The author reports on a new effort by 12 major education philanthropies that aims to dovetail with the Education Department's "i3" agenda, raising complex issues. The decision by a dozen major education grantmakers to team up on an initiative designed to dovetail with the federal "Investing in Innovation" grant competition is being seen by…

The twofold objective of this paper is to communicate the findings and the methodology employed by a group of Italian researchers who have spent more than six years constructing an atlas of education in the ancient Italian states from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, and to compare the quantitative observations reported in an earlier…

A Victorian government initiative called "The Primary Science Specialists Professional Learning Program" is designed to tackle students' falling interest in science by investing in the building of teacher capacity. The aims of the initiative are: to improve the science knowledge base of all teachers and therefore increase teachers'…

This is the second of three reports from MDRC's evaluation of the Success for All (SFA) scale-up demonstration, funded under the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation (i3) competition. The report presents updated findings on SFA's implementation and impacts in the scale-up sites participating in the evaluation. The i3 evaluation…

In 2012-2013, sixteen senior secondary classes participated in this study, with eight of them being distance classes. Approximately 220 Year 11-13 students and 8 teachers took part in this study. This project aimed at designing and evaluating a computer-supported knowledge building community in senior secondary classes. Researchers sought to…

Exploring the critical role of school choice in the future of education reform, the Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI) is an interactive web application that scores large school districts based on thirteen categories of policy and practice relevant to choice. The intent of the ECCI is to: create public awareness of the differences among…

West Virginia Code §18B-1D-8 statutorily mandates the "West Virginia Higher Education Report Card." This annual accountability report provides year-end higher education statistics for both of the state's higher education systems, the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission (Commission) and West Virginia Council for Community and…

J. Schumpeter is a key figure, even a seminal one, on technological innovation. Most economists who study technological innovation refer to Schumpeter and his pioneering role in introducing innovation into economic studies. However, despite having brought forth the concept of innovation in economic theory, Schumpeter provided few if any analyses…

Successful teachers strive to ensure that their students learn to their maximum abilities. Is action research a valuable way for graduate students to review their effectiveness as teachers? Do students learn more through varied teaching strategies and techniques? The authors examined graduate students' perceptions of action research projects…

This article will discuss the development of an innovative instructional design for teaching graduate courses in counselor education programs. The teaching strategies that will be highlighted evolved during a collaborative team-teaching project conducted by two counselor educators. These two faculty members worked together to redesign a course in…

This paper states the current situation of foreign language teachers' affective variables in universities for ethnic minorities when teaching a foreign language. It emphasizes the urgent need of improvement of affective variables in such universities based on relevant research results and an interview performed in a university for ethnic…

This article discusses the use of role-play as an effective strategy for enhancing the quality of multicultural curricula in the English as a second language (ESL) classroom. The author critiques the use of the simplistic additive approach to multicultural instruction and furthers the work of those theorists who advocate the use of the more…

Electronic government has been embraced by many organizations seeking to dramatically improve service delivery, but results to date have often fallen short of expectations. This dissertation is focused on state revenue agencies and their electronic tax filing mechanisms for state individual income taxes. It asks: What factors best explain whether…

Nearly thirty years after the Cold War era commission's report titled "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform," educators and historians must evaluate its relevance and its contribution to the shifting educational paradigm in the United States.

America's higher education system is in dire need of reform. The average college student leaves school with more than $23,000 in debt, and total student loan debt in the United States now exceeds $1 trillion. Furthermore, too many students are leaving college without the skills needed to be successful in the workforce. And yet, despite the dire…