Background: Over the past several years, numerous news stories have highlighted school districts' struggles in attracting personnel to adequately staff their schools. While these stories provide important anecdotes, there is little comprehensive work that documents school districts' demand for teachers, paraprofessionals, and other essential…

The Train-the-Trainer approach is widely used in Cooperative Extension education to efficiently disseminate research-based information to many clientele groups, including farmers. This paper compares the traditional Train-the-Trainer model to a comprehensive Collaborative Train-the-Trainer model and discusses weaknesses of the traditional model…

Forest landowners are an important target audience for many state Extension programs. Acknowledging the differences and associations between landownership values, characteristics, and educational preferences of forest landowners should lead to improvement of educational programs and ensuring that educational needs are being met. Through an…

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are the preferred healthcare providers for managing the direct clinical care of patients with dysphagia. By assessing self-perceived competency during academic training, SLP graduate student clinicians may increase their understanding of their skills in dysphagia management. We modified the Dysphagia Competency…

This study explores the human dimensions of the broad-based adoption of Short Rotation Woody Crops (SRWCs) among farmers in North Carolina. We used an actor diagramming and tracing approach to explore factors influencing farmers' adoption of SRWCs. Results suggest four factors strongly influence the adoption process: (1) market availability; (2)…

Farm to Early Care and Education (Farm to ECE) initiatives generate similar benefits as Farm to School programs. However, there is a lack of research about local food procurement in Farm to ECE programs. We provide a descriptive evaluation of how 12 child care centers that participated in a Farm to ECE program procured local food. We found that…

The perineal body is located where four muscles (the superficial anal sphincter, the bulbospongiosus and both superficial transverse perineal muscles) have a common insertion at a nondescript point between the vagina or penile bulb and the anus. Health professions students have difficulty identifying its location and do not have a full…

Purpose/Objectives: The purpose of the study was to determine types and frequency of local food products purchased by schools as part of FTS programs and to identify whether differences in purchasing exist relative to school size (number of lunches served). Methods: A valid and reliable questionnaire was developed from qualitative interviews with…

In North Carolina and across the nation, districts and schools struggle to recruit and retain effective teachers, especially teachers of color. For more than a decade, declining enrollments in educator preparation programs and rises in teacher vacancies and attrition rates, coupled with population growth and increasing demand for teachers, have…

This paper explores how alumni of a multi-term public service program understand the connection between the program and their career development. Qualitative data were collected from 393 alumni based on six open-ended survey questions. While career and professional development is not an explicit goal of the program, a thematic analysis suggests…

Forest-based production on U.S. farms totaled $653.2 million in 2012, admittedly a small portion of total farm wealth. However, despite the effects of the recent economic downturn, on-farm forest product revenues still approached the gate value of North Carolina timber in 2012, which was $730.6 million. Providing the research-based information,…

Using achievement goal theory and positive youth development frameworks, this exploratory study reports findings of an innovative career exploration experience designed for high school student members of a health science academy (HSA). Students interested in healthcare careers (n = 9) completed two different interaction sessions with adolescents…

Using information from precision farmer surveys conducted in the southern United States in 2005 and 2013, we evaluated changes in the use of precision farming information sources among cotton producers. Although Extension remains an important source for producers interested in precision farming information, the percentage of cotton producers using…

Purpose: Audience response system technology has been found to have modest learning and larger non-cognitive impacts on students in traditional secondary and post-secondary learning environments. The impacts of this technology are less understood for learners in informal settings, including for farmers in training provided by extension services.…

Researchers have long recognized that instructors face distinctive challenges at different career stages. While much work has been done on developing best practices around early career faculty, the literature only pays scant attention to later-career or senior faculty (Sorcinelli, 1999; Zeig and Baldwin, 2013). The most common challenges cited by…