The Concerns Based Adoption Model (CBAM) focuses on measuring the process of change experienced by teachers involved in the implementation of new curriculum materials and/or instructional practices, and how interventions by change facilitators affect that process (Anderson, 1997). The purpose of this mixed-methods study was twofold: 1) identify peak concerns of teachers currently implementing Project/Problem Based Learning (PBL), and 2) determine if a two-week professional development program on PBL resolved teachers' concerns. Results indicated that regardless of the years teachers were associated with the innovation, concerns requiring more information about PBL and how it would affect them personally were present. In addition, concerns of teachers were resolved after completing the two-week professional development designed to administer to those concerns.

<p>This descriptive study investigated student academic performance in skills-based word processing courses taught in two different scheduling formats at one small rural western United States university over the period of several years. One scheduling format followed a more traditional approach where courses were taken at the same time as at least one other course and in a time frame more resembling a typical semester. This distributed practice model, or cohort approach, required a prerequisite beginning level course or appropriate substitute course before enrolling in an advanced word processing course, thus spreading the instructional time over a longer timeframe. The other scheduling format allowed students to take only one course at a time, thus a massed practice model, in a compressed time format that presented the contents of the entire course in 18 instructional days. Student academic performance was measured by a subset of equivalent posttest questions that were common to both scheduling formats. Retention performance during the cohort approach was measured by a subset of equivalent questions common to the beginning and advanced cohort courses. The entire population of word processing students at this university was studied and thus there is no generalizability from this study to another population. Participants self-selected into groups by enrolling in course sections. Simple means were used to compute descriptive and comparative statistics. The distributed practice cohort group out-performed the massed practice group by an experimentally important five percent on the posttest. Results from the retention portion of the study indicate additional research is needed.</p>

<p>There has been much criticism of academic leadership programs for not adequately preparing leaders. This is the case for all of the major programs: business administration, educational leadership, military science, and public administration. However, these evaluations themselves are limited inasmuch as they are typically concerned with such dimension as students' satisfaction and faculty credentials and performance while organizational outcomes attributable to leadership are ignored. The present research investigates the relationship of institutional outcomes for colleges and universities and the presence or absences of presidents with formal leadership training. The outcomes indicators are those contained in the Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data Systems (IPEDS), and include variables such as tuition affordability, graduation rates, availability of student leans, and faculty salaries and benefits. A mixed methodology is used: A quantitative analysis of important IPEDS indicators and a content analysis of interviews with selected presidents. The quantitative analysis employed inferential statistics using a random sample groups of 100 presidents--one with formal leadership education, and a second group of 100 without such education--to determine the relationship- between success and the presidents' credentials. Using IPEDS data, it was found overall that presidents with formal leadership education are no more and no less likely to run successful colleges than their counterparts without such training. When comparing colleges of similar student body size and setting, four-or-more year colleges that employ presidents with no formal leadership education where three times more likely to be successful as compared to colleges that employ presidents with formal leadership education. This trend is reversed among two-to-four year schools. Those schools that employ presidents with formal leadership education were two times more likely to be successful as compared to those without formal leadership education. These data suggest a niche in which presidents with formal leadership education are most successful. The content analysis used interviews of the presidents. Those with formal leadership training, all referred to their education as being important to their responsibilities and all presidents interviewed felt that using IPEDS data in making institutional decisions was important. Implications of the finding form training programs and for future are offered.</p>

The study determined the relationship between perceptions that the Washington State county commissioners' hold of WSU Extension and their knowledge of WSU Extension. In addition, the study determined whether their perceptions, knowledge, and/or understanding of Extension are related to and thereby may have predictability to their willingness to provide the essential local funding to continue the educational programs Extension delivers. The study addressed the interest Washington State county commissioners/county council members have in funding WSU Extension, which directly affects the critical element of maximizing Extension's impact on society. As a publicly funded educational organization, WSU Extension faces an uncertain fiscal future as funding partners face financial stress. Without funding from the key partners, such as county government, WSU Extension would not be able to continue to provide educational programming and nor would society benefit from the verifiable impacts that Extension has imparted for the past 100 years. An electronic census was administered through a variety of methods to insure sufficient response. There were 43 responses representing each of the 39 counties in Washington State. County commissioners have knowledge of Extension and the educational programs delivered to constituents. Respondents attend Extension programs, read Extension produced newsletters, join Extension educational organizations such as 4-H and access the web resources that Extension produces. Commissioners report that they are willing to continue to fund Extension in both times of financial adequacy and insufficiency. Based on the data, county commissioners in Washington State believe that WSU Extension is effective; the programs that Extension delivers are of good quality and beneficial to their constituents. Extension services are considered to be a good value for the level of county expenditure.

Longitudinal studies carried out by Statistics Canada and Human Resources Development Canada (Bowlby & McMullen, 2002) identified that dropout rates are high in Canada in relation to other developed nations. In 2003, Alberta's Commission on Learning found that one quarter of Alberta's high school enrollees were not completing high school. The Commission proposed the formation of learning communities as one way to increase the achievement of students in Alberta, with the intention that this would then increase the number of students completing high school. This research was undertaken to ascertain how mature the learning communities were in the high schools in Zone 6 of Southern Alberta, and whether there was a relationship between the maturity of a school's learning community and the school's achievement and high school completion rates. As the findings demonstrate, some relationships may have existed between the maturity of the schools' learning community and the diploma examination results, especially in Social Studies. Correlations were not found between the maturity of a school's learning community and eligibility for Rutherford Scholarships, the percentage of students taking four or more diploma examinations, and high school completion rates. The research did show, however, the levels of maturity in each of the learning communities at the time of this study, and the areas requiring further attention. The dimension of the learning communities requiring the most attention was found to be in the area of peer observation and feedback.

