Industrial and Organizational Psychology

The Volunteer Program Assessment at UNO (VPA-UNO), a faculty-led student group, partners with nonprofit and governmental agencies to provide free assessments and consultations to enhance volunteer engagement, organizational commitment and retention. Three recent initiatives are discussed representing an intentional effort of a metropolitan university to extend love of place to love of state through outreach efforts to rural volunteers and to promote inclusivity to Spanish-speaking volunteers by translating the VPA assessment into Spanish. Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a case example of volunteer efforts of students participating in the Volunteer Program Assessment at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (VPA-UNO) to make their community a better place. The initiatives described demonstrate how students and faculty at a metropolitan university can provide much needed service to the community while at the same time enhancing student professional development and civic-mindedness. This narrative will first provide a context for VPA-UNO's efforts, highlighting the important role of UNO and the Omaha community in supporting meaningful collaborations between students with the community. Second, VPA-UNO's process will be described along with client and student outcomes. Next, we will describe VPA-UNO's effort to extend love of place to love of state through outreach efforts to rural volunteers and to promote inclusivity among Spanish-speaking volunteers. Finally, these highlighted VPA-UNO projects will be reviewed, noting key findings and underscoring the reciprocal benefits accrued to both the clients and to VPA-UNO through these collaborations. Importance of Place The importance of place cannot be under-emphasized as UNO nurtures a university culture that through policy and action promotes student-centeredness, academic excellence, and community engagement Specifically, UNO administration at all levels support curricular and co-curricular programming efforts that encourage and support relationships between students and community partners. Furthermore, the establishment of the UNO Barbara Weitz Community Engagement Center has reaffirmed UNO's commitment to engagement, highlighting the importance of facilitating meaningful collaboration, by bringing community partners directly onto the UNO campus. The building provides free space for campus and community events, as well as office space for thirty-three community and university partners. VPA-UNO is one of the university partners housed in the Community Engagement Center, benefiting from this collaborative space within a supportive metropolitan university culture.

Collective impact is a recently developed concept and approach to solving social problems that rectifies many of the issues associated with isolated impact. We compared collective impact and the formal definition of collaboration and made integrations between the two concepts. Specifically, we explored effective assessment and facilitation methods and applied them to collective impact initiatives in order to facilitate more purposeful implementation of collective impact. We concluded that collective impact is a specific form of collaboration.

The Volunteer Program Assessment at UNO (VPA-UNO), a faculty-led student group, partners with
nonprofit and governmental agencies to provide free assessments and consultations to enhance volunteer
engagement, organizational commitment and retention. Three recent initiatives are discussed representing
an intentional effort of a metropolitan university to extend love of place to love of state through outreach
efforts to rural volunteers and to promote inclusivity to Spanish-speaking volunteers by translating the
VPA assessment into Spanish.

The theme for the 2015 CUMU National Conference in Omaha, NE was " Love of Place: The Metropolitan University Advantage ". The 2015 theme celebrates key elements that establish the identity of metropolitan universities and CUMU as an organization. The theme recognizes the unique opportunities and benefits provided by metropolitan universities for students and communities. Metropolitan universities provide students with enriching educational experiences while contributing to building and strengthening the community. These enriched experiences also support faculty and staff growth as members of the university and community. The theme encouraged conference participants to explore new pedagogical approaches, strategies for sustaining meaningful partnerships, and opportunities for successful engagement of the community by examining the transformative power of the relationships between metropolitan universities and their " place. " Essential to this theme is the notion of stewardship and being good stewards of the communities that we live in, that bless our lives, our families, and our universities. The special issue devoted to the theme and notion of " Love of Place " provides an overview of the stewardship witnessed at the conference and then launches into the full article contributions that illustrate the " Love of Place " exemplified by the great presenters and the many initiatives occurring across the CUMU.

Although a number of factors condition the success of creative efforts, most investigators recognize the fundamental importance of novel problem solutions. As a result, a number of systems intending to describe the processes contributing to the generation of innovative problem solutions have been proposed. In the present article, earlier models describing the processes contributing to creative problem solutions are reviewed.

Little explicit attention has been given to the impact of item pools on the validities and cross-validities of different background data scoring approaches. This study tests the idea that pools of items theoretically related to the performance of interest will outperform pools of items with no hypothesized relationship with the criterion. Validities and cross-validities of rational scales and empirical keys created from theory- and non-theory-based item pools were compared for 3 criteria. When size of the item pools was held constant, theory-based empirical keys (correlational and vertical percent) and rational scales showed larger validities and cross-validities than non-theory-based empirical keys (correlational and vertical percent) and showed minimal shrinkage in cross-validities. Even when item pool for the non-theory-based keys was expanded to include all items in the instrument, the theory-based keys showed comparable or slightly better validities and cross-validities for 2 of the 3 criteria, including college GPA, which was separated from the predictors by 4 years.

... JODY J. ILLIES~ RONI REITER-PALMON St. ... For this reason, that person will tend to be closed-minded (Johnson, Lin, Symons, Campbell, & Ekstein, 1995; Maio & Olson, 1995) and therefore may not feel the need to search for additional information or to devote the extra effort ...