Empathy plays a vital role in improving student engagement and supporting organizational change in schools. In fact, empathy is widely recognized as an essential skill for integration during such efforts. In collaboration with Battelle for Kids, the Cumberland Valley School District in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, launched a vision for school…

Educators interact with more than 4 million infants and toddlers each week in the United States and can provide positive, nurturing experiences that enhance development. Tragically, the infant-toddler workforce in the United States often lacks the support and resources necessary to support their work. These urgent needs require comprehensive…

Despite widespread interest in the construct of executive functioning (EF), we currently lack definitive evidence regarding the best measurement model for representing the construct in substantive analyses. The most common practice is to represent EF ability as a reflective latent variable, with child performance on individual EF tasks as observed…

In order to create a greater abundance of effective and affordable pathways for low-income learners, the Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL) created Minds That Move Us (MTMU). MTMU challenges the bright minds of communities around the country to design innovative education and training models that create social equity and economic mobility…

Coaching is an individualized approach to professional development where educators work towards specific teaching goals with support and feedback from a designated colleague or expert. Coaching appears to be increasingly common in early childhood education (ECE) classrooms, and a number of local, state, and federal policy initiatives over the past…

This pretest/posttest study investigated the effectiveness of an interdisciplinary program in which occupational therapists and speech-language pathologists used a combination of video modeling, scenario-based learning, guided discussion, and reflection on the development of interpersonal skills and work readiness among students with disabilities.…

This resource was prepared in response to a request for information from a Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) State about which RTT-ELC States are using the Pyramid Model for Supporting Social Emotional Competence in Infants and Young Children. The State also requested information about other projects States have designed to…

Limited research exists on rural student academic aspirations from a counseling perspective. Much of the existing research focuses on the high school years and their implications for college. This study explores the relationship between place attachment, academic self-efficacy, and academic aspirations in rural elementary students. The sample…

Mentoring research and development often uses a mentor-protégé model, but research often takes place in teams. In this exploratory study, the authors identify the structures and prevalence of multi-mentoring teams by surveying undergraduate researchers about the people who helped them and the support they received. Research teams were common, and…

The purpose of the CASEL State Scan is to support the development of high-quality standards for social and emotional learning (SEL), preschool through high school, across the country (Dusenbury, Zadrazil, Weiss-berg & Mart, 2011). This brief summarizes recent findings from CASEL's State Scan (Dusenbury, Newman, Weissberg, Goren, Domitrovich…

The primary focus of this Executive Leadership Portfolio (ELP) is to investigate whether teachers who actively participate in professional development designed to model best practices and explore digital technology would incrementally change their instructional moves to include these practices and technologies. The literature presented within this…

Honors graduates have much to learn when transitioning into their first position after college. For instance, workplaces have an entirely different culture and set of expectations from undergraduate honors classrooms. Furthermore, the skills they need to become successful employees or graduate students are different from those required of…

Public school teachers within a Pennsylvania intermediate unit are receiving inadequate job-embedded professional development that recognizes knowledge of content, pedagogy, and technology integration, as outlined by Mishra and Koehler's Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework (2006). A school environment where teachers are…

Evidence points to associations between the socioeconomic composition of neighborhoods and children's and adolescents' development. A minimal amount of research, however, examines how timing of exposure to neighborhood socioeconomic conditions matters. This study used longitudinal data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development…

Many computer science programs have capstone experiences or project courses that allow students to integrate knowledge from the full breadth of their major. Such capstone projects may be student-designed, instructor-designed, designed in conjunction with outside companies, or integrated with ongoing free and open source (FOSS) projects. The…