Education Encyclopedia: Education Reform - OVERVIEW to Correspondence course

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Common School Movement - Colonial and Republican Schooling, Changes in the Antebellum Era, The Rise of the Common School

The ubiquity of "common" schools in the United States belies both the long effort to establish a system of publicly supported elementary and secondary schools and the many controversies that have attended public schools before and since their creation. The belief that public, or free, schools and pauper schools were synonymous terms, and that such schools were only for children of th…

16 minute read

Agencies Community-Based Organizations and Groups - Community Organization versus Community Organizing, The History of Community Organization, Types of Community Organization

COMMUNITY-BASED ORGANIZATIONS, AGENCIES AND GROUPS By Paul W. Speer & Douglas D. Perkins, Vanderbilt University In J. Guthrie (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Education, 2nd edition. (pp. 431–441). New York: Macmillian Reference USA. 2002. Child and youth development are influenced not only by families and schools, but by a wide variety of formal and informal community organizations; some of whi…

28 minute read

Community Colleges - The History of Community Colleges, The junior college and the research university., The Community College Mission

The community college is largely a phenomenon of twentieth-century American higher education. The label applies to an array of institutions that offer six-month vocational diplomas; one- and two-year vocational, technical, and pre-professional certificates; and two-year programs of general and liberal education leading to an associate degree. Two-year colleges may be public, private, proprietary, …

24 minute read

Community Education - A Comprehensive Plan, Community School, Impact on Education and Communities, Community Education in Action

In numerous polls and surveys, Americans identify education as one of the leading domestic challenges of the twenty-first century. Specifically, the challenge is not just to reform public schools but also to achieve the goal of academic success for all students. Many educational experts agree that reaching that goal will require increased cooperation among the schools themselves and a new kind of …

9 minute read

Commuter Students - Commuter Student Challenges

According to Laura J. Horn and Jennifer Berktold, approximately 86 percent of college and university students are defined as commuter students, that is, students not living in university-owned housing. The commuter student population is a diverse group, which encompasses full-time students who live with their parents, part-time students who live in off-campus apartments, parents with children at h…

5 minute read

Compensatory Education - UNITED STATES, POLICIES AND PROGRAMS IN LATIN AMERICA

The detrimental effects of poverty on children's academic outcomes and general well being are well documented. Children who grow up in poverty suffer higher incidences of adverse physical health, developmental delays, and emotional and behavioral problems than children from more affluent families. In school, children and adolescents living in poverty are more likely to repeat a grade, to be…

38 minute read

Compulsory School Attendance - Development of Compulsory School Attendance Philosophy and Laws, Exemptions and Alternatives, Issues Associated with Compulsory Attendance

The term compulsory attendance refers to state legislative mandates for attendance in public schools (or authorized alternatives) by children within certain age ranges for specific periods of time within the year. Components of compulsory attendance laws include admission and exit ages, length of the school year, enrollment requirements, alternatives, waivers and exemptions, enforcement, and truan…

12 minute read

Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning - A Brief History of CSCL Research, A Paradigmatic Example of CSCL Research

The traditional expansion for the acronym CSCL is computer-supported collaborative learning. However, many who work in the field find aspects of this title problematic; therefore a convention has developed to use the acronym as a free-standing designation in its own right. The traditional title is controversial in several ways. As Pierre Dillenbourg points out, the term collaborative learning has …

9 minute read

J. B. Conant (1893–1978) - Education, War Work, Academic Career, President of Harvard University, Presidential Appointments, Publications, Contribution

Twenty-third president of Harvard University, James Bryant Conant witnessed many defining moments of twentieth-century American history. He was intimately involved with transformational events: World War I, as president of Harvard University, the initial formation of federal science policy, the development of the atomic bomb in World War II, the cold war and the postwar atomic energy policy (inclu…

13 minute read

Consortia in Higher Education - Types of Consortia, Conclusions

A consortium is an association of institutions for the purpose of improved and expanded economic collaboration to achieve mutually beneficial goals. In higher education, this organizational form was originally designed to foster interinstitutional cooperation among a group of colleges and universities for the purpose of enhancing services within a geographic region. More recently, as information a…

