Higher education in the United States is facing a critical juncture. Tuition costs are rising, while measures of success are declining. Students struggle to meet the most basic academic requirements, barely passing their courses, while others battle physical and mental health difficulties that profoundly impact their ability to do well in college. This book responds to these challenges, offering a holistic collection of practices to guide those working with emerging adults in higher education. Beginning with an introduction to the developmental period of emerging adulthood, the volume examines how the social and emotional development of emerging adults is relevant to struggles and successes in higher education. Subsequent chapters focus on how technology has impacted on learning and communication for today's students and how faculty and staff can best work with students through meaningful relationships. Consisting of chapters from experts in a variety of disciplines, the volume provides faculty, administrators, and staff with the knowledge and skills needed to help today's students succeed.

Many educator preparation programs have a teacher reflection component and/or model; however, the current available literature provides little information regarding reflection’s impact on teacher performance and student learning. Reflectivity and Cultivating Student Learning includes theory, research, and practice appropriate for teacher educators, teacher candidates, classroom teachers, school administrators, and educational researchers. This text will be useful for teacher education programs, graduate programs in education, and professional development for educators. The goal of this book is to substantiate the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that have been used to establish teacher reflectivity as a foundation of teacher education and to advance the acquisition, applications, and appreciation of teacher reflectivity as a critical aspect of professional growth and development. Pultorak and his contributors enrich the literature and provide greater clarity regarding reflectivity’s impact on student learning in our global society.

In today's colleges and universities, whether students succeed depends in large part on access to effective services that can support and guide them in pursuit of their educational goals. Policy and practice in the field of student services has been largely based on professional literature from US sources. Donna Hardy Cox and Carney Strange offer the first comprehensive description of professional student services in Canadian colleges and universities from the perspective of the practitioner-scholars who create and lead them. Hardy Cox and Strange begin with an overview of student services dealing with the matriculation of post-secondary students - through enrolment management, financial assistance, and orientation to the institution and accommodation - and then discuss housing and residence life, student leadership programs, systems of judicial and academic integrity, and student support and adjustment through counseling, health and wellness initiatives, career and employment advice, and a variety of services that can respond to a variety of needs. How these services are integrated professionally on campus, including their organization and leadership as well as their design within differing institutional contexts, and delivery methods, is the focus of the closing chapters, followed by a distillation of principles that underlie effective student services.

As higher education institutions grapple with the rapid evolution of technology, they are faced with a myriad of challenges in effectively integrating these innovations into teaching, learning, and student support services. From navigating the complexities of instructional design to addressing issues of student engagement and success, educators and administrators are often left searching for comprehensive solutions to enhance the academic experience. Moreover, the increasing diversity of student populations and the growing demand for inclusive practices further complicate this landscape, requiring innovative approaches to ensure equitable access and support for all learners. Emerging Technologies Transforming Higher Education: Instructional Design and Student Success emerges as a timely solution to the pressing challenges facing higher education in the digital age. By offering a nuanced exploration of the intersection between technology and academia, this book equips educators and administrators with the knowledge and tools needed to navigate the complexities of technology integration effectively. Through insightful discussions on topics ranging from virtual reality and artificial intelligence to student support services and cybersecurity, this book provides practical guidance for leveraging emerging technologies to enhance teaching, learning, and student success.

In the current educational environment, there has been a shift towards online learning as a replacement for the traditional in-person classroom experience. With this new environment comes new technologies, benefits, and challenges for providing courses to students through an entirely digital environment. With this shift comes the necessary research on how to utilize these online courses and how to develop effective online educational materials that fit student needs and encourage student learning, motivation, and success. The optimization of these online tools requires a deeper look into curriculum, instructional design, teaching techniques, and new models for student assessment and evaluation. Information on how to create valuable online course content, engaging lesson plans for the digital space, and meaningful student activities online are only a few of many current topics of interest for promoting student achievement through online learning. The Research Anthology on Developing Effective Online Learning Courses provides multiple perspectives on how to develop engaging and effective online learning courses in the wake of the rapid digitalization of education. This book includes topics focused on online learners, online course content, effective online instruction strategies, and instructional design for the online environment. This reference work is ideal for curriculum developers, instructional designers, IT consultants, deans, chairs, teachers, administrators, academicians, researchers, and students interested in the latest research on how to create online learning courses that promote student success.

