Each year, Austin Independent School District Department of Research and Evaluation (DRE) staff develop a plan of work to describe the scope of work for the coming year. The plans that make up this document identify programs to be evaluated and services to be provided by DRE staff and provide the blueprints for evaluation that staff will follow…

Higher education can play a major role in helping British business to survive the economic downturn and to build for the future. Your universities and higher education colleges have a strong record in fostering innovation, enterprise and skills, and in helping to create wealth and job-generating opportunities. And they want to work with you to…

Many political scientists maintain that public policies diffuse across states and that proximate states, in particular, influence one another's policy activities. Using state-funded merit aid for college as its case, this article takes a new approach to the study of the diffusion phenomenon, leaving behind conventional techniques used by…

Institutions that have organized and centralized their data enjoy an obvious advantage in grappling with strategic planning and other issues. As the drumbeat for accountability, planning, and demonstrating effectiveness to internal and external stakeholders intensifies, the stature and importance of institutional research offices on most campuses…

Michael Hinojosa, general superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District, is hiring 140 new arts teachers this year. It is the latest and perhaps most remarkable step in a 10-year effort by policymakers, educators and community leaders to ensure that every student in Dallas has access to quality arts learning experiences in and out of…

The paper focuses on oral storytelling and transformation through the significance of the liminal zone as thresholding. Involving the reader-listener in an experiential and performative approach, the article draws on all of the senses, using a wide range of data such as dreams, drawing, writing, as well as the act of (sacred) oral storytelling and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyse innovations in education from the point of view of product content and markets selected. Emerging market economies face a number of problems many of which are closely linked to and dependent upon the effectiveness of higher professional education. External environment changes, such as the formation…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to reflect on and inform about learning points from ECUANET, a two-year duration best practice action research and transnational networking project as it approaches its final stage. Design/methodology/approach: The paper explicates the key positive and obfuscating dynamics that the project team have had to,…

This paper describes the dynamic changes in research productivity of Chinese higher education institutions (HEIs) before and after merger with Malmquist index, and decomposes the total factor productivity change index into catching-up effect, scale effect and frontier-shift effect. The main finding is that technological improvement and innovation…

Distance education plays an important role in broadening educational access and increasing higher educational opportunities. The success, however, for any distance education initiative relies on a critical and core resource, namely having participating faculty who provide quality instruction. This study uses survey design and diffusion of…

This paper presents and analyses the main characteristics of successful experiences of Development Education (DE) introduced in two major Spanish Technical Universities (Technical University of Catalonia, TUC, and Technical University of Valencia, TUV) during the nineties and the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this paper, after a brief…

This article attempts to provide a review of literature pertaining to computer technology use in education. The authors discuss the benefits of learning with technology tools when integrated into teaching. The argument that introducing computer technology into schools will neither improve nor change the quality of classroom instruction unless…

This article aims to clarify the relationship between education and women's empowerment. Drawing from qualitative data collected in a study of four Garifuna villages on the north coast of Honduras, it argues that education can trigger the empowerment process if it expands women's knowledge and understanding, self-confidence and awareness of gender…

This article analyzes a hybrid after-school learning activity for children called "New School" (NS). NS is an inter-institutional, collaborative project based on a partnership between a university and local elementary schools that also involves other social actors and institutions. Using a framework of third generation activity theory, the article…

Today's specialists are required to be actively involved, independent, flexible, original thinkers, and well trained both generally and professionally. Results of a sociological survey of 2,000 students at Urals State University indicate that a majority of students are at an average level of well-formed professional competence, and less than 1…