Rural areas in the alpine regions suffer from dwindling student numbers. Differentiated instruction (DI) could help improve the teaching culture by allowing instructors to better adapt to heterogeneous student groups. At the beginning of a combined research and school improvement project, a survey of 162 teachers and 1180 students was conducted to…

Employee engagement is not just HR's responsibility. While HR is responsible for the process of measuring and driving engagement, improving it is actually everyone's responsibility. And that means reducing the barriers to productivity to drive business performance. Training departments can play a pivotal role. Their job is to enhance curriculum or…

Benchmarking, when done properly, offers a lot of promise for higher education units that want to improve how they do business. It is clear that much is known, but still more needs to be learned before it reaches its full potential as a useful tool. Readers of this issue of "New Directions for Institutional Research" have been treated to useful…

Despite a great increase in the numbers of students enrolling in higher education, specifically at community colleges, the successful completion rates for these students has remained static since the 1970s. When reviewing strategies to increase student retention and successful completion, the Student Success Course (SSC) has emerged as a promising…

In this important book, respected educator Robert Rueda proposes a multidimensional model that will provide a more comprehensive lens for addressing the achievement gap in today's schools. Drawing on work from educational psychology as well as several other fields, Rueda identifies three primary reasons for the stubborn failure of most school…

Previous research (i.e., Wilder, Rost, & McMahon, 2007) has suggested that managers perform poorly when predicting items and activities which their employees state that they might like to earn as part of performance improvement programs. The purpose of the current study was to replicate the earlier study conducted by Wilder et al. (2007) with a…

The State of Wisconsin's YoungStar system was created by the Legislature and Governor in 2010 to "drive quality improvement in child care throughout the state." YoungStar uses a five-star system to rate child care providers based on several measures of quality, including staff education levels, learning environment, business methods, and…

The importance of global education cannot be overstated in modern society. In order to be successful and live happily in the world, today's young people must develop the skills, knowledge, and attitudes required to interact with people and countries around the globe. The first step to promoting global perspectives in the classroom is to ensure…

It's no mystery why children from low-income families often arrive at the kindergarten door lagging substantially behind their wealthier peers in foundational vocabulary, literacy, math, and social skills. These children, writes Cynthia Lamy are less likely to have the early educational supports their wealthier peers receive. They are less…

In this paper, we consider several features of teacher-retention policies based on value-added measures of effectiveness under a variety of empirically grounded rules and parameters. We consider the effects of policy design by varying the standard above which satisfactory teachers are expected to perform. We simulate recently adopted policies that…

Objective: Insufficient and poor quality sleep is prevalent in children, and is a significant public health concern due to the negative consequences for health. Certain sleep-related behaviours are associated with improved sleep, and sleep behaviours are amenable to efforts targeted towards behaviour change. Parental educational interventions have…

This article describes a novel effort in New York City, the Learning Partners Program, which matches veteran principals with two or more newer ones. In 2014-15, the first full year of the effort, the city's Department of Education put 73 of the city's more than 1,800 schools into 23 groups of threes and one group of four. Every group comprised one…

There have been limited qualitative case studies exploring effective strategies designed to improve graduation rates in rural school districts. Specifically, few studies have presented information based solely upon the voices of practitioners themselves in solving the graduation crisis in America's public schools. This study will add to the…

The following design case illustrates the approach a group of advanced graduate online-design students, two design coaches, and an instructor used to design an online instructional intervention as a service-learning project for parents interested in improving their parenting skills with their pre-teens. This design case is distinctive in that it…

In this paper, we describe the faculty development resources, structures, and processes utilized to promote educational scholarship in a department of pediatrics. We discuss a 5-year effort based on the strategy of forming an "academy" of educational scholars and resulting in significant increases in peer-reviewed conference…