This paper compares the status of young naturalist after-school programs in three post-Soviet republics: Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. In the past, the region's environmental teachers, leaders and activists have emerged from such youth programs. Thus, the health of these programs is a leading indicator for the long-term viability of broader…

This article describes the work of the Circle of Courage, a cross-cultural group committed to improving the cultural competence of organizations providing services to Aboriginal populations in a midsized city in Canada. Rather than concentrating on individuals' cultural competence, the Circle targets mainstream organizations. Many of its…

Nature education is an important part of early childhood education. As young children develop, the natural world offers concrete and authentic learning experiences. Activities focused on nature support learning in all developmental domains. Children develop physically through hiking in natural terrain, climbing hills and trees, balancing on logs,…

The authors assert that higher education has a significant role to play in the reinvigoration of American democracy, and that narrow specialization of academic interests, technocratic practices and assumptions, and privatizing values throughout colleges and universities limit the ability of higher education to play this role. These dynamics also…

This chapter describes the system office for community college institutional research for the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. What makes this System Offices for Community College Institutional Research (SOCCIR) somewhat different from the others reviewed in this volume is that the Minnesota system IR office has responsibilities for both…

Hippocampal-dependent tasks often involve specific associations among stimuli (including egocentric information), and such tasks are therefore prone to interference from irrelevant task strategies before a correct strategy is found. Using an object-place paired-associate task, we investigated changes in neural firing patterns in the hippocampus in…

A challenge for undergraduate learning in strategy is that the students lack professional work experiences. Without a rich background of experience, many strategic management topics are difficult to grasp. Our solution has been to develop a strategic management capstone course that combines service-learning and problem-based learning. The…

Context: With limited resources and increased public health challenges facing the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others have identified partnerships between local health departments (LHDs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as critical to the public health system. LHDs utilize financial, human, and informational…

This paper explores the educational experiences of a specific group of refugees, namely academic women refugees who were members of various branches of the International Federation of University Women, and who came to Britain under the auspices of the British Federation of University Women from 1933. As a result of voluntary or forced migration…

School districts are moving toward a new form of management in which superintendents need to form and nurture leadership teams. A study of 25 such teams in Connecticut suggests that a team's effectiveness is maximized when the team members are coached by other team members, not the superintendent, and when they are coached on task-related…

The principle of arbitrariness in language assumes that there is no intrinsic relationship between linguistic signs and their referents. However, a growing body of sound-symbolism research suggests the existence of some naturally-biased mappings between phonological properties of labels and perceptual properties of their referents (Maurer,…

Many district administrators are finding that they can save money on computers by buying preowned ones instead of new ones. The practice has other benefits as well: It allows districts to give more computers to more students who need them, and it also promotes good environmental practices by keeping the machines out of landfills, where they…

In the present paper, education reform in the Republic of Serbia since 2000 is presented. The focus is on two major reform waves: 2000-2003 and 2004-2005. We analyse why these broad educational interventions failed. After 2005, there was a lull in the reform process, a period with no major changes (2005-2010). A new phase of improving education…

The International Research and Studies Program supports surveys, studies, and instructional materials development to improve and strengthen instruction in modern foreign languages, area studies, and other international fields. The purpose of the program is to improve and strengthen instruction in modern foreign languages, area studies and other…

Launched in 2008, the Strategic Data Project, housed at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, seeks to bridge the divide between educational research and practice in order to transform the use of data in education to improve student achievement. Through the project, the authors build robust research partnerships with…