The National Resource Centers Program provides grants to institutions of higher education to establish, strengthen, and operate comprehensive and undergraduate centers that are national resources for: (1) Teaching modern foreign languages, especially the less and least commonly taught languages; (2) Disciplinary instruction to provide a thorough…

A significant proportion of students enrolling in mathematical subjects designed for non-STEM majors in university courses have minimal mathematical skills and poor motivation. This combination of starting attributes often leads to failure in the first mathematical subject encountered. We have been implementing simple, alternative pedagogies in an…

This paper describes and analyses the work of a large scale improvement project in England in order to find more effective ways of fostering equity within education systems. The project involved an approach based on an analysis of local context, and used processes of networking and collaboration in order to make better use of available expertise.…

In the fall of 2007--aware that the continuing professional development of teachers is paramount to quality education--John Baird, head of Westtown School (Pennsylvania), asked the faculty Professional Development Committee (PDC), consisting of faculty representatives from all three divisions of the school, to design a "professional growth…

A domestic credit union engages in a systematic performance improvement plan to better leverage a technical application within its organization. By engaging stakeholders early in the process, standardizing the organization's nomenclature, and building strategic partnerships, the credit union was able to achieve both quantitative and qualitative…

Education is a lifelong process of continuous learning and renewal. This is necessary because of ongoing research and changes in technologies. For educators, the need for training leads to a continual search for learning opportunities from many sources. School administrators routinely provide in-service training. National and state associations…

Around the world there is a preoccupation with improving the performance of schools and school systems. Comparisons made between countries through PISA and PERLs have led to a preoccupation, and in some cases, an obsession, with securing a high position in the international league tables. The minds of policy-makers and politicians alike are…

Purpose: The use of teams in organizations given the current trend toward globalization, population changes, and an aging workforce, especially in high-income countries, makes the issue of diverse team building critical. The purpose of this paper is to explore the issue of team diversity and team performance through the examination of theory and…

A combination of regular classroom teaching with the use of resources available on the Moodle platform has been designed to foster the development of skills for learning to learn for students in an undergraduate general chemistry course. The use of the Moodle platform essentially aimed at strengthening the students' prior knowledge of…

This paper describes an action research project that investigated a range of activities to improve learners' mathematical communication skills. It also gives details of a subsequent case study that illustrates how technology can provide a means of overcoming some of the difficulties learners and tutors face in communicating about numeracy, while…

High school students have had some difficulties in understanding chemistry due to traditional ways of teaching this specific science. It is important to improve teaching methods that increase student motivation, not only to enhance their capacity for understanding, but also to generate a greater level of interest in the study of chemistry for…

What does it take to change a school's mathematics achievement profile from low to one that is proficient and advanced? Is this transformed achievement profile sustainable? Such is the story presented here, in this three-phase case study of a K-8 urban charter school's mathematics program. The first phase discusses the school's…

For decades, minority students have been falling behind non-minority students, and schools have been striving to bridge this gap. It has, indeed, been challenging for middle and high schools, especially when striving to increase reading achievement: Since most middle and high school teachers are non-English teachers, they lack reading instruction…

Discusses the evaluation of library reference service; examines problems with past evaluations, including the lack of long-term planning and a systems perspective; and suggests a method for continuously monitoring and improving reference service using quality improvement tools such as checklists, cause and effect diagrams, Pareto charts, and…

The purpose of this research was to document the extent to which Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB)-accredited business schools have implemented strategies to improve students' ability to achieve program learning objectives. Assessment of academic programs is increasingly important at AACSB schools. Compliance with…