Over 50 years ago, the Norwegian-American linguist Einar Haugen published a seminal paper entitled 'Dialect, language and nation' (Am Anthropol 68:922-935, 1966b), in which he expounds his four-step model of standardization, explaining the development from dialect to standard following a process of norm selection, codification, acceptance and…

Quality teaching and how to assess and award it, continue to be an area of scholarship and debate in higher education. While the literature demonstrates that assessment should be multifaceted, operationalizing this is no easy task. To gain insight into how teaching excellence is defined in Canadian higher education, this empirical study collected…

Analyzes the current state of early childhood education in terms of sociological criteria for a profession in order to point out differences between professions and early childhood education and to identify changes needed to upgrade the status of primary and preprimary education. (Author/RH)

A summary of a 1986 Leipzig symposium on the international comparison of studies and degrees includes debates on evaluation methods and criteria, certification of achievement, the relationship between academic and professional recognition, recognition of partial studies, and collection and dissemination of information about comparability and…

Characteristics of preschool provision for early childhood education in Malawi are compared with that in Kenya and Zambia. Highlighted are government involvement in preschool education as a reflection of changing economic and social structures, national preschool objectives, national and local teacher training programs, curriculum development,…