The Families of Merit Program was designed as an adult education course that could build individual self-efficacy and parental self-efficacy to effect outcomes that would benefit their child and the school. Building this self-efficacy in a community where those children served are predominately in poverty presents a compounded challenge. The…

Higher education institutions are charged with creating one million more STEM professionals over the next decade, a 34% increase in undergraduate STEM degrees annually (PCAST 2012). Examining why college STEM courses manifest high attrition rates, interdependencies emerge that begin in early childhood education. Those of us in higher education…

As budgets for education in the United States shrink, educational organizations have sought outside grants and funding for their schools. Many state and national organizations have provided funding opportunities specifically to ensure that the arts remain in the schools. Teaching artists are one resource being employed by schools not only to teach…

The purpose of this study is to compare three intervention approaches that focused on alleviating some of the deleterious effects of poverty by building parental self-efficacy, increasing parenting skills, and decreasing parental stress levels in parents at-risk for negative child outcomes due to factors associated with adverse socioeconomic…

Scope and Method of Study: This quantitative, non-experimental study sought to determine if a statistically significant difference existed in student achievement on the PSE exam in Belizean primary schools for students who have teachers with varying levels of self-efficacy (high, medium and low). The Teacher Efficacy Scale (TES), which captures…

Adolescents defined as at-risk typically lack healthy models of parenting and receive no parenthood education prior to assuming the parenting role. Unless a proactive approach is implemented, the cyclic pattern of dysfunctional parenting-- including higher rates of teen pregnancy, increased childhood abuse, low educational attainment,…

Amartya Sen's writings have articulated the importance of human agency, and identified the need for information on agency freedom to inform our evaluation of social arrangements. Many approaches to poverty reduction stress the need for empowerment. This paper reviews "subjective quantitative measures of human agency at the individual level." It…