Education Commons^™

Service-Learning As A Professional Development Tool, Lillian Wichinsky, Carolyn Turturro

Administrative Issues Journal

The authors examined students’ attitudes towards grant writing and program evaluation when service learning was integrated into the assignment. Over a two-year period, 71 graduate students participated in an online survey responding to both qualitative and quantitative items. Students overwhelmingly reported that they learned more through the servicelearning experience than they would have doing the assignment as an academic exercise. It is recommended that all disciplines seek out service-learning opportunities to promote professional development.

Federal Accommodation Policy In Practice: Implications For A Substantive Process, Lynn Hemmer, Candace Baker

Administrative Issues Journal

The design of governmental regulations creates an assumption that policy implementation is linear in nature and is unproblematic (Dorey, 2005). As states, local education agencies (LEAs), and eventually school leaders and teachers engage in the policy implementation process, it becomes evident that this hierarchal dissemination of policy results in various interpretations and actions (Spillane, 1996, 2002). In the 1997 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and the 2001 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, the legislative language clearly states that students with disabilities are to participate in assessments with accommodations as described on their Individualized Education Plan (IEP). Research suggests …

The Role Of Reflection In Audiology Students’ Development As Professional Practitioners: A Constructivist Grounded Theory, Stella Ng

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Audiology is a young health profession striving toward a value for and use of evidence-based practice (EBP). Currently within audiology, there is a lack of attention to a complementary epistemology of practice; that is, one that explicitly values experience as a valid and important source of knowledge, worthy of theoretical and empirical scholarly attention. The current study addresses this gap using a constructivist grounded theory approach to explore the research question: How is reflection enacted and implicated in audiology students’ development as professional practitioners? A total of 18 participants contributed data to this study (13 audiology students from a single …

Creative Arts Therapies Students' Professional Development: Mixed Methods Longitudinal Research, Hod Orkibi

Expressive Therapies Dissertations

This mixed-methods longitudinal study sought to describe, understand, and explain the professional development (PD) of graduate students during art therapy (AT), dance movement therapy (DMT), and drama therapy (DT) training (N = 51).

Repeated measures of students’ scores in profession-related variables were performed. Quantitative theory testing probed the extent to which students confirm Rønnestad and Skovholt’s (2003) theory of counselors and therapists’ PD as representative of their pre-training and in-training experiences. Qualitative theory derivation generated data-driven concepts to modify and refine the extant theory. Data were collected using My Vocational Situation, Career Commitment Measurement, and questionnaires for each developmental phase. …