An urban community college routinely assigns Swift, Plato, Joyce, and other classic authors of the Western tradition to its immigrant and minority students. Bruce Gans, who founded and directs the program, tells of the value of Great Books to those who have the most to gain from rising above race, culture, and class.

Educators must know their students' backgrounds to effectively increase their knowledge and skills. In determining the best delivery approach, educators must also understand the "market" in which their students will likely work after their formal education. While many students from developing countries attend universities in developed…

While learning is often designed and executed as if it stood alone, it rarely exists in isolation. If more than one learning event is offered, a relationship between units exists and should be defined. This relationship calls for an architecture of curriculum that defines audience, content, and delivery within a context of performance. Curriculum…

The push for academic electives has grown over the years for many reasons. The pressure for high test scores has forced schools to focus on literacy and core content areas. The competition for entrance to four-year universities has grown, too. However, in the race to improve academic offerings and raise test scores, some schools have neglected to…

"Curriculum alignment projects, towards developing a need to know", presents an approach to curriculum design that could be considered truly constructive in its format. Successful completion of the project requires students to synthesize a number of concepts that make up the block's learning objectives.

This article proposes a reconsideration of curricular objectives with respect to the teaching of culture, in the interest of broadening the humanistic scope of the second/foreign language curriculum while at the same time alleviating the pressure of a typically over-extended instructional agenda. Recent research and theory support a relational…

Purpose: This paper evaluates whether the revalidated Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) programme encourages independent learning by its curriculum design, delivery and assessment. Results: Evidence regarding the promotion of independent learning was gained from learners and external examiners. The scientific publications, presentations and posters…

This paper has been developed by the Division for Early Childhood (DEC) of the Council for Exceptional Children to serve as a companion document to the 2003 joint position statement, "Early Childhood Curriculum, Assessment and Program Evaluation-Building and Effective, Accountable System in Programs for Children Birth through Age 8,"…

Schmoker asserts that the kinds of skills students need to succeed in college--skills like clear thinking, effective writing, and the ability to analyze international and policy issues--are equally needed for non-college-bound youth. He maintains it is possible--and necessary--to provide an intellectually challenging and culturally enriching…

Fifth-grade students with learning disabilities (LD) and their typically achieving (TA) peers participated in an 8-week investigation about 19th-century U.S. westward migration. During their investigations, the students analyzed primary and secondary sources to understand the experiences of these emigrants and Native peoples. The analysis of…

Purpose: An online questionnaire survey was conducted to explore University of Plymouth students' perceptions and understandings of, and attitudes towards, sustainable development and related concepts and issues. In general, student perceptions of sustainable development have been under-researched. This research sought to go some way towards…

This article reports on a self-study that focuses on encouraging a group of undergraduate students to be active learners by promoting their critical engagement with what they are learning. The descriptions and explanations in the self-study give account of the contradictions and challenges encountered in my attempts to reconcile between students'…

Previous research has documented a need for the development of a sex education programme in Turkish schools in terms of adolescence readiness and the presence of misconceptions regarding critical aspects of sexual issues. Currently no school-based sex education is available for Turkish adolescents. This paper presents the development of a…

Cross-sectional and longitudinal data from students as they advance through the middle school years (grades 6-8) reveal insights into the development of students' pattern generalization abilities. As expected, students show a preference for lower-level tasks such as "reading the data," over more distant predictions and generation of abstractions.…

The present paper presents a longitudinal study of the course "High-tech Entrepreneurship and New