Your search

The Connecticut Comprehensive School Counseling Framework was released in November 2020?8 months into the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to explore the progress made by principals and school counselors in implementing the new framework, and to understand the impact of the pandemic on their efforts to do so. We found significant overlap between the perceptions and priorities expressed by participating principals and school counselors. Particularly noteworthy was the fact that both groups described increased collaboration within their schools.

The study aims to suggest a model for attitudes towards inclusive education that will yield a good fit across different countries. Moreover, we aim to explore the effect of years of teaching experience, educational work level of teachers, and the highest degree completed by teachers on teachers’ attitudes towards inclusion across different countries. A demographic scale and the ATTAS-mm were applied to 908 teachers employed in schools of general education or who offered parallel support and/or resources in five different countries (Greece, the UK, the USA, Malaysia, and Turkey). CFA suggested a 4-factor solution, which included the cognitive, affective, and behavioral factors that have been previously introduced by Gregory and Noto (2012), and a fourth factor, labeled overall attitudes towards teaching all students. In the cognitive factor, the UK had the most positive attitudes. TU, MA, and GR enrolled in the same cluster, and the USA had the least positive attitudes. In the affective factor, GR had the most positive attitude. MA and the USA enrolled in the same cluster and TU and the UK had the least positive attitudes. A similar pattern is observed for the behavioral factor with GR having the most positive attitude. TU and MA enrolled in the same cluster, and the USA and the UK had the least positive attitudes. Finally, years of teaching experience, educational work level, and the highest degree completed have a significant effect on teachers’ attitudes towards inclusion in all countries. Providing feedback for future research is the focal point of the discussion part. © 2022, Associação Brasileira de Psicologia.

Almost half of the students who begin college are not retained at the institution in which they began. The purpose of this research was to explore the perceptions of first-year college students to improve their psychological and emotional well-being.  This quantitative study utilized the College Student Mentoring Scale that includes two interrelated constructs which are, Psychological and Emotional Support and The Existence of a Role Model. The research found that multiple factors impact first-year students' perceptions of their psychological and emotional well-being. Additional findings indicated that response levels were highest for The Existence of a Role Model.  It is the intention that this study will add to the somewhat limited research on improving the psychological and emotional well-being of first-year college students in higher education. Also, it will assist in future policies and practices by providing a foundation of the components that influence first-year student success through improving the effectiveness of peer mentoring programs.

A curriculum is not known to improve academic achievements. This book offers case studies of three Connecticut districts of high, medium and low socio-economic status, three districts from a national sample that won the prestigious Booker prize mainly representing low SES districts, and 10 districts that have implemented a Balanced Curriculum with a sample of various SES districts from high to low. All of them have used their curriculum as the vehicle toward improved achievements. The districts studied have four common themes, represented by the acronym "ASIA", for Alignment, Structure and Stability, Implementation and Infrastructure, and Assessment. All districts aligned their curriculum to state standards and assessments. They had a structure for the curriculum and had stability at the superintendent's position. The districts applied a lot of effort and attained results from implementing the curriculum and developing the infrastructure to support implementation, and they finally incorporated frequent district-wide assessments into their design. The book documents the subsets of these four areas that were present in most districts that might help other districts to replicate the findings. Research in the four areas is also documented. This book demonstrates through the case studies that it is possible to use curriculum as a framework for raising test scores. This is not normally thought of as a path to improved achievements. The fact that districts from a wide range of socio-economic statuses have used their curriculum to improve achievements demonstrates that a wider application of this direction could yield positive results for other districts. © 2014 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.

In reading through the district stories about using curriculum as a framework for improvement, many innovations were interwoven into ancillary efforts for curriculum development. As these are part of the stories of district curriculum development, we thought that discussions of these "ancillary efforts" were important. The innovations considered in this chapter are: Power standards, Professional learning communities, Common assessments, Data-driven decision making, and Walk-through's. We will consider these as if they were being implemented alone, and assess their power to produce student achievement gains using the ASIA framework. References to the district stories will be given. © 2014 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.

Working with districts over the past 15 years to write and implement a balanced curriculum has been a wonderful experience; especially as so many of the districts that I worked with saw their student achievement improve (Squires, 2013). Now, thousands of students are getting better results because the curriculum was developed and well implemented using the Balanced Curriculum model. As is evident by the chapters about other school districts, the balanced curriculum is not the only way to get improvement, as the districts highlighted in this book also used curriculum as a framework for improving achievement. In this chapter I will highlight lessons learned along the way about developing and implementing curriculum. Using ideas described in chapter 6, we will highlight what major roles need to know and be able to do in planning, developing and implementing curriculum. For those with experience of working within a district, this will give one model to compare your district's curriculum writing and implementation efforts. We begin by dividing the effort into three areas: planning, writing, and implementing curriculum. To plan, we create a planning team to guide the process of writing and implementing curriculum. We don't separate curriculum writing from curriculum implementation because how the curriculum is implemented will, in part, depend on how the curriculum was written. We believe that such curriculum development and implementation has the potential to last over several years, and we believe that such an effort needs people who can stay the course over those years, so the effort is not wasted. © 2014 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.