This article describes the development of a family literacy project that involves university preservice teachers creating literacy backpacks. The family literacy project was developed with two objectives: (1) to encourage parent/child participation in literacy activities; and (2) to give preservice teachers the opportunity to develop literacy…

This paper starts out with a discussion of the importance of user-centred design, outlining its history and current embodiment in national and international standards and considers its particular relevance in addressing the needs of ageing populations. The paper moves on to examine how the premise of user-centred design has been taken up in…

Equity Indexed Annuities (EIAs) are controversial financial products because the payoffs to investors are based on formulas that are supposedly too complex for average investors to understand. This brief describes how Monte Carlo simulation can provide insight into the true risk and return of an EIA. This approach can be used as a project…

Despite calls for research-based policies, other types of evidence also influence education policy, including personal experience, professional expertise, and normative values. This article focuses on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative, examining how research use varied over stages of the process and how it was integrated with other…

Although the Faculty Learning Community is not a new structure or initiative in the higher education arena, adapting this model for faculty development focused on grant proposal writing is relatively new. This article describes how the concept developed by Milt Cox of Miami University has been successfully modified and implemented twice on the…

This article chronicles the undergraduate research (UGR) process in the Sport Sciences Department at Wingate University. The main focus is a description of a course-based approach to UGR, followed by a brief summation of the department's experiential component that results in graduating seniors completing an extensive research project to meet…

"Gardens for Bellies" ["Haver til Maver"] is an organic school gardens project at Krogerup farm in Northern Sealand, Denmark, which provides children with first-hand experiences in a natural, outdoor environment. The general intention of the project is to expand children's competences and their knowledge of nature, farming and…

In this paper, I argue that Dewey's pragmatist aesthetics, and in particular, his concept of "consummatory experience", should be engaged anew to rethink the merits of the Philosophy for Children (PFC) programme, which arose in the 1970s in the US as an innovative educational programme that aims to use philosophy to help school children (aged…

Language difference among speakers of African American English (AAE) has often been considered language deficit, based on a lack of understanding about the AAE variety. Following Labov (1972), Wolfram (1969), Green (2002, 2011), and others, we define AAE as a complex rule-governed linguistic system and briefly discuss language structures that it…

This paper analyzes student evaluations of library orientation and information literacy instruction over a ten-year period, 2002 to 2011. The survey respondents were five hundred students who were taking or had just completed their first course in LEEP, the distance education option of the M.S. program at the University of Illinois. This case…

Supervision for beginning adapted physical education (APE) teachers and inservice general physical education teachers who are learning to work with students with disabilities poses a number of challenges. The purpose of this article is to describe a project aimed at developing a remote video system that could be used by a university supervisor to…

The push for accountability in public schooling has extended to the measurement of teacher performance, accelerated by federal efforts through Race to the Top. Currently, a large number of states and districts across the country are computing measures of teacher performance based on the standardized test scores of their students and using them in…

In this paper, we provide an overview of psychometric procedures and guidelines Educational Testing Service (ETS) uses to evaluate automated essay scoring for operational use. We briefly describe the e-rater system, the procedures and criteria used to evaluate e-rater, implications for a range of potential uses of e-rater, and directions for…

Not only are the problems teachers pose throughout their teaching of great importance but also the ways in which they use those problems make this a critical component of teaching. A problem-posing episode includes the problem setup, the statement of the problem, and the follow-up questions. Analysis of problem-posing episodes of precalculus…

This paper discusses the ways in which university programs for older people should change to cater to the interests and concerns of generative older people. We describe university programs offered at present, underlining their emphasis on personal growth and on learning for the sake of learning. We argue that these programs are not entirely…