The Unique Aspects of Short-Term Teaching: How to Teach the “How To's” to the Doers

Effective short-term teaching, as in continuing education, requires of the teacher special competence in small group dynamics and current practice involvement. Students are practitioners who are motivated to learn quickly whatever will be immediately useful to them on their jobs. Objectives must be clearly defined and understood by both teacher and learner and content presented in a specific and well-focused manner. Educators involved in short-term teaching should relate participants' experiences to concepts, facilitate sharing, and involve participants in developing content. Teaching methodology is purposefully selected to stimulate learner engagement. Evaluation of progress toward educational goals is an ongoing process.     

Physical activity and hormone-replacement therapy: interactive effects on cognition?

The purpose of this study was to examine the interactive effects of hormone-replacement therapy (HRT) and physical activity (PA) on the cognitive performance of older women. Postmenopausal women (n = 101) were recruited to complete a PA questionnaire, provide demographic information, and perform the digit-symbol substitution task (DSST) and the trail-making tests (TMT). Regression analyses were conducted for participants with complete data for each cognitive test (DSST n = 62; TMT n = 69). For both tasks, results indicated that PA and education were positively related and age was negatively related to cognitive performance. The interaction of HRT with PA did not add to the predicted variance of either measure of cognitive performance. This was true even after limiting the HRT users to women using unopposed estrogen. It is concluded that the beneficial relationship between PA and these two measures of cognitive performance in postmenopausal women exists irrespective of HRT use.     

An overview and critique of the experience corps for independent living initiative

This article presents findings of the evaluation of the Experience Corps for Independent Living (ECIL) initiative. The ECIL initiative was a two-year demonstration program designed to test innovative ways to use the experience, time, and resources of volunteers over 55 to expand significantly the size and scope of volunteer efforts on behalf of independent living services for frail older people and their caregivers in specific communities. Six demonstration projects were selected to participate in this initiative. The intensive volunteers, the critical component of the program, were more highly skilled than typical volunteers from existing senior volunteer programs. ECIL volunteers collaborated with agency partners to develop new programs, supervise direct service activities, and enhance the performance of the agencies being served. Although the projects addressed many of the goals of the initiative, they did not fully accomplish all of their objectives. The ECIL initiative was particularly successful in providing independent living services to frail elders and their families in the communities served. It was less successful in developing and maintaining the team and corps concept, in attracting and retaining the anticipated numbers of volunteers during the study period, and in becoming self-sufficient by the end of Year Three.     

Marketing planning for colleges and universities

History proves that institutions of higher education have been notoriously slow in adapting to changes in their environments, especially in their student-markets' needs. It is time for them to employ the techniques of strategic marketing planning used by the business sector. With adjustments made for their nonprofit nature and without comprising their cultural responsibilities, institutions of higher education could clearly better serve their students, benefactors, and communities by developing an ongoing system of environmental analysis and by acting on the insight they gain. This article demonstrates how institutions of higher education can implement strategic marketing planning. Frequent references are made to actual situations.     

Is it God or Just the Data that Moves in Mysterious Ways? How Well-Being Research may be Mistaking Faith for Virtue

Opinion is mixed regarding the link between spiritual faith-based beliefs (SFBBs) and psychological well-being—however, most published field studies suggest a positive link. Controlled experiments demonstrate that spirituality promotes social cohesion and deters excessive self-interested behaviour. Yet past research has largely overlooked virtues (which are related to, yet distinct from, SFBB) as a rival explanation for these observations. Reviewed papers almost exclusively employed bi-variate designs incapable of answering the question “Is it God, or just missing variables?” This paper redresses this oversight by simultaneously including virtue (e.g., kindness, etc.,) and SFBB as predictors of well-being. Although simple analyses (.02 ≤ β ≤ .28) replicate the typical SFBB findings, multivariate analyses reveal that virtues (spirituality) positively (negatively) predict well-being. Since multivariate analyses (which are rarely conducted in this field) are appropriate for testing competing theories, past claims that SFBBs improve well-being appear spurious.