As far back as the late 1800s, U.S. physics teachers expressed many of the same ideas about physics education reform that are advocated today. However, several popular reform efforts eventually failed to have wide impact, despite strong and enthusiastic support within the physics education community. Broad-scale implementation of improved…

This paper explores the notion of impact in the context of academic development programs and considers how it can be described and understood. We argue that impact has a range of meanings and academic development programs such as graduate certificates have a broad group of stakeholders and hence the impact is different for each group depending on…

One of the main factors implicated in the atomization of contemporary life, both as cause and effect, is the brunt and tenor of modern liberal education. For it cannot be denied that liberal education in the classic sense has severed its mandate to instruct and enlighten from the archive of the past and has been replaced by the concept of…

Above-level testing (also called "out-of-level testing," "off-grade testing," and "off-level testing") is the practice of administering a test level that was designed for and normed on an older population to a gifted child. This comprehensive literature review traces the practice of above-level testing from the…

This article features Oscar F. Smith Middle School, a challenging school in Chesapeake, Virginia. When Principal Linda Scott exclaims, "Oscar F. Smith Middle School is "hot"!" to visitors, she is not referring to the inside temperature of the bustling school of grades 6-8 located in the historic South Norfolk borough of…

Twenty years ago the development of a sports management program at Massey University was then the only one in New Zealand. Professional rugby was still a couple of years away. Kit McConnell, Head of the 2011 RWC and Tournament Director for the IRB, was a Masters student back then. He indicated "the academic staff were doing something new--and…

What is meant by the term "standards"? This article will use the definition of the National Academy of Sciences for their workshop on Assessing the Role of K-12 Academic Standards, "generally used to refer to both content standards, which describe material that students should be expected to learn, and performance standards, which…

Ten years ago, the author wrote a short piece entitled "Mathematics and numeracy--Is there a difference?". In mathematics, many put an emphasis on the content concepts and skills contained typically in strands such as Algebra, Number, Geometry, etc. Others argued that "mathematics" was about the "search for pattern" and that the key elements of…

Interdisciplinary processes are being developed for a better present and future in primary and secondary education teaching in France. Over the past few years, the education authorities have increased incentives to open the subjects for one another and created new teaching-learning programs for interdisciplinary purposes. In spite of the obvious…

Cognitive objectives provide an alternative to behavioral objectives which have been so eagerly and uncritically accepted by instructional technologists. (Author/STS)

Past, present, and future trends concerning behavioral objectives. Topics include: the nature and roles of objectives, conceptual objectives for domain-referenced education, and objectives for instructional and evaluation design. (DAG)

This volume contains 20 case study profiles of educational RDD&E projects and, as such, constitutes the data base for the Oregon Studies. This part (Part 2) of Volume IV contains profiles of seven development projects along with information that describes the development of the profiles, explains how to read the profiles, and includes a glossary…

This is a guide to the nature, purpose, and potential uses of 12 course goal collections produced by the Tri-County Goal Development Project through the cooperative efforts of school districts and intermediate education districts of three counties in the metropolitan Portland, Oregon, area. The Project initially fostered collections of educational…

This article presents a portrait of interdisciplinarity in the Quebec school system. Following a contextual overview of this system, including its sociohistorical evolution and current organization in order to define the problem of interdisciplinarity, a second section, beginning with a clarification of terms related to interdisciplinarity,…