Opportunities and Options for Facilitating and Evaluating Access to the General Curriculum for Students With Disabilities

Federal regulations concerning the development and implementation of alternate assessments based on modified achievement standards include a set of safeguards intended to ensure that eligible students have access to grade-level general curriculum. These regulations concerning curricular access and opportunity to learn for students with disabilities may prove difficult for educational researchers and policymakers to operationalize and evaluate. This article provides a historical and policy context for efforts to ensure curricular access. In addition, this article reviews research on potential indicators of (or ways of measuring) access to the general curriculum and opportunity to learn. Finally, best practices for facilitating and evaluating access to the general curriculum are discussed.     

Connections as a Focus for Model-Building Learning in Engineering

Learning to create and use models of real-world situations is an important goal for under-graduate engineers. Engineers today use computer models to explore design problems and test solutions before actually building anything. Learning to create and use models of real-world sit-uations is a challenging task. Most efforts to teach modeling are essentially a means of teach-ing students programming, which is recognized as difficult. In the approach described in this paper, we sought to simplify the task as much as possible away from programming, while still requiring students to learn to use the mathematical models necessary to understand a given sit-uation. We worked in the domain of Chemical Engineering with a tool called DEVICE (Dynamic Environment for Visualization in Chemical Engineering). What we found through an iterative development effort is that emphasizing connections between the real world and the mathematical model led to learning and transfer benefits.     

Beyond Antagonism? The Discursive Construction of ‘New’ Teachers in the United Arab Emirates

The UAE, which celebrated independence in 1971, is a rapidly changing environment where aspects of traditional Bedouin culture co‐exist with the immense changes being wrought by the forces of globalization and the wealth brought about by the development of the oil industry. Emirati nationals are a minority within the UAE, comprising approximately 20% of the population, and the majority of the schoolteachers are expatriates drawn from other Arabic speaking countries. Within this context, the Higher Colleges of Technology’s Bachelor of Education degree in Teaching English to Young Learners prepares young UAE national women for English language teaching positions in local government schools. The research presented in this paper is drawn from this two‐year study of student teachers and explores the discursive construction of the students’ systems of knowledge and belief. The paper concludes with a critical consideration of the study’s implications and some possible recommendations for teacher education in the UAE that may also have resonance for teacher education programs in other contexts.     

Production and consumption of university Linked Data

Linked Data increases the value of an organisation's data over the web by introducing explicit and machine processable links at the data level. We have adopted this new stream of data representation to produce and expose existing data within The Open University (OU) as Linked Data. We present in this paper our approach for producing the data, based on well-defined workflows at the organisation as well as the technical levels. We also discuss the data already available to consume, and show the potential improvements that Linked Data brings by presenting three applications: (1) the OU Expert Search system for finding experts at the OU based on a specified topic of interest, (2) the Social Study application to identify potential courses for students based on their Facebook profile information, and (3) the Linked OpenLearn application that helps students identify related media and courses to OpenLearn units at the OU. Before concluding the paper, we show the potential benefits and an approach towards interlinking data beyond The Open University with other universities, using a common categorisation scheme.     

Ideology and criminal justice: Suggestions for a pedagogical model

Without the explanatory power of general theoretical principles, criminal justice educators are limited to subjectively describing the structure and function of our systems of criminal justice rather than explaining why these systems behave the way they do. Because of this, criminal justice lacks integrity as a legitimate academic discipline that seeks to meet the objectives of a liberal arts education. This paper explores the establishment of ideology as a first principle of criminal justice, derived from political philosophy and sociological theory. We examine ways to build upon this principle as a means of teaching criminal justice within the guise of the liberal arts tradition by guiding students toward a deeper understanding of the nature of our criminal justice systems and their place in larger society.     

Criminal justice education in relation to law school expectation: A failure of confidence

This paper discusses the findings from a survey of admissions officers at law schools in the United States. Deans of Admission (N=119) were asked a variety of questions pertaining to how the undergraduate criminal justice major is perceived in relation to the adequacy of the academic preparation it provides for individuals applying and/or currently attending law school. The findings suggest that the criminal justice major is not perceived as adequate preparation for law school education by the Deans of Admission. Results are discussed within the context of the criminal justice curricula standards recommended by the academic review committee of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.     

ERIC

Three focus groups consisting of 42 board of trustee members, community college presidents, senior administrators, and faculty members developed critical issues facing community colleges with respect to instructional planning and services; planning, governance, finance; and workforce development. Thereafter, the delegation of more than 200 voted upon the overall top critical issues. “Ask customers what they want and give it to them—create for the future,” “the first rule of business is the same as the first rule of life: adapt or die;” and “hire the right people, get them on the right seat on the bus, and keep them there” were the top three critical issues overall.     

Dual Enrollment and Retention in Tennessee Community Colleges: Implications for Practice

ABSTRACT

With the increased numbers of dual enrollment students across the country as well as various state initiatives to increase retention among the student population at large, institutions face great challenges when balancing the many initiatives incumbent upon them. However, Tennessee, a state leader in both the free community college and dual enrollment initiatives, the Tennessee Board of Regents System (TBR), and its community colleges are positioned to improve retention rates by giving greater attention to their dual enrollment students. This brief study of one cohort of students at Walters State Community College (WSCC), located in East Tennessee, noted a major disparity in retention between students with dual enrollment experience and those without, suggesting an extant need to give particular consideration to institutional approaches designed to reinforce the dual enrollment programs and the students’ experience in said programs. Doing so may not only address the initiative of providing high quality dual enrollment classes to high school students but also improve institutional retention rates.