The main objectives of teaching history and government are: First, to demonstrate an understanding of how people and events of the past has influenced the ways in which people live and behave; Second, to appreciate the need for an importance of mutual responsibility; and Third, to develop a sense of patriotism and national pride. The paper seeks…

The National Research Council (NRC) was asked by the National Defense Intelligence College (NDIC) to convene a committee to review the curriculum and syllabi for their proposed master of science degree in science and technology intelligence. The NRC was asked to review the material provided by the NDIC and offer advice and recommendations…

Approaches to standards, curriculum development, and pedagogy are remarkably diverse; however, recent years have seen a growing movement to base each of these on learning trajectories. In this paper, I discuss and compare the various terms and conceptions of this construct, present our definition, differentiate between our conception and that of…

This report describes results for the school-wide growth component of the Austin Independent School District (AISD) REACH strategic compensation program in 2009-2010.

"Solve for x." While many people first encountered this enigmatic instruction in high school, the last 20 years have seen a strong push to get students to take algebra in eighth grade or even before. Today, concerns about the economy highlight a familiar worry: American eighth-graders trailed their peers in five Asian countries on the…

This article presents the idea that distance delivery in social work education is seen as an interaction between four constructs: the student, the setting in which the education is delivered, the educational content, and the expected educational outcomes. To fully understand these interactions, clear operational indicators, well established in…

This essay focuses on the need to educate the new "persona educada", a dignified, honorable person with a good measure of social and personal responsibility who also possesses the habits of the mind and heart. To cultivate "una persona educada" requires a newly formed vision of education and pedagogy. Examples of three entrenched agreements that…

Online asynchronous courses constitute a significant portion of Tulane University's School of Continuing Studies (SCS) curriculum. Online instruction is sufficiently important to the School of Continuing Studies that it merited special attention in the form of a two-year review to ensure its quality. The review identified and implemented different…

Although the author has been teaching for over a quarter century, he was never trained in, nor truly understood, "outcomes assessment." He regarded it as a task to be completed for an outside accreditor that had little relation to his real "liberal arts" goals for students. Those goals include teaching critical self-awareness, developing…

The "Balance of Nature" metaphor is a pervasive idea in ecology. However, the scientific community acknowledged during the last decades that equilibrium conditions are rare, while disturbance events are not uncommon. We suggest that the exclusive teaching of the "Balance of Nature" metaphor produces cultural, scientific and learning misconceptions…

Previous research has shown that disfluency--the subjective experience of difficulty associated with cognitive operations--leads to deeper processing. Two studies explore the extent to which this deeper processing engendered by disfluency interventions can lead to improved memory performance. Study 1 found that information in hard-to-read fonts…

The goals of citizenship education are often contested in Protestant schools with an ethnically heterogeneous population of pupils in multicultural European societies today. This is connected to the tension between the inclusive goal of citizenship for a pluralistic world and the exclusive goal of education in the Christian faith. This paper…

The American educational system is no fairy tale. Students who think that it takes nothing more than a wish upon a star to make their educational dreams come true are sure to be disappointed. The authors agree with Professor Rosenbaum: In order to realize their educational dreams, students must invest considerable effort. Rather than encouraging…

The study examines whether college instructors use PowerPoint differently in upper level versus lower level courses and whether PowerPoint differentially affects the learning and behaviours of students in those courses. The authors surveyed 191 students from 14 psychology classes and found that instructors teaching higher level courses use…

Wyoming Park High School in Wyoming, MI, is working to improve its instructional and professional development processes to foster student success. Wanting to do more than repeat failed efforts at improvement, the members of the leadership team found the "Breaking Ranks" framework to be the right fit for their needs and approached NASSP…