The objective was to establish how stakeholders in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) conceptualize child mental health impact. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 stakeholders from disadvantaged urban communities in Kenya, South Africa, Turkey and Brazil. Participants represented education, welfare and health care agencies; as…

The COVID-19 pandemic challenged educational developers, like instructors across the world, to pivot their traditionally face-to-face faculty development programs to online formats. At the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning at George Mason University (classified as research-intensive and the largest public institution in Virginia, U.S.), we…

Workplace-based experiences are considered centrally relevant in the professional preparation of prospective teachers. In spite of this, few studies have focused on the assessment of workplace-based learning (WBL) in early childhood education (ECE). This study aims to examine pathways of professional learning of students attending an ECE…

A peer-coaching approach was adopted in the out-of-class stage of the flipped classroom. Out of the classroom, learning tutors help students engage in learning and improve performance. Eighty-seven participants from two classes were involved in this study. One class of 44 students was the experimental group with the peer-coaching approach in a…

Strong collaborations are critical to successful youth transitions. Preparing students with disabilities for life after high school requires extensive partnerships within and beyond the school. However, transition educators often struggle to meaningfully engage the people and programs that exist within their local community. A community…

Social policies can be well-intentioned but ineffective in achieving what is intended. They can be undermined or destroyed by their exaggerated or oversimplified caricatures with a single, narrow focus. Caricatures may result in the opposite of the original intent of more carefully crafted variants. Institutionalization and deinstitutionalization…

This study examined changes in beliefs and confidence of 24 pre-service mathematics teachers after they participated in professional learning in an algebra pedagogy course, which addressed an under-researched area about their domain-specific beliefs in teaching algebra. A single-group pretest-posttest design was adopted. Quantitative data were…

In the U.S. Antarctic Program, NSF-funded scientists--most from universities--perform basic research in geosciences and other disciplines at research stations or field camps throughout the continent and the Southern Ocean. Scholars in the humanities, as well as support specialists from various fields, work closely together with the scientists.…

Overseas placements are promoted in many tertiary institutions as a valuable component of undergraduate programs. Institutional ethnography, as a mode of inquiry that begins in the actual doings of people, was employed in this study to understand preservice teachers' perceptions of their learning from an innovative model of overseas placement. In…

What do we know about camps and COVID-19? About as much as we know about the virus itself, which is that it is universal, it is catastrophic, and it is forcing us to bend and shift in ways we never expected. We don't yet know the full impact of COVID-19 on camps, although preliminary findings from a series of studies conducted by the American Camp…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate Penn State Extension 4-H volunteer leaders' leadership development needs and preferred delivery methods for leadership development. The participants were 147 volunteer leaders who attended Penn State Extension Annual 4-H Leader Forum and filled out the survey. We found that the overall mean…

This work analyzes the influence and efficiency of BYOD for learning students and academic perfection. The relevance of mobile technologies for learning has been substantiated. The influence of BYOD on academic performance of undergraduate students in terms of their test scores and final course marks, as well as on quality of work on selected…

We show how learning can be improved, beyond that shown in actively taught classrooms, by also transforming the homework using the principles of deliberate practice. We measure the impact of transforming the homework on student learning in a course that had already implemented an active approach to teaching in class. We compare performance on the…

This article investigates a life education initiative from India, directed at children from primary to the end of secondary school. Over the course of the program, students learn to connect with their emotions and values, to understand that their lives are made of stories, and that they have a place in the larger community as agents of change.…

Research has indicated beneficial effects of Animal-Assisted Interventions (AAIs) for children with Autism. However, there is a dearth of meta-analyses and findings are often contradictory. The current meta-analysis assesses the effectiveness of AAIs on social interaction, communication and global Autism symptoms. A total of 1447 studies were…