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Research over the last decade or so has made it clear that quality teachers matter to student achievement. What is less clear is the ways in which they matter and how we can prepare such high-quality teachers. Nowhere is this lack of clarity more evident than in special education, where we have few studies on teacher quality and even fewer studies on the type of preparation opportunities that would lead to high quality. Thus, it is difficult to make evidence-based decisions about how quality special education teachers should be defined and prepared. As a field, we have to turn to research in general education to provide a sense of some of the dimensions of teacher quality and effective teacher education. In this chapter, we provide a summary of the research on characteristics of highly qualified teachers and what we know from the research on teacher education and professional development that might foster these qualities, both in general and in special education. Part of our discussion centers on the concerns surrounding this body of research and the challenges of applying the findings to the field of special education. Although these challenges pose considerable problems, we are optimistic that potential solutions exist and can be reached through an alignment of initial teacher education and induction.

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how an academic library can use a library-led, public, positive, and broad faculty gratitude campaign to help a campus embrace a culture of open education.

Using a literature review of faculty outreach efforts in the area of open education and an examination of the psychology of persuasion, this library developed a gratitude campaign that consisted of a faculty video, letters from the provost, signed cards from students, door hangers, and the delivery of swag bags to faculty offices.

While it is challenging to assess how much an initiative may have changed campus culture, initial responses to the gratitude campaign have been overwhelmingly positive. In addition, it cost little or nothing to develop the campaign and materials can be reused in future events and initiatives.

Changing campus culture, maintaining momentum in a program with limited funding, and reaching reluctant faculty are all challenges for open education initiatives. Initiating a gratitude campaign can begin to address all of these by being public, positive, and inclusive. This case study describes how a campus could adopt any or all of the gratitude campaign strategies and it includes openly licensed examples, templates, and models for readers to use.

Open education and affordability efforts that use presentations, grant programs, and awards are common on academic campuses. However, when funding is tight or these efforts fail to reach new audiences, a gratitude campaign can make inroads where these traditional efforts are limited.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the mediating role of students’ engagement to their classes, for the conventional relationship between teachers’ efforts and students’ development, for a better understanding of the instruction-based classroom learning.

The investigation is made using a mult-istage-stratified-systematic sample of 500 students from business and engineering schools with an almost equal representation of both the genders and the type of schools’ ownership. A structural equation modeling is used for this mediation analysis.

The mediating role of students’ engagement is identically established both for business and engineering schools and for both genders. However, in public sector universities, this mediation is insignificant.

The investigation is limited only to business and engineering schools, and this limitation may conceal some factor(s) more important for other schools. Further, the investigation is reading data from Lahore, a metropolitan, which may hide some factor(s) some appropriate for smaller cities.

The data are gathered, analyzed and discussed through the lens of the socio-cultural theory, allowing for a comprehensive understanding to emerge for students’ engagement to their classes.

This paper aims to explore consumer attitude towards service failure and recovery in the higher education in general and with respect to teaching, examination, library, computer lab, administration and infrastructure in particular.

The data are collected from 120 students of three undergraduate colleges of University of Jammu using purposive sampling.

The findings reveal that all recovery efforts pertaining to teaching, examination, library, computer lab, administration and infrastructure are significant in overcoming the respective service failures.

The present study is limited to address service failure and service recovery relationship with respect to teaching, examination, library, computer lab, administration and infrastructure and limited to three undergraduate colleges operating in Jammu city only. The sample of the study is small which needs to be considered before generalizing the results.

This study makes a maiden attempt to identify service failure issues with respect to teaching, examination, library, computer lab, administration and infrastructure using quantitative methodology in higher education and role of service recovery strategies in monitoring and reducing service failure.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a selected bibliography of recent resources on library instruction and information literacy.

The paper introduces and annotates periodical articles, monographs, and audiovisual material examining library instruction and information literacy.

Information about each source is provided. The paper discusses the characteristics of current scholarship, and describes sources that contain unique scholarly contributions and quality reproductions.

