This report details the work defined by a doctoral team looking at the literacy and implementation of formative assessment in classrooms in Southwest Missouri. The mission of this project was to identify the formative assessment literacy levels and the degree of classroom implementation of these strategies in districts and the resulting…

Financial literacy--the ability to use knowledge and skills to manage financial resources effectively for a lifetime of financial well-being--is becoming more and more important as individuals and families become increasingly responsible for their own long-term financial well-being. Financial and economic literacy education programs have been…

The "National Dropout Prevention Newsletter" is published quarterly by the National Dropout Prevention Center/Network. This issue contains the following articles: (1) A New Vision of Summer Learning (Brenda McLaughlin); (2) Using Summers More Strategically to Bridge the 8th-9th Grade Transition (Brenda McLaughlin and Hillary Hardt); (3)…

Although the importance of addressing and evaluating treatment and program fidelity is clearly emphasized in the literature on psychology, education, and health, little attention has been given to fidelity in adventure literature or research. Program fidelity refers to whether or not, and how well, a specific intervention or program was…

Extension educators need simple and accurate evaluation tools for program evaluation. This article explains how to use aspiration as an outcome indicator in Extension evaluation and introduces a practical evaluation tool. Aspiration can be described as the readiness for change. By recording participants' levels of aspiration, we will be able to…

The economic downturn has hit everyone hard. The author's organization, the Los Angeles Opera, has completed two years of downsizing, resulting in an almost 25% reduction in staff and overall budget cutting. Change that is not "nipping and tucking," but changing the dynamic and culture of the institution. However, if the organization hadn't done…

The Science Cafe is a national movement that attempts to foster community dialog and inquiry on scientific topics in informal venues such as coffee houses, bookstores, restaurants and bars. The California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, Robert E. Kennedy Library staff have taken the Science Cafe model out of bars and cafes and into…

Population-wide interventions do not often address parenting, and relatively little is known about large scale dissemination of evidence-based parenting interventions. Most parenting interventions are not designed to reach the majority of parents in a geographic area or to influence prevalence rates for a problem, nor do they take full advantage…

For more than 20 years, the system of care philosophy has comprised a central strategy of service reform in children's mental health at the federal, state, tribal, and local levels. System of care terminology has become widely used in many different service sectors but often without a shared understanding of what a system of care is. This…

Consultation is a promising approach to creating change in early childhood programs, from innovations in instructional strategies to the enhancement of global program quality. Studies of consultation effectiveness have been hampered by limited reports of implementation fidelity related to consultation procedures. This article describes the…

This article discusses the implication of the implementation of anti-poverty policy in both the United Kingdom and the United States. International studies of child poverty usually find that the United States and United Kingdom are at the bottom of the league table in terms of child poverty. Indeed, the U.S. and U.K do not fare well in…

The Academy for Educational Development (AED) sent a research team to the University of Dayton (UD) on November 5-7, 2008, to conduct interviews with individuals who played significant roles in the university's teacher preparation program (see Appendix A). These interviews, along with additional materials provided by UD and identified by the AED…

The federal government has had a long-standing commitment to ensuring access of English Learner (EL) students to a meaningful education. As early as 1968, the "Elementary and Secondary Education Act" ("ESEA") contained provisions for supporting the education of EL students and in its 1974 landmark decision, "Lau v.…

Although a growing body of research points to the critical need to foster reading, writing, speaking, and critical thinking skills for students in order to ensure their success in college, careers, and life, these efforts have tended to focus more on developing literacy skills in the early years, often ignoring secondary students. The outcome has…

This paper speculates how a model for the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) development of novice science teacher educators in a science education doctoral programme could have wider application to future teacher educators in science (and other subject domains) who enter tertiary teaching via different pathways. When the model is aligned with…