The Michigan Center for Student Success commissioned this study to determine whether strategies employed to improve adult students' success at 41 Breaking Through colleges nationwide have taken root at Michigan's original colleges and spread beyond them. A statewide survey revisited four of the colleges profiled in previous publications, and the…

Delaware's Partnership Zone (PZ) is a multi-year initiative designed to produce dramatic improvement in Delaware's lowest achieving schools. Currently composed of the State's 10 persistently lowest achieving schools, the PZ aims to improve student achievement so schools realize adequate yearly progress by 2014. These schools remain a part of their…

More than a project, The Big Shift is an epic library tale for the ages. What starts as a simple collection shift grows into a major space-planning project, a lesson in catalog maintenance, and thanks to Hurricane Ike, a disaster recovery effort. The Big Shift tells the story of how the University of Houston Libraries handled the numerous…

Social work education has historically been grounded in professional practice but recent discussions have urged a reconsideration of social work as a science. Social work is progressively doing more intervention work, service systems research, implementation research, and translational research which are elevating research standards to new levels…

Taken-for-granted pedagogical practices and institutional policies are often built without evidence of effectiveness, or can result from external calls for accountability that are often accepted given the lack of evidence to challenge them. We argue the need for evidence-based perspectives to support the rethinking of such practices and policies…

The purpose of this work is to develop an evolutionary procedure to be used by Chemical Engineering students for the base-case design of a Vanadium Redox-Flow Battery. The design methodology is based on the work of Douglas (1985) and provides a profitability analysis at each decision level so that more profitable alternatives and directions can be…

Community coalitions are a recognized strategy for addressing pressing public health problems. Despite the promise of coalitions as an effective prevention strategy, results linking coalition efforts to positive community outcomes are mixed. To date, research has primarily focused on determining organizational attributes related to successful…

This paper analyses the uncertain foundations of the use of action research in a graduate teaching degree. This analysis is conducted by the course coordinator in partnership with a recent graduate. The uncertainty is traced to the pedagogical incoherence of the course that is caused by philosophical infidelity. The philosophy and practice of the…

Parent/teacher relationships are fraught with potential for perilous misunderstandings amid what often are construed as conflicting interests. Perhaps that is nowhere more true than in parent/teacher relationships regarding children with disabilities. The authors report on a program at St. John Fisher College where teams of preservice teachers…

This study evaluated the efficacy of the Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP) adapted for Danish couples expecting their first child. Couples were recruited consecutively through a public maternity ward (N = 290). On the basis of due dates, they were allocated to (a) PREP, (b) an information-based control group (INFO), or (c)…

To date there have been a number of studies that have assessed the effects of caffeine on Rated Perceived Exertion (RPE) and Pain Scale scores during continuous exercise. Presently there is little information about the effects of caffeine on RPE and Pain Scale scores during short term, anaerobic and muscle endurance activity. The purpose of the…

Learning in the outdoors provides lasting educational experiences. Most students retain information best when doing an activity, and the outdoors allows for these opportunities. Outdoor education (OE) is a large, multi-disciplinary field cultivated from many roots. Since OE offers such vivid learning opportunities, it is an important area for…

An estimated three million American youth are in formal, one-to-one mentoring relationships, and countless more have meaningful, natural mentoring relationships with extended family members, teachers, neighbors, coaches and other caring, non-parental adults. The empirical literature generally indicates that close and enduring mentoring…

While research has confirmed their role adaptation and importance in reducing recidivism in drug courts, little research has documented the role of the judge in reentry courts. Based on interviews with participants and the workgroup, court observations, and a document analysis, this study revealed that judges in a federal reentry court program…

In this article, the author talks about the plight of conservatives within academia. He discusses the results of a study of politics in higher education. Using survey data from the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, the author and his wife set about testing possible explanations for the ideological…