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Assessing learners with extensive support needs has traditionally been rooted in deficit perspectives, in which student incapacities are highlighted. We start this chapter with an overview of this historical view and identify its shortcomings. Next, we identify alternate assessment and progress monitoring as key efforts for shifting the lens from deficit-oriented assessment toward more grade-aligned, inclusive-, and strengths-based strategies. We also identify strategies for comprehensive assessment that can continue this shift in approach. Finally, we conclude with ideas for future directions in assessing learners with extensive support needs.

High-quality nursing home (NH) care has long been a challenge within the United States. For decades, policymakers at the state and federal levels have adopted and implemented regulations to target critical components of NH care outcomes. Simultaneously, our delivery system continues to change the role of NHs in patient care. For example, more acute patients are cared for in NHs, and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has implemented value payment programs targeting NH settings. As a part of these growing pressures from the broader healthcare delivery system, the culture-change movement has emerged among NHs over the past two decades, prompting NHs to embody more person-centered care as well as promote settings which resemble someone's home, as opposed to institutionalized healthcare settings.

Researchers have linked culture change to high-quality outcomes and the ability to adapt and respond to the ever-changing pressures brought on by changes in our regulatory and delivery system. Making enduring culture change within organizations has long been a challenge and focus in NHs. Despite research suggesting that culture-change initiatives that promote greater resident-centered care are associated with several desirable patient outcomes, their adoption and implementation by NHs are resource intensive, and research has shown that NHs with high percentages of low-income residents are especially challenged to adopt these initiatives.

This chapter takes a novel approach to examine factors that impact the adoption of culture-change initiatives by assessing knowledge management and the role of knowledge management activities in promoting the adoption of innovative care delivery models among under-resourced NHs throughout the United States. Using primary data from a survey of NH administrators, we conducted logistic regression models to assess the relationship between knowledge management and the adoption of a culture-change initiative as well as whether these relationships were moderated by leadership and staffing stability. Our study found that NHs were more likely to adopt a culture-change initiative when they had more robust knowledge management activities. Moreover, knowledge management activities were particularly effective at promoting adoption in NHs that struggle with leadership and nursing staff instability. Our findings support the notion that knowledge management activities can help NHs acquire and mobilize informational resources to support the adoption of care delivery innovations, thus highlighting opportunities to more effectively target efforts to stimulate the adoption and spread of these initiatives.

Organizational researchers studying well-being – as well as organizations themselves – often place much of the burden on employees to manage and preserve their own well-being. Missing from this discussion is how – from a human resources management (HRM) perspective – organizations and managers can directly and positively shape the well-being of their employees. The authors use this review to paint a picture of what organizations could be like if they valued people holistically and embraced the full experience of employees’ lives to promote well-being at work. In so doing, the authors tackle five challenges that managers may have to help their employees navigate, but to date have received more limited empirical and theoretical attention from an HRM perspective: (1) recovery at work; (2) women’s health; (3) concealable stigmas; (4) caregiving; and (5) coping with socio-environmental jolts. In each section, the authors highlight how past research has treated managerial or organizational support on these topics, and pave the way for where research needs to advance from an HRM perspective. The authors conclude with ideas for tackling these issues methodologically and analytically, highlighting ways to recruit and support more vulnerable samples that are encapsulated within these topics, as well as analytic approaches to study employee experiences more holistically. In sum, this review represents a call for organizations to now – more than ever – build thriving organizations.

Work-life flexibility policies (e.g., flextime, telework, part-time, right-to-disconnect, and leaves) are increasingly important to employers as productivity and well-being strategies. However, policies have not lived up to their potential. In this chapter, the authors argue for increased research attention to implementation and work-life intersectionality considerations influencing effectiveness. Drawing on a typology that conceptualizes flexibility policies as offering employees control across five dimensions of the work role boundary (temporal, spatial, size, permeability, and continuity), the authors develop a model identifying the multilevel moderators and mechanisms of boundary control shaping relationships between using flexibility and work and home performance. Next, the authors review this model with an intersectional lens. The authors direct scholars’ attention to growing workforce diversity and increased variation in flexibility policy experiences, particularly for individuals with higher work-life intersectionality, which is defined as having multiple intersecting identities (e.g., gender, caregiving, and race), that are stigmatized, and link to having less access to and/or benefits from societal resources to support managing the work-life interface in a social context. Such an intersectional focus would address the important need to shift work-life and flexibility research from variable to person-centered approaches. The authors identify six research considerations on work-life intersectionality in order to illuminate how traditionally assumed work-life relationships need to be revisited to address growing variation in: access, needs, and preferences for work-life flexibility; work and nonwork experiences; and benefits from using flexibility policies. The authors hope that this chapter will spur a conversation on how the work-life interface and flexibility policy processes and outcomes may increasingly differ for individuals with higher work-life intersectionality compared to those with lower work-life intersectionality in the context of organizational and social systems that may perpetuate growing work-life and job inequality.

