Many of the leading private sector organizations have for years embraced a survey approach to improving products, services, and internal policies and processes. Like these successful private sector businesses, school systems can utilize a similar survey-based approach to improving teacher evaluation. Here, the authors provide and outline some…

Higher education today is confronted with increasing marketization and aggressive regulation of the public sector. In an attempt to address these challenging issues, public universities are undergoing unprecedented change, particularly Colleges of Education. Redesigning educational leadership preparation programs, working in partnership with local…

Nonprofit organizations are under great pressure to use evaluations to show that their programs "work" and that they are "effective." However, empirical evidence indicates that nonprofits struggle to perform useful evaluations, especially when conducted under accountability pressures. An increasing body of evidence highlights…

Process use refers to the ways in which stakeholders and/or evaluands change as a function of participating in evaluation activities. Although the concept of process use has been well discussed in the literature, exploration of methodological strategies for the measurement and assessment of process use has been limited. Typically, empirical…

Research universities seeking to promote community-engaged scholarship (CES), defined here as research of mutual benefit to community and academic interests, will discover that it requires capacity building and institutional support. At the University of California at Merced, our 7-year experience in building a new public research university that…

Calls for employability skill development in undergraduates now extend across many culturally similar developed economies. Government initiatives, industry professional accreditation criteria, and the development of academic teaching and learning standards increasingly drive the employability agenda, further cementing the need for skill…

Supporting the "Infrastructure Needs of 21st Century School Library Programs," also known as the Pennsylvania School Library Project, was a one-year project conducted in Pennsylvania to better identify and understand what stakeholders--teachers, administrators, parents, school and community leaders, and education associations--expect…

The purpose of this study was to determine with whom Turkish and Danish school principals engage in reflective practice and how this interaction helps to develop them as reflective practitioners. A phenomenological approach was followed in the study. Data were collected from 37 school principals (24 from Istanbul and 13 from Copenhagen) who were…

This article reports on a study into student teachers' perceptions about their professional development during practicum. Framed within a symbolic interactionist perspective, the study examined to what extent, and how effectively, one group of student teachers was able to integrate theory and practice during a three-week practicum in the…

Purpose: The article reflects on transition management in rural areas and the possible implications for extension services able to support social innovation and rural change, starting from experiences on social farming in different areas of Italy. Design/methodology/approach: By presenting three case studies we investigate the role of social…

Purpose: The rapidly evolving nature of agricultural innovation processes in low-income countries requires agricultural extension agencies to transform the classical roles that previously supported linear information dissemination and adoption of innovation. In Bangladesh, strengthening agricultural innovation calls for facilitation of interactive…

This paper focuses on promoting fairness and equity in student assessment practices. The researchers used questionnaires and interviews and the study encompassed a total of 3312 individuals representing a range of stakeholders. The paper is presented in two parts: fairness and discrimination, and challenging policy and practice. Five key…

Corruption is at the core of weak governance. In the education sector, corruption is a threat to the quality of and access to education. Although the diagnosis is straightforward, effective reforms are more difficult to implement. The principles of good governance (transparency, participation, accountability, and integrity) provide us guidance,…

This article reviews findings from the authors' studies of recovery high schools (RHS), including a 1995 program evaluation of a school in New Mexico (Moberg & Thaler, 1995), a 2006-09 descriptive study of 17 recovery high schools (Moberg & Finch, 2008), and presents early findings from a current study of the effectiveness of recovery…

The objective of this paper is to identify the impact of current national policies and emerging curricular practices on master's by coursework students in Australia. It is argued that the rate of top-down policy change, together with bottom-up innovation, is resulting in a high level of complexity that is challenging providers, staff and…