The information in the paper may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

The paper aims to examine the effect of levels of self-regulated effort (SRE) and levels of cognitive load on the watching and completing of video lectures used as the main source of instruction in online learning environments.

A survey provided data on the students’ engagement with video lectures, their level of SRE and the level of cognitive load they perceived while watching video lectures. The relationships between these variables and statistical significance were analyzed.

There were three key findings: a positive relationship between SRE and both watching and completing lectures; a negative relationship between SRE and perceptions of existing cognitive load; and students in different demographic groups watched fewer lectures, experienced higher cognitive load and reported lower levels of SRE.

Implications of this study are that video lecture creation would benefit from the development of best practices, consideration of students’ levels of self-regulation, minimization of extraneous load and individual differences among groups of students. Limitations are the context-specific nature of the findings and the fact that data were drawn from self-reported survey responses, meaning they are subjective in nature.

The originality of this paper lies in its investigation of relationship between SRE, cognitive load and video lecture viewership. No research of this topic could be found during the literature review. Findings are of value to those interested in reaping increased levels of video lecture viewership by showing elements that will encourage engagement, satisfaction and better transmission of instruction.

Although much attention has been devoted to the study of accounting students’ performance, little attention has been shown to the process of accounting students’ performance. Attention to process necessitates that the subject of accounting students’ test-taking behavior be explored. This study invites attention to the amount of time students take to return their examinations. Time spent on this critical task can be understood as a measure of student ambition to do well, student preparation or cognitive engagement. Using data collected from many classes taught by several instructors at one selective private institution, the results suggest that there is a non-linear relationship between the order in which exams are returned and exam performance. Specifically, those who work on their exams for longer tend to score lower. However, those that return their exams relatively quickly do not necessarily score better. The middle range, wherein students complete their exams neither early nor late relative to others, is associated with better test performance. The relationship between exam return order and test performance also varies by the type of exam and by the matriculation level. The study offers to add to our understanding of accounting students, an achievement that may be an underappreciated prerequisite to effective instructional outcomes.

The growing body of research on student engagement in online writing courses suggests that learning management system (LMS) technology does not by itself create an interactive learning situation nor does it automatically engage students in meaningful interactions with their peers and the instructor. Traditional top-down engagement strategies such as a discussion forum, we argue, have not worked to increase student-to-student engagement in the online environment, confirming our contention that students’ notions of engagement and quality are different from instructors’. Engagement should be re-envisioned as a student-centered effort, wherein educators take on the responsibility of implementing strategies that promote student-to-student engagement. This chapter, then, reconceptualizes approaches to student engagement in online writing-intensive classes. It examines how virtual learning environments challenge traditional notions of student engagement, offers some innovative learner–instructor engagement strategies that can be marshaled to improve student learning, and addresses the challenges and successes of this undertaking, in an effort to establish a meaningful and sustainable student-centered online writing classroom.

This chapter highlights the creation of a STEM Center of Excellence for Active Learning (SCEAL) at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. The overarching goal of the STEM Center is to transform pedagogy and institutional teaching and learning in order to significantly increase the production of high-achieving students who will pursue careers and increase diversity in the STEM workforce. Some of the STEM Center’s efforts to reach its goals included supporting active learning classroom and course redesign efforts along with providing professional development workshops and opportunities to garner funding to cultivate student success projects through the development of an Innovation Ventures Fund. Outcomes from this Center have led to several publications and external grant funding awards to continue implementation, assessment, and refinement of active learning innovations and interventions for STEM student success for years to come.

Sets out to understand how schools participating in a project to create empowered schools defined empowerment, how they structured the change process and how the school culture changed as a result of the effort to empower participants. Results of the change effort indicate that the participating schools could be grouped into three categories regarding their success in substantially changing the school culture in support of the empowerment concept, creating structures that build participant empowerment and in principal actions that facilitate the development of empowered participants. The three types of school were the opportunity school, the shifter school and the no‐go school. From these types of school, presents five themes for understanding school change.