As numerous studies from 1906 on have confirmed, children lose ground in learning if they lack opportunities for building skills over the summer. Nonetheless, summer learning loss comes up but rarely in the national discussion of education reform. By the end of summer, students perform on average one month behind where they left off in the spring.…

In response to the changing demands of the U.S. healthcare system and the needs of the nursing profession, the Institute of Medicine, in collaboration with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, spearheaded a two-year initiative to develop recommendations for the future of nursing. Discussions of these recommendations within nursing education led to…

Program evaluation is recognized as an essential skill set for practitioners in service-related fields, such as education, nonprofit management, social work, and public health. Recently, the need for a public workforce trained in evaluation has increased and is driven primarily by our nation's emphasis on accountability during a time when…

Patient centered medicine is a paradigm of health care that seeks to treat the whole person, rather than only the illness. The physician must understand the patient as a whole by considering the patient's individual needs, social structure, socioeconomic status, and educational background. Medical education includes ways to train students in this…

The efficacy of the "Chase Charlie Races" (an experiential learning activity) was demonstrated via program assessment. This was achieved via post-event evaluations of race participants and student club members, and with fitness assessments of 76 elementary students who participated in an eight-week training program. Paired sample t-tests revealed…

This article provides a description of the birth of The Odyssey Initiative. As teachers, this group of three, all educators, knew that there was outrage about the state of education in America. Griping about our nation's schools has almost become a pastime, and with very good reason. However, they found the solutions being offered to save our…

Service-learning projects are a cornerstone of student experiential learning. Such programs have proven to be mutually beneficial to communities and students within a variety of family and consumer sciences courses. However, there is a paucity of literature addressing service-learning efforts within the field of financial planning. There is an…

For this study, one hundred and twenty student reflection papers (undergraduate and graduate) from a service learning extracurricular event titled, "Community University Educational Summit" (CUES) was analyzed. Over a two-year period, this event was held on one Saturday during the month of October at California State University San…

Civic engagement has become an essential learning goal for institutions throughout higher education. Communication scholars employ various pedagogical tools to foster civic engagement. For instance, service learning has been shown to increase political and community engagement in courses such as family communication and public relations. Teachers…

In undergraduate geography programs in the United States there is increasing demand for students to be prepared for real-world project management and to possess strong GIS technical skills and cartographic communication skills upon graduation. There is, however, limited time and opportunity within the framework of traditional undergraduate…

"Listening to the River" (LTTR) is a watershed science education project funded by the National Science Foundation. The project aims to deliver watershed education experiences in and around Traverse City, Michigan, and also to develop a model that can be replicated in other locations. Inverness Research was contracted by the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how knowledge of different kinds is put to work in workplace education programmes for adults with low skills and adults with higher skills. A novel framework, which has moved beyond narrow conceptions of "transfer" to concentrate on different forms of knowledge and the ways these are…

A group of 41 Tulsa Tech students and two instructors volunteered to the Mission of Mercy, a free, two-day dental clinic co-sponsored by the Oklahoma Dental Association, the Delta Dental of Oklahoma Charitable Foundation and the Oklahoma Dental Foundation held downtown at the Tulsa Convention Center. The clinic was designed to meet the critical…

Wheat and soybean producers pay a small amount per bushel produced as a check-off. Funds are used for research, outreach, and crop promotion. Commodity organizations and Extension joined forces to develop multi-state educational outreach on spring wheat and soybean production. Participatory planning involved producers in developing these…

A critical interest of applied anthropology is to educate students to be theoretically grounded and capable of assuming a level of social responsibility that extends beyond academia. In this paper, we reflect on the issue of student preparation for work in the policy arena by focusing on the experiences of a five-year applied research project that…