Anticipating change in student affairs and developing new strategies to meet the challenges posed by change requires an understanding of the current themes and trends in higher education. This article analyzes themes, issues, and trends from higher education during the past decade, including: the engaged institution; enhanced student learning;…

An emphasis on learning and development is a student-centered focus. It is essential for student affairs professionals to keep the resources of the institution focused on the student experience. Student affairs personnel need to map the learning and developmental agenda for students and identify the educational strategies needed to help learners…

Observes an eighth grade science class in two overlapping perspectives: an action orientation and a discourse orientation. Reports that the teacher's actions encouraged univocal discourse between students and their reproductive understanding of scientific concepts. Concludes that before a class can become more like a scientific discourse…

Students have problems successfully arranging an electric circuit to make the bulb produce light. Investigates the percentage of students able to complete a circuit with a given apparatus, and the effects of prior experience on student success. Recommends hands-on activities at the elementary and secondary school levels. (Contains 14 references.)…

Asserts that principals can improve student learning by sharing the leadership of instruction with teachers and parents thereby building leadership capacity. Describes characteristics of schools with high leadership capacity. Provides examples of building leadership capacity through the use of study groups, action-research teams, and leadership…

Describes research done at the Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed At Risk on the development and evaluation of the Talent Development model, which asserts that all students can learn in demanding, high-expectation academic settings. Focuses on maximizing every child's potential. (SLD)

Draws upon psychoanalytic theory to study learning from experiences in group psychology. Urges the educational leadership field to consider uses of emotional conflict in group psychology, analyzes group language usage, and presents three examples of leaderless groups' efforts to transform institutional life. (Contains 52 references.) (MLH)

Clarifies how students' mathematical reasoning as acts of participation are analyzed in the mathematical practices established by the classroom community. Presents episodes from a recently completed classroom teaching experiment that focused on statistics. Discusses change, diversity, and equity. (Contains 66 references.) (Author/ASK)

Focusing on whether computer-based study tasks should use multiple-choice or constructed-response (CR) question formats, this study hypothesized that a CR task with feedback would be superior to multiple-choice study tasks that allowed either single or multiple tries (STF, MTF). As hypothesized, CR scores were larger than MTF and STF scores,…

Describes four ways that principals can provide leadership to overcome several school culture barriers to accountability: Be a champion for standards; emphasize learning, not performance; educate the public; and protect the things that matter. (PKP)

This chapter is designed to acquaint the reader with the context for accreditors' increased emphasis on student learning outcomes as a key indicator of institutional quality and on the use of learning assessment as a key strategy for guiding institutional improvement. It articulates accreditors' expectations for the presentation of evidence that…

We have completed a piece of research into the process of production of speech on the part of students as regards their idea of "the good student", taking social postmodern theories as a conceptual reference and within the university context. The study tries to show how disciplinary technologies are a major influence in the make-up of particular…

The "Mozart effect" refers to an increase in spatial reasoning performance following exposure to music composed by Mozart. Empirical tests of the effect have resulted in an inconsistent pattern of findings with some studies producing the effect and others failing to do so. The majority of the investigations have relied on paper-and-pencil tests.…

This study examined the effect of scaffolding students who learned by designing assignments for a computer simulation on the physics topic of alternating circuits. We compared the students' assignments and the knowledge acquired in a scaffolded group (N = 23) and a non-scaffolded group (N = 19). The scaffold consisted of a Design Sheet that guided…

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to measure Organizational Learning Capability (OLC) perception in the managers of public, private and multinational organizations and establish the link between OLC and firm performance. Design/methodology/approach: The data were collected from a sample of 612 managers randomly drawn from Indian industry,…