Our knowledge "system" is built up from disciplines and specialties as its components, which are "wired" by patterns of collaboration that constitute its organization. The intellectual autonomy of these components prevents this knowledge system from adequately accounting for what we have gradually discovered during the past 50 years: In human…

As a result of a recent College Board Admissions Testing Program Achievement Test scaling study, L. L. Cook and others recommended that the practice of sampling only high school juniors taking the achievement tests in June might be expanded to include sophomores and that a two-stage scaling procedure be evaluated. The two-stage procedure would…

This paper proposes a definition of intellectual character in which metacognition plays a key enabling role. Two necessary, if not sufficient, conditions for being said to have intellectual character are having high intellectual standards and habitually checking one's thinking against those standards, or being metacognitive. Four questions…

Both writing and critical thinking are based in context; students write and think best about subjects in which they are knowledgeable. Neither can therefore be regarded as a generic basic skill. Linear conceptions of learning which permeate both informal and formal views of education, writing, and critical thinking set students up for failure.…

The major in most colleges has been criticized as little more than a gathering of courses taken in one department, lacking structure and depth or emphasizing content to the neglect of inquiry on which the content is based. This report, based on the "Re-Forming Majors" project of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, presents…

The way job positions in English studies are conceptualized, advertised, applied for, and awarded is defined by the conventional contours of literary study. The precision with which the "Job Information List" breaks down literature positions by national and historical categories reflects the desire of a great many departments to hire and…

Approval plans are widely used in academic libraries to acquire current books soon after publication without time-consuming, costly title-by-title ordering. However, return rates of unselected books to the approval plan vendor are sometimes unacceptably high. Wright State University Library attempted to moderate their high approval return rates by…

In a time of continually shrinking budgets, first year composition programs in Canadian universities, particularly the University of Waterloo, Ontario, have proven to be vulnerable to budget cuts. In 1980, each teaching assistant had one class of about 22 students and there were over 20 tutors in the writing center. In 1992, each teaching…

Courses in communication theory in the 1990s may emphasize the social sciences, critical theory, or both, depending on the orientation of the professor. The modern field of communication in the United States arose after World War I in response to increasing technology and the progressive, pragmatic philosophy that has dominated American life.…

This paper suggests that the institution of teacher education, stripped of its oppressive yet defining characteristics, is undergoing an identity crisis, a crisis that some teacher educators fear threatens the very core of teacher education. This paper draws upon central concepts from the psychoanalytic tradition and the work of several theorists…

The explanation of the anomalies that learning disabled students present depends on the discourse in which educators and researchers locate learning disabilities. The field of learning disabilities is a discipline in the midst of a paradigm shift in which the new discourses are incompatible with the field's basic tenets and assumptions.…

This paper examines and comments on the rhetorical dimension of legitimation apparent in the articles in the professional literature of technical communication--this dimension is the epideictic aspect of professional rhetoric. Michael Halloran has shown that epideictic is that dimension of all rhetorical acts which strives to show that the rhetor…

Competent practice in the field of evaluation calls upon many skills, which all can be taught. This paper suggests one perspective on how these evaluation skills could be acquired. A seven-item question-and-answer format is used to respond to a panel discussing structuring a program to prepare professional evaluators. The following questions are…

A study investigated leading mass communication scholars' opinions concerning the most influential works in their development as scholars, what books or journal articles they would recommend for aspiring scholars, and which researchers in the field are doing promising work. Fifty-one scholars identified through previous studies as being the most…

The task of transforming the undergraduate curriculum to reflect feminist concerns should involve a consideration of the way existing curricula are structured. This paper pursues the question of structure and considers two existing and separate courses: the sociology of work (or occupational sociology) and the sociology of the family. Alternative…