Growing Leaders: An Evaluation of a Community College Grow-Your-Own Leadership Institute

Community colleges serve a significant portion of the nation’s college students; however, community college leaders are in short supply, a function of mass retirements across the sector in conjunction with a lack of prepared practitioners in the community college leadership pipeline. To address this leadership gap, the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) identified core Competencies for Community College Leaders to inform and encourage the development of community college leadership preparation programs, which generally take one of three forms: university-based programs leading to a terminal degree; state or organization-based programs requiring broad collaboration and common, system-based outcomes; and grow-your-own leadership institutes specific to local contexts and internal leadership development. The evaluation of a community college grow-your-own (GYO) leadership institute—the Western Pennsylvania Community College Leadership Institute (WPCCLI)—forms the core of the present study. Using a program logic model approach, the WPCCLI was evaluated across each of AACC’s five Competencies for Community College Leaders: 1) organizational strategy, 2) institutional finance, research, and resource management, 3) communication, 4) collaboration, and 5) community college advocacy. Participant surveys were used to assess the degree to which each AACC competency was met at the “emerging leaders” level. The WPCCLI met its established program outcomes across all competency areas except, Institutional, Finance, Research, and Resource Management, suggesting the Institute was a successful means of leader development. A deeper analysis of quantitative and qualitative survey data revealed the primary strengths and weaknesses of the Institute. Relationship building, inclusive of networking, conflict resolution, shared governance, customer service, and collaboration, formed the primary strengths of the WPCCLI, while applied learning, across the dimensions of active learning, skill practice, institutional context, and immersive experiences, formed the primary weaknesses of the Institute

Equity, Education, and Emergency: Examining Social Resilience Building Pilot Programs, Methods, and Successes in Massachusetts Communities

The concept of resilience and the methods and process of building it are as-of-yet undefined, set, or universally agreed upon. However, as the need to build resilience’s essential components, i.e. “the capacity of social, economic, and environmental systems to cope with a hazardous event or trend or disturbance,” increases, the urgency to understand the driving factors behind the concept and develop effective methods to foster these capacities grows as well. To gain insight into how climate change preparations can best facilitate resilience in their target communities, therefore, this thesis explores the concept of resilience as it is built, practiced, and manifested in Massachusetts. Because of how grossly physical efforts can and often do overlook already vulnerable communities, I focus on the critical nature of creating social bonds, resilience hubs, and cultures of empathy, responsibility, and climate awareness in building resilient communities through incorporating a community-based, justice-informed framework into resilience-building

Higher Education\u27s Immunity to Change: Understanding How Leaders Make Meaning of Their Student Success Landscape

Closing equity gaps in the higher education sector is a long-standing issue. This issue has become exacerbated with the impact of COVID-19 and racial injustices happening across America. Now more than ever it has become imperative to use participatory action research to understand how leaders make meaning of their student success landscape and use that meaning to influence their strategic action for equity. I engaged two student success stakeholders from one university as co-researchers to help identify a problem in practice as it relates to equity gaps in student success. We used a modified approach to immunity to change (ITC) coaching coupled with an action inquiry framework to assist student success stakeholders with processing and reflecting on this problem to enact change. Co-researchers identified groups of stakeholders, referred to as “ITC participants,” based on their problem in practice to complete modified ITC mapping. I then used the findings from the modified ITC mapping to ask co-researchers to develop a plan of action to sustain momentum around resolving the Problem in Practice. This qualitative research project revealed three key findings: (a) understanding problems that relate to equity requires disaggregating data; (b) staff who are on the ground are key in understanding student success and creating a student-centered culture; and (c) leaders’ beliefs are translated into actions and demonstrated in structures and policies created. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, http://aura.antioch.edu/ and OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu

An Evaluation of Equity and Access for All Students in a School District\u27s Career and Technical Education Programs

There is a great deal of research regarding the need for equity and access in Career and Technical Education (CTE); however, very little research exists acknowledging strategies to achieve it. The purpose of this study was to evaluate equity and access in CTE programs, as well as to determine any barriers to CTE program enrollment, participation, and completion faced by students identified as economically challenged, students with disabilities, or English language learners. The context of this inquiry was high school CTE programs in one school district in the United States of America. My study demonstrates both qualitative and quantitative data that reveal what CTE teachers were doing in their 21st century classrooms to provide equity and access for all students, and it further acknowledges any barriers that those teachers identified

How Should a Robot Approach a Pair of People?