9 minute read

Constitutional Requirements Governing American Education - Federal Constitutional Requirements, State Constitutional Issues, Conclusion

The right to a free public education is found in the various state constitutions and not in the federal constitution. Every state has a provision in its constitution, commonly called the "education article," that guarantees some form of free public education, usually through the twelfth grade. The federal constitution, on the other hand, contains no such guarantee. In San Antonio Ind…

17 minute read

Continuing Professional Education - UNITED STATES, INTERNATIONAL CORPORATIONS

Continuing professional education (CPE) may be thought of as the planned and systematic attempt to introduce, review, or alter the competencies and thereby the professional performance of professionals. Cyril Houle refers to CPE in observing that "whether it designates the improvement of professional competence or any other goal, (it) implies some form of learning that advances from a previ…

21 minute read

Cooperative and Collaborative Learning - Theoretical Perspectives on Collaboration, Collaborative Learning in Dyads and Groups, Group and Individual Performance

Cooperative and collaborative learning are instructional contexts in which peers work together on a learning task, with the goal of all participants benefiting from the interaction. Cooperation and collaboration can be treated as synonymous, as a truly cooperative context is always collaborative. Varied perspectives on collaboration and their implications for classroom instruction will be describe…

9 minute read

Corporate Colleges - The Evolution of Corporate Colleges, The Decline of Corporate Colleges, Corporate Universities, Conclusion

Dramatic changes have occurred in the scale of corporate investment in employee education since the end of World War II. Business and industry leaders have recognized that an educated workforce is essential to remaining competitive in a global economy. It is estimated that organizations in the United States with 100 or more employees spend approximately $60 billion annually for employee education.…

8 minute read

Cost Effectiveness in Education - Methodology, Examples, Use of Cost-Effectiveness Analysis

Cost-effectiveness analysis is an evaluation tool that is designed to assist in choosing among alternative courses of action or policies when resources are limited. Most educational decisions face constraints in the availability of budgetary and other resources. Therefore, limiting evaluation to the educational consequences of alternatives, alone, without considering their costs provides an inadeq…

10 minute read

Council for Basic Education - History, Activities, Governance Legal Status and Publications, Assessment of CBE's Influence and Significance

The Council for Basic Education (CBE) was founded in 1956 by a group of distinguished citizens alarmed at the shift in American education from intellectual development to an emphasis on social development. From its inception CBE set out, as it states in its bylaws, to ensure "that all students without exception receive adequate instruction in the basic intellectual disciplines, especially E…

4 minute read

Council of Chief State School Officers - History, Governance and Operations, Accomplishments and Influence, Concluding Note

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) is a nationwide, nonprofit organization composed of the public officials who head the departments of elementary and secondary education in the states, five U.S. extra-state jurisdictions, the District of Columbia, and the Department of Defense Education Activity. The council serves these leaders and their state education agencies by: Membership in…

8 minute read

Council for Exceptional Children - Program, Organizational Structure, Membership and Financial Support, History and Development

The Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) is a professional association dedicated to improving the educational success of children with disabilities and/or gifts and talents. Its members include special education teachers and administrators, professors, related service providers, paraprofessionals, and parents. CEC focuses on improving the quality of special and general education. To achieve this…

3 minute read

George S. Counts (1889–1974) - Sociology and Education, Social Reform, Political Activism, Contribution

Progressive educator, sociologist, and political activist, George S. Counts challenged teachers and teacher educators to use school as a means for critiquing and transforming the social order. Perhaps best known for his controversial pamphlet Dare the School Build a New Social Order? (1932), Counts authored scores of scholarly works that advanced the social study of education and emphasized teachi…

6 minute read

Creativity - Characteristics, Creativity as Ability, Relation to Intelligence, Creativity as Process, Relation to Imagery, Relation to Knowledge

Creativity is the ability and disposition to produce novelty. Children's play and high accomplishments in art, science, and technology are traditionally called creative, but any type of activity or product, whether ideational, physical, or social, can be creative. Creativity has been associated with a wide range of behavioral and mental characteristics, including associations between semant…

