Discusses distance learning research and describes a study of 399 students at two universities that investigated the role of perceived technology usefulness, technological familiarity and accessibility, reputation, constraints, learning preferences, and demographic factors on prospective receptivity toward distance learning. Considers implications…

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is used to evaluate the performance of top US business school in maintaining reputation among members of the academic and business communities. The authors generate efficiency measures and identify peers against which underperforming schools should benchmark.

Thoreau's "Walden" is a text that has been misinterpreted in various ways, one consequence of which is a failure to appreciate its significance as a perfectionist and visionary text for education. This paper explores aspects of what might be called its teaching, especially via the kind of teaching that is offered by Stanley Cavell's commentary,…

"Library Quarterly's" seventy-fifth anniversary invites an analysis of the journal's bibliometric dimension, including contributor attributes, various author rankings, and citation impact. Eugene Garfield's HistCite software, linked to Thomson Scientific's Web of Science, as made available by Garfield, for the period 1956-2004, was used as the…

This narrative provides an account of one teacher's use of a minimal, real-world text--a Fantale lollie wrapper--in her classroom as a means of motivating Year 7 students to write concisely and imaginatively. It discusses the success of this strategy and the way in which information technology was utilised in the production of facsimile texts.…

Objective: To experimentally test for confirmational response bias among social work journals and to assess the time-liness and quality of the referee review process. Method: A positive and a negative version of two stimulus articles were sent to two randomized groups of 31 social work journals; journals were stratified by prestige; the timeliness…

Sociologists of knowledge find that academic stratification is present among individual scholars, genders, networks, fields, and all kinds of scientific organizations, while communications scholars have been studying global cultural asymmetry for a long time. Yet few researchers have explored the global dimension of academic stratification. In…

Research on the first day of class by Knefelkamp (Rubin, 1985) showed there was a real desire on the part of both students and teachers for connectedness, but neither group realized the other shared that desire. This paper presents a way to address, before the first day of class, the desire of students to learn about a class and instructor, and…

This paper considers the discursive production of violence in the context of educational markets. Drawing on a larger study of sexually violent incidents that occurred in an elite private boys' school in Sydney, Australia, in 2000, the paper examines disciplinary traditions and communicative practices surrounding these events. Insights from Michel…

When North Carolina native Evan Raleigh was in search of the perfect college, he had three things in mind: (1) the strength of the school's academic reputation; (2) the size of the school; and (3) the school's location and proximity to home. He found all three in the form of Wake Forest University. But Raleigh, who received a full academic…

This paper examines the relationship between university ranks and outcome measurements. Many students select the university that they will attend based on these rankings In this paper the rankings conducted by two studies are examined. U.S. News and World Report rankings are based upon measures of the quality of input, retention while in school…

The popular image of the Ivy League is one of a slightly awesome bastion of the well-born, well-bred, and soon-to-be-powerful or, less charitably, a haven for "the effete, unAmerican, and hopelessly bookish." This pervasive idea of collegiate personality is analyzed, tracing the evolution of the Ivy League from an incongruous array of…

The traditional sellers' market in higher education has become a buyers' market, with both the nature of the student body and the services offered being changed. Marketing, as a comprehensive tool for planning and delivery of educational services, offers an integrated method for meeting the disparate demands growing from the shift to a longer…

Examined the precounseling effects of reputational cues on high school students' preferences for counselors and perceptions of the counselor's credibility and interpersonal attractiveness. Students observed videotapes presenting reputational cues with and without a counseling session, or only the counseling session. Reputational cues strongly…

Two surveys on how students choose a college are reported. Reputation is often the most powerful of all influence factors. Sources of first information about colleges are identified: friends, parents, college recruitment publications, college guide books, etc. The declining role of the high school counselor was noted. (MLW)