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…

Background: The use of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarette) offers potential to facilitate cigarette smoking cessation, yet potentially increases risk of cigarette smoking initiation. This relationship has been primarily modeled in mathematical ways that often do not represent real-world complexities, which could inform decisions regarding local…

This paper examines the feasibility of developing a new Master Volunteer training program to help communities adapt to and mitigate the impacts of climate change. Traditional models of volunteer training programs, such as the Cooperative Extension Master Volunteer peer-to-peer learning model, are based in part on Diffusion Theory. The existing…

COVID-19 has profoundly affected educational institutions across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, as it has in the rest of the country and around the world. Since March 2020, school buildings statewide have been closed. Although many schools have worked hard to provide instruction remotely, it is likely that schoolchildren all over the state are…

The 2-MEV model is a widely used tool to monitor children's environmental perception by scoring individual values. Although the scale's validity has been confirmed repeatedly and independently as well as the scale is in usage within more than two dozen language units all over the world, longitudinal properties still need clarification. The purpose…

Engineering byDesign™ (EbD) provides teachers and students with reflective, formative, and comprehensive summative assessment tools throughout the curriculum. Each lesson, unit, and course is created with a list of essential questions that are meant to guide students to a deeper understanding of national standards across the STEM domains (STL,…

There are marked individual differences in the formation of cognitive maps both in the real world and in virtual environments (VE; e.g., Blajenkova, Motes, & Kozhevnikov, 2005; Chai & Jacobs, 2010; Ishikawa & Montello, 2006; Wen, Ishikawa, & Sato, 2011). These differences, however, are poorly understood and can be difficult to…

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…

Teachers are responsible for delivering academic instruction, facilitating student learning and engagement, and managing classroom behavior. Stress may interfere with performance in the classroom, however (Tsouloupas, Carson, Matthews, Grawitch, & Barber, 2010), and recent studies suggest that stress is quite common among today's educators. In…

Schools presently operate without a method for recognizing how the relational aspects of the school environment impacts physical safety. Using two previously unrelated frameworks, NIMS/ICS and the Taguiri model, this paper connects the formal curriculum to relational, administrative and physical safety. The first model presented, National Incident…

This study investigated the unique relations between school concentrations of student risk factors and measures of reading, mathematics, and attendance. It used an integrated administrative data system to create a combined data set of risks (i.e., birth risks, teen mother, low maternal education, homelessness, maltreatment, and lead exposure) for…

University faculty and outreach program directors have been called to deliver more effective, equitable, and sustainable ways in which neighborhood and university communities may creatively interact. The authors report on the case of the Pittsburgh Studio, an initiative that matches students and resident stakeholders in researching local issues…

Across the country, school psychologists are pushing for a role beyond the traditional refer-test-place model and "gatekeeper" of special education. The broad skill set of school psychologists, including knowledge of curriculum, instruction, data analysis, and intervention, can produce positive results for all students throughout the…

The article addresses the effective use of full-time and part-time faculty in transforming an institutionalized marginalized professional studies unit into an academic unit with greater academic credibility, as perceived by traditional colleagues and accreditors. Recommendations are supported by a case study narrative from the experiences of the…

Women farmers are underserved in agricultural education and technical assistance. Long held social constructions of farming women as "farmwives" and in some cases "the bookkeepers" rather than farmers or decision-makers influence the direction of most educational programming delivered through extension programs in land-grant…