The digitized collections of artifacts known as electronic portfolios are creating solutions to a variety of performance improvement needs in ways that are cost-effective and improve both individual and group learning and performance. When social media functionality is embedded in e-portfolios, the tools support collaboration, social learning,…

Background: Approximately 1 million people in the United States suffer from aphasia and > 50% of those people may demonstrate recurrent perseverations. No consensus has been forthcoming on whether: (1) a therapy that directly confronts clients with imminent pre-articulatory automatisms (the perseverations); or (2) a more typical…

Institutional policies and policy systems are vital to the well-being of institutions of higher education. While many institutions dedicate time and resources to the development of key policies, the establishment of a well-designed and well-functioning policy system is often neglected. We refer to the discrepancy between the importance of…

Eclectic instructional design is the process whereby a designer blends ideas from multiple learning theories to construct a learning experience that works better than a course designed from only one theoretical influence. Eclectic instructional designers are those who do not get hung up or rely consistently on any one theory for their designs.…

Field instructors have often not felt empowered to address their concerns about a critical skill in their students' professional development: their students' writing. In this article, we explain ways that field education departments and social work faculty can support field instructors to improve their students' writing. In addition, we provide…

This article presents the author's Presidential Address delivered to the Association for Science Education Annual Conference, University of Liverpool, January 2012. "Science for all" has been an aspiration of the Association for Science Education and the organisations from which it evolved for almost a century. It has, however, proved an…

Effective approaches to assessment in the classroom have long been debated at national, regional and local levels. The Department for Education has embarked upon numerous curricular reforms that will have an impact upon the assessment arrangements for our current and future learners. However, many of these educational transformations impacting…

Many science problems require students to convert units. While this skill may not get the attention that more central science concepts do, teachers in the middle school and early high school grades will be doing their students a great service by leaving them with a strong understanding of both the skill itself and the reasons behind it. When the…

Principals must cope with the pressures arising from accountability while enabling flexibility in teachers' work. How do principals manage these tensions when attempting to improve their schools? And where are these tensions most commonly centered? Both questions relate to "managerial ambidexterity," or how principals simultaneously…

On September 22, 2012, NSF announced its decision to fund a three-year project, "Models for Information Assurance Education and Outreach" (MIAEO). In the first year of grant operation, MIAEO has invited 18 high school students, two K-12 teachers, and two CSUB student assistants to conduct research explorations in the fields of…

Policy shapes practice, and the increasingly important realm of professional development is no exception. In order to identify effective professional development policies and strategies, a Stanford University research team examined the policy frameworks supporting high levels of professional development activity in four states. The…

In the late 1980s, the University of Maryland Baltimore County launched a major initiative to find out why more students were not succeeding in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics--known collectively as the STEM disciplines--despite the university's long-standing commitment to those fields. A review of student data revealed that the…

Purpose: Researchers and scholars have called for greater attention to collaboration among and between educational leaders in districtwide reform. This work underlines the important social aspect of such collaboration and further investigates the type of professional interaction among/between district and school leaders particularly around the…

The "over-age, under-credited" (OA/UC) student population is defined as high school students who are at least two years behind their peers in terms of age and credits earned toward a high school diploma. To date, few studies have examined the schooling of OA/UC students. The purpose of this study is to use the insights of six African…

This study investigates the different learning opportunities enabled by text-based and video-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) from an interactionist perspective. Six Chinese-speaking learners of English and six English-speaking learners of Chinese were paired up as tandem (reciprocal) learning dyads. Each dyad participated…