The Arizona Geographic Alliance has addressed out-of-field geography teaching for three decades by training organisational leaders (called Teacher Consultants or TCs) who become advocates for geographic literacy in their districts and schools. The core recruitment tool has been an annual Alliance Summer Geography Institute (ASGI). Here, we ask the…

Some of the simplest affordances of study abroad became unavailable when students stayed stateside because of the pandemic-induced disruptions to international travel. These ranged from touring city and historical/cultural landmarks, having spontaneous and chance interactions with locals, participating in the performance of traditions and…

Summer bridge programs are designed to help transition students into the college learning environment. Increasingly, bridge programs are being developed in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines because of the rigorous content and lower student persistence in college STEM compared with other disciplines. However, to…

Skill and drill remediation in developmental reading courses do not prepare students for reading tasks in future college-level courses. When a skill and drill model is replaced with a model that utilizes contextualization, students engage in relevant activities with authentic texts to prepare students for college-level activities. The reading…

Summer bridge programs are supposed to connect a graduating high school senior's summer to their first semester in college, easing the transition away from home and into a university setting. Although research is plentiful on the programs, assessments regarding the overall effectiveness of such programs have been mixed (e.g., Cabrera, Miner, and…

The authors conducted comparative cross-cultural research to examine a select group of the available and more noteworthy art education organizations and their programs after observing significant differences in the community art education programs offered in Tucson, Arizona, and Anyang, South Korea. The study reports several major differences…

Four years of math in high school, with a strong foundation in algebra that builds from middle school, is key to higher education access. Therefore, ensuring that middle and high school students succeed in math--and in algebra in particular--is an important issue for policy and practice. This research brief examines three recent Regional…

This longitudinal study assesses the impact of the University of Arizona's New Start Summer Program (NSSP) on participants' first year GPA and retention, controlling for incoming student characteristics. While programmatic participation significantly predicted first-year GPA and retention, this relationship became insignificant when controlling…

This study looks deeply inside 17 schools that stand at the vanguard of the current revolution in teaching. This new National Center on Time & Learning (NCTL) report reveals the substantive ways in which these schools are providing their teachers with more time to reflect on, develop, and hone their craft, by very explicitly leveraging an…

The nature of science is a prevalent theme across United States national science education standards and frameworks as well as other documents that guide formal and informal science education reform. To support teachers in engaging their students in authentic scientific practices and reformed teaching strategies, research experiences for teachers…

The cost of attending college has risen sharply over the last 40 years. Although more credit and grant aid have been made available to students, there are still major gaps between aid and the cost of attendance for many students in the United States, all of whom are left to figure out whether they can afford the remaining costs associated with…

This quasi-experimental, action-research study explored a five-week pre-enrollment initiative called the Pathways Summer Bridge (PSB) Program in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University (ASU). Theoretically framed and developed using the six components of Tinto's (1993) longitudinal model of institutional…

The Junior Forester Academy (JFA) is a summer forestry camp that provides environmental education (EE) in the context of an outdoor education program. The JFA was established in 2004 and is located at Northern Arizona University's Centennial Forest site. The JFA's goal is to increase a campers' understanding of forest ecology and forestry skills…

This study describes the effect of embedding content in the Communication in Inquiry Science Project professional development model for science and language arts teachers. The model uses four components of successful professional development (content focus, active learning, extended duration, participation by teams of teachers from the same school…