Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to deal with the design of small-business training programs and focuses on women business owners, their real needs and the supply of adequate training. How and to what extent are client selection and support needs influenced by the gender system? Design/methodology/approach: An in-depth study of an ambitious…

It may be said that risk and resilience lie at two ends of a spectrum co-dependent on each other for existence. This chapter explores the concept of resiliency noting that it is used interchangeably within and between discourses and that there remains much disagreement around which factors constitute vulnerability and invulnerability. Gordon and…

This volume builds on Fortune and Tedick's 2008 Pathways to Multilingualism: Evolving Perspectives on Immersion Education and showcases the practice and promise of immersion education through in-depth investigations of program design, implementation practices, and policies in one-way, two-way and indigenous programs. Contributors present new…

The evaluation of educational or social programmes is paramount for establishing success or impact in higher education. Evaluation questions about programme goals (e.g. better performance of first-year students) or about the quality of programme strategies (design and implementation) and effectiveness of delivery (coordinator inputs and…

Educational technology-related professional development (ETPD) can be designed in many different ways. ETPD varies by general purposes and goals, specific learning objectives, curriculum content, student grade levels for which the strategies and tools presented are appropriate, professional development models used, how it is matched to…

This article describes the design and implementation of a school-based obesity prevention program, the successes associated with its implementation, and challenges with development and application of the program's curriculum base. The program is described, including purpose and goals, content and structure of the curriculum, type and training of…

Online discussions have been increasingly integrated into face-to-face classes at universities to enhance student learning of course content. The primary focus of past research has been on the end products of online discussions. Studies reported either successful findings or results that fell short of desired learning outcomes. An in-depth…

Over the past several decades, millions of digital objects of significant scientific, economic, cultural, and historic value have been published and distributed to libraries and archives on removable media. Providing long-term access to these documents, media files, and software executables is an increasingly complex task because of dependencies…

The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) has been conducting comparative studies for 50 years. SITES 2006 is the fifth wave of surveys related to information and communication technology (ICT), a wave that IEA started with its Computers in Education Study (two studies with data collection in 1989 and 1992),…

Project SUCCESS sought to recruit, train, and support paraprofessionals and mid-career adults in high-need teaching fields (math, science, special education, bilingual) in transitioning to teach in high-need schools. A 27-minute video was produced to supplement reporting of project evaluation outcomes. This paper highlights procedures and…

In this paper, we synthesize two bodies of work related to students' representational activities: the notions of meta-representational competence and representation as a form of practice. We report on video analyses of kindergarten and first-grade students as they create representations of pollination in a science classroom, as well as summarize…

Scientific and religious ways of thinking are central to an individual's cognitive and cultural ways of making sense of the world. This paper explores what foundational concepts pre-service primary teachers are employing when they teach science. The study measured the attitudes to science and religion of 92 pre-service primary teachers. The…

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress and accompanying machine-readable documentation are currently maintained on the National Military Command Information Processing System (NIPS) data base management system. National Assessment's data management and file processing systems, however, are not well-suited to secondary users.…

Defines workshops, compares the workshop with other program formats, discusses advantages and limitations, and proposes guidelines for determining whether a workshop format is appropriate for a particular learning situation. (JOW)

Policymakers are fond of saying that we have enough research knowledge; however, one problem is that nobody is applying the knowledge we already have. This paper offers a discussion of the kinds of knowledge needed to improve students learning, what to do about this in the assessment and testing arena, and where assessment falls short. Types of…