Over 2,000 years ago, Aristotle wrote a treatise on ethics in which he proposed that there were both intellectual and moral virtues to be developed in the human being. Virtue ("aristeia") was roughly equivalent to the English word "excellence" and the unifying virtue that was both a moral and an intellectual virtue was…

Unlike most other fields, business school Ph.D. production has declined in the last decade. Data from the National Science Foundation (NSF) reveal that business and management doctorate production decreased by 6.9 percent between the first and second half of the 1990s. Over the same period, humanities (18.9 percent increase) and life sciences…

A 20th-century discipline in American universities, communication has struggled with questions of academic identity: generically, as to whether it is a "humanities" or a "social science", a "practice" or a "technology", and theoretically, as to what sorts of axioms, theorems, research methods or logics, and problems should form its core. This…

The Polish school education system makes a distinction between two types of assessment: (1) Intra-school or internal assessment; and (2) External assessment. The idea of introducing external examinations into the Polish school education system emerged in 1992. This was directly inspired by study visits to the United Kingdom and the Netherlands…

Since the publication of Samuel Shem's "House of God," medical students and residents have been famous for their cynical conversations about patients and life on the wards. This image is largely a caricature, yet peer pressure, medical machismo, stressful working conditions, and house staff subculture do foster negative attitudes and…

The purpose of the study was to determine the typical teaching methods used in upper secondary physics in Finland and Norway and how students would like to study physics. Moreover, the further aim of seeing how certain background variables may explain students' desire to study their chosen specialist subject, physics or social science…

This qualitative case study illustrates barriers to informal argumentation and reasoned debate, i.e., "critical discourse," in online forums. The case is the computer conference of a 15-week, graduate-level humanities course offered entirely at a distance. Twelve students, all with families and careers, were enrolled in the course. We read all…

This research report examines the data collected in The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) for 1992, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. The study also provides a context for interpreting the data with a comparison to a similar survey of 1982. Jazz was defined as the respondents saw fit. Findings of the survey include:…

This book highlights case studies from Providence, Rhode Island, of history and social studies classes in grades 7 through 12. Rather than use textbooks to study history, the students used documents and primary sources to construct history, acting as historians and drawing their own conclusions from the past. Accounts of classroom lessons,…

This book is designed to help school districts plan comprehensive art curricula that are addressed to the concerns of society as well as to the needs of individual students. Specifically, it will help elementary classroom teachers, art teachers, supervisors, and administrators prepare their own local art curriculum guides and courses of study. The…

The purpose of this study, unique in that it centered on students as creators rather than users of programs, was to determine whether collaboratively creating HyperCard stacks that presented information on four decades (i.e, the 1920s, the 1930s, 1945-60, and the 1960s) affected the amount of knowledge and the interrelatedness of informational…

This study compared the formation of the names of Victorian women writers in the Library of Congress name authority file to the formation of names in selected bibliographic tools created by humanities scholars. A purposive sample of 52 writers, divided into 12 problem categories derived from Chapter 22 of the "Anglo-American Cataloguing…

This manual reflects the highlights of an urban park study developed and tested over a 6-year period at the Churchill School, an elementary school for children with learning disabilities. This book makes possible an integrated study that develops understandings in natural science and the social studies along with reading, writing, and language…

This book analyzes the notions that are "fashionable" in the humanities today, arguing against the orthodoxy that has installed race, gender, and class perspectives at the center of college humanities curricula. The book contends that humanistic education today, far from being historically aware, relies on anachronistic thinking; far…

Traditionally, humanities instruction at two-year colleges has been identified with transfer education. Since enrollments are decreasing in humanities classes, the future viability of the humanities curriculum will depend on providing humanities instruction to vocational students. This fact sheet discusses some obstacles to changing the humanities…