Judge Harry T. Roman, an electrical engineer and inventor himself, has selected the best entries in the 2007-2008 "Tech Directions" Inventors Award Competition. This year's challenge called for students to devise new uses for the common Ping-Pong ball. Of the results, the judge notes "The ideas submitted were most interesting, with a high number…

This study was designed to analyze the hiring criteria of principals in Iowa to determine whether districts were seeking the characteristics of second-order change in their principals. Using content analysis, hiring criteria provided by districts were coded to identify those that described second-order change responsibilities per Mid-continent…

Pigeons responded in a successive-encounters procedure that consisted of a search state, a choice state, and a handling state. The search state was either a fixed-interval or mixed-interval schedule presented on the center key of a three-key chamber. Upon completion of the search state, the choice state was presented, in which the center key was…

Simply defined, the term browsing means: "to casually look over or through an aggregate of things, especially in search of something of interest." When students come up to a librarian and say, "I don't know what book to get!" the cause is either they are not sure how to look through the collection of materials, or they are not sure where their…

Four experiments with 1391 participants compared descriptive models of risky decision making. The first replicated and extended evidence refuting cumulative prospect theory (CPT) as an explanation of Allais paradoxes. The second and third experiments used a new design to unconfound tests of upper and lower coalescing, which allows tests of…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB, 2002) has produced an explosion of interest in the use of assessment to measure and improve student learning. Initially focused on annual state tests, educators quickly learned that results came too little and too late to identify students who were falling behind. At the same time, evidence from the…

This study examined the English, mathematics, and natural sciences course work taken by students in their first year of college. Four-year postsecondary institutions (k = 110) provided first-year performance data for the first-time, first-year students who began college in the fall of 2006. As in previous research, composition is the most commonly…

This report on a statewide telephone survey describes child care use in Minnesota among households with children 12 and younger. Minnesota has an estimated 908,000 children ages 12 and younger; 24 percent are ages 0 to 2, 24 percent ages 3 to 5, 30 percent ages 6 to 9 and 23 percent ages 10 to 12. Of the nearly 500,000 households with one or more…

In the last thirty years, there has been a significant increase in the number of adjunct faculty delivering postsecondary education at community colleges (Jacoby, 2006). Multiple studies have evaluated the impact of part-time faculty on student learning outcomes, but findings have varied. This action research study utilized a phenomenological…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine whether there are any differences in what school board members look for in the areas of personal characteristics and professional skills when hiring a superintendent. A sample population of school board members who were serving at a school that had an opening for a superintendent during the…

This dissertation presents two frameworks of what drives the ICT workers' decisions to terminate their employment with their employers, using in-depth interviewing of 38 ICT participants in different industry sectors in South Africa. The findings show external labor markets (ELMs) and internal labor markets (ILM) turnover factor across information…

The study examined the effect of being offered enrollment at a charter middle school on student achievement and behaviors. The study analyzed data from two cohorts of more than 2,100 students in 29 sites across 15 states between 2005 and 2008. Enrollment offers at each charter school were granted by lottery. The study compared outcomes of students…

The WWC practice guide "Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade" presents a set of evidence-based practices that teachers and other educators can use to successfully teach reading comprehension to young readers. The guide, developed by a panel of experts, presents a set of evidence-based practices that teachers…

The superintendent is the highest ranking administrator in a school district (Katz, 2005). Despite increasing trends of women advancing in the fields of business and government, the superintendent position in school districts still has relatively few women (Brunner & Grogan, 2007; Dana & Bourisaw, 2006; Glass, 2000; Grogan & Brunner,…

This article challenges current recruitment and hiring practices in educational advancement organizations, while proposing a paradigm shift in addressing the talent shortage of fundraising professionals. A case is presented that competence and fit is more important than experience for successful and productive fundraising outcomes. The paper…