effectively when given the opportunity to display or perform in front of an audience.

Since the mid-20th century, instructional technologies and educational media in social work education have undergone significant development with the goals of improving learning and performance and enhancing access. This growth has been marked by technical advances in hardware and by innovations in media, or so-called soft formats. Current…

This paper reports a problem-based learning model for the training of university students in the area of industrial energy efficiency, and discusses its context, contents, and the results from its implementation. The impact has been significant, with hundreds of university graduates trained and many of them now working in industry, leading their…

In this article, I argue that student learning is enhanced when civic engagement is a component of international education initiatives. When only presented with knowledge about global challenges, students can become frustrated and overwhelmed unless they also understand how they might contribute to solutions. Political science programs are…

Decades of research have demonstrated, now convincingly, that emotional and behavioral syndromes and many of their antecedent risks can be prevented. Much of this progress can be traced to the founding and expansion of the relatively young field called prevention science, an interdisciplinary field that emerged in the early 1990s to address the…

Objective: This report describes the development and preliminary findings regarding the reliability, validity, and sensitivity of a scale that has been developed to assess practitioners' perceived familiarity with, attitudes about, and implementation of the phases of the evidence-based practice (EBP) process. Method: After a panel of national…

Action research, also called classroom or teacher research, has been defined as "systematic, intentional inquiry by teachers". Action research encourages school personnel to systematically develop a question, gather data, and then analyze that data to improve their practice. Over the last 15 years, the complexities of using action…

In the U.S., only 38 of every 100 ninth graders enroll in college; of these 38, only 18 complete bachelors' degrees within six years. Asynchronous learning networks (ALN)--asynchronous, highly interactive, instructor-led, resource-rich, cohort-based learning--can yield high success rates. Growing demand for online education and the expectation…

Higher education is charged with preparing graduates to be successful in an international society. This paper will examine Missouri Southern State University's approach to internationalizing their campus and curriculum.

Missouri's vocational education delivery system provided a full range of programs, services, and activities for students in secondary, postsecondary, and adult institutions during fiscal year 1993. Some highlights of these activities are the following: (1) the system was composed of 418 local education agencies (LEAs), including 397 comprehensive…

This report provides an overview of a 2-year project aimed at developing an introductory-level training and educational support program for family day care providers in Jackson County, Missouri. The report describes participant characteristics, curriculum development, provider recruitment efforts, formative and summative evaluation procedures and…

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics encourages the use of calculators in the classroom as a teaching and learning tool, as well as a computational tool. This paper evaluates the impact on teachers' approaches to teaching mathematics and students' attitudes toward mathematics as the result of participation in an in-service program…