Several years ago, when the author was associate dean in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, a new senior administrator on campus expressed the view that one of their premier first-year experience programs in the college was too expensive and that a different model, based on an approach taken at the administrator's previous…

Granted, it might be a bit of a stretch to find comparable attributes between an ice hockey team and facilities management organizations. However, if you are open-minded to the possibility and begin to analyze each of these entities, you will find there are some distinct similarities. Ice hockey is a fast-paced and ever-changing game, much like a…

This paper focuses on widening participation in higher education and the low recruitment of students from diverse backgrounds within sport-related programs. The purpose of the study has been to describe and increase the understanding of how the preconditions and premises for choosing to study "sport" appear to students from diverse…

It is well documented that studies reporting statistically significant results are more likely to be published than are studies reporting nonsignificant results--a phenomenon called "publication bias". Publication bias in meta-analytic reviews should be identified and reduced when possible. Ferguson and Brannick (2012) argued that the inclusion of…

This article focuses on power, difference and knowledge, areas critical to adult education. It conveys insights into how educators and curators in an art museum imagined and engaged with difference, and particularly the black subject, when working within a collaborative project that included the acquisition of art objects (fine art photography).…

The author's journey as a strategic staffing principal in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has been one of ups and downs, scary turns and some great success for students. It began in May 2008 when she was asked to move to Devonshire Elementary School with marching orders to "turn the school around." Because of its failure to meet annual…

Creating experiential learning opportunities that engage students, meet marketing curricula objectives, and fit the application in a traditional semester course is extremely challenging. This paper describes a role-playing simulation offered concurrently to the professional selling and sales management classes in which the selling students act as…

This paper focuses on two likelihood-based indices of person fit, the index "l[subscript z]" and the Snijders's modified index "l[subscript z]*". The first one is commonly used in practical assessment of person fit, although its asymptotic standard normal distribution is not valid when true abilities are replaced by sample…

When tests consist of multiple-choice and constructed-response items, researchers are confronted with the question of which item response theory (IRT) model combination will appropriately represent the data collected from these mixed-format tests. This simulation study examined the performance of six model selection criteria, including the…

Chinese learners of Dutch and a control group of native speakers of Dutch were presented with 26 sentences in the order they come in a story, visually as well as auditorily as spoken with four intonation contours. Participants were instructed to select the most appropriate intonation contour for each sentence in a forced choice task. Chinese…

It would be unusual to read the current literature on community colleges and not find a reference to impending retirements of senior-level administrators, faculty, and staff, as well as what skills and characteristics are important for future leadership. There is limited research on attaining the first community college presidency. This study…

On a recent Saturday morning, 20 inmate mothers filed into the prison chapel at Alabama's Tutwiler Prison to participate in a unique program--The Storybook Project, a program of Aid to Inmate Mothers (AIM). AIM is a nonprofit organization that helps mothers in prison stay in contact with their children during their incarceration. At the front of…

In this paper the authors present a new method for sample selection for scale-up experiments. This method uses propensity score matching methods to create a sample that is similar in composition to a well-defined generalization population. The method they present is flexible and practical in the sense that it identifies units to be targeted for…

This dissertation transforms a set of system complexity reduction problems to feature selection problems. Three systems are considered: classification based on association rules, network structure learning, and time series classification. Furthermore, two variable importance measures are proposed to reduce the feature selection bias in tree…

This practical guide demonstrates how to sponsor a successful, student-led book club for grades K through 12 that is fun, easy-to-implement, and encourages reading. Establishing a book club for children and young people that's self-sustaining and successful long-term is a challenge that this book addresses and conquers. According to recent…