BACKGROUND
Few studies examine why rural public schools have weaker policies and practices related to school nutrition environments compared to their urban counterparts. It is important to understand this disparity because federal school meal standards aim for children to access health‐promoting nutrition environments. In this study, we identify challenges and opportunities for the implementation of school meal standards in rural high schools.
METHODS
We interviewed 38 rural school professionals from 22 high schools across 7 states. School professionals included food service directors, principals, school nurses, and teachers. Team coding in Atlas.ti Qualitative Data Analysis software v8 and principles of comparative analysis were employed to generate themes related to challenges and opportunities.
RESULTS
Overall, school professionals described improvements with implementation experiences and student acceptance over time. Key challenges included the negative influences of home and community food environments and limited staff size and capacity. Key opportunities involved joining co‐ops to enhance purchasing power, leveraging state technical assistance, and forming external partnerships.
CONCLUSIONS
This study offers insights from a broad range of rural school professionals' implementation experiences. The findings can inform governments and technical assistance agencies working with rural schools and school districts to facilitate implementation and sustainability of initiatives.
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted and reshaped undergraduate students’ social, learning, and workplace environments. Using an ecological systems framework, we draw on survey data from a sequential, mixed-methods study of undergraduate students at an urban, Minority-Serving Institution ( n = 1,272) to examine the association between health, economic, and other pandemic-related shocks and students’ academic perceptions. First, we conducted exploratory factor analyses on two groups of measures: “basic need concerns” and “interference with academic performance and plans.” Second, we connected student perceptions of the pandemic's interference with their academic performance and plans to ecological changes using regression analysis. Our model found a significant amount of the variance (12.6%) could be attributed to economic and health-related shocks and academic disruptions, including changes to caretaker responsibilities. However, students’ perceptions of how well they were doing with online learning accounted for most of the modeled variance. Implications for undergraduate student retention are discussed.
This study applied pedagogically-focused project design by using Instagram as a platform to investigate how the use of social media such as Instagram in a multimodal digital storytelling model could bridge the skills English language learners (ELLs) learn in the classroom to out-of-school literacy practices. The study applied the five learning objectives of the bridging-activities framework to investigate to what extent ELLs achieve these objectives. There were forty-two participants (female: n= 22; male: n= 17), international arts and media students. The study collected their main Instagram posts, questionnaires were given with a five-point Likert scale and open-ended questions, and individual follow-up interviews for content analysis. A cross-tabulation was conducted to investigate the relationships between ELLs' Instagram use and how they perceive Instagram as a meaningful way of communication for professional purposes. The findings revealed pedagogical practices of using Instagram as a tool for professional purposes and how ELLs achieved the bridging-activities learning outcomes.
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