The Lessons of Meta-Analysis: Does Group Counseling with Children and Adolescents Make a Difference?

Carey and Dimmitt present a brief overview and analysis of the article, Evaluating the effectiveness of child and adolescent group treatment: A meta-analytic review, originally published in Journal of Clinical Child Psychology. The authors present a summary of the key components of the article including the introduction, method and results of the study. They offer an additional analysis of implications for future practice, including a discussion of the positive outcomes that result from group counseling, both in clinical and school settings

The Current Status of School Counseling Outcome Research

Wendy McGannon has taken the lead in developing a review and analysis of The Current Status of School Counseling Outcome Research. Some basic information related to the NCLB mandates are reviewed in terms of how they impact the school counseling profession and counselor accountability. Types of research are described and a distinction is made between research and evaluation. Additionally, this paper includes a discussion of evidence-based practice and an explanation of how all of these topics are relevant to school counselors and school counseling programs at this time. This includes a brief history of the school counseling movement from the mental health model to Comprehensive Developmental Guidance, and then to the American School Counseling Association’s (ASCA) National Model and data-driven decision-making

Higher bundle gerbes and cohomology classes in gauge theories

The notion of a higher bundle gerbe is introduced to give a geometric realization of the higher degree integral cohomology of certain manifolds. We consider examples using the infinite dimensional spaces arising in gauge theories.Comment: 16 pages, LaTe

College Rankings Reformed: The Case for a New Order in Higher Education

Every year, students and parents eagerly scour the new college rankings. But those rankings may be misleading them about the "best" colleges and universities. New data and technology offer an opportunity to really measure how well colleges and universities are preparing their undergraduate students

Health Insurance Exchanges: Key Issues for State Implementation

Explores considerations for state governments in planning infrastructure and policies for exchanges for individuals and small businesses, including interactions with state Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Programs. Lists options and pros and cons

The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act

When policymakers wrote the No Child Left Behind Act, their goal was to steadily raise the bar for academic achievement. But many states have undermined the spirit of the law by lowering achievement goals every year. Kevin Carey explains how these states are gaming NCLB's accountability system -- and doing so with the full approval of the U.S. Department of Education

Promoting international cultural and academic collaborative communication through technologies of open course ware

In the diverse cultures of an increasingly transnational world where\ud academic literacy in English or Englishes is required for advancement in\ud universities, communication technologies play critical roles. This paper integrates\ud scholars from diverse cultures through online technology which allows for\ud participants from several universities to develop their awareness of diverse\ud cultures and academic English across disciplines. This research addresses the issue\ud of how online collaboration among scholars can develop their technological,\ud cultural and academic literacies which are essential to their academic progress. By\ud creating electronic discussion forums that include scholars from universities\ud worldwide it is possible to engage in transcultural dialogue regarding how diverse\ud cultures view technology as a means to advance academic and cultural literacy.\ud Through combining the wealth of academic Open Course Ware (OCW) through\ud the consortium and linkages with international universities it is possible to create\ud credit courses for students in each of their home universities thereby overcoming\ud the major limitation of OCW by providing access to credit for OCW courses

Minimization Solutions to Conservation Laws with Non-smooth and Non-strictly Convex Flux

Conservation laws are usually studied in the context of sufficient regularity conditions imposed on the flux function, usually $C^{2}$ and uniform convexity. Some results are proven with the aid of variational methods and a unique minimizer such as Hopf-Lax and Lax-Oleinik. We show that many of these classical results can be extended to a flux function that is not necessarily smooth or uniformly or strictly convex. Although uniqueness a.e. of the minimizer will generally no longer hold, by considering the greatest (or supremum, where applicable) of all possible minimizers, we can successfully extend the results. One specific nonlinear case is that of a piecewise linear flux function, for which we prove existence and uniqueness results. We also approximate it by a smoothed, superlinearized version parameterized by $\varepsilon$ and consider the characterization of the minimizers for the smooth version and limiting behavior as $\varepsilon\downarrow0$ to that of the sharp, polygonal problem. In proving a key result for the solution in terms of the value of the initial condition, we provide a stepping stone to analyzing the system under stochastic processes, which will be explored further in a future paper.Comment: 27 pages, 5 figure