As college promise programs proliferate across the United States with noted intentions to promote access through increased affordability, it is necessary to understand the relationship between these programs and other forms of financial aid, including loans. Using federal, state, and program-level data, we leverage a natural experiment to estimate…

Shortages of STEM teachers have presented challenges to school employers for decades. Additionally, universities are tasked to produce science teachers of better quality, equipped in both content and pedagogical strategies. Undergraduate STEM majors with no prior inclination toward teaching were strategically selected to receive pedagogical…

Two distinct literature bases exist documenting the benefits of study aboard participation and state-adopted merit-aid policies. However, few, to date, have estimated the impact of merit-aid adoption on study abroad participation. Results from our study demonstrate the potential positive externality merit-aid policy adoption has on study abroad…

Guided pathways reforms are emerging as a promising strategy for improving student outcomes and closing equity gaps at community colleges, but little is known about how the guided pathways approach can help address challenges facing adult students. This report discusses strategies that three Tennessee community colleges that have implemented…

We explore the impacts of a Consortium of rural high schools and colleges in Tennessee engaged in partnership activities to improve high school students' college and career readiness. These 29 Consortium schools received support from the federal Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) to scale up local promising practices, including distance and online…

Leading voices in the biological sciences have called for a transformation in graduate education leading to the PhD degree. One area commonly singled out for growth and innovation is cross-training in computational science. In 1998, the University of Tennessee (UT) founded an intercollegiate graduate program called the UT-ORNL Graduate School of…

This article describes Marathon Month, a workplace wellness program for Extension employees. The program promoted physical activity by challenging employees to walk or run the length of a marathon (26.2 mi) or half marathon (13.1 mi) over the course of 1 month. Of the 317 participants, 90% achieved a self-set goal of completing a full or half…

The purpose of this study was to identify and describe successful innovations in educational leadership preparation programs. Professors of educational leadership from across the nation nominated innovations of 12 programs. Based on review of descriptions of the innovations provided by nominees, further documentation on the innovations was…

Interest in scaling up prekindergarten programs for children from low income families is dramatically increasing, especially with the announcement by President Obama of support for "universal preschool." Research in early education supports the idea of developmentally appropriate practice as reflected in instructional groupings and…

This article explores civic development and its roles in the lives of emerging adults, and the ways in which college contexts--particularly Christian colleges and universities--may foster adaptive civic development. First, the article presents an argument for the importance of fostering civic development as rooted in historic truths of the…

By 2013, all 50 states and the District of Columbia had adopted college- and career-ready standards in English language arts and mathematics, placing a greater emphasis on argument writing to prepare students for life after high school. Solving the specific problem of how to help teachers teach to new standards for argument writing as well as the…

The following profiles address how the state departments of education are supporting local educators in classroom implementation of the states' new college- and career-readiness standards by providing (or facilitating the development of) aligned instructional resources and materials. These resources and materials are supplementary supports that…

This article examines an ongoing university-community relationship that fuses innovative technology delivery, university-outreach research, and social work practice/research education into a unique, collaborative intervention to reduce homelessness. In doing so, we apply a social justice framework to homelessness, arguing that housing is a right…

Tennessee began its movement toward Middle Level Licensure during the 2002-2003 school year. Only 14 years later, in 2016, Middle Level Licensure in Tennessee will change. In this article, the background and experiences of seven middle level education teacher candidates at the University of Memphis who were the first candidates to complete the…

The following profiles address how the state departments of education are helping educators prepare for and implement their states' new college- and career-readiness standards and aligned assessments, through professional learning. SREB researchers examined each state's major professional development efforts around its new standards in order to…