As states work to meet the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) requirement to follow individuals through the P-20 pipeline and into the workforce by 2011, their progress will be expedited and supported by using the following processes to guide the development and implementation of their cross-agency data sharing efforts: (1) Prioritize,…

Standards-based reform, as codified by the No Child Left Behind Act, relies on the ability of assessments to accurately reflect the learning that takes place in U.S. classrooms. However, this property of assessments--their instructional sensitivity--is rarely, if ever, investigated by test developers, states, or researchers. In this paper, the…

Due to the complexity of the legal domain, reasoning about law cases is a very complex skill. For novices in law school, legal reasoning is even more complex because they have not yet acquired the conceptual knowledge needed for distilling the relevant information from cases, determining applicable rules, and searching for rules and exceptions in…

The aim of this study is to develop a general attitude scale about environmental issues (GASE) for students in different grade levels. The research was carried out with the total 1225 students; 409 (33.4%) were primary school students in grades 5, 6, 7 and 8; 408 (33.3%) of the students were in grades 9, 10, 11 and 12 at high schools and the…

As community colleges move beyond traditional ideals of quality instruction and attempt to improve student learning experiences and student success, they increasingly turn to the use of Internet technology and tools. The use of the Internet for instruction has expanded the possibilities of teaching and learning to blended, hybrid, Web-enhanced,…

Poor instruction has been cited as a primary cause of attrition from STEM majors and a major obstacle to learning for those who stay [Seymour and Hewitt [1997]. Talking about leaving: Why undergraduates leave the sciences. Boulder, CO: Westview]. Using a double-blind design, this study tests the hypothesis that the lack of explicit instructions in…

In 1993, colleges in Scotland became independent corporate bodies, funded directly by central government. This article is a review of the evolution of college management practice within the context of the political reform of the public services and recent educational policy developments in Scotland. It is an analysis of a complex and continuous…

Novice and skilled golfers took a series of golf putts with a standard putter (Exp. 1) or a distorted "funny putter" (consisting of an s-shaped and arbitrarily weighted putter shaft; Exp. 2) under instructions to either (a) take as much time as needed to be accurate or to (b) putt as fast as possible while still being accurate. Planning and…

This dissertation focuses on changes in the organizational development of community-based organizations (CBOs) within the context of new patterns of immigration, in the United States. Organizational development is considered within the context of dialects of growth, change and transformation of communities in transition. The primary goal of this…

How do people reason about issues related to child and youth development? Are the patterns of reasoning in the lay public significantly different from the way experts reason about the issue? What can the anthropological theory of cultural models bring to efforts to improve the public's understanding of child and youth development? In this article,…

An important element of adaptive expertise involves stepping away from a routine to retool one's knowledge or environment. The current study investigated two forms of this adaptive pattern: fault-driven adaptations, which are reactions to a difficulty, and prospective adaptations, which are proactive reformulations. Graduate and undergraduate…

This paper presents findings from a study of the experiences of in-service trainee teachers in colleges of further education in England on programmes run under the auspices of and through franchise arrangements with universities. It argues that there is a significant gap between the rhetoric of gaining teaching qualifications through a work-based…

A major challenge facing academic libraries is the need for reference librarians to become knowledge experts in their assigned subject areas. The subject-specialist approach increases the effectiveness of collection development, classroom instruction, and faculty liaison interactions. Simultaneously, this approach creates the need for continuous…

Using the expert opinion of more than 30 professionals, this Delphi study set out to develop a set of assistive technology competencies for teachers of students with visual impairments. The result of the study was the development of a highly reliable and valid set of 111 assistive technology competencies. (Contains 2 tables.)

Practitioners in youth settings experience life on the ground as a tumble of events, shaped by a confluence of youth needs, institutional expectations, and other inputs. The quality of the setting is determined in part by practitioners' expertise in shaping and responding to these events. The situations that arise in practice, and how staff…