The class unit is the basic unit of organization for instruction; therefore class-size information should be foundational knowledge for educators. Yet between the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Education in 1971 (see John Reisert's entry on class size, pp. 157–160) and its second edition in 2002, understanding of class size and its actual use have arguably seen both the greates…
Classroom management is the orchestration of the learning environment of a group of individuals within a classroom setting. In the early 1970s classroom management was seen as separate from classroom instruction. Teachers' management decisions were viewed as precursors to instruction, and were treated in the literature as if they were content-free. The image was of a teacher first attending…
Systematic classroom observation is a quantitative method of measuring classroom behaviors from direct observations that specifies both the events or behaviors that are to be observed and how they are to be recorded. Generally, the data that is collected from this procedure focuses on the frequency with which specific behaviors or types of behavior occurred in the classroom and measures their dura…
When people really want to learn something, they ask questions. They ask questions to become skilled in using new software, or to figure out the norms of courtesy in another culture, or to master the fine art of parking a car. It is not surprising that for many, questioning is at the very heart of learning, the central skill in the teaching-learning process. Teachers have been described as "…
Many schools and community organizations sponsor clubs for children and adolescents. These clubs provide opportunities for youth to participate in activities, interact with peers in a supervised setting, and form relationships with adults. Some clubs focus on a specific area, thus allowing members to develop their skills and interests in that area. Other clubs provide an array of activities from w…
The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) is a grass-roots network of approximately 1,000 schools and twenty regional centers around the country that seek to enact a set of ideas put forth by the American educator Theodore R. Sizer in Horace's Compromise (1984). Sizer found that, despite their differences in location and demography, American high schools, by and large, were remarkably simila…
The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) was founded in 1984 with the financial support of several national foundations as a secondary school reform organization. It built on the research conducted during the preceding five years by Theodore R. Sizer, Arthur G. Powell, and their colleagues in A Study of High Schools, research that was cosponsored by the National Association of Secondary School Pri…
A major twentieth-century figure in the sociology of education, James S. Coleman was a social theorist and an empirical researcher with a prevailing interest in social problems in education–tackling issues that were sometimes unpopular. Richard Elmore describes Coleman as a "person who said what he thought and what the evidence said, regardless of whether he felt it was the right thi…
Applying for admission to colleges and universities has evolved from a relatively straightforward process to a complex rite of passage that causes anxiety for many high school students. Increased media attention about college admissions during the late 1980s and 1990s facilitated the growth of a booming college admissions industry. Commercial test-preparation courses, independent counselors, annua…
The ACT Assessment and SAT are the most popular college entrance tests administered in the United States. The ACT Assessment, formerly called the American College Test, is a standardized examination required by many colleges and universities in the United States for admission to their undergraduate degree programs. The test was developed in 1959 to measure the academic abilities of prospective col…
THE ROLE AND SCOPE OF INTERCOLLEGIATE ATHLETICS IN U.S. COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES Bradley James Bates HISTORY OF ATHLETICS IN U.S. COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES John R. Thelin Jason R. Edwards ACADEMIC SUPPORT SYSTEMS FOR ATHLETES Robert E. Stammer Jr. ATHLETIC SCHOLARSHIPS Bradley James Bates COLLEGE STUDENTS AS ATHLETES Bradley James Bates INTRAMURAL ATHLETICS IN U.S. COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES Rache…
The College Entrance Examination Board, or College Board, is a national, nonprofit membership association with a mission of preparing, inspiring, and connecting students to college and opportunity. The College Board assists students in the school-to-college transition by helping them prepare academically for, and enter, colleges and universities. It also endeavors to aid international students in …
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, many colleges and universities have a broad educational mission: to develop the "whole student." On college campuses, extracurricular involvement is a key tool in this personal development. For the majority of college and university students, involvement in extracurricular activities plays an integral role in the collegiate experience. St…
Despite the fact that college tuition rose much more rapidly than either consumer prices or family incomes during the 1980s and 1990s, few college students paid the full cost of higher education during this period. Those who attended public colleges and universities paid relatively low tuition, with state taxpayers funding much of the cost of running these institutions. Students enrolled in privat…
Among the earliest systematic analyses of college outcomes are those of C. Robert Pace (1941, 1979); James Trent and Leland Medsker (1968); and Kenneth Feldman and Theodore Newcomb (1969). Focusing on both longitudinal changes and cross-sectional differences, this body of research generated some of the first significant impressions of the efficacy of college attendance. By and large, these studies…
David Webster stated in 1986 that there are two elements that define college rankings. The first is that academic quality can be measured by selected criteria. For example, in many studies the reputation of the faculty and the selectivity of students are used as measures of an institution's quality. The second element is that using these measurements leads to an ordering of institutions. In…
College recruitment practices are as distinctive as the scope and breath of the more than 3,200 accredited colleges and universities in the United States. With more than 2.5 million students matriculating to a college campus for the first time each year, the role and responsibility of admission and enrollment personnel in higher education has become increasingly critical to the success of the inst…
The decision to attend a college or university and admission to an institution of higher education has important outcomes for individuals and for society. Most of the attention given to these decisions by researchers and by public policymakers has focused on how high school graduates (often referred to as traditional-age students) make their decisions. Attention has also been given to how the inst…
The successful transition from secondary school to the collegiate environment for students has been the topic of much research, many articles and books, international conferences, and a plethora of newspaper articles at the beginning of each new academic year. First-year seminars have become a common approach adopted by higher education institutions in their efforts to ease the transition to colle…
Why do students leave college before completing a degree? This question is of interest not only to scholars, but also to employers, institutions, students, parents of students, and spouses. A student who leaves college before graduating paid tuition that will probably not be made up for through employment, for a person who lacks a college degree will have diminished lifetime earnings (compared to …
ACCOMMODATING Troy R. Justesen SPECIAL LEARNING NEEDS Frances K. Stage Magdalena H. de la Teja Before the 1970s, more than half of the children with disabilities in the United States did not receive appropriate educational services that would enable them to have full equality of opportunity. More than one million of these children were excluded from the public school system and did not go through …
College teaching is a very complex activity that cannot easily be defined or measured. Part of the reason is that teaching at any level cannot be divorced from the context in which it takes place and particularly from the teachers and learners who are involved. Good teaching in a graduate seminar in physics is not necessarily the same as good teaching in a large, introductory physics course, and i…
When the English colonized North America, they brought with them the educational traditions and concepts of England. In 1636 the Congregationalists founded Harvard University, using Oxford and Cambridge Universities as their model. With the exception of the Philadelphia Academy and the College of William and Mary, the original nine colonial colleges were founded by graduates of either Oxford or Ca…
The organizational structures of American colleges and universities vary distinctly, depending on institutional type, culture, and history, yet they also share much in common. While a private liberal arts college may have a large board of trustees, and a public research university nested in a state system no trustees of its own, the vast majority of public and private universities are overseen by …
The landscape of higher education in North America first began to take shape at the start of the colonial period as religious communities and individual religious leaders realized the need to bring Western education to what was for them a newly discovered land. The motivation for the education varied. Some communities began schools as a means for training religious leaders. The first college, foun…
A founder of and one of the most significant contributors to the discipline of visual anthropology, John Collier Jr. applied still photography and film to cross-cultural understanding and analysis. He used photography for education in two ways. First, his principle work, Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method (with Malcolm Collier, 1986[1967]), defined the discipline for many years,…
A prolific scholar on pedagogical, spiritual, and social reform, Johann Amos Comenius was born in the village of Nivnice in southeast Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic), and became a minister in the Unity of Brethren church, a Protestant sect. Political and religious persecution during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) drove Comenius from his homeland in 1628, and despite his e…
The culmination of education for the high school student, the commencement ceremony, or graduation, is a major event and transition point for students, parents, and teachers. It is a time for students, parents, and teachers to celebrate their hard work and accomplishments. Students take pride in having met the graduation requirements that were established by their state and local board of educatio…
By the end of the twentieth century, the world economy had shifted in two important ways. First, the free flow of capital had created a high level of global interdependency. Second, production and distribution were no longer regionally bound within the nation-state. Trade agreements provide evidence of these trends. Educational commodities in the global marketplace are evident as services and good…