Leadership emerges as a powerful force in the effort toward achieving quality education. The transformational leadership style inspires leaders to work toward a common goal to create change. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to explore higher education deans’ and faculty directors’ perspectives on their practice of transformational leadership in higher education institutions in Colombia. Transformational leadership theory served as the conceptual framework for this study. Data was collected from semi-structured interviews with six higher education deans and six faculty directors. Findings from coding analysis revealed seven themes: leadership commitment, shared vision, idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, organizational performance, and future orientation. Colombian higher education leaders may use the findings to improve decision-making practices, increase motivation, and enhance organizational commitment and effectiveness.
This study seeks to document whether the profiles of faculty at HBCUs are similar to faculty at non HBCUs. The researchers analyze the data using the χ2 test of independence to make direct comparisons of profile data between faculty at HBCUs and non HBCUs and within each institution type by gender. The findings suggest that faculty profiles at HBCUs and non HBCUs are nearly identical. The research shows that the highest degree earned, professional certification, and teach/research interest ratio is similar for faculty at HBCUs and non-HBCUs. Meanwhile, the academic professor ranking shows that the percentage of HBCU faculty is higher than of nonHBCUs and that 38% of HBCU faculty received their highest degree before 1990 in comparison to the 29.3% of the non-HBCU faculty. These findings suggest that HBCU schools are not attracting younger graduates in comparison to non-HBCU schools. Given that there are anticipated shortages of accounting faculty, rate of retirements and salary inversion, this information should be of interest to faculty and administrators for budgeting and those seeking to employ accounting faculty. This research provides insight to students who are considering entering into the profession and help project the future demand for accounting faculty at HBCUs.
At many U.S. universities, the tendency to self-segregate has become a familiar and accepted occurrence, evident in a wide array of college settings including housing and social gatherings, classes and training events, protests, and grievance sessions, and even separate commencement events. In many ways, this trend represents a return to the “separate but equal” doctrine ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka (1954) as unconstitutional, which gave birth to the Civil Rights Movement and integration. This further resulted in numerous benefits related to cross-racial interaction and increased ethnic heterogeneity. Today, however, some college leaders endorse student petitions for “safe spaces” and separate, distinct programming based on various demographic characteristics and assert that such efforts enhance the college experience and create a greater sense of belonging for underrepresented student groups. Segregation appears to be re-emerging at many U.S. universities as an example of déjà vu all over again. In this paper, the authors argue that segregation of racial and ethnic groups on university and college campuses generally appear to exacerbate racial tensions and reinforce in-group and out-group interactions and biases. However, multicultural integration builds trust, reduces out-group biases, increases friendships across racial and ethnic lines, and advances racial reconciliation.
study, ABSTRACT This quantitative study examined the relationship between implementation of a Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) program and academic achievement, attendance, and discipline. The data was collected from schools from South Texas Educational Regions One, Two, and Twenty. The public middle school campuses for this study were chosen based on demographics, size, and PBIS implementation. Campuses were similar in demographics and size and were also be PBIS implementing campuses as well and non PBIS campuses. Data was obtained through the 2017-2018 Texas Academic Performance Report (TAPR) published by Texas Education Agency (TEA) for each campus to assess attendance, academic achievement in Reading and Math on The State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR), and discipline. The design used for this study was a non-experimental study that examined the statistical relation between PBIS, academic achievement, attendance, and discipline. The study investigated two schools from each of the educational regions listed, one school being a PBIS implementing school and the other implementing no form of PBIS. The two groups from each region were compared by attendance, academic achievement in Reading and Math as determined by STAAR, and discipline, through TAPR data released by TEA.
An administration of a private school located in the south reported the problem of a lack of curriculum fidelity to a new phonics program, which created a need to identify barriers preventing full curriculum implementation. Using the concerns-based adoption model (CBAM) as the conceptual framework, this qualitative case study identified concerns and barriers teachers report when implementing a new curriculum. Data were collected from 10 participants (8 teachers and 2 administrators) through a questionnaire, interviews, and observations. Participants were interviewed to identify any barriers experienced with curriculum fidelity of a new phonics program. Teachers were observed to determine which components of the curriculum were present in or omitted from their lessons. Participants completed a questionnaire to determine their levels of concern when asked to implement a new curriculum. Results indicated that teachers required additional information before the expected implementations occur and an understanding of demands on their personal time. Common themes showed a desire for professional development (PD), peer-collaboration, and access to curriculum resources, which served as the basis for the project. The resulting project integrated PD to address concerns connected to reoccurring themes. Implications for social change include change at a systematic level by providing administrators with data to support teachers during curriculum changes and substantiation for the benefits of understanding concerns prior to a change for improving curriculum fidelity.
We propose ways of incorporating Google Translate into the teaching of Finnish and Hungarian in a higher education setting at different skill levels. The task types tested in our study were: analytical tasks (dictionary-like exercise, word-building, part-of-word identification), discovery method tasks (elicitation, problem solving), and awareness raising tasks (error correction, text-level error analysis, guided essay writing in the target language). Students were interviewed about their experience as users of Google Translate and the usefulness of the exercises conducted in class. In line with the principles of action research, the survey results enabled the practitioners to reflect on and improve the teaching of two morphologically complex languages, Finnish and Hungarian, and optimise the ways in which Google Translate is used in the language classroom. With the development of their Finnish and Hungarian language skills, students become more critical, and more competent, users of online translation tools as well.
The delivery of online university courses has continued to grow for more than a decade. New advances in technology have made the efficient delivery of courses possible, as well as increasing the collections of tools for students to cheat. Cheating results in the atrophy of the student’s academic integrity, it has the potential to damage a university’s reputation, it causes employers to lose faith in the competencies of graduates, and it wastes the large amounts of time and resources that have been devoted to the development of new knowledge and skills that are not subsequently obtained. As new technological tools are introduced to improve the delivery of courses, there has been a similar increase in the proliferation of methods for students to cheat. This article examines the history and motivations for cheating and the proliferating number of entrepreneurs and products available to assist students in completing their courses in ways that compromise academic integrity. Solutions are examined that offer alternatives for developing and enforcing academic integrity policies and preventing the occurrence of online cheating.
This paper examines relationships between teaching ratings and research ratings of business professors. The analysis uses matched data on teaching and research performance for 300 business professors across 104 United States universities. The analysis utilizes teaching data from ratemyprofessor.com (RMP) and research data from Social Science Research Network (SSRN). Findings reveal no evidence of a relationship between teaching ratings and research quality or quantity. However, results show that professor ‘Hotness’ significantly relates to student teaching evaluation ratings. Evidence shows that female professors receive higher teaching ratings than male professors. Further evidence shows that expertise area explains both teaching and research rankings. The data reveals no teaching performance differences for professors based on their university’s research ranking.
