This collection of best practices shares how 18 higher education institutions across the country have successfully evaluated and redesigned their student financial services programs to improve services to students and their parents and find cost savings for the institution. This volume illustrates how other institutions have successfully tackled…

The authors detail technology-based active literacy strategies that they employed with preservice teachers to enhance their skill and comfort level in providing appropriate technology-supported literacy instruction to future students. They examine four theoretical and pragmatic threads to include in course design: active learning, open-ended…

The Academy for Educational Development (AED) sent a research team to Jackson State University (JSU) on October 13-14, 2008 to conduct interviews with individuals who play important roles in the university's teacher preparation program (see Appendix A). These interviews, along with additional documentation provided by JSU and identified by the AED…

This volume is a critical and objective study of the contemporary college student athlete. Framed around the process of recruitment, transition, and support of student athletes in higher education, the volume is a response to societal pressures to reform college athletics. Driven by publicity and the potential for revenue gains, colleges and…

The AIDS epidemic presents a complex of issues that require global answers, involving entire societies. The only sustainable solution is to include all sectors of society in a multidisciplinary collaboration, within which the formal education system plays a key role in delivering a comprehensive response to the disease at the national level.…

Best practice in teaching American History is a two-pronged approach: a high quality curriculum with highly engaging instruction. Muir (2001) showed that good learning experiences: create strong relationships; involve hands-on, active work; adjust for differences in learning styles; make learning interesting; allow students choices; make…

This report looks at the experience of those young people who broaden their learning and develop their essential skills by undertaking school-college partnership programmes. Its primary aim is to identify what makes these programmes successful for young people and what needs to be done better. It is intended to help schools, colleges, and local…

Introduction: This article results from a qualitative study of 1) information behavior in community problem-solving framed as a distributed information use environment and 2) approaches used by a best-practice library to anticipate information needs associated with community problem solving. Method: Several approaches to data collection were…

Recently the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) conducted a nationwide survey on programs that exhibit best practice in addressing student behaviour issues (de Jong, 2004). Seven themes related to the characteristics of best practice were identified in this survey. Alternative education programs…

Historically, reform efforts to address poor student achievement have focused on a variety of issues other than teacher quality. Movements such as TQM (Total Quality Management), class size reduction (CSR), school leadership, parental involvement, and multicultural curriculum have not directly addressed the power or influence of the individual…

The issues of teacher empowerment and decentralized management have been a part of the educational reform agenda for decades. Recent legislation has required that leadership teams have teacher, support staff, and parent representation, and possibly student representation. Principals receive specific instructions from their Boards of Education as…

This article addresses the issues of how cultural historical theory of activity can help design democratic teacher education classrooms aimed at developmental learning and dialogical, humanitarian thinking of students and prospective teachers. On the basis of retrospective analysis, the author begins by summarizing activity-based approaches to…

The area of integration of technology in education is a continuous effort that revolves around looking for factors and practices that can be applied to encourage faculty to integrate technology into their areas of teaching. Web-based instruction (WBI) is one of the technologies affecting higher education, and historically Black colleges and…

To address a public relations problem faced by a large urban public school district in Texas, we conducted action research that resulted in an audited self-monitoring system for high-stakes testing environments. The system monitors violations of testing protocols while identifying and disseminating best practices to improve the education of…

This paper provides a critical evaluation of the model of professional development elucidated within the Career Entry Development Profile and induction arrangements for newly qualified teachers (NQTs) in England. In addition, it outlines the findings from a small-scale study of NQTs' professional development during their first year of teaching.…