The purpose of this study was to understand the landscape of the Sports Based Youth Development (SBYD) field, especially around areas of practical concern for program leaders, staff, and funders. This study integrates SBYD best practices from the research perspective as reflected in empirical studies and non-empirical literature and from…

Animal-assisted interventions intentionally incorporate the power of the human-animal bond into the therapeutic process. Research findings indicate that therapy dog programs can reduce student stress and build connections within the school, strengthening student response to school-based interventions and providing a foundation to achieve a diverse…

Academic advising has been researched and linked to student retention and completion in numerous studies. New state initiatives, legislative funding pressure, and financial aid changes have increased pressure on accurate, timely, and intrusive advising to increase timely graduation and student success. As academic advising played a vital role in…

The authors describe the efforts of the faculty and administration at a small, Midwestern, Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business-accredited school to improve business students' career readiness. Over a four-year period, the school moved through three distinctive phases in developing a robust career development program serving…

Some institutions' prior learning assessment (PLA) programs are far more successful than others. As with any strategic initiative, the best-intentioned policy is only as good as the implementation, operations, and people behind it. Beyond progressing through the change management process, ensuring sustainability is critical to long-term PLA…

This article describes the creation of a First Year Experience learning community in a teacher education program. The First Year Experience model was adopted by the university because of declining enrollment, retention, and graduation rates and has been generally successful in the education department. With little information available for teacher…

The primary purpose of the article was to build a framework for an innovative approach to online internships after examining best practices in hospitality internships. Learning the ins and outs of an industry virtually, using contemporary internship methods strengthens the student's expertise and better prepares them for future workplace…

This chapter describes a model for continuous improvement that guides the work of the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools, or NCSU. NCSU is a research and development center funded by the Institute for Education Sciences, the research arm of the United States Department of Education. At the core of the Center's work is an innovative…

The purpose of this descriptive case study was to identify teacher strengths and needs to create a site-specific professional development program for literacy. I was interested in studying how to identify teacher needs and strengths and explore the compatibility between teacher beliefs, current practice, and best practices in literacy. This study…

Borrowing the term "translational research" (TR) from medicine, along with some of the ideas and practices that define it, holds promise as a way of linking research more closely to the practice of youth development. However, doing so entails substantial adaptation. TR is more than a new name for applied research. It comprehends the…

Background: The Whole Child approach and the coordinated school health (CSH) approach both address the physical and emotional needs of students. However, a unified approach acceptable to both the health and education communities is needed to assure that students are healthy and ready to learn. Methods: During spring 2013, the ASCD (formerly known…

This article describes the various aspects of developing a new EdD model at a large, urban university, the University of Southern California. The authors were all centrally involved in the change process and the conceptualization and implementation of the restructured program. The article summarizes the decade-long experiences and lessons learned…

The espoused foundation of U.S. society, "E pluribus unum" (out of many, one), is based on the belief that this nation should simultaneously support pluralism and promote unity. The road to making this ideal a reality, however, has not always been smooth. The ever-widening achievement gap highlights how this discordance plays out in our…

Emphasis on improving student learning has brought increased attention to the execution of schoolwide instructional reforms in general and the use of data by teacher teams in particular as an expected element of a school's instructional reform strategy. With this in mind, the purpose of this article is to focus important attention on the work…

Effective public history dialogue depends on all voices having adequate access to interpretation and experience set in historical and/or cultural environments. The dissertation explores programming developed specifically for secondary education students who have intellectual disabilities and other related cognitive and developmental disabilities.…