This thesis experimentally investigates the comfort of pairs of seated people when they are approached by a robot from different directions. While the effect of robot approach direction on the comfort of a lone person has been investigated previously, the extension to a robot approaching pairs of people has not been explored rigorously. Three maximally-different seating configurations of paired people and eight different robot approach directions were considered. The experiment was augmented with a fourth seating configuration of a lone individual, allowing the responses of grouped and lone participants to be compared. Data obtained from the experiment were analysed using both linear and directional statistics. Results from 180 unique participants showed that the comfort of a person when a robot approached is influenced by the presence and location of a second person. Analysis of these data with directional statistics showed that participant comfort preference clusters into angular regions of ‘suitable for robot approach’ and ‘unsuitable for robot approach’. This finding shows the importance of avoiding robot approach directions of low comfort, rather than selecting a singular robot approach direction of high comfort. Rayleigh’s test of uniformity, a directional statistics method, also shows across all participant configurations that robot approach directions that minimize participant discomfort align spatially with regions that allow for good line of sight of the robot by both people, and are centred on the largest open space that a robot could approach the group from. Participants who were grouped also regarded the robot as having more social agency than did lone experimental participants. Grouped participants were less frustrated with the experimental task and also found it less physically and temporally demanding in comparison to lone experimental participants

The Emergent Logic of Health Law

The American health care system is on a glide path toward ruin. Health spending has become the fiscal equivalent of global warming, and the number of uninsured Americans is approaching fifty million. Can law help to divert our country from this path? There are reasons for deep skepticism. Law governs the provision and financing of medical care in fragmented and incoherent fashion. Commentators from diverse perspectives bemoan this chaos, casting it as an obstacle to change. I contend in this Article that pessimism about health law’s prospects is unjustified, but that a new understanding of health law’s disarray is urgently needed to guide reform. My core proposition is that the law of health care provision is best understood as an emergent system. Its contradictions and dysfunctions cannot be repaired by some master design. No one actor has a grand overview—or the power to impose a unifying vision. Countless market players, public planners, and legal and regulatory decisionmakers interact in oft-chaotic ways, clashing with, reinforcing, and adjusting to each other. Out of these interactions, a larger scheme emerges—one that incorporates the health sphere’s competing interests and values. Change in this system, for worse and for better, arises from the interplay between its myriad actors. By quitting the quest for a single, master design, we can better focus our efforts on possibilities for legal and policy change. We can and should continuously survey the landscape of stakeholders and expectations with an eye toward potential launching points for evolutionary processes—processes that leverage current institutions and incentives. What we cannot do is plan or predict these evolutionary pathways in precise detail; the complexity of interactions among market and government actors precludes fine-grained foresight of this sort. But we can determine the general direction of needed change, identify seemingly intractable obstacles, and envision ways to diminish or finesse them over time. Dysfunctional legal doctrines, interest group expectations, consumers’ anxieties, and embedded institutional and cultural barriers can all be dealt with in this way, in iterative fashion. This Article sets out a strategy for doing so. To illustrate this strategy, I suggest emergent approaches to the most urgent challenges in health care policy and law—the crises of access, value, and cost

Big data for monitoring educational systems

This report considers “how advances in big data are likely to transform the context and methodology of monitoring educational systems within a long-term perspective (10-30 years) and impact the evidence based policy development in the sector”, big data are “large amounts of different types of data produced with high velocity from a high number of various types of sources.” Five independent experts were commissioned by Ecorys, responding to themes of: students' privacy, educational equity and efficiency, student tracking, assessment and skills. The experts were asked to consider the “macro perspective on governance on educational systems at all levels from primary, secondary education and tertiary – the latter covering all aspects of tertiary from further, to higher, and to VET”, prioritising primary and secondary levels of education

“Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies

Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model – based on self-interest – fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life