Building Citywide Systems for Quality: A Guide and Case Studies for Afterschool Leaders

This guide is intended to help cities strengthen and sustain quality afterschool programs by using an emerging practice known as a quality improvement system (QIS). The guide explains how to start building a QIS or how to further develop existing efforts and features case studies of six communities' QIS

Beyond the Numbers: Data Use for Continuous Improvement of Programs Serving Disconnected Youth

The American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF) conducted a series of in-depth case studies to examine how three programs which serve a disconnected youth population are utilizing data as a tool for continuous program improvement and ongoing accountability. The resulting publication, Beyond the Numbers: Data Use for Continuous Improvement of Programs Serving Disconnected Youth, describes data collection and use at three successful programs, and distills the key lessons learned and issues to consider both for practitioners and policymakers aiming to improve outcomes for the disconnected youth population

Collecting and Using Information to Strengthen Citywide Out-of-School Time Systems

Looks at the kinds of data U.S. cities are gathering and analyzing in their efforts to build citywide systems that make high-quality after-school programs more available to children, how they collect it, and how they put it to use

Supporting Success: Why and How to Improve Quality in After-School Programs

This report examines the program improvement strategies, step-by-step, that allowed The James Irvine Foundation's CORAL initiative to achieve the levels of quality needed to boost the academic success of participating students. And, it makes specific policy and funding suggestions for improving program performance. Communities Organizing Resources to Advance Learning (CORAL) is an eight-year, $58 million after-school initiative to improve educational achievement in low-performing schools in five California cities

Turning engineers into reflective university teachers

Increasing attention to quality and innovation in Higher Education (HE) is enhancing the pedagogic knowledge of faculty members and thereby encouraging the academic success of their students. This aim requires, from the institution and teachers, a greater degree of involvement than was previously the case. This is certainly borne out by experience in Portuguese universities. The growing concern of engineers with issues of pedagogy and academic success marks a sea change in the traditional conceptions of teaching and learning in Higher Education. There are, of course, indications that many academics are resistant to change. Our research indicates a tradition among Portuguese and Scottish academics to incline their effort toward research with a resultant decline in interest and effort on teaching. The present paper presents a meta-analysis of research conducted at the University of Aveiro (Portugal) and the University of Strathclyde (United Kingdom) between 2000 and 2004 involving academics who taught first-year introductory Programming courses. The purpose of our study was to promote reflection and research on teaching based issues as a strategy toward improved student learning. The findings of the study raised a number of salient issues for discussion and consideration. In this paper, we present some of these issues, aiming to explore the impact that the findings may have on teachers' attitudes towards teaching and students' learning in introductory programming courses

ULS FY14 Planning and Budget Report

This document was submitted by the University Library System (ULS) to the University of Pittsburgh's provost's office on March 1, 2013. Incorporating the work of the ULS FY14 Planning Task Force, it reports ULS accomplishments for 2012-2013 and strategic priorities for 2013-2014

Building Quality Improvement Systems: Lessons from Three Emerging Efforts in the Youth-Serving Sector

Quality is fast becoming a policy priority in states and localities around the country. As a result, formal and informal networks of youth organizations are seeking and developing strategies to help them assess and improve performance. This report takes a close look at efforts underway in three networks and provides a preliminary framework for thinking about key questions when planning any kind of program quality improvement work in the youth-serving sector

What Matters, What Works: Advancing Achievement After School

This brief provides highlights from "Advancing Achievement: Findings from an Independent Evaluation of a Major After-School Initiative." The brief underscores the potential of after-school programs in the ongoing drive to advance children's academic achievement. It shines a light on some of the issues that matter most for programs striving to promote academic success -- namely, program quality and youth engagement. The brief also suggests what works by linking these program attributes to academic benefits. Like the report on which it is based, the brief draws lessons from the Communities Organizing Resources to Advance Learning (CORAL) initiative of The James Irvine Foundation

The First-Year Gateway Experience: A Groundbreaking Model

Based on calls for a paradigm shift in higher education, which have appeared in the literature for years (Barr &Tagg, 1995; Tagg, 2003, Bryant University transformed its first-year experience into an innovative model, The First-Year Gateway). Informed by research from The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education, the Association of American Colleges & Universities’ Liberal Education for America’s Promise, and the Wabash National Study, a group identified five learning outcomes: effective communication, critical thinking, ethical reasoning, diversity awareness, and information literacy. Key to this undertaking was faculty development, and utilizing assessment data to improve curricular design and learning outcomes. The result is an interdisciplinary 13 credit first-year program developed to foster a successful transition into Bryant University. Launched in fall 2012, assessment data was gathered to determine whether common learning outcomes were achieved. Faculty embedded student success goals into their courses, which are designed to foster purposeful adjustment to higher education. Preliminary assessment indicates institutional gains in retention, academic standing, and student and faculty engagement during the implementation year. The new model, based on Wenger’s community of practice (COP), created opportunities to discuss pedagogy. Most importantly, the model fostered faculty’s deeper understanding of first-year transitions

Toward a Semiotic Framework for Using Technology in Mathematics Education: The Case of Learning 3D Geometry

This paper proposes and examines a semiotic framework to inform the use of technology in mathematics education. Semiotics asserts that all cognition is irreducibly triadic, of the nature of a sign, fallible, and thoroughly immersed in a continuing process of interpretation (Halton, 1992). Mathematical meaning-making or meaningful knowledge construction is a continuing process of interpretation within multiple semiotic resources including typological, topological, and social-actional resources. Based on this semiotic framework, an application named VRMath has been developed to facilitate the learning of 3D geometry. VRMath utilises innovative virtual reality (VR) technology and integrates many semiotic resources to form a virtual reality learning environment (VRLE) as well as a mathematical microworld (Edwards, 1995) for learning 3D geometry. The semiotic framework and VRMath are both now being evaluated and will be re-examined continuously