Institutional Accreditation: Making the Process More Efficient, Effective, and Meaningful to Colleges and Universities

Institutional accreditation is a voluntary, peer-review process that is overseen through the seven institutional accreditors governed by the U.S. Department of Education. The purpose of accreditation is to ensure institutional quality standards are being met by colleges and universities. The purpose of this study was to identify how the accreditation process could be improved with foci on efficiency, effectiveness, and more meaningful impact to the institutions. Drawing on Heifetz et al.’s (2009) theory of adaptive leadership, Kotter’s (2012) accelerators and the integrated planning principles of Stephens (2017) and Immordino et al., (2016), this study employed grounded theory to discover the experiences, perceptions, and potential solutions to accreditation challenges. Within the region that is overseen by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU), 23 institutional leaders including administrators and faculty from two- and four-year institutions from both the public and private sectors residing in four states were interviewed. The findings revealed several successes as well as challenges. In general, colleges using a more integrated rather than disparate-compliance approach to accreditation have found added success in all aspects of the process. The assessment of student learning remains a challenge at all levels due to a lack of clarity regarding how to design the evaluation of learning in a manner that prioritizes clear outcomes and meaningful planning. Findings from this study offer implications to support higher education personnel in integrated planning for greater alignment of resources and continuous improvement; the assessment of student learning and achievement; and institutional effectiveness

Design and Fabrication of On-Chip Inductors

An inductor is a conductor arranged in an appropriate shape (such as a conducting wire wound as a coil) to supply a certain amount of self-inductance. This passive device stores magnetic energy. Simple spiral planar inductors of varying geometry were designed and fabricated on a silicon substrate insolated by silicon oxide. The process chosen for fabrication of the devices was the copper damascene process. Line widths and spaces varied from 5μm to 20μm. Thickness of the copper wire was approximately 1.5 μm. The inductors were isolated from the silicon substrate by 0.5 μm of Si02 and wires were insolated with the same material. Theoretical inductance values for the designed inductors ranged from 17nH to 300nH

Strategies to Increase Membership in a Canadian Nonprofit Protecting Rights and Benefits of Retired Military Personnel

Nonprofit organization leaders with an advocacy mission are increasingly challenged to identify, convert, and maintain their membership base to sustain the effectiveness of their advocacy reach and effectiveness. Grounded in stakeholder theory, the purpose of this qualitative single case study was to explore strategies some nonprofit leaders used to increase membership in a Canadian nonprofit protecting the rights and benefits of retired military personnel. The participants included four leaders of a small nonprofit organization in Ontario, Canada, who have directly or indirectly implemented membership strategies. Data were collected through semistructured interviews, client organizational documents, the organization’s website, an assessment of the client organization using the Baldrige Excellence Framework, and public information. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis, which yielded four themes: marketing reach, membership value proposition, nonprofit strategy and mission, and board governance. A key recommendation is for nonprofit organization leaders to define a new veteran-focused strategy and mission that meets the needs of its current stakeholders. Implications for positive social change include the potential to provide membership recruitment and retention strategies supporting the needs of veterans and their communities

Influence of Science Fairs on the Choice of a Scientific Career

Natural Scienc

Analysis of Two Methods of Teaching Biological Sciences Laboratory

Higher Educatio

Charter schools as state actors: are they truly public schools?

