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Business schools have established measurement tools to support their assurance of learning (AoL) systems and to assess student achievement of learning objectives. However, business schools have not required their tools to be empirically validated, thus ensuring that they measure what they are intended to measure. The authors propose confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) be utilized by business schools to evaluate AoL measurement systems. They illustrate a CFA model used to evaluate the measurement tools at their college. The authors' approach is in its initial steps, currently evaluating individual measurement tools, but the authors are working toward developing a system that can evaluate the entire AoL measurement system.

In a fifth grade classroom at The University of Texas Elementary School (UTES), a unit on the Constitution sets the stage for a year of integrated learning. The very next unit of study focuses on the civil rights movement. Teaching UTES students, who come from diverse backgrounds, means exposing them to many points of view so that they may form their own opinions and learn to express them effectively. There is an expectation at UTES that each teacher demonstrates best practice instruction and explicitly teaches and integrates social emotional learning (SEL) into the general curriculum. SEL skills enable children to be socially competent citizens within their school environment and help build an overall positive climate in their school. At this school, SEL skills from the beginning of the school year include empathy with respect, listening with attention, being assertive, predicting feelings, and taking other's perspective. Wanting students to employ the same kinds of strategies that they learn in their SEL lessons, this article describes how one fifth grade teacher led a discussion about the classes' own Peace Table. Students generally use the Peace Table when two or more individuals need to discuss an issue and work out differences or misunderstandings. They are taught to follow a "Peace Table Protocol," which requires participants to be calm, respectful, assertive (not passive or aggressive), to listen carefully, and to show empathy. This article describes how students bring the skills, which they have begin to learn at their fifth grade Peace Table, to a historical peace table in class. In class the students brainstorm a list of people in history whom they would like to see talking "at the table." Students role-play people who hold different points of view about civil rights with one team member acting as mediator. In this lesson, students also learn to employ strategies from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s suggestions for peaceful integration, provided in the article.

Mary Ledbetter's fifth grade students at the University of Texas Elementary School know immigration well. Some of them are recent immigrants from Mexico, or they have family members who are. Several of Mary's students are first or second generation Americans. For Mary, immigration is one of the most important units she teaches, one that integrates several disciplines. When teaching about immigration, her goal is to have students understand that immigration is a constantly evolving issue, not just something we learn about in past tense.

Across the United States, the Great Depression was a period of tremendous upheaval. Economic, family, political, and educational institutions shook mightily as the tremors of widespread financial downturn were felt. Public schools faced increasing hardships, which included financial problems such as a weakened tax base due to the non-payment of property and school taxes; personnel problems such as non-payment and/or layoffs of teachers; and academic problems such as shortened school terms, elimination of programs, firing married female teachers, and children leaving school to help their families meet economic needs. The financial strain on schools throughout the United States during the Depression is well documented in the literature (Freedman 2005; Moreo 1996; Stanley 1992; Tyack, Lowe, and Hansot 1984). In many cases, the educational gains made during the 1920s seemed to evaporate during the Depression years. This article, the second in a larger study of schooling during the Great Depression, highlights teachers' challenges to win professional status and voice in educational issues in Texas during that time, and how, despite these challenges, educational professionals fought to keep the school day. The article examines professional issues educators encountered during the difficult financial times in the 1930s. It also illustrates the types of curricular trends that surfaced in the social studies as reported in the pages of "Texas Outlook" magazine from 1933-1937.

Children are active watchers of the world as they learn to be a part of their community. Field trips are a key component in addressing the 10 themes of the social studies standards through experiential learning. The authors recognize that in today's tough economic times, field trips that require additional funding may not be possible for all schools. They encourage teachers to think about utilizing community resources that are free and that are nearby, thus allowing people outside of the school itself to be a part of every child's social studies education. The University of Texas (UT) Elementary School social studies curriculum has enhanced the opportunities for students to learn in and out of school and to build upon the community's diversity in powerful ways. Visitors to the school see engaged children who are motivated to learn about themselves, the school, the community, and the larger world. (Contains 11 notes.)

Instructional time for social studies has been reduced nationwide, particularly in the elementary grades. Yet states continue to promote content standards in history, economics, civics, and geography for young learners. Purposeful integrative content that is appropriate for grades K-6, while sometimes difficult to find, seems to many elementary school teachers to be a favored approach. Research suggests that instructional time devoted to elementary social studies is minimal at best. There also seems to be a discernible trend that teachers are finding ways to incorporate social studies throughout the school day, by carefully integrating content. Recognizing these realities, the authors have worked together for the past three years to document and report through publications and conference presentations how a fifth grade teacher finds time to plan and implement high-quality social studies instruction through content integration. They have found that purposeful content integration is an effective means of providing young children with rich learning experiences in the social studies. This article features the successful integration techniques that the fifth grade teacher uses as she and her fifth grade students work together to learn social studies through integrated instruction. (Contains 8 notes.)

Pedometers are great equalizers. They are wonderful for students who don't have the speed of other students, but can still keep up by taking as many steps as other students while improving their fitness level. In this article, teachers describe how they are using pedometers creatively in classes to impact the level of physical activity.

The authors describe how three elementary teachers working in very different parts of the United States teach about Mexico. These teachers' practices allow them to enhance the traditional social studies curriculum, help children learn about themselves and other people, and increase children's capacities for global citizenship. (Contains 1 figure.)

What happens when three primary-grade teachers, whose schools are located in Tennessee, Texas, and Michigan, decide to teach a unit of instruction focusing upon the same cultural universal (the human need for shelter) at the same time? How do the teachers use the Internet to share with each other their geographically and socio-economically diverse classroom experiences during this unit of study? Do teachers grow as professionals through face-to-face meetings, unit planning and sharing, online chats, and computer-assisted multimedia teaching in the process? What happens when teachers and their university teacher-educators share their experiences with others? This article explains the utility of teaching cultural universals, describes the unit of instruction undertaken by the three teachers and provides suggested resources for teachers who wish to teach about shelter or to adapt this or other units of instruction about human culture into their social studies curricula. (Contains 7 endnotes and 5 photographs.)

A personal narrative is presented which explores the author's experience of becoming a doctoral student of Curriculum Studies advisor O. L. Davis Jr at the University of Texas in Austin.

Purpose: Patients receiving cancer-related thoracotomy are highly symptomatic in the first weeks after surgery. This study examined whether at-home symptom monitoring plus feedback to clinicians about severe symptoms contributes to more effective postoperative symptom control., Patients and Methods: We enrolled 100 patients receiving thoracotomy for lung cancer or lung metastasis in a two-arm randomized controlled trial; 79 patients completed the study. After hospital discharge, patients rated symptoms twice weekly for 4 weeks via automated telephone calls. For intervention group patients, an e-mail alert was forwarded to the patient's clinical team for response if any of a subset of symptoms (pain, disturbed sleep, distress, shortness of breath, or constipation) reached a predetermined severity threshold. No alerts were generated for controls. Group differences in symptom threshold events were examined by generalized estimating equation modeling., Results: The intervention group experienced greater reduction in symptom threshold events than did controls (19% v 8%, respectively) and a more rapid decline in symptom threshold events. The difference in average reduction in symptom interference between groups was -0.36 (SE, 0.078; P = .02). Clinicians responded to 84% of e-mail alerts. Both groups reported equally high satisfaction with the automated system and with postoperative symptom control., Conclusion: Frequent symptom monitoring with alerts to clinicians when symptoms became moderate or severe reduced symptom severity during the 4 weeks after thoracic surgery. Methods of automated symptom monitoring and triage may improve symptom control after major cancer surgery. These results should be confirmed in a larger study.