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Online courses and self-directed and asynchronous learning may not be the best for everyone. Individuals possess a number of different learning styles and life circumstances when they enter higher education. Technology is but one answer to addressing these diverse needs and providing choices to students. Technology should be employed in a way that does not replace this system of choice but enhances it and provides individuals with other opportunities for achieving educational goals. The ideal for higher education lies somewhere in-between the purely digital and purely traditional modes of educational delivery. Lost in this capitulation of higher education to the enrollments of distance education is student success. This chapter will explore challenges to distance education student retention and persistence, disseminate the theoretical construct of the Dynamic Student Development Metatheodel, and apply specific student success strategies to distance education. These strategies include intrusive advising and asynchronous advising techniques. This chapter will conclude with how these advising techniques and strategies can facilitate increased student persistence through engagement with academic advisors using asynchronous approaches that move beyond the traditional temporal, didactic strategies employed by most higher education institutions.

Transition can be seen as the capstone of many if not most efforts of special educators on behalf of students with disabilities. Transition programs must build upon the foundation set by general and special education teachers to promote accomplishments that will support engagement in adult life. The assumption underlying transition policy is that classroom personnel are adequately trained and supported to promote such outcomes. We investigated that assumption through research on the perceptions of 17 graduate students or recent completers of an alternative certification program serving a large urban district in the northeast. Study participants were interviewed regarding the provision of special education services at their assigned schools, the manner in which they were utilized, the degree to which they felt prepared and supported to teach students with disabilities, and recommendations for improving special education services, teacher training, and support. All participants taught special education students in secondary settings and were assigned to different schools. Several themes were identified including stress due to professional demands, concerns with collaboration and the quality of special education services, and a need for additional special education training. Implications for transition are discussed.

Technology has become a very important aspect of our sacred existence as humans. It has penetrated all sections of our society – it is now an enrichment tool for our economy, politics, education, and society. While these enrichments are naturally inclusive, this chapter focuses on the use of technology in enhancing the education of students, especially those with disabilities. Things that were once inaccessible are now accessible to students with disabilities through the use of technology. These students might have some atypical traits; however, they are humans who can learn and function in our society when provided with appropriate learning tools such as technology. With technology, these students' learning and social activities can be enhanced, modified, adapted, and adjusted so that they can maximize their fullest potential. This is the premise of this chapter; and it sets the stage for the other chapters.

The American public greatly esteems their First Amendment right to freedom of speech, but generally understands poorly its true ambit. Unfortunately, this defect in understanding permeates American educational institutions, from the lowest grades to higher education and even professional schools. Students’ pervasive ability to engage in technological speech and expression further complicates the issue, especially when inappropriate or offensive speech originating outside school crosses the geographic boundary and enters school. School administrators at all levels, challenged with maintaining atmospheres of safety and security conducive to learning, are being asked to respond to such student speech, but they fear to exceed the limits of their authority. Cyberbullying and harassing communications continue to distract victims and educators and detract from the quality of education at all institutions. The legal system and judiciary provide little guidance, and what guidance there is suffers from lack of consistent definitions and conflicting analyses. This chapter will review the jurisprudence pertaining to the First Amendment as applied to the school setting. The emphasis will be on legislative, judicial, and societal responses to cyberbullying and cyber harassment in the school setting, from the elementary level to higher education. Finally, recommendations for policies and procedures for dealing with cyberbullying and cyber harassment in schools will be presented.

Recently, a national priority has been set to improve mental health services for children and families. It has been identified in epidemiological literature that in the United States, an approximate 15% of youth meet diagnostic criteria for emotional or behavioral problems. Furthermore, less than one in every five children that present with such needs receive mental health services. Individual, family, and system barriers such as transportation, competing demands, and long waiting lists have negatively impacted access to mental health services. Therefore, the school system has become the “de facto” mental health system for children and adolescents, in part because of the significant time students spend at school. However, meeting the needs of students with behavioral or emotional problems within the school system poses its own challenges. Schools have reported being limited in their ability to deliver basic mental wellness to students due to the lack of available resources. Specifically, there is a shortage of school-employed mental health personnel and the ratio of student to mental health professional is two to three times larger than recommended. Expanded school mental health programs are partnered systems that utilize existing services and collaborate with community mental health (CMH) professionals at each level of the three-tiered system. This partnership enables CMH staff gain access to youth with emotional and behavioral problems, resulting in increased prevention and intervention services for students. Additionally, a coordinated effort such as student-transition services has an integral role of facilitating the process from the school system to postsecondary employment, training, and or additional education.

Despite the breadth of knowledge on self and identity formation across the study of organizations, the field of organizational development and change has limited research on the construction of professional identity. Much has been written to describe the “self-concepts” of those practicing and researching in the field, but there have been no investigations that have explored how these “self-concepts” form. In addition, although women have contributed to defining the “self” in the field, men have held the dominant perspective on the subject. Thus, in this chapter, we address a disparity in the research by exploring the construction of professional identity in the field of organizational development and change, and we give voice to the renowned women who helped to build the field. Using the profiles of 17 American women included in The Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers, we perform a narrative analysis based upon the concepts and models prevalent in the literature on identity formation. By disentangling professional identity formation of the notable women in the field, we can begin to see the nuance and particularities involved in its construction and gain deeper understandings about effective ways to prepare individuals to work in and advance the field.

Purpose – Accounting research has long shown the effect of subjectivity in performance evaluation. This study investigates one form of subjectivity in performance evaluation: flexibility in weighting performance measures examining decisions made by supervisors about weighting. Empirical studies show that the performance-measure weights are only partially consistent with the predictions of the agency theory and they are a still outstanding issue.

Methodology/approach – We develop an experiment to analyse supervisor decision-making, manipulating two factors: internal organisational interdependence and the level of managerial performance. We derive hypotheses along with both economic and behavioural approaches. The economic approach is based on agency theory predictions and the controllability principle while the behavioural approach is drawn on the organisational justice theory. We argue that in low interdependence contexts the supervisor's decision confirms the agency theory predictions, while in high interdependence conditions weighting decisions could be driven by behavioural considerations of fairness perceptions of the evaluation process and the level of managerial performance.

Findings – We find that in low interdependence contexts the supervisor's decision confirms the agency theory predictions, while in high interdependence contexts it does not. The results indicate that the supervisor's decision stems from the integration of economic and behavioural perspectives.

Research and social implications – The theoretical framework can be useful for interpreting the supervisor decision-making and the weighting process.

Originality – The economic and behavioural approaches allow us to understand flexibility in weighting performance measures suggesting that, in addition to economic considerations, a behavioural perspective may also be relevant in explaining subjective weighting.

Operating as a promising regional university well into the 1960s, Stanford witnessed a “great leap forward” in the 1970s and 1980s. Guided by the visionary leadership of its president, Wallace Sterling, and provost, Frederick Terman, Stanford began its meteoric climb into the ranks of the nation's top tier universities. This more general history has been told and retold in numerous publications (e.g., Lowen, 1997; Gillmor, 2004) and need not be recounted here.