This paper explores the ways one school continues to enhance both literacy and service-learning through the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. Over the course of their middle-school years, young adolescents at Canterbury School visit a range of sites in the community. They also explore service-learning at home and around the world by…

Digital technology is providing a growing variety of methods for school leaders to connect with parents anywhere, anytime--a tactic mirroring how technology is used to engage students. Through Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, and text messages sent in multiple languages, school staff members are giving parents instant updates, news, and information…

Geospatial tools and technologies have become core competencies for natural resource professionals due to the monitoring, modeling, and mapping capabilities they provide. To prepare students with needed background, geospatial instructional activities were integrated across Forest Management; Natural Resources; Fisheries, Wildlife, &…

This newsletter of best practices in implementing the High Schools That Work (HSTW), Making Middle Grades Work (MMGW) and Technology Centers That Work (TCTW) school improvement models is based on presentations at the 27th Annual HSTW Staff Development Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the summer of 2013. The newsletter is divided up into…

In spring semester 2009, two of the authors taught LIB 5020--Information Sources & Services to graduate library science students at Appalachian State University. The course covers information seeking patterns and provides an overview of reference services. The course is also designed to examine and evaluate library reference materials and…

Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) researchers visited 38 public high schools around the United States in 2007 and 2008 with the goal of validating and operationalizing a definition of college readiness. Schools in the sample were selected because they were demonstrating success at enabling more students from underrepresented groups to…

This document presents the proceedings of the 20th Annual Research Forum held June 25, 2015, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included are the following 21 action research papers: (1) History Lives! The Use of Simulations in a High School Social Studies Classroom (Lydia Adkins); (2) Using Francophone Music in the High…

College honors courses provide an opportunity to tackle controversial topics in an atmosphere that encourages active learning, critical thinking, and open discussion. This venue is particularly appropriate for examining the debate about teaching intelligent design (ID) in public school science classes. A one-credit honors enrichment seminar taught…

Contract grading has achieved some prominence in our field as a practice associated with critical pedagogy. In this context we describe a hybrid grading contract where students earn a course grade of B based not on our evaluation of their writing quality but solely on their completion of the specified activities. The contract lists activities…

Implementation of communication-across-the-curriculum initiatives has outpaced their systematic assessment, leaving many stakeholders wondering whether faculty and students are benefiting from the emphasis on writing, speaking, and other communicative media in discipline-based courses and curricula. Increasing interest in assessment, however, has…

The North Carolina Virtual Public School completed its first session during the summer of 2007. Evaluation results revealed differences between accelerated and credit recovery students, including a significantly higher likelihood for accelerated students to rate their courses as high quality, to express interest in taking another online course,…

In North Carolina schools, the grade 10 writing assessment will be given once a year in the spring semester to all 10th-grade students. This change from an English II End-of-Course Test to a grade-specific test emphasizes the need for writing across the curriculum. This document is designed to illustrate correlation between high school courses and…

North Carolina students taking statewide achievement tests in grades 6 and 9 were ased two questions about the amount of time they spend doing homework: how much time do you spend doing assigned homework, and how much time do you spend doing work which is not assigned or required by the teacher? The results were compared with their scores on the…

The Second International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM2009) was held at the University of Cordoba, Spain, on July 1-3, 2009. EDM brings together researchers from computer science, education, psychology, psychometrics, and statistics to analyze large data sets to answer educational research questions. The increase in instrumented…

SUCCEED (Southeastern University and College Coalition for Engineering Education) is an eight-campus coalition of engineering schools formed in 1992 under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation. In 1997, a faculty survey of instructional practices and attitudes regarding the climate for teaching on the Coalition campuses was designed…