Decisions, Agency, and Advising considers the role of students’ own agency in the placement of multilingual writers—including international students and US residents or citizens who are nonnative users of English—in US college composition programs. Grounded in qualitative research and concerned equally with theory and practice, the book explores how multilingual students exercise agency in their placement decisions and how student agency can inform the overall programmatic placement of multilingual students into first-year composition courses.
 
Tanita Saenkhum follows eleven multilingual students who made their decisions about placement into first-year composition courses during one academic year at a large public university. She identifies the need for the process of making placement decisions to be understood more clearly, describes how to use that knowledge to improve placement practices for these students—particularly in advising—and offers hands-on recommendations for writing programs.
 
Decisions, Agency, and Advising is a significant contribution to the field and particularly valuable to writing program administrators, academic advisors, writing teachers, researchers investigating second language writing and writing program administration, composition and second language writing scholars, and graduate students.

For more than thirty-five years, Thomas W. Dichter has worked in the field of international development, managing and evaluating projects for nongovernmental organizations, directing a Peace Corps country program, and serving as a consultant for such agencies as USAID, UNDP, and the World Bank. On the basis of this extensive and varied experience, he has become an outspoken critic of what he terms the "international poverty alleviation industry." He believes that efforts to reduce world poverty have been well-intentioned but largely ineffective. On the whole, the development industry has failed to serve the needs of the people it has sought to help.

To make his case, Dichter reviews the major trends in development assistance from the 1960s through the 1990s, illustrating his analysis with eighteen short stories based on his own experiences in the field. The analytic chapters are thus grounded in the daily life of development workers as described in the stories.

Dichter shows how development organizations have often become caught up in their own self-perpetuation and in public relations efforts designed to create an illusion of effectiveness. Tracing the evolution of the role of money (as opposed to ideas) in development assistance, he suggests how financial imperatives have reinforced the tendency to sponsor time-bound projects, creating a dependency among aid recipients. He also examines the rise of careerism and increased bureaucratization in the industry, arguing that assistance efforts have become disconnected from important lessons learned on the ground, and often lessons of world history.

In the end, Dichter calls for a more light-handed and artful approach to development assistance, with fewer agencies and experts involved. His stance is pragmatic, rather than ideological or political. What matters, he says, is what works, and the current practices of the development industry are simply not effective.

Discerning Experts assesses the assessments that many governments rely on to help guide environmental policy and action. Through their close look at environmental assessments involving acid rain, ozone depletion, and sea level rise, the authors explore how experts deliberate and decide on the scientific facts about problems like climate change. They also seek to understand how the scientists involved make the judgments they do, how the organization and management of assessment activities affects those judgments, and how expertise is identified and constructed.
 
Discerning Experts uncovers factors that can generate systematic bias and error,  and  recommends how the process can be improved. As the first study of the internal workings of large environmental assessments, this book reveals their  strengths and weaknesses,  and explains what assessments can—and cannot—be expected to contribute to public policy and the common good.
 

Psychotherapy is a $2.5 billion business in the United States, but no one can answer the basic question of how therapy works. No watchdog groups rank therapists for potential consumers; no one school of thought has proven to be superior to another. And no method has emerged for determining what makes therapy successful for some but not for others. Doing Psychotherapy Effectively proposes much-needed answers to the puzzling questions of what therapists actually do when they are effective.

Mona Sue Weissmark and Daniel A. Giacomo offer a unique mode of evaluation that focuses not on a particular school of therapy but on the relationship between therapist and patient. Their approach, the "Harvard Psychotherapy Coding Method," begins with the assumption that good therapeutic relationships are far from intuitive. Successful relationships follow a pattern of behaviors that can be identified and quantified, as the authors demonstrate through clinical research and videotaped sessions of expert therapists. Likewise, positive changes in the patient, observed through client feedback and case studies, can be described operationally; they involve the process of overcoming feelings of detachment, helplessness, and rigidity and becoming more involved, effective, and adaptable.

Weissmark and Giacomo explain and ground these principles in the practice of psychotherapy, making Doing Psychotherapy Effectively an accessible and pragmatic work which will give readers a tool for measuring therapeutic effectiveness and further understanding human transformation. For the first time, successful therapy is described in a way that can be practiced and communicated.