The trend of establishing charter schools across the United States has been accomplished by authorization statutes labelling them as public schools. They are supported by public tax dollars but private entities are obtaining charters and in some cases hiring for-profit companies to operate the schools. Private boards of directors replace a locally elected school board to direct the operation of these schools. As teachers find traditional public schools closing and charter schools entering the market where closures have occurred they must choose between moving to a district still hiring fully certified teachers or entering employment with charter organizations. In making that change teachers must consider whether the terms of their employment have changed and understand the nature of their new relationship with school leadership. As public employees, teachers were protected by constitutional provisions extending that protection to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. That amendment is what incorporates much of the Bill of Rights and prohibits deprivation of those rights by state action. As charter schools become a larger employer of teachers the question arises whether these schools are also subject to those constitutional provisions in the same way a public school district is when employing teachers. The state action doctrine, developed in Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence, controls whether those charter school employers must observe constitutional limitations or the employees have lost those protections by becoming charter employees. The question can only be answered by tracking the development and status of the state action doctrine through the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. The state action doctrine has been famously labeled a “conceptual disaster area”1 and has eluded consistent interpretation for more than a century. Because the law is often developed in a syllogistic pattern supported by building on previous holdings and remaining consistent in interpretation of fact situations most commentators have searched for some consistency in the holdings of the Court by connecting words that appear in multiple decisions. That method has failed to provide a truly consistent interpretation of state action and leads mostly to the “torchless search" for a way out of a camp echoing cave”2 as described by Professor Black sixty years ago. This study takes a different approach to the decisions to make sense of the changing interpretation of the doctrine through time. Reading the cases with an eye to the members of the Court and the prevalent political issues of the day reveals first a steady expansion of the doctrine and then a contraction that follows the patterns of those political issues and pressures felt by the Court from time to time. This method uncovers an arc of decisions that follow that expansion and contraction through time and develop an understanding of how new cases might be decided. Because the Court has not dealt with this issue that projection will assist any litigants attempting to claim constitutional protection to shape their cases to provide the best chance of success

The Grizzly, April 24, 2008

Ursinus College Dance Company Kicks Off Tonight! • CoSA at UC! • Charity Events in the Classroom • Red Sky in Morning • Another Collegeville Restaurant Review: BonJung • Ursinus Graduate Awarded Watson Fellowship • Achievement Gap: Close to Home • Opinions: Bush / Clinton Dynasty? • Weekend Success and Dubb Appreciation Week • UC Softball Flying High After Wins Against Gettysburg • Great Success Strikes Men\u27s Laxhttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1763/thumbnail.jp

Rapid detection of structural variation in a human genome using nanochannel-based genome mapping technology

BACKGROUND: Structural variants (SVs) are less common than single nucleotide polymorphisms and indels in the population, but collectively account for a significant fraction of genetic polymorphism and diseases. Base pair differences arising from SVs are on a much higher order (>100 fold) than point mutations; however, none of the current detection methods are comprehensive, and currently available methodologies are incapable of providing sufficient resolution and unambiguous information across complex regions in the human genome. To address these challenges, we applied a high-throughput, cost-effective genome mapping technology to comprehensively discover genome-wide SVs and characterize complex regions of the YH genome using long single molecules (>150 kb) in a global fashion. RESULTS: Utilizing nanochannel-based genome mapping technology, we obtained 708 insertions/deletions and 17 inversions larger than 1 kb. Excluding the 59 SVs (54 insertions/deletions, 5 inversions) that overlap with N-base gaps in the reference assembly hg19, 666 non-gap SVs remained, and 396 of them (60%) were verified by paired-end data from whole-genome sequencing-based re-sequencing or de novo assembly sequence from fosmid data. Of the remaining 270 SVs, 260 are insertions and 213 overlap known SVs in the Database of Genomic Variants. Overall, 609 out of 666 (90%) variants were supported by experimental orthogonal methods or historical evidence in public databases. At the same time, genome mapping also provides valuable information for complex regions with haplotypes in a straightforward fashion. In addition, with long single-molecule labeling patterns, exogenous viral sequences were mapped on a whole-genome scale, and sample heterogeneity was analyzed at a new level. CONCLUSION: Our study highlights genome mapping technology as a comprehensive and cost-effective method for detecting structural variation and studying complex regions in the human genome, as well as deciphering viral integration into the host genome. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/2047-217X-3-34) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Conference of Microelectronics Research 2001

https://scholarworks.rit.edu/meec_archive/1010/thumbnail.jp

Rapid phase-shift reversal on a Jamaican coral reef

Abstract Many Caribbean reefs have experienced a phase-shift in community structure, the principle features being a decline in coral cover and an increase in macroalgal biomass. However, one Jamaican reef-Dairy Bull on the north shore near Discovery Bay-is once again dominated by scleractinian corals and several key species have returned. Living coral cover at 6-8 m depth at Dairy Bull has doubled over the past 9 years and is now $54$11% by January 2004. During this time the cover of macroalgae decreased by 90%, from 45 to 6%. We speculate that long-lived colonies of Montastraea annularis may have facilitated the recovery of this reef by providing structural refugia