Youth Academic Success:It Starts in the Home

Academic Success of youth is critical for their future success as well as for the economic and social health of their communities. Using a mixed methods approach (the 2008-2013 “Social Capital and Children’s Development” survey and commentaries of eight education professionals), academic support in the home was found to be the most influential in promoting sociable and non-disruptive behaviors in the classroom and contributing to academic success of 1800 youth. The importance of a supportive home ecological environment (relative to the school and community ecologies of youth) lent support to the predictions of social and cultural capital theories in shaping the core academic self-concept of youth. Education professionals lent support for the importance of a supportive home environment in youth academics. These findings, while contributing to the scholarship in the field of early education, also pointed to new research directions on how schools and communities can support parents

Editorial: The engaged university

Gateways has been a place where university researchers and community members join together to better understand the broad range of issues confronting communities across the globe, including academic communities. It is well positioned to promote a healthy debate among community members, researchers and policy-makers around scores of problems. We will continue to be a resource that is free to the thousands of our readers

On the side of the angels: community involvement in the governance of neighbourhood renewal.

This article draws upon the authors’ experiences of community-led regeneration developed while members of the National Evaluation Team for the NDC Programme. The article continues the focus on urban regeneration adopted in a range of outputs from two of the authors over the last decade. In assessing how the term community has been defined by policy-makers and the challenges involved in empowering communities, the output was aimed at both academic and user communities. For its direct relevance to communities involved in regeneration, the article was awarded the 2006 Sam Aaronovitch Prize, awarded annually by the journal Local Economy

What We're Learning: Building Professional Scholarly Communities in Russia

Outlines the foundation's initiatives to strengthen academic innovation and build communities of scholars in Russia by supporting institutes of higher education and research, competitions, and journals. Evaluates varied successes and lessons learned

Rexplore: unveiling the dynamics of scholarly data

Rexplore is a novel system that integrates semantic technologies, data mining techniques, and visual analytics to provide an innovative environment for making sense of scholarly data. Its functionalities include: i) a variety of views to make sense of important trends in research; ii) a novel semantic approach for characterising research topics; iii) a very fine-grained expert search with detailed multi-dimensional parameters; iv) an innovative graph view to relate a variety of academic entities; iv) the ability to detect and explore the main communities within a research topic; v) the ability to analyse research performance at different levels of abstraction, including individual researchers, organizations, countries, and research communities

Towards a Swiss National Research Infrastructure

In this position paper we describe the current status and plans for a Swiss National Research Infrastructure. Swiss academic and research institutions are very autonomous. While being loosely coupled, they do not rely on any centralized management entities. Therefore, a coordinated national research infrastructure can only be established by federating the various resources available locally at the individual institutions. The Swiss Multi-Science Computing Grid and the Swiss Academic Compute Cloud projects serve already a large number of diverse user communities. These projects also allow us to test the operational setup of such a heterogeneous federated infrastructure

Academic literacies twenty years on: a community-sourced literature review

In 1998, the paper ‘Student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’ by Mary Lea and Brian Street reinvigorated debate concerning ‘what it means to be academically literate’ (1998, p.158). It proposed a new way of examining how students learn at university and introduced the term ‘academic literacies’. Subsequently, a body of literature has emerged reflecting the significant theoretical and practical impact Lea and Street’s paper has had on a range of academic and professional fields. This literature review covers articles selected by colleagues in our professional communities of the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education (ALDinHE), BALEAP the global forum for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) professionals, and the European Association of Teachers of Academic Writing (EATAW). As a community-sourced literature review, this text brings together reviews of wide range of texts and a diverse range of voices reflecting a multiplicity of perspectives and understandings of academic literacies. We have organised the material according to the themes: Modality, Identity, Focus on text, Implications for research, and Implications for practice. We conclude with observations relevant to these themes, which we hope will stimulate further debate, research and professional collaborations between our members and subscribers

Do academic laboratories correspond to scientific communities? Evidence from a large European university.

Although acknowledged as central in the economic literature, the issue of intra academic collaboration has been, insofar, relatively overlooked. This paper fills this gap by stressing the importance of communities in academic research. By analysing the publication behavior of researchers from a large European scientific university, we argue that in certain cases, the community level constitutes a relevant level for analysing the collaborative nature of scientific investigation. Indeed, the reality of research collaborations doesn’t always fit the institutional division of academic work provided by laboratories.Economics of Science, Knowledge Intensive Communities, Academic Collaborations, Social Network Analysis.