A critical need exists for adults who are properly prepared to meaningfully engage with adolescents. While utilizing teens in leadership and teaching roles has been gaining popularity and application, a developmental and skills-based approach for improving "trusted adult" capacity to engage with adolescents has not been comprehensively…

Well-known disparities exist in rates of obesity and drowning, two public health priorities. Addressing these disparities by increasing access to safe swimming and water recreation may yield benefits for both obesity and injury prevention. "Everyone Swims," a community partnership, brought community health clinics and water recreation…

In recent years, many states have expanded their state-funded prekindergarten programs, drawing on evidence that public investments in early childhood education bring substantial returns in children's educational trajectories and a more skilled future workforce. Evidence also suggests that returns to early education may be larger for children of…

Background: For decades, scholars have argued that teaching and learning depend fundamentally on the quality of relationships between teachers and students, yet there is little research about how teachers develop relationships with students or how teacher education prepares teachers to do this work. Arguably, articulating the relational practices…

The National Institute on Out-of-School-Time (NIOST) investigated partnership strategies between community-based organizations conducting afterschool programs and the schools they serve. NIOST used in-depth phone interviews and site visits to collect information on several community-based organization afterschool programs and their affiliated…

Background: Research shows that students who are overrepresented when it comes to failure are underrepresented when it comes to being taught by highly qualified teachers who are well prepared to teach students from diverse backgrounds. Teacher education, as one aspect of the educational system, plays a critical role in preparing teachers with the…

Underlying this report on Asian Americans in Central Washington State is the concept that Asian Americans do have common problems, experiences and needs. An extension of this concept is that Asians should point out institutional racism when appropriate, and take their place as members of American society in the dual spirit of self-determination…

This book explores how community functions in "Bremer," a small rural town in eastern Washington. Human interactions in a variety of contexts are analyzed within a framework that posits three distinct eras of social and economic organization: community-control, mass-society, and information eras. Contexts examined are farming (the…

A research project was conducted in Washington State in 1992 to develop an assessment system that could be used by adult basic education (ABE) and English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) programs to satisfy accountability requirements and to provide assessment information useful for classroom instruction. In this preliminary work, 35 ABE/ESL programs…

This case study of a higher education policy-making process tested a conceptual model based on a combination of political systems, behavioral power, and influence theories. The study, which followed the course and outcomes of a branch campus policy formulated in Washington state over a four-year period (1985-89), sought to show that the ability of…