What is already known about this topic? Policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) change strategies combined with education are known to support healthy behavior change and obesity prevention in a community-based setting. What is added by this report? We share the process through which coalitions in rural Louisiana implemented PSE change. What are the implications for public health practice? By understanding the process, potential barriers, and time needed to establish and create fully operational community coalitions, communities can implement strategies to improve community engagement and entities funding PSE work can set better grantee expectations, ultimately leading to more sustainable obesity prevention interventions.

Understanding the impact of youth development programs has been an important topic since the programs first began, and the past 25 years in particular have witnessed considerable advances in the evaluation of youth development programs. This article presents a brief history of youth development program evaluation, considering how it has changed over the years. From there, three contemporary trends related to youth program evaluation are examined: 1) a new evaluation focus, which is the emphasis on evaluating program quality; 2) organizational structures related to effective program evaluation, primarily in the area of program evaluability and evaluation capacity building; and 3) an emerging evaluation approach, involving youth in evaluating the programs that affect them. The article concludes with a call for programs to attend carefully to program implementation quality.

Historically, education abroad has been designed to provide students a full immersion experience by way of semester or year-long study at a foreign university. However, this traditional format has been redefined to include a variety of non-traditional international experiences, such as international service learning projects, internships, and short-term international experiences. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to develop a deep understanding of the lived experiences of agricultural education undergraduate students participating in a short-term international experience. The overarching question that guided the study was: What were the lived experiences of agricultural education undergraduate students during a short-term international experience? As a result of the short-term international experience, students did not progress fully through all levels of development needed to be considered proficient in cultural competence. However, students demonstrated significant gains in cultural awareness and some gains in cultural understanding and cultural sensitivity. Finally, participating students verified some progress toward building cultural communication competencies as a result of their experience.

The literature regarding teamwork has supported the idea that the key to improving team performance is to understand team processes. Early work within the realm of teamwork focused on quantifiable measures of team performance, like number of products developed. The measure of a successful team hinged on whether or not the team accomplished the end task. In more recent years, the focus has shifted to other measures of team functioning such as communication, problem solving, decision making, planning and task coordination, goal setting, and conflict resolution. The purpose of this study is to report the development and construct validity of an instrument to measure perceptions of engagement in teamwork among middle school aged youth.

No abstract