Credit recovery in public education has become an intervention used widely in the United States to address the rising number of students who are not meeting with success in the completion of required courses in the traditional education setting. With the passing of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, public schools sought a method to motivate…

In the five years following implementation of a chat reference service at James Madison University (JMU), the service proved very popular but was not closely assessed for quality of service. Using grounded theory and qualitative data analysis techniques, a comprehensive assessment effort was begun in earnest and is in progress. Preliminary results…

The FNS Research Corner provides a continuing series to summarize recently completed and current research conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) in the area of child nutrition. Summaries of recently completed research projects and in-progress research are provided in this article.

Assessment is a cyclical process within which educators construct outcomes, implement programs, assess constructs such as learning, evaluate results, and utilize results to craft stronger programs and services. Within educational and faculty development, assessment measures program impact on faculty, students, and/or institutional culture.…

First year students, like all students at a university, comprise a diverse mixture of personal traits, backgrounds, experiences, and assorted learning styles. Each of these unique student characteristics can either enhance or inhibit successful integration to the campus community. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of various…

In 2004, Lumina Foundation for Education launched "Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count," a national initiative aimed at improving success among community college students, particularly low-income students and students of color. Now encompassing more than 130 institutions in 24 states and the District of Columbia, Achieving the…

In the fall of 2008, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) commissioned a research study comparing the college access provider resources in Virginia to the access and academic achievement needs of the state. That study--conducted by researchers from the College of William and Mary and West Carolina University--resulted in the…

Differential response (DR), also referred to as alternative response (AR), family assessment response (FAR), or multiple track response, was developed to incorporate family-centered, strengths-based practices into child protective services (CPS), primarily by diverting lower risk families into an assessment track rather than requiring the…

Virginia's SHARP logger program is a Cooperative Extension program currently providing training to over 1,500 loggers, foresters, and others. We conducted a mail survey of SHARP loggers to characterize program participants, assess programming needs, and evaluate program effectiveness. Results indicate a diverse group of participants in terms of…

This is the final external evaluation report prepared by SRI International for the Rural Math Excel Partnership (RMEP) project, an investing in innovation (i3) development project funded by the U.S. Department of Education. Operated by Virginia Advanced Study Strategies, Inc. (VASS), the RMEP project included six rural school districts (LEAs) in…

In 2004, Lumina Foundation for Education launched "Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count," a national initiative aimed at improving success among community college students, particularly low-income students and students of color. Now encompassing more than 130 institutions in 24 states and the District of Columbia, Achieving the…

This guidebook aims to provide clear, non-technical descriptions of procedures for evaluating the effectiveness of local gifted education programs in Virginia. The procedures were developed with both external and internal evaluations in mind. The evaluation process is described in four phases: planning, collecting the data, interpreting the data…

The Commonwealth of Virginia, as with other states, operates a panoply of programs whose objectives, either directly or indirectly, are to develop the state's workforce. Some programs enhance the skills of Virginians through training or formal education; whereas other programs, such as the Employment Service, attempt to facilitate the employment…

Designed to ascertain whether advanced students could apply language skills acquired through a minimum of three years of study to a practical purpose such as an academic subject, this report describes and evaluates a 2-year research project involving the teaching of history in French or Spanish in a number of Virginia high schools. Following a…

A followup study was conducted to determine the number and percentage of former vocational agricultural students who left high schools in Virginia from 1954-1966 and who were engaged in farming and other occupations in 1967. Occupational records of 32,270 former students who had completed 1 or more years of vocational agriculture were secured from…