Extant research on job insecurity has traditionally investigated this construct as a hindrance stressor, based on theoretical developments and meta-analytical results that have shown consistent negative relationships between job insecurity and a host of organizational outcomes. In this chapter, the authors take a person-centered perspective based on the transactional theory of stress and argue that employees can and do appraise job insecurity in different ways which is manifested by qualitatively distinct latent profiles. The authors also argue that certain positive psychological variables (i.e., hope, optimism, self-efficacy, and grit) might influence one’s odds to belong to specific appraisal latent classes. Using a cross-lagged dataset of 322 US-based employees, the authors found evidence of five qualitatively different latent profiles (i.e., employees who viewed job insecurity as: (1) irrelevant, (2) simultaneously moderately challenging and hindering, (3) primarily hindering, (4) both highly challenging and highly hindering, or (5) primarily challenging). Further, the results showed that higher grit was associated with higher odds of belonging to any of the appraisal profiles compared to the high challenge/high hindrance group whereas higher self-efficacy was associated with higher odds of belonging to the irrelevant group compared to any of the appraisal profiles. Hope and optimism, however, did not influence latent class membership. The authors discuss the implications for theory and practice considering seemingly paradoxical findings demonstrating sometimes positive and sometimes negative outcomes of job insecurity, as well as traditional assumptions that employees primarily view job insecurity as either a hindrance or a challenge.

On many occasions, organizational science research has been referred to as fragmented and disjointed, resulting in a literature that is, in the opinion of many, difficult to navigate and comprehend. One potential explanation is that scholars have failed to comprehend that organizations are complex and intricate systems. In order to move us past this morass, we recommend that researchers extend beyond traditional rational, mechanistic, and variable-centered approaches to research and integrate a more advantageous pattern-oriented approach within their research program. Pattern-oriented methods approximate real-life phenomena by adopting a holistic, integrative approach to research wherein individual- and organizational-systems are viewed as non-decomposable organized wholes. We argue that the pattern-oriented approach has the potential to overcome a number of breakdowns faced by alternate approaches, while offering a novel and more representative lens from which to view organizational- and HRM-related issues. The proposed incorporation of the pattern-oriented approach is framed within a review and evaluation of current approaches to organizational research and is supplemented with a discussion of methodological and theoretical implications as well as potential applications of the pattern-oriented approach.

This chapter provides “viewpoints” on the education of learners with extensive and pervasive support needs. That is, students who require the most support to learn, often categorized as having intellectual disability, multiple disabilities, autism spectrum disorder, or related disabilities. The lenses through which we provide these viewpoints are historical and future-oriented; we begin with historic perspectives on the education of students with extensive and pervasive support needs, and then provide 21st century viewpoints for these learners. We interpret the notion of viewpoints in two ways: first, consistent with a viewpoint as indicating an examination of objects (in this case, practices and interventions) from a distance so as to be able to compare and judge; and, second, viewpoint as indicating our perspective on said interventions and practice.

This chapter will outline and discuss an original approach to qualitative research interviewing, the participant-centered approach (PCA), which was developed in the context of a project which used interpretative phenomenological analysis (Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009) to explore aspects of the professional identity of academic staff in higher education. The chapter outlines the specific methodological issues which led to the development of the PCA, and discusses the rationale for the development of the approach, highlighting its theoretical and conceptual roots in therapeutic counseling/helping contexts and literature. Practical techniques associated with the approach are described, and the broader methodological and ethical implications of working with it are discussed. The PCA aims to bridge the gap between discussions of qualitative interviewing in methods textbooks and the practical interviewing skills upon which, it will be argued, the quality of data from research interviews depends. The PCA is likely to be of interest to higher education researchers seeking to generate rich data relating to the experiences of a range of stakeholders in the higher education community, and may be of particular interest to novice researchers insofar as it facilitates the scaffolding of expertise and confidence in qualitative research interview practice.

There is a concerning disparity between students with disabilities and their peers without disabilities in their long-term, postsecondary outcomes. The former group tends to have a variety of poorer outcomes in important domains of life, such as employment, postsecondary education, independent living, and community participation. Policymakers, scholars, and the general public alike have called attention to this issue, resulting in both legal mandates and research on evidence-based practices in the area of transition services. While the law requires individualized, results-oriented transition services based upon age-appropriate transition assessment and a number of evidence-based transition practices and predictors have been identified, studies of individualized education programs and practices have revealed a significant underuse of best practices in transition assessment and services. In this chapter, we discuss the importance of comprehensive transition assessment as a foundation for setting postsecondary goals and designing services that best fit individual student strengths and needs and best prepare students to be successful in their adult lives. Further, we provide an overview of current recommendations for best practices in planning, conducting, and interpreting transition assessments, and offer suggestions for areas where further research is needed.