7 minute read

Ellwood Cubberley (1868–1941) - Education and Career, Contribution

An influential educator in the field of educational administration, Ellwood Patterson Cubberley helped guide the teacher education curriculum in the early twentieth century through his edited textbook series. His account of educational history set the historiographical tone for the first half of the twentieth century. Cubberley was born in 1868 in Antioch (later to be named Andrews), Indiana. He g…

4 minute read

Higher Education Curriculum - National Reports On The Undergraduate Curriculum, Traditional And Contemporary Perspectives - INNOVATIONS IN THE UNDERGRADUATE CURRICULUM

During the last decade of the twentieth century, significant changes occurred in American higher education generally and in the undergraduate curriculum in particular. These changes were propelled by several developments. Together they provided the momentum to enable higher education to make unprecedented strides. Educational leaders debate whether these changes are primarily additive and limited …

13 minute read

International Curriculum - Authority and Function, Curriculum and Globalization, Curriculum and Learning

The field of curriculum studies is cluttered by an array of dissimilar definitions of the term curriculum. In empirical studies, definitions of curriculum run the gamut from those that would have the term signify everything that takes place in a classroom to others that restrict its meaning to only the topics that are defined as instructional requirements in the official policy of an educational s…

16 minute read

School Curriculum - Core Knowledge Curriculum, Hidden Curriculum - OVERVIEW

In its organizational aspect the curriculum is an authoritative prescription for the course of study of a school or system of schools. In their traditional form, such prescriptions set out the content to be covered at a grade level or in a course or sequences of courses, along with recommended or prescribed methods of teaching. In their contemporary form such prescriptions have been re-presented a…

20 minute read

Merle Curti (1897–1996)

A leading U.S. historian, Merle Curti studied the complex relationship of education to democratic values and to capitalist institutions. Born in Nebraska, he went to Harvard for his B.A. and stayed to complete his Ph.D. He worked with both Frederick Jackson Turner and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. During Curti's years as a graduate student, he became acquainted with Charles Beard, the most inf…

5 minute read

Dalton School

The Dalton School, founded by Helen Parkhurst in New York City in 1919, was one of the important Progressive schools created in the early part of the twentieth century and the home of the internationally famous Dalton Plan. In the early twenty-first century it is a competitive, elite, coeducational K–12 independent day school located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Parkhurst opened h…

3 minute read

Agnes De Lima (1887–1974)

Journalist, educator, and activist, Agnes de Lima wrote significant books and articles about Progressive education. She was born in Holywood, New Jersey, and grew up in Larchmont, New York, and New York City in a prosperous, conservative banking family that had emigrated from Curacao. De Lima attended private school and entered Vassar College in 1904 at the age of seventeen. At Vassar, de Lima rec…

4 minute read

Decentralization and Education - Definition, Measurement, Rationale, Implementation, School Finance, Effects of Decentralization

The ways in which public primary and secondary education is financed and delivered varies greatly throughout the world. In France, education is highly centralized at the level of the national government, whereas in Canada the national government does not even have an education ministry, and in the United States education is mainly the responsibility of local school districts. Many developing count…

12 minute read

Applying Economic Analysis to Decision-Making in Developing Nations - Internal Efficiency of Education, External Efficiency of Education, Growth with Social Equity?

In mainstream economic analysis, education is seen as a production process in which inputs (e.g., students, teachers, and textbooks) are combined to yield desired outputs (e.g., student learning) within the education sector, and larger societal outcomes outside the sector (e.g., increased earnings in the workplace or greater social equality), under the prevailing educational technology (encompassi…

13 minute read

Applying Economic Analysis to Decision-Making in Schools - Reallocation of Existing Resources, Incentives, Venture Capital (Equity), Market Approaches

In the 1999 through 2000 school year, spending for all levels of education amounted to $646.8 billion. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, of this total, $389 billion was spent for K–12 education and the remaining $257.8 billion was expended by postsecondary institutions. Despite the substantial financial commitment to education, the impact of economics on the way edu…

9 minute read

Dental Health and Children - Prevention of Dental Diseases, School-Based Health Care Services

