Super Parents is a group-based, Extension-led parenting program developed to enhance the parent-child relationship. Implemented by trained Head Start staff using the train-the-trainer model, this effort is achieved by teaching positive parenting practices, increasing parents' knowledge of child development, instructing parents in activities and…

There has been a dramatic shift in how people engage with agriculture over the past 50 years in the United States, leading to little interaction between consumers and the farm. Despite extension initiatives to communicate with urban consumers about agriculture, the disconnect between consumers and agricultural producers continues to grow. Research…

International Extension experiences can provide valuable outcomes to clientele. Careful planning is necessary to maximize the benefits to participants and the potential impacts of the tour. International agricultural sciences students can benefit from participating in these tours and greatly add to their success. In this article, we describe the…

Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers are among the fastest growing and highest paying, yet women are largely underrepresented in these fields, and many girls lack access to STEM opportunities in school. Oregon State University's Open Campus partners with the American Association of University Women to bring an experiential…

The 4-H Youth Development Program, the youth development program for the United States Cooperative Extension service, is a nonformal education program with more than 100 years of history providing experiential learning activities for youth. As growing evidence supports the critical role of nonformal education in STEM literacy (National Research…

Early childhood professionals attending in-depth literacy training have been shown to gain knowledge and change classroom practices. These early childhood professionals play an important role in children's literacy development. In this multi-state study, the effectiveness and usability of the Literacy in the Early Childhood Classroom training…

An extensive faculty partnership at the University of Connecticut (UConn) that reaches across college and departmental lines is engaged in a project that seeks to enhance, expand, institutionalize, and study a new model for community engagement. The model, called the Environment Corps (E-Corps), combines the familiar elements of classroom…

Livelihood adaptation in refugee camps is often fragile and inherently problematic owing to their physical characteristics and policy restrictions. The Uganda refugee policy applauded as progressive exhibits internal contradictions which influence livelihoods. The purpose of this study is to explore the significant role of adult education in…

Public health efforts have emphasized changes to policies, systems, and environments (PSEs) to improve health behaviors for individuals and communities. Extension has increasingly emphasized these approaches, particularly for the work of Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) agents. In part, this emphasis on PSEs in Extension has been driven by…

For children experiencing chronic stress, succeeding academically in the face of other obstacles can be daunting. Many efforts focused on supporting students fail to address nonacademic aspects of well-being that can impact their ability to succeed. Working to bridge the gap between research and practice, here we describe the results of an…

Social marketing campaigns are effective in promoting health behavior changes in individuals and communities. Mississippi State University Extension Service's (MSU Extension) Office of Nutrition Education launched a statewide social marketing campaign branded HappyHealthy to target nutrition and healthy lifestyle-related behaviors of Supplemental…

Heart and Hope (H&H) was designed to provide parenting education and social-emotional skills to children and parents exposed to intimate partner violence (IPV) in rural Nevada. The goal was to evaluate IPV efforts by measuring parent (N = 47) and children's (N =100) knowledge and behavior change around building healthy relationships and…

The active engagement of educators within the family and consumer sciences (FCS) discipline is an important area of interest to Cooperative Extension. Using job demands-resources theory (JD-R), this study was designed to investigate the impact of job demands and job resources on engagement of FCS educators. Results showed "job demands"…

This article introduces a process for computational text classification that can be used in a variety of qualitative research and evaluation settings. The process leverages supervised machine learning based on an implementation of a multinomial Bayesian classifier. Applied to a community of inquiry framework, the algorithm was used to identify…

This article introduces Q methodology, an idea-sorting activity that can help Extension improve outreach and education on new and contentious issues. Q methodology is a helpful tool when Extension professionals are confronted with controversial or complex resource management challenges. Through the analysis of a simple card-sorting exercise,…