Kategoria BISAC: Education >> General

A rash of new publications from nearly every national higher education organization address accountability. The purpose of this volume is to highlight the emerging consensus from this work and show how these ideas are playing out across the country. It is a collection of essays by practitioners, many at the highest levels of U.S. higher education, who have been asked to focus on how accountability systems in their states and at their institutions are being used and for what purposes. As consensus emerges that state-level accountability should be focused on the state's public agenda rather...

This volume examines how developmental issues facing older youth impact their crossover into early adulthood, and investigates innovative strategies being employed to better meet the needs of these youth. Implications for policymakers and funders in taking the support of older youth to scale are also considered in this volume.

There is a growing concern that young people are reaching the age of eighteen unprepared for the primary challenge of young adulthood: successfully joining the workforce or continuing on to higher education or vocational training. In order to see outcomes improve for...

Because faculty members' thinking is immersed in the discipline(s) they teach, it often makes good sense to begin an assessment initiative at a college or university by focusing on student learning in the discipline, or academic major. This new issue illustrates how assessment initiatives focused in that fashion can be the starting point of a successful institutional assessment program.

Methods range from faculty-developed comprehensive exams to computer simulations, from patient-actors to electronic portfolios. Disciplines represented include political science, psychology, sociology,...

From the Editors

This issue of New Directions for Teaching and Learning presents research from a collaboration between learning scientists, assessment experts, learning technologists, and domain experts as part of a project with the vision of transforming education (specifically in bioengineering, but eventually in all fields) to produce adaptive expertise in students. This research is based on the model proposed in the National Research Council book, How People Learn. This model proposes a sequence of learning activities drawn from learning research that are designed to maximize...

This volume reexamines the community college's functional missions in the context of both long-established and emerging societal missions. Written for college leaders, scholars, and policymakers, Community College Missions in the 21^st Century addresses the most pressing questions concerning community colleges, including:

• Is the societal mission of a community college to provide postsecondary education to students who might not otherwise obtain it, or to be responsive to the needs of local communities, including business and industry?
• Should its dominant...

Promoting diversity as a core value among social groups is one of the major challenges faced by institutions of higher education in the United States. By focusing on racial and ethnic minorities in higher education, this monograph provides a view of diversity as a positive and dynamic social force in society that promotes its integration as a core value and process.

Diversity leadership challenges higher education to move beyond co-optation strategies, in which diversity is viewed as a descriptive and static organizational element, to the adoption of transformational strategies, in...

Intergroup dialogue promotes student engagement across cultural and social divides on college campuses through a face-to-face, interactive, and facilitated learning experience that brings together twelve to eighteen students from two or more social identity groups over a sustained period of time. Students in intergroup dialogue explore commonalities and differences; examine the nature and impact of discrimination, power, and privilege; and find ways of working together toward greater inclusion, equality, and social justice.

Intergroup dialogue is offered as a cocurricular activity on some...

This volume speaks to the work of deans at small colleges by:

• addressing the history and diversity of small colleges and the role of the dean
• describing the realities of organizing and staffing a student affairs division at a small college
• identifying the differences between the role of vice president and the role of dean in small colleges
• providing examples of effective academic affairs and student affiars partnerships in small college settings
• thoroughly examining the rewards and challenges of being a senior student affairs officer at a...

An important part of cognitive development is coming to think in culturally normative ways. Children learn the right names for objects, proper functions for tools, appropriate ways to categorize, and the rules for games. In each of these cases, what makes a given practice normative is not naturally given. There is not necessarily any objectively better or worse way to do any of these things. Instead, what makes them correct is that people agree on how they should be done, and each of these practices therefore has an important conventional basis.

The chapters in this volume highlight the...

An in-depth look at self-authorship and students' intellectual growth

The notions of self-authorship, evolution of consciousness, and transition theory are key elements in understanding and molding the modern learning environment and intellectual growth of students. Self-Authorship: Advancing Students' Intellectual Growth is the collaborative work of multiple expert authors. The book takes an in-depth and nuanced look at these relatively new and fascinating theories and how the concepts put forth in the theory of self-authorship can play into influencing learning...

The transition from care to independent living has become a recent focus for research given the poor outcomes that have been documented to date. This issue will present multiple perspectives on this problematic issue, examining outcomes and offering a critique of traditional approaches while at the same time outlining promising developments in programming both in the United States and internationally. Practices that build competence will be highlighted, given the need to prepare these youth for successful transitions into independent living.

It has been well established that significant...

This volume challenges quantitative researchers to become more critical. By providing examples from the work of several prominent researchers, and by offering concrete recommendations, the editor and authors deliver messages that are likely to cause many educational researchers to reexamine their own work.

Traditional quantitative research tends to be probabilistic, and often mass the experiences of many subgroups in the population. Most models, framesworks, and findings that appy to the majority of students and faculty may not adequately apply to important subpopulations as defined by...

Nine contributions discuss the trends and issues in sexuality education in colleges, universities, and institutions training teachers, clergy, and physicians. They discuss a range of philosophical and methodological approaches to vital issues, from theoretical conceptualizations to qualitative phenomenological from interpretive methods, and from qu

This book contains the results of the first and only multi-institution study of interlibrary loan and document delivery customer satisfaction among academic library patrons. By examining customer perceptions and ILL/DD activities, Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery and Customer Satisfaction: Strategies for Redesigning Services allows library administrators and managers to better understand service needs and shows them where to best allocate resources. The volume includes current reports on workload and staffing in ILL, analysis of current ILL statistical software packages, reports of on-site...

Adapt traditional library techniques to the task of indexing, cataloging, and metadata creation for Internet resources

The rapid shift toward digital resources in K-6, higher education, adult education, and other learning communities, has greatly increased the demand on the information professionals to manage this new technology. Metadata and Organizing Educational Resources on the Internet, the first book of its kind, helps clarify the process of cataloging and indexing the vast quantities of data available in digital form, so that users can readily access the information they...

In Emergent Issues in Education, leading scholars in comparative education and in the politics, sociology, anthropology, and economics of education illuminate worldwide trends in critical issues that confront policymakers and practitioners in different national settings.

Among the topics raised and analyzed are the organization, governance, and financing of education; the content of curriculum, texts, and tests; and the quality and nature of teacher training. Among the issues examined is the tension that has emerged between the imperative to achieve equality of educational opportunity and...

Many factors contribute to the way individuals come to an understanding of what schooling is about and where it might be headed. This book explores the role of popular culture in that process.

The authors illustrate how powerful and suggestive images and ideas about teachers, learning, and other aspects of schooling are constructed in the "texts" of various modes of popular culture. As a basis for further inquiry, the book describes important tendencies and patterns in the representation of aspects of schooling. It also provides examples of analytical approaches and strategies for...

This book was written as Paulo Freire himself would have done it, using a method of learning through victories and defeats in the same way one learns in life. The author follows a chronological line in which life and work are naturally mixed. In many cases, he lets Paulo Freire's work speak for itself.