The oral health of children is important to their overall well-being. Just as the mouth cannot be separated from the rest of the body, oral health cannot be considered separate from the rest of children's health. Often thought to be only the presence or absence of tooth decay, oral health actually includes all the sensory, digestive, respiratory, structural, and emotional functions of the t…

10 minute read

Dentistry Education - Undergraduate Requirements, The Dental Admissions Test, The Application Process, Licensing and Certification

There are fifty-four dental schools in the United States as of 2001. These schools share the goal of producing graduates who are dedicated to the highest standards of health involving the teeth, gums, and other hard and soft tissues of the mouth. Dentists are educated in the basic and clinical sciences and are capable of providing quality dental care in several specialty areas. More than 17,000 st…

6 minute read

the Department Chairperson - Chairperson Roles, Important Position A Challenging

Over time, the profile of academic department chairpersons, often referred to as chairs, has remained fairly constant. They are tenured faculty, primarily male, and between the ages of forty and sixty. For the most part, chairs are internal appointees, either selected by their deans or elected by their departments and then appointed by their deans for terms of usually three to five years. In some …

6 minute read

Developmental Theory - Cognitive And Information Processing, Evolutionary Approach, Vygotskian Theory - HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

Developmental psychology attempts to understand the nature and sources of growth in children's cognitive, language, and social skills. Within that context, there are four central themes that are unique to a developmental perspective and that bear on issues in childhood education. The first is the role of nature versus nurture in shaping development. Specifically, developmentalists want to k…

18 minute read

John Dewey (1859–1952) - Experience and Reflective Thinking, Learning, School and Life, Democracy and Education

Throughout the United States and the world at large, the name of John Dewey has become synonymous with the Progressive education movement. Dewey has been generally recognized as the most renowned and influential American philosopher of education. He was born in 1859 in Burlington, Vermont, and he died in New York City in 1952. During his lifetime the United States developed from a simple frontier-…

16 minute read

Discourse - CLASSROOM DISCOURSE, COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE

The term classroom discourse refers to the language that teachers and students use to communicate with each other in the classroom. Talking, or conversation, is the medium through which most teaching takes place, so the study of classroom discourse is the study of the process of face-to-face classroom teaching. The earliest systematic study of classroom discourse was reported in 1910 and used sten…

23 minute read

Distance Learning in Higher Education - Related Terms and Concepts, Goals of Distance Learning, Technologies Used in Distance Learning

For more than a century, distance learning in higher education has constantly evolved–both in practice and in the definition of the term. As in many academic pursuits that are still in a state of development, there have been debates not only about the definition, but also about the words distance and learning themselves. While there is no one authority to arbitrate this issue, reviewing som…

12 minute read

Divinity Studies - Admission to Divinity School, Degrees Conferred

The nature of divinity schools' programs of study and admissions policies, procedures, and qualifications differ greatly from institution to institution. Some generalizations can be made, however. The Association of Theological Schools–the central accrediting agency for divinity schools and seminaries–is a good source for more specific information regarding individual schools …

6 minute read

the Doctoral Degree - The Dissertation

Advanced education culminates with the awarding of the doctoral degree. Allen R. Sanderson and Bernard Dugoni, in the 1997 edition of their annual survey of new doctoral recipients from U.S. universities, identified fifty-two different research doctorates. Traditionally, the nonprofessional doctoral degree most often awarded is the doctor of philosophy (Ph.D.), although other degrees such as the d…

3 minute read

Driver Education - Goals and Purposes, Course Offerings in the School Curriculum, Student Enrollment, Issues and Trends

Driver and traffic safety education began as a concept in 1928 as part of a doctoral thesis by Albert W. Whitney. Whitney argued that since so many high school students were learning to drive cars, schools had a responsibility to include driver education and safety instruction in the curriculum. Driver and traffic safety education was developed as a method for persons to gain licensure to use an a…

7 minute read

School Dropouts - Extent of the Problem, Factors Associated with Early School Leaving, Dropout Prevention Programs and Their Effects

