As part of principal succession, new school leaders must take action to solidify their position as the school's legitimate lead authority while at the same time, develop and utilize interactive mechanisms designed to nurture staff relations and engender teacher support and confidence in their leadership. For beginning principals, this process…

The purpose of this study was to examine mentoring relationships of women working within intercollegiate athletic administration. More specifically, the mentor characteristics and the career and psychosocial benefits of having a mentor in intercollegiate athletic administration were the focus of the study. The population for this study was all…

This study explored students' experiences of transition from centralized, professional advising to decentralized, faculty-based advising within a shared advising model at a public research university. Data were collected via focus groups and interviews from 17 participants and examined using phenomenological analysis. Four fundamental themes were…

The aim of this study was to examine conceptions associated with sense of belonging (SEBE) in Finnish general and special school placements for pupils with special education needs. Five pupils were selected for this study by means of purposive sampling. They had a history of several school placements prior to arriving at their current special…

This essay reviews progress in empirical economics since Leamer'rs (1983) critique. Leamer highlighted the benefits of sensitivity analysis, a procedure in which researchers show how their results change with changes in specification or functional form. Sensitivity analysis has had a salutary but not a revolutionary effect on econometric practice.…

Looking back at quality assurance in Europe, the author establishes that it has become a fact of life in higher education. It has also become a profession with its own set of practitioners and instruments. With the appearance of the common European standards (ESG), quality assurance anchors its credibility in the public mind. But with compliance…

This issue of "Assessment Update" presents the following articles: (1) Accreditation and Assessment: The Root of My Teaching Metamorphosis (Barbara June Rodriguez); (2) Editor's Notes: Addressing a Question of Credibility (Trudy W. Banta); (3) Do We Practice What We Preach? The Accountability of an Assessment Office (Keston H. Fulcher…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify what leadership coaches perceive to be the benefits of authenticity to their clients' success. Another purpose was to identify what barriers leadership coaches perceive as preventing their clients from developing authenticity. A final purpose of this study was to identify which strategies…

Special education is relatively new in Tanzania. The Irente Rainbow School (IRS) in Lushoto, Tanzania, where this ethnographic case study was conducted, is the first school for children with developmental disabilities in the area. Their curriculum stresses skills important in family life and the rural economy of Lushoto. The purpose of the study…

This exploratory study investigates the perceptions and experiences of a group of institutional repository (IR) stakeholders seldom heard from: end-users. We interviewed twenty IR end-users recruited through five IRs to discover how they characterize the IR, how/why they use the IR, their credibility judgments in relation to the IR, and their…

This article describes analyses of three contexts (civic, business, and military) in which understandings of intellectual property differ from those taught in the schools. In each of these contexts, it is possible to document specific examples of unattributed material that would be considered to violate most academic plagiarism policies. Yet in…

This article explores the initial results produced by the European Commission's "better regulation agenda", which aims to stimulate productivity and employment, on the use of evidence and its potential to enhance democratic governance. The article finds that implausible rational models of policy making dictate the ways in which the…

Well-educated laypeople tend to rely on their own ability to evaluate scientific claims when they obtain information from texts with high comprehensibility. The present study investigated whether controversial content reduces this facilitating effect of high text comprehensibility on readers' self-reliance and whether the influence of…

Soft skills comprised both rational and emotional elements, becoming a new focus on leadership, as behavior displayed during interaction with other individuals will affect effective interaction outcomes. This study aimed to examine the leadership soft skills of deans in public universities of Malaysia. This survey designed research was performed…

Although the human mind resists confusion, this feeling of disequilibrium nurtures learning. Newkirk, the author quotes, says intelligence is not a matter of being smart--it is the capacity to view difficulty as an opportunity to stop, reassess, and employ strategies for making sense of problems. These same habits of mind define reflection, a…