Advocating for Young Children: A Preservice Teacher Education Project

As experts on the nature and needs of young children, early childhood educators are in prime positions to advocate for the health and well-being of young children. Advocacy can take the form of personal, public, or private-sector endeavors. Personal advocacy is usually informal and involves educating others on an issue about early childhood education. Similarly, public advocacy involves educating policy makers, and private-sector advocacy is directed toward businesses. The project described here is a course assignment for undergraduate teacher candidates in which they learn about advocacy strategies and design and implement authentic advocacy projects. Sample projects are discussed. Engaging in this project has raised awareness for teacher candidates about the importance of and strategies for being advocates. The response from early childhood teacher candidates has been positive.     

Sustainability and Performance Measurement: Corporate Real Estate Perspectives

When it comes to sustainable development, doing the right thing pays off. Research studies have correlated positive business measures for companies that make investments in sustainable strategies related to corporate real estate and sustainable development. This article explores the scope of sustainability and the short‐ and long‐term strategies that corporations identify, plan, implement, and evaluate. The results go beyond profit, affecting people and the planet with improved air quality, water savings, reduced carbon emissions, and operational cost savings. Corporations should begin sustainable strategies by analyzing their present state and carbon footprint to establish baseline data.     

Exploring the Underlying Factor Structure of the Parent Reading Belief Inventory (PRBI): Some Caveats

Although mainstream preschool programs have been in existence since the 1970s, little is known about the ways in which typical children attempt to understand what it means for a peer to have a disability. In this study, 4-year-old children without disabilities who were enrolled in a mainstream preschool class explained their peers' disabilities by referring to concepts of immaturity, accident, or adaptive equipment to account for the behavioral differences that they observed. The implications of these cognitions for children's developing attitudes and behaviors toward peers with disabilities are discussed.     

Systemic Change for School Improvement

Despite the nationwide emphasis on school improvement, the complexities of accomplishing desired systemic changes have been given short shrift in policy, research, training, and practice. This article focuses on the problem of expanding school improvement planning to better address how schools and districts intendto accomplish designated changes. Specifically, weframe and outline some basic considerations related to systemic change, and, to encourage a greater policy discussion of the complexities of implementing major school improvements on a large scale, we propose a set of policy actions.     

The Ultimate Survey: Asking One Question at a Time to Get Feedback from Library Users

ABSTRACT

Libraries use surveys and other instruments to gather feedback from their users. However, with competition from many other campus entities requesting input, how can survey fatigue be avoided? To gather this feedback, the Social Sciences Reference Desk utilized a short, fun and easy method. Each week for 10 weeks during the fall semester of 2017, the reference assistants wrote a survey question on a whiteboard and provided sticky notes for patrons to write their answers. The survey provided valuable information about patrons’ needs and expectations. It also fostered changes that were easily implemented to improve the delivery of library services.     

There’s a creepy guy on the other end at Google!: engaging middle school students in a drawing activity to elicit their mental models of Google

Although youth are increasingly going online to fulfill their needs for information, many youth struggle with information and digital literacy skills, such as the abilities to conduct a search and assess the credibility of online information. Ideally, these skills encompass an accurate and comprehensive understanding of the ways in which a system, such as a Web search engine, functions. In order to investigate youths’ conceptions of the Google search engine, a drawing activity was conducted with 26 HackHealth after-school program participants to elicit their mental models of Google. The findings revealed that many participants personified Google and emphasized anthropomorphic elements, computing equipment, and/or connections (such as cables, satellites and antennas) in their drawings. Far fewer participants focused their drawings on the actual Google interface or on computer code. Overall, their drawings suggest a limited understanding of Google and the ways in which it actually works. However, an understanding of youths’ conceptions of Google can enable educators to better tailor their digital literacy instruction efforts and can inform search engine developers and search engine interface designers in making the inner workings of the engine more transparent and their output more trustworthy to young users. With a better understanding of how Google works, young users will be better able to construct effective queries, assess search results, and ultimately find relevant and trustworthy information that will be of use to them.     

Governing Boards in Public Higher Education Institutions: A perspective from the United States

Governing boards have a long tradition and prominent role in U.S. higher education. The diversity of institutional types, and thus governing boards, represents a multifaceted tapestry of functions, roles, and responsibilities. This paper will attempt to define the parameters of public higher education governing boards in the USA and offer critical insights into their degree of effectiveness. It is the author’s position that both positive and negative lessons can be learned through an examination of these public governing boards in the USA. The recent emergence of university boards in Europe is examined and their characteristics are compared against the characteristics of public and private boards in the USA.

     

Performance strategies of US Olympians in practice and competition

Until recently, no self‐report instruments have examined psychological skills use in both practice and competition. In light of the significant role of practice in sport performance outcomes, a need exists to measure these skills in both domains. This study was designed to investigate differences in performance strategies of US Olympians in both practice and competition. The Test of Performance Strategies was administered to 176 US participants in the 2000 Sydney Olympic Summer Games. Discriminant function analyses demonstrated significant differences between medalists and nonmedalists in both the competition and practice performance strategies. Furthermore, significant gender and age differences were identified for competition strategies only. The 16 subscales of the TOPS, with two exceptions, create an internally stable instrument with moderate predictive ability relative to quality of sport performance, gender, and age in this elite sample of athletes.