The First Nations, Métis, and Inuit School-Community Learning Environment Project was one of the programs through which the Aboriginal Branch of Alberta Education attempted to increase the academic success rate of First Nation, Métis, and Inuit students. Sixteen school jurisdictions in Alberta were asked to choose one school within their district on which to focus the resources offered by the Project. These resources included a large amount of money and print materials prepared by the Aboriginal Branch. The schools were asked to consult with the school community and area residents, including elders, to prepare strategies they believed would fulfill the goals of the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit School-Community Learning Environment Project. The first goal of the Project, and the one this quantitative study examines, was to increase the number of students who obtained the acceptable standard on the Provincial Achievement Tests. The Project was initiated in the 2003-2004 school year and ended in 2004-2005. This study compares the means of the numbers of students who obtained the acceptable standard on the Provincial Achievement Tests in the two years before the Project began, 2001-2002 and 2002-2003; two years during the Project, 2003-2004 and 2004-2005; and two years after the Project ended, 2005-2006 and 2006-2007. This study also compares the strategies each school used to achieve the goal of increasing the numbers of students attaining the acceptable standard on the Provincial Achievement Tests. In addition, 12 schools were purposefully quota sampled that were not part of the Project; the numbers of students who obtained the acceptable standard on the Provincial Achievement Tests in these schools were compared with the numbers of students who obtained the acceptable standard in schools that were part of the Project. Analysis of the results indicated that, generally speaking, the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit School-Community Learning Environment Project resulted in only nominal improvements in increasing the academic success of First Nation, Métis, and Inuit students attending schools that took part in the Project.

Comparatively little educational research has focused on home schooling. Since most students are educated in public schools, parents' choice of other educational alternatives is often perceived as a deviation from the societal norm. Friends and neighbors of parents who home school rarely understand their motivation for doing so. This study addresses the following question: why do parents remove their children from traditional, public school programs to initiate home schooling, and how well do public school personnel understand this motivation? Using qualitative case study methodology, the researcher confined the study to a specific concentrated population of home schooling families. Phenomenological data analysis procedures were used to refine the volume of data and to construct a narrative containing the essence of parents' lived experience concerning the decision to home school their children. A total of 31 parents from 20 home schooling families participated in semi-structured face-to-face interviews with the researcher. Six public school administrators and 12 teachers from schools directly impacted by home schooling were also interviewed. Parents explained their motives for initiating home school programs and elaborated by telling their stories. Educators described their experiences with children being removed from their schools and with home school children returning to the classroom. They shared their experiences and perceptions of the value of home school and issues relating to student learning. Educators were included in order to determine how well they understand parents' reasons for choosing to home school a child. Data analysis revealed eight primary factors that initially motivated parents in this study to choose home schooling for their children: (1) negative effects of peer socialization; (2) religion; (3) a child's special learning needs and disabilities; (4) negative personal experiences of a parent as a student in school; (5) lack of administrative support; (6) an incident at school involving the child; (7) unique environmental needs of the family; and (8) recruitment. Data analysis also revealed that educators' understanding of these motivations was limited. Although educators' views of home schooling were primarily negative, they are clearly keenly interested in and concerned about the learning of all children, in and out of school.

Frank B. Wynn was a leader in the first decades of the 20th Century. In the process of establishing timeless leadership standards for reconstructing his biography, it became apparent that no such standard existed, owing to more than 300 definitions of leadership at the end of the 20th century. The central research question asked what elements of leadership are historically and logically independent of context, and if those elements can be illuminated in a specific example of a leader examined from holistic criteria? The study consisted of an etymology of leadership terms, an exploration of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and Categories, an examination of the criteria for accurate definition, and finally a reconstructed biography of Dr. Frank B.Wynn.

This study explores the relationships between adults who work at an inclusive preschool setting in the South using Nel Nodding's articulation of caring as a theoretical framework. Through this ethnography I sought to understand [1] the experiences of early childhood staff at an inclusive learning environment as they foster caring-communities and nurture relationships between adults who work at the program; [2] the barriers faced when trying to encourage and engage caring attitudes and approaches; and [3] the ways that the staff respond to these barriers. The thesis explores the ways [1] race and culture differences, ability differences, teaching differences and power differences can be barriers to care; [2] understanding similarities and differences through dialogue, building a common purpose, and modeling caring attitudes supports the nurturing of care; and [3] feeling included, an increase in team work, handling hard times with grace, and trans- reciprocity are experiences of care.

The primary objective of this project was to analyze the change in use of academic science vocabulary and conceptual understanding of erosion by the ELLs participating in the Math, Science and Language (MSL) camp conducted in 2008. The researcher examined archival data in the form of student journals collected during the MSL camp of 2008. Current assessments are not developed to assess both vocabulary development and conceptual understanding. The researcher developed a new assessment tool named JASTO that allowed assessment of both vocabulary and conceptual understanding parallel to one another. JASTO was used to analyze the science journals of the MSL camp of 2008. Data indicate an increase in conceptual understanding of the erosion topic. Some students expressed their understanding using everyday vocabulary and others using academic vocabulary. The type of vocabulary usage was dependent on the English language proficiency of the student.