This book presents and examines key issues not only on addressing changing student demographics and needs but also on aligning institutional and student expectations, connecting student-oriented services systemically, organizing and fostering student services for learning, and creating and delivering services for students to achieve success on campus. While the essential supportive role student services plays in student retention and success is generally understood, this book provides several constructive approaches and key indicators that service providers can use to challenge their campuses for better results in achieving student success. While this book does not define what student success is for all institutions or suggest that one size fits all institutions, it does emphasize that student learning and achieving student success on campus is everyone’s business. The chapter contributors share their wisdom on and experience in creating a student-centered culture and emphasize student services as the primary approach for putting students first in the campus community. Written for student service providers, academic departments, and others responsible for the support, direction, and coordination of services to students—vice presidents, deans, directors, and department chairs—readers will learn how to encourage a variety of desired outcomes, including student persistence, satisfaction, learning, and personal development. Also included is a systems perspective that will help readers evaluate and align services for students with the goals of both the students and the institution.

Cultivate resilience by incorporating small challenges (also known as micro-adversities) in your classroom with effective, trauma-informed strategies that are proven to improve behavior, increase engagement, and empower students to achieve. One in four children have witnessed or experienced a traumatic event by the age of 16 that can affect behavior and learning. Fortunately, educators of all grade levels can inspire resilience and grit that helps students adapt to change and overcome hardship with simple everyday activities. This book offers a breakthrough method for building community and empowering your students with a new strategy: micro-adversity. Micro-adversities in the classroom can be actionable activities, like trying to solve a puzzle that is intentionally missing a few pieces, or building emotional intelligence with conversation starters. By experiencing small failures, students learn to overcome them and thrive. Written by two teachers, one a former US Army Ranger, this method combines the extensively trained military perspective with the important foundations of trauma-informed education.

The linkages between a student’s health and a student’s ability to learn have been well established. Children who are sick stay home; and, children at home cannot learn if they are not in school leading to increased dropout rates among other educational outcomes. However, an understanding of this concept is just the beginning of understanding how education and public health are inextricably linked. In light of this, Linking Health and Education for African American Students’ Success examines health disparities and education inequities simultaneously and moves beyond a basic understanding of health and education in K-12 school programs. The structural inequalities which lead to reduced academic attainment mirror the social determinants of health. Education is one of the most powerful determinants of health, and disparities in educational achievement as a result of structural inequalities closely track disparities in health. These disparities lead to both sub-standard healthcare and reduced academic attainment among children from underserved minorities in the United States, especially African Americans. This book discusses how this may result in children with poorer mental health outcomes; higher school dropout rates; increased risks of arrests and incarceration; higher rates of chronic diseases and mortality; and overall diminished opportunities for success, while providing suggestions as to how to address these issues. This results in an insightful read for researchers, academics and practitioners in the fields of healthcare and education.

As a result of this distressing information on the challenges facing our educators, this book was written to highlight approaches and strategies that have been found to improve student outcomes. Administrative factors, educational policy and law, implementation of evidence-based teaching practices, collaborating with teachers’ unions, fostering partnerships with parents as well as community organizations, meaningful professional development, and considerations for early childhood and special populations of students have been found to play a role in achieving such improved results.

The importance of higher education has never been clearer. Educational attainmentâ€"the number of years a person spends in schoolâ€"strongly predicts adult earnings, as well as health and civic engagement. Yet relative to other developed nations, educational attainment in the United States is lagging, with young Americans who heretofore led the world in completing postsecondary degrees now falling behind their global peers. As part of a broader national college completion agenda aimed at increasing college graduation rates, higher education researchers and policy makers are exploring the role of intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies in supporting student success. Supporting Students' College Success: The Role of Assessment of Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Competencies identifies 8 intrapersonal competencies (competencies involving self-management and positive self-evaluation) that can be developed through interventions and appear to be related to persistence and success in undergraduate education. The report calls for further research on the importance of these competencies for college success, reviews current assessments of them and establishes priorities for the use of current assessments, and outlines promising new approaches for improved assessments.