As communities become more urbanized, there is concern about a decline in sense of community and an increase in fear of crime. Developers are creating gated communities to reverse this trend, but their success remains unknown. This research empirically addresses the issues of sense of community, crime, and fear of crime in a comparative study of two gated and two nongated communities with similar attributes. Mail surveys were conducted in both a gated and a nongated community in two contexts: public housing and high-income suburban communities. Results showed that high-income gated community residents reported a significantly lower sense of community, significantly higher perceived personal safety and comparative community safety, and no significant difference in actual crime rate as compared to their nongated counterparts. In the low-income communities, there were no significant differences between the gated and nongated communities on any of the measures. Implications of creating gated communities in different economic contexts are discussed.

The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is a growing and vibrant field, and with that growth has come some serious reflection on the models we use to conduct SoTL and the robustness of these models. Unfortunately, there is no clear-cut set of benchmarks for robust research. In this article, we identify a continuum of SoTL and demarcate aspirational benchmarks. Whereas qualitative and quantitative data and methods all have a place in SoTL, psychological science provides gold standards of design and analysis. We advocate for similar SoTL standards that are theory based and intentionally designed using the best models for methodological and statistical rigor.

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Observational and survey data were collected from a pre-World War I and a post-1970s neighborhood to assess the influence of push and pull forces away from front porch use. The findings indicate that the most important factors in reducing front porch use are design issues having to do with the small size of porches, the attractiveness of the backyard, and lifestyles that no longer support front porch use. Implications for design, including support of New Urbanist design principles, are discussed.

Experiential learning is not a new concept, but it is one that is frequently misunderstood. From the perspective of Kolb and Kolb (2005), students must in some way transform their experiences for learning to occur. Kolb and Kolb argued that to label an activity experiential learning, it is not sufficient for students simply to participate in a group activity (e.g., active learning) or volunteer at a community agency as a part of a course requirement (e.g., service learning); rather, those activities become constructed experiential learning when students reflect on them, develop abstract ideas on the basis of their reflections, and can actively test those ideas. In the pages that follow, we examine a number of popular approaches to experiential learning, such as service learning and research assistantships or apprenticeships. Although the ideas presented in this chapter should be applicable to multiple academic fields and different levels of education, our focus is on education in the psychology discipline and on the undergraduate experience. Experiential learning is key as part of a quality undergraduate education in order to develop psychologically literate students (Dunn, McCarthy, Baker, Halonen, & Hill, 2007;Dunn et al., 2010), and it is a feature of many programs (Stoloff et al., 2009).