In a nation and political climate where models of communication and respect for another's ideas are difficult to find, the authors take seriously their charge to support educational practices that prepare students to critically engage in a free and democratic society. As part of a summer high school outreach program, they sought to develop a…

Each summer, faculty and academic deans from institutions across the country make their way to the Wye River campus of the Aspen Institute on the Eastern Shore of Maryland for a weeklong seminar. Described as professional development, it often turns out to be much more. The Wye Seminars have at their core a collection of classic texts--from Plato…

Home visiting programs recognize the importance of promoting women's mental health during and around the time of pregnancy. However, the process of planning and integrating mental health promotion and intervention into the home visiting setting can seem daunting. Using examples and lessons learned from research and practice, the authors provide a…

As an educator, the author has been drawn to rubrics at times and repelled at other times. After working with students at various levels for many years, she has come to learn the value of rubrics that are well-crafted. A well-crafted rubric is difficult to create, and it might be easier to dismiss the entire notion of rubrics than to devote the…

Accreditation by the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences (AAFCS) was a long-held dream of the Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) Unit at Jacksonville State University in Alabama. After more than 6 decades of preparing FCS students for life and the workplace, the FCS Unit resolutely began the journey to the coveted and honored…

While previous studies indicate that participation in sport has the potential to facilitate positive developmental outcomes, there is a lack of consensus regarding the possible transfer of these outcomes to other environments (i.e., school or work). An important issue within the positive development literature concerns how sport programs should…

In the 1990s, a handful of arts institutions made an unprecedented effort to engage young people through intensive programming geared directly at adolescent audiences--teen councils and apprenticeships sprouted up across the country and sought to welcome and empower teens within the museum. The Whitney Museum of American Art is currently leading a…

Nonprofit organizations are under great pressure to use evaluations to show that their programs "work" and that they are "effective." However, empirical evidence indicates that nonprofits struggle to perform useful evaluations, especially when conducted under accountability pressures. An increasing body of evidence highlights…

Implementation of health education programs is often inadequately considered or not considered at all in planning, developing and evaluating interventions. With the focus being predominantly on the adoption stage, little is known about the factors influencing the implementation and continuation stages of the diffusion process. This study…

Despite our best efforts as evaluators, program implementation failures abound. A wide variety of valuable methodologies have been adopted to explain and evaluate the "why" of these failures. Yet, typically these methodologies have been employed concurrently (e.g., project monitoring) or to the post-hoc assessment of program activities.…

In the past years, the number of mindfulness-based intervention and prevention programs has increased steadily. In order to achieve the intended program outcomes, program implementers need to understand the essential and indispensable components that define a program's success. This chapter describes the complex process of identifying the core…

During adolescence, young people are traversing exciting and also challenging stages in their development. Mindfulness, if taught in a developmentally appropriate way, has the potential to be an asset in adolescents' lives. Developmentally appropriate approaches of mindfulness intervention during adolescence need to consider adolescents'…

Objectives: Recruitment of the needed doctoral level social workers is impeded upon when doctoral graduates experience greater educational debt burden, modest salaries, and limited opportunities for student loan debt repayment. The purpose of this article is to describe a promising opportunity to reduce doctoral level social workers'…

Rubrics are a rapidly growing subfield of information literacy assessment, providing a powerful tool for understanding student learning. This paper explores the role that the creation and application of an information literacy rubric can play in program development. Because of the Information Literacy in Student Writing assessment project at…

As a result of the remarkable speed of the recent technology advancement, major innovations should be proposed for the engineering laboratory contents and delivery methods. Since telecommunications are science centered, it is essential that the telecom engineering laboratory takes as its main goal the development of skills requisite to the…