With the start of every school year, new teachers enter classrooms across our country filled with excitement surrounding the impact they hope to have on students. Some teachers discover that teaching at the elementary level can often times involve more than teaching and loving children. The expectations, demands, and time constraints put on new…

Most US institutions of higher education do not assess advisor quality. We report a scale development effort informed by the developmental prescriptions of self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985, 2000). The 15-item Missouri Advisor Quality Survey assesses advisor knowledge, advisor availability, and advisor autonomy supportiveness.…

The purpose of this study was to examine the demographic and academic variables of students involved in roommate changes to determine which variables predict who will move from a room and who will stay in a room and what alternatives to current housing arrangements are selected by those who initiate the roommate changes. [This article was…

Self-monitoring interventions are well supported within the empirical literature as improving classroom engagement for students with disabilities. However, studies implementing self-monitoring interventions in high school settings are rarely conducted despite their potential to improve student academic and behavioral outcomes. In an investigation…

The college sophomore year is considered a difficult year for many students. College sophomores tend to experience the least amount of attention and support during a time when they are pursuing academic and personal goals. When these students encounter challenges that coincide with a limited amount of assistance with decision making, they can…

Community colleges in the state of Missouri began to offer a two-year degree known as the Associate of Arts in Teaching (AAT) in 2007. Because this was a new degree for the state and only a few other states in the nation offered the degree, community colleges in Missouri were eager to measure the efficacy of the degree. The purpose of this…

The United States has experienced unrivaled success in attracting international students for higher education studies. Saudi Arabia has sponsored students for study in the United States since 1950, with the number of students on scholarship varying according to the fluctuation in oil prices. The cultures of Saudi Arabia and the United States…

The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) is a rapidly expanding network of public charter schools whose mission is to improve the education of low-income children. As of the 2012-2013 school year, 125 KIPP schools are in operation in 20 different states and the District of Columbia (DC). Ultimately, KIPP's goal is to prepare students to enroll and…

Each afternoon across the U.S., 15 million children are alone and unsupervised after school. The parents of 18 million would enroll their children in an afterschool program, if one were available. These are some of the key findings from the nation's most in-depth study of how America's children spend their afternoons. The 2009 report, conducted…

This study--on 100 African American wife and 258 daughter primary caregivers--uses a contextual approach in its examination of the relationship between social resources and caregiver depressive symptoms. At the bivariate level, significant differences in certain key characteristics of primary caregivers and care receivers underscore the…

This study details parents' and students' current thinking about math, science and technology (MST) education and their satisfaction with the existing curriculum which most experts see as vastly below world-class standards. The study finds just 25% of Kansas/Missouri parents think their children should be studying more math and science; 70% think…

Surprisingly, given the level of leadership anxiety about math and science education in the United States today, national research conducted by Public Agenda shows that the number of parents who worry about whether local schools are teaching enough math and science has declined since the mid-nineties. In 1994, 52 percent of parents said that it…

Investigates relationships among students' engagement in five selected programmatic practices in 62 Missouri middle schools and student satisfaction with school. Although a curriculum based on young adolescents' developmental needs predicts students' satisfaction with school, more specific program concepts do not correlate with student…

Beliefs about and attitudes toward child care were examined among 134 mothers, 55 child care providers, 46 kindergarten teachers, and 62 employers in 11 rural Missouri communities. Mothers were very satisfied with quality of child care services and degree of employer support. However, teachers felt that their students were less ready for school…

Cell phones afford a set of distinctive advantages for gathering information on daily patterns of behavior, establishing relationships, maintaining contact, and providing professional expertise to participants in a wide array of programs, including intervention, treatment, and service. This paper presents new findings about innovative applications…