Students who accept the goal of becoming physicians early in life because of external pressures appear to have lower academic achievement than students who develop their professional identity because of personal abilities or interests. Data are from students (N=1156) attending the University of Michigan medical school between 1976-81. (MLW)

The Council for Advancement and Support of Education's Professor of the Year, Vicente Villa, is a first-generation college graduate who teaches biology at Southwestern University (California). He began his study of biology in college and provides an important role model for Hispanic-American students. (MSE)

Reviews the process by which California State University implemented a new systemwide classification and compensation structure for information-technology professionals in 1996, and describes the compensation structure, union negotiations, and lessons learned. The new plan features more flexibility, room for growth in job classifications and…

Discusses information technology in higher education. Includes comments from Educom Medal Awards winners honored for contributions made to improving undergraduate education through information technology: Paul Velleman, Cornell; Diana Eck, Harvard; Richard Larson, Stony Brook; David Fulker, University Corporation; and Stephen Ressler, Military…

Discusses an alternative to abandoning the word "library" for "information" in graduate education. Recommends patient, consistent effort by library- and information-science educators to convince academic librarians that if they accept the standards of the teaching/research faculty, including the need to earn a Ph.D., it will raise the prestige of…

Student learning, perhaps the best measure of exemplary teaching, can be examined indirectly through correlated measures of teaching. Guidelines for good practice in assessment of teaching include use of multiple methods; assessment of multiple dimensions of learning; use of multiple assessors; distinguishing qualities best assessed by the…

A means of documenting exemplary college teaching is the teaching portfolio, which offers a wider range of evidence than single measures. A proposed faculty development program has teachers prepare portfolios individually, discuss teaching issues as a group within the academic unit, and design and test a system for evaluating teaching. This…

The Council for Exceptional Children's 1996 Teacher of the Year, Donald Butzko, a high school teacher of students with learning disabilities and mental retardation, is profiled. Characteristics of Butzko that have enhanced his effectiveness are identified, including his relationship with parents, his attendance at students' extracurricular…

Presents a blueprint for innovation and change in psychology undergraduate education to help psychology be recognized and strengthened as a science and a profession. It offers the characteristics that psychology programs should have in order to enhance the quality of undergraduate students, the faculty, and the curriculum. (GR)

Presents four articles about professionalism in early childhood education: "Early Childhood Education as an Emerging Profession: Ongoing Conversations" (Stephanie Feeney and Nancy Freeman); "Voices in Search of Cultural Continuity in Communities" (Marion Cowee and others); "Early Childhood Professionals: Current Status and…

In this article, the author invites students to reflect on the characteristics of their own teachers. The author contends that this reflection can be a methodological process and model toward a better understanding of what identifies teachers as professionals. To "constructively reflect" on teacher professionalism, it is imperative that…

It is in general considered self-evident that those people who will later transfer the educational content of culture to children and youth should themselves have first assimilated intensively as much of this culture as possible. They will then be able to pass on their education to others because they will know how such processes are gotten under…

Today we often hear that early care and education is becoming or should become a profession. In this article, the authors discuss what it means to be a profession, and a professional and consider how these characteristics apply to the field of early care and education now and in the future. Professionals possess specialized knowledge and…

In this presentation we will examine the situation of English as a Second Language (ESL) program managers, many of whom are charged with the responsibility of marketing their programs and recruiting students internationally, often with little or no training in how to do so (Eaton, 2005). Not only are they set forth ill-prepared, the repercussions…

This book explains the episodic changes in the meaning of "profession" and its cognates in the United States from 1600 to the present. An introduction states the book's central theses, that the meaning of the word "profession" has changed episodically in American history, that these changes in meaning were directly informed by…