The Report of the Nuffield Review of 14-19 education, described by its Lead Director Professor Richard Pring of Oxford University in the last number of FORUM (Volume 51, Number 2 http://dx.doi.org.bibliotheek.ehb.be/10.2304/forum.2009.51.2.197), highlights the increasing use of what can be described as "edu-dabble" by sectors of the education establishment.

President Obama has embraced an audacious ambition--to renew America's status as the world leader in college attainment. That goal is daunting, and it leads many people to conclude that they should focus federal investments on four-year colleges. If individuals want to realize the president's goal, that would be a terrible mistake. Located in…

"Process-oriented pedagogy: facilitation, empowerment, or control?" claims that process-oriented pedagogy (POP) represents the methodological perspective of most practising teachers and that outcomes-based education (OBE) poses a real and present danger to stakeholder autonomy. Whereas POP may characterize methodological practices in the inner…

The first thing many learn about international poverty measurement is that European nations apply a "relative" poverty threshold and that they also do a better job of reducing poverty. Unlike the European model, the "absolute" U.S. poverty threshold does not increase in real value when the nation's standard of living rises,…

This study approaches young managers' occupational well-being through their work-related goal pursuit. The main aim was to identify content categories of personal work goals and investigate their associations with background factors, goal appraisals, burnout, and work engagement. The questionnaire data consisted of 747 young Finnish managers…

While most of Gramsci's party work is well known to education scholars of Gramsci, and the educational aspects of his writings have been repeatedly analyzed, what remains a constant in education-based Gramsci studies is the nearly universal minimization of this work for what it was, namely party work. For Gramsci, it would have been unthinkable to…

Teaching math to reflect values of democracy has to begin with some consideration of how democracy is conceptualized. A review of various theories of democracy conducted by Hagen (1992) provides everyone with a good starting point as it identifies three primary forms of democracy: competitive, participatory, and dialogue. In this essay, the author…

College and university instructors who assess student writing, including but not limited to teachers of first-year composition, sometimes keep the gate. Gatekeeping by writing instructors is an activity directly related to grading practices and, in many cases, to grading practices which emphasize formal, mechanical, usually sentence-level choices…

The University of Chicago met widespread national opposition ten years ago after it instituted a new, less demanding core curriculum to make way for more electives. It was part of a plan to make the curriculum significantly less demanding in order to attract more students and improve the school's bottom line in a time of putative budget deficits.…

Once taught almost exclusively in seminaries, spirituality is now finding its way into the curricula of professional training for health and welfare workers. How this should occur, particularly within the context of the secular university, raises many questions and may require different approaches to those used to teach spirituality to theological…

In this article we set out to explore and discuss reasons for reading literary texts in university curricula of foreign languages. Our analysis is based on 2 sources of information: 16 syllabi of Spanish as a foreign language and a questionnaire in which 11 university instructors teaching these syllabi express their intentions. We point to a…

In "Elementary School Mathematics Priorities," Wilson (2009 [this issue]) presents a list of five core concepts that students should master in elementary school so that they can succeed in algebra. As researchers in mathematics education, the authors enthusiastically endorse Wilson's recommendations. Learning algebra is key to further study of…

Developmental education is one of the most difficult issues confronting community colleges. Community colleges are charged with teaching students college-level material, yet a majority of their students arrive with academic skills in at least one subject area that are judged to be too weak to allow them to engage successfully in college-level…

Although the title of the course, Combating Loneliness among Older People in Contemporary Society, states a clear goal, our service-learning class was shaped by five guiding parameters. By avoiding certain things, we allowed the course to self-organize and evolve into a learning experience beyond the one originally envisioned. This paper…

A comentoring project paired students in a lifespan developmental psychology course with older adults to conduct a life review. The intergenerational paring was designed to increase students' knowledge of older adults, the aging process, and development across the lifespan. Students developed a paper that included their partner's life history, a…