Individuals who leave school prior to high school graduation can be defined as school dropouts. From the early 1960s into the twenty-first century, as universal secondary school attendance became the norm, such individuals were the subject of study by educators, educational researchers, and concerned policymakers in the United States. With some variation in local circumstances, they are of increas…

12 minute read

Drug and Alcohol Abuse - SCHOOL, COLLEGE

Drug and alcohol abuse are important problems that affect school-age youth at earlier ages than in the past. Young people frequently begin to experiment with alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs during the middle school years, with a smaller number starting during elementary school. By the time students are in high school, rates of substance use are remarkably high. According to national survey data,…

21 minute read

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) - The Formative Years, Early Scholarship, The Crisis Years, After the Crisis, The Final Years

Scholar, educator, philosopher, and social activist, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois is among the most influential public intellectuals of the twentieth century. A pioneer of the civil rights movement, Du Bois dedicated his life to ending colonialism, exploitation, and racism worldwide. Experiencing many changes in the nation's political history, he served as a voice for generations of Afr…

13 minute read

Early Childhood Education - Preparation Of Teachers, International Context - OVERVIEW

Early childhood education is concerned with the learning experiences of children below the age when compulsory schooling begins (usually age five or six). In terms of organized educational programs, it generally encompasses kindergartens (enrolling mainly five-year-olds) and prekindergartens and preschools aimed at children starting at about age three. Kindergarten, while not compulsory in most st…

21 minute read

East Asia and the Pacific - Some Key Issues, Prospects for the Future, China, The HPAEs

The region of East Asia and the Pacific encompasses some of the richest and poorest nations in the world, as well as the largest (China) and some of the smallest (the island states). It includes states with most successful record of economic development in the late twentieth century–the high-performing Asian economies (HPAEs) of the Republic of Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong (China), and Singapor…

18 minute read

Eastern Europe and Central Asia - New Rules for Education in the ECA Region, The Economic Imperative, The Civic Imperative

The Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region includes Central Europe (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and the Slovak Republic), Southeast Europe (Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania), the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), the western Commonwealth of Independent States (Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine), the Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Republic of Georgia), former Yugoslav…

20 minute read

Measurement Economic Benefits of Education Investment - An Illustration, Private Versus Social Costs, Empirical Findings, Estimation Issues

The concept of the rate of return on investment in education is very similar to that for any other investment. It is a summary of the costs and benefits of the investment incurred at different points in time, and it is expressed in an annual (percentage) yield, similar to that quoted for savings accounts or government bonds. Returns on investment in education based on human capital theory have bee…

12 minute read

Education Commission of the States

The Education Commission of the States (ECS) is an interstate compact created in 1965 to improve education by facilitating the exchange of information, ideas, experiences, and innovations among state policymakers and education leaders. Forty-nine states, three territories, and the District of Columbia constitute the commission's membership, each represented by the governor and six other ind…

1 minute read

Education Development Projects - History, The Project Model, Aid for Education

Contemporary education development projects can trace their origins to the programs of bilateral and multilateral official development assistance offered to newly independent and developing countries after World War II. The goals and purposes, content, format, actors, financing, and delivery of education development projects have undergone many changes throughout the last half of the twentieth cen…

9 minute read

Education Reform - OVERVIEW, REPORTS OF HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE

In 1983 American education reform entered a new era. It was in that year that the federal government published a report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education entitled A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. Commissioned in August 1981 by President Ronald Reagan's secretary of education, Terrel H. Bell, and chaired by David P. Gardner, then president of the U…

33 minute read

Educational Accountability - Moral and Professional Accountability, Bureaucratic Accountability, Political Accountability, Market Accountability, Legal Accountability, Standards and Assessment

Accountability has been an educational issue for as long as people have had to pay for and govern schools. The term covers a diverse array of means by which some broad entity requires some providers of education to give an account of their work and holds them responsible for their performance. These means include, among others: According to a 1999 article written by Jacob E. Adams and Michael W. K…

16 minute read

Federal Support Educational Broadcasting - Financial Arrangements, Current Scope of Services and Analysis of Impact, The Challenges and Opportunities Ahead

