The Exploring Engagement Fund provides risk capital for arts nonprofits to experiment with innovative ideas about how to engage diverse Californians. In order to understand the variety of Californians engaged in arts experiences, this guide is intended to support current and future Fund grantees in collecting participant information. Exploring…

Maryland's demanding new Kindergarten Readiness Assessment was administered statewide for the first time. Its results are revealing and sobering. Many states do not even check in any systematic way on their children's readiness for kindergarten, and in previous years, Maryland used metrics based on modest expectations, outdated standards, and…

As the world is experiencing unprecedented changes and challenges, it is essential to develop educational approaches that enable current and future leaders to be effective in meeting them. To do so, education must foster transformation of the learner to achieve an inclusive, dynamic, and flexible approach to life. This dissertation involved a case…

Public health agencies protect the health and safety of populations. A key function of public health agencies is surveillance or the ongoing, systematic collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of data about health-related events. Recent public health events, such as the H1N1 outbreak, have triggered increased funding for and…

Wait-time is an important aspect in a teaching and learning process, especially after the teacher has posed questions to students, as it is one of the factors in determining quality of students' responses. This article describes the practices of wait-time one after teacher's questions at multiple representation levels among twenty three chemistry…

The average American produces around 1,600 pounds of garbage every year, and it is estimated that 50 percent of that waste is material that could be composted (Clean Air Council, 2012). Instead, most is sent to landfills and incinerators. In technology and engineering education, a great deal of time is spent in talking, teaching, and thinking…

Although student involvement in research and inquiry can advance undergraduate learning, there are limited opportunities for undergraduate students to be directly involved in social science research. Social science faculty members typically work outside of laboratory settings, with the limited research assistance work being completed by graduate…

The lesson described herein is the result of a partnership between a teacher and an entomologist brought together by a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded grant that paired teachers and researchers to impact K-12 STEM education through partnership and innovation. This collaboration resulted in five lessons featuring live insects such as…

Demographic data on students are now routinely collected in universities. However, these data do not include information on sexual orientation and gender identity. In Australia there has been public resistance to tracking the enrollment and retention of gay, lesbian, and transgender people in tertiary education. This article interrogates this…

This article reviews a hermeneutic phenomenological study of five beginning teachers who were introduced to mindfulness during their initial teacher education programme. The participants kept fortnightly journals and engaged in three interviews with the researcher to assess the benefits of using mindfulness during the first year of teaching. The…

This paper describes a technique for locating indicators of success within the data collected from complex learning environments, proposing an application of e-research to access learner processes and measure and track group progress. The technique combines automated extraction of tense and modality via parts-of-speech tagging with a visualisation…

Extension educators have used different methods to collect information for a needs assessment, including advisory committees, survey questionnaires, focus groups, interviews with key informants, or a combination of the former. This article describes the use of key informant interviews (agency personnel working with parents and young children) that…

The primary goal of this paper is to present the theoretical basis and application of two types of cognitive maps, concept map and mind map, and explain how they can be used by educational researchers in engineering design research. Cognitive mapping techniques can be useful to researchers as they study students' problem solving strategies…

Extension professionals often assess community needs to determine programs and target audiences. Data can be collected through surveys, focus group and individual interviews, meta-analysis, systematic observation, and other methods. Knowledge gaps are identified, and programs are designed to resolve the deficiencies. However, do Extension…

The aim of this study is to investigate communication between preschool teachers and children in documentation situations. The focus is also on what preschool teachers actually document. The research questions are: What characterizes the communication between teachers and children when these teachers are documenting at the same time? What is the…