Mentoring programs for youth have grown tremendously in popularity in recent years and in many important respects reflect core principles of community psychology. Mentoring of youth is a complex phenomenon, however, with a range of significant processes occurring at the levels of individual youth and their mentors, youth-mentor relationships and…

As learning and performance improvement continues to dominate the training research landscape, so does the need to justify the results of relevant interventions. One area in training research that has continued to elude practitioners and researchers is enhancing the use of trained skills back on the job (i.e., training transfer). Relapse…

Working memory is where we "think" as we learn. A notion that emerges as a synthesis from several threads in the research literatures of cognition, motivation, and connectionism is that motivation in learning is the process whereby working memory resource allocation is instigated and sustained. This paper reviews much literature on motivation and…

Principals in the information age need to be information driven, committed to shared leadership and relentless about continuous improvement. They must reshape the processes, norms, and behaviors of teaching and learning around aggregating and interpreting shared information. In this article, the authors discuss the role of a principal in shaping…

In a review of the challenges to progress in providing social research evidence that might usefully inform policy, Oakley (2004) argues strongly that the "paradigm divide" between qualitative and quantitative research communities continues to constitute a major problem. Oakley refers to a number of recent critiques of what is seen as "misplaced…

The research literature provides important guidance to counselors working to keep abreast of the latest thinking regarding best practices and recently developed counseling tools. The purpose of this digest is to highlight a few errors that seem to recur within the literature, and to provide some helpful references that further explore these…

Over the years, many different labels have been used to describe nontraditional students. This study examined whether terminology used in surveys could affect respondents' answers. Two forms of a questionnaire were designed and distributed randomly to college students. One form consistently employed the terms gay, lesbian, and bisexual while the…

This paper explores how youth programs, particularly programs that try to prepare young people for the world of work and higher education, are organized and implemented in the field. It is argued that, in many cases, the needs of program practitioners are overlooked by the research community. The focus is on the field of "second-chance"…

There exists in the counseling and therapy professions the paradox of widespread endorsement of research with little use of, or engagement in, research in actual practice. This situation exists in large part because many counselors and therapists are less knowledgeable of research than they are of clinical practice. This collection of digests,…

Proceedings of a symposium sponsored by the Coalition for Education in the Outdoors (CEO) are presented in this report. The CEO is a network of institutions, organizations, agencies, businesses, and associations in support of outdoor education. This symposium, reflecting the work of CEO's Research Task Force, provides literature reviews and field…

This paper reports on research into the concept of mentoring from many educational perspectives, based on six papers presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association in April 1994. The paper notes that mentoring is a slippery concept, without a precise operational definition; definitions used in the six papers are…

In an attempt to replicate an earlier study by H. G. Schmidt, H. P. A. Boshuizen, and P. P. M. Hobus (1988), 96 students and physicians at the University of Limburg (Netherlands) studied 4 clinical cases, produced a diagnosis, and recalled each case. Subjects were 24 second-year, 24 fourth-year, and 24 sixth-year medical students and 24 internists…

This paper has three purposes. First, it places in scientific perspective the growing acceptance in educational administration research of alternative methods to empiricism by an explication of chaos theory and its assumptions. Second, it demonstrates that chaos theory provides a scientific basis for investigation of complex qualitative variables…

As part of a larger research progam on learning to teach, this paper reviews 15 empirical studies that followed students through one or more components of their student teaching program. The review focused on teacher development, constructivism (which ascertains how initial experiences in teacher education interact with the preconceptions held by…

While the notion of "cultural imperialism" has received significant attention in communication studies since the early 1970s, researchers have ignored analyses of message systems and audience cultivation in favor of institutional analysis. Likewise, researchers have concentrated on the technologies, media products and processes of…