The U.S. federal government has always had a strong interest in broadcasting, but its relationship with the broadcasting industry was not formalized until the enactment of the Communications Act of 1934. The primary objective of this legislation was to clearly and officially assert federal, rather than private, control over all channels of interstate and international communications by wire and ra…

5 minute read

Educational Change - Phases of Educational Change, Emerging Theories of Educational Change

Education is generally thought to promote social, economic, and cultural transformation during times of fundamental national and global changes. Indeed, educational change has become a common theme in many education systems and in plans for the development of schools. According to Seymour Sarason, the history of educational reform is replete with failure and disappointment in respect to achieving …

3 minute read

Projecting Educational Expenditures - Projections Using Average Annual Increases in Expenditures, Projections Using Average Annual Percentage Increases in Inflation

Every responsible educational organization estimates the amount of expenditures necessary to provide services desired by its students, staff, and faculty. Utilizing historical financial data, an analyst can use a variety of statistical methods to project fairly accurately what expenditures will be needed to provide the same level of educational services in future years. Though there are a number o…

7 minute read

Educational Interest Groups - Diversity, Autonomous Power Centers, Postmaterialism

Public schools in the United States operate in a pluralist democracy that enables competing interests to gain access to the decision-making process. Quite frequently, conflicts over educational issues occur. Political leaders and educational professionals formulate policies that attempt to mediate competing views and contending interests. There are, however, three understandings about the interact…

6 minute read

Educational Leadership - A Challenging Environment, Preparing Recruiting and Sustaining School Leaders, Leadership in the Twenty-First Century

Schools are social institutions that play an important role in what is arguably the most complex responsibility of society: the healthy development of children. The people who lead schools must have a deep understanding of the many dimensions of this task, yet the challenges fall within the general category of crafting and carrying out agreements among many stakeholders. Some of these agreements h…

12 minute read

United States Educational Policy - The Basics of Educational Policy, The Pressure for Reform in American Education, Defining Policy

Education is an instrument of the broader social order. When society changes, education, sooner or later, also changes. Few activities or agencies, however, change as slowly, or in such small increments, as formal education–both schools and colleges as well as both public and private institutions. Education's roots are deep and wide, penetrating almost every facet of society. Hence, …

28 minute read

Educational Resources Information Center - Program, Organization, History

The Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) is a federally funded nationwide information system established to provide easy access to information about education research. ERIC offers educators and researchers a single source through which they can identify and obtain copies of educationrelated documents, articles, books, monographs, tests, manuals and handbooks, bibliographies, statistica…

3 minute read

Educational Testing Service

Educational Testing Service (ETS) is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help advance quality and equity in education by providing fair and valid assessments, research, and related services. Its products and services measure knowledge and skills, promote learning and performance, and support education and professional development worldwide. Founded in 1947 as an independent organization b…

3 minute read

Efficiency in Education - The Choice of Outcomes, The Choice of Inputs, The Transformation Process and Implications for Policy

Educators often feel ambivalent about the pursuit of efficiency in education. On the one hand, there is a basic belief that efficiency is a good and worthy goal; on the other hand, there is sense of worry that efforts to improve efficiency will ultimately undermine what lies at the heart of high-quality education. Part of the difficulty stems from a misunderstanding about the meaning of efficiency…

16 minute read

Effort and Interest - Effort, Interest, Effort and Interest

The research literature provides support for John Dewey's observation that effort and interest in education can be understood as being both oppositional and complementary. Five minutes of work on a task may feel like hours to a student who does not know what the next steps need to be, or even what the longer-range goals for the work are–especially if the student does not have a devel…

9 minute read

Eight-Year Study - Purpose, Method, Results

The Eight-Year Study (also known as the Thirty-School Study) was an experimental project conducted between 1930 to 1942 by the Progressive Education Association (PEA), in which thirty high schools redesigned their curriculum while initiating innovative practices in student testing, program assessment, student guidance, curriculum design, and staff development. By the late 1920s the members of PEA …

5 minute read

Elementary Education - Current Trends, Preparation Of Teachers - HISTORY OF

Elementary schools exist worldwide as the basic foundational institution in the formal educational structure. Elementary schooling, which prepares children in fundamental skills and knowledge areas, can be defined as the early stages of formal, or organized, education that are prior to secondary school. The age range of pupils who attend elementary schools in the United States is from six to twelv…

19 minute read

Charles Eliot (1834–1926) - Harvard: From College to University, Recruiting a Superior Faculty, The Elective System

During Charles Eliot's forty-year tenure as president of Harvard, he helped transform the relatively small college into a modern university and became a leading spokesman for Progressive educational reform in America. The son of a prominent Bostonian businessman, Charles Eliot entered Harvard in 1849. After graduating second in his class, Eliot became a tutor and was then promoted to assist…

11 minute read

Education of Emotionally Disturbed

Since enactment of the Education of All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, under 1 percent of school children have been identified for special education and related services as having serious emotional disturbance (SED); since 1997, the term emotional disturbance (ED) has been applied under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Although the percentage has remained stable for decad…

5 minute read

Employment - Employers' Perceptions Of Employment Readiness, Reasons Students Work - GENERAL IMPACT ON STUDENTS

Paid employment begins at a relatively young age in the United States. While exact figures vary, depending on the means of measurement, a survey published in 2000 by the U.S. Department of Labor found that half of American twelve-year-olds have had some kind of work experience. While at such young ages work experiences tend to be informal and short-term, as American youth progress through their te…

16 minute read

Engineering Education - Undergraduate Curricula, Graduate Curricula, Traditional Degree Areas, Other Engineering Specializations

As of 1997, 315 institutions housed 1,516 accredited engineering programs within the United States. To receive accreditation for their engineering programs, university departments comply with the standards established by the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET). ABET is an organization that consists of twenty-six professional engineering societies and six other affiliating prof…

8 minute read

English Education - TEACHING OF, PREPARATION OF TEACHERS

The teaching of the English language has a long history in U.S. education; the practice of teaching a native language can be traced to antiquity. In the Greek and Roman worlds, literacy was encouraged both to foster citizen participation in a democracy as advocated by Plato, Quintilian, and Cicero; much later it was fostered by the emergence of print and print cultures in western Europe. In the Am…

26 minute read

Enrollment Management in Higher Education - Defining Enrollment Management, Key Offices and Tasks in Enrollment Management, Organizational Models

During the last decades of the twentieth century, the concept of enrollment management emerged as a new organizational structure within two- and four-year colleges and universities. The term enrollment management refers to the ability of institutions of higher education to exert more systematic influence over the number and characteristics of new students, as well as influence the persistence of s…

8 minute read

Erik Erikson (1902–1994) - Career, Contribution

Child psychoanalyst Erik Homburger Erikson focused his research on the effects of society and culture on individual psychological development; he also developed the eight-stage model of human development. Erikson was born in Frankfurt, Germany, of Danish parents who had separated before his birth. His surname for the first four decades of his life, Homburger, was that of his stepfather, a physicia…

6 minute read

Ethics - SCHOOL TEACHING, HIGHER EDUCATION

Ethical concerns about teachers and teaching occur in a variety of contexts and can be thought of in several ways. This article discusses (1) how ethical issues are represented in the law; (2) how ethical issues are represented in the National Education Association's (NEA's) code of ethics; (3) ethically based comprehensive views of education; (4) the role of ethics in educational po…

24 minute read

Experiential Education - Brief History of the Role of Experience in Education, Roles for the Teacher and the Student

Although experiential education has come to mean simply "learning by doing" for some, educators utilizing this approach recognize both its distinguished historical and philosophical roots and the complexity of applying what appears to be so elementary. When education is said to be experiential, it means that it is structured in a way that allows the learner to explore the phenomenon …

10 minute read

Expertise - ADAPTIVE EXPERTISE, DOMAIN EXPERTISE

Investigators on knowledge transfer have almost unanimously concluded that students seldom effectively apply short-term training at school to problem-solving situations outside school. Experts, who have had years of problem-solving experience in a given domain, may not be different–they can solve familiar types of problems quickly and accurately but fail to go beyond procedural efficiency. …

12 minute read