This report highlights the experiences of the 33 members of CIC's (Council of Independent Colleges) Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) Consortium over the past three years as they used the CLA to measure student learning outcomes. The CLA instrument assesses how the college experience helps students develop such "higher order" cognitive skills…

Keeping middle school students focused and engaged in the classroom is a challenge amid the physical, intellectual, emotional, and social changes that young people experience during this phase of their lives. Youth aged 11 to 13 years are characterized by a growing desire to think and act independently while at the same time caring about being…

The purpose of this study was to examine the experiences of biracial students with one parent of African American heritage attending Predominantly White Institutions (PWI) in the South. This study utilized a basic qualitative research design and was comprised of three phases: semi-structured individual interviews, responses to written prompts and…

In September 2006, the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education released its final report entitled "A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education" postulating that graduates today are lacking important skills such as reading, writing, problem solving, and critical thinking. In the field of…

This article extends the relevance of multicultural development to the Strengths-Based School Counseling (SBSC; Galassi & Akos, 2007) perspective. A relatively new construct for school counselors, the "multicultural personality" (MP), is introduced and defined. The MP is conceptualized as a cluster of narrow personality traits that…

There is a strong consensus in the educational literature that teaching is an inherently moral endeavour, and that the moral work of teachers is of central importance to education. However, programmes of teacher education in the USA typically do not reflect these beliefs in their curricula. One reason for this inconsistency is that researchers…

Most colleges adopt strategies to improve student performance. In this article, the authors describe how Valencia Community College in Florida developed a strategy that would move it from the already much better than average results in student learning, persistence, and success it was achieving toward the quantum level of improvement. They also…

Mentoring and ethics are integral and intersecting components of medical education. Faculty workloads and diffusion of responsibility for teaching impact both ethics and mentoring. In current academic medical center environments, the expectation that traditional one-on-one mentoring relationships will arise spontaneously between medical students…

This study investigates key educational experiences in higher education. Key experiences are short and intense instructional episodes that students remember to have had a decisive effect on their lives. Data comes from a sample of 3045 key educational experiences, focusing on the 11.6% that relate to higher education. The paper uses a qualitative…

The cookbook analogy is employed to explain the fundamentals underlying the studies that are conducted in different conditions and the literature comparing novice and expert learners. The analysis proves that the theory-to-practice link becomes stronger, when the students have the correct facilities for complete development, implementation and…

Because bereavement is a common experience among college students, institutions of higher education must understand how students respond to death loss to take actions to assist them appropriately. How students cope with the death of someone close to them is tied to their unique developmental status, the climate of the campus, and their personal…

Two studies assessed student writing in a critical thinking course. The first study examined initial and final versions of a term paper. Linguistic inquiry and word count (LIWC) analyses of essays revealed significant differences in linguistic variables and some differences in cognitive variables. The second study examined student essays at the…

In recent years there has been growing interest across the world in ways of developing children's thinking and learning skills. This interest has been fed by new knowledge about how the brain works and how people learn, and evidence that specific interventions can improve children's thinking and intelligence. Thinking skills are important because…

This module is the result of the author Michael Chirichello's visit to Luxembourg in 2008. He includes the contact information here for the Atert-Lycee Redange principal or director: Claude Boever, Directeur, email: directeur@alr.lu This publication aligns with the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISSLC) Standard 1: "An…

In this article, the author shares her research findings on the differences between how men and women respond to college. She explores some of the cornerstones of the undergraduate experience--living away from home, interacting with faculty, being academically engaged, and learning about diversity--and how they contribute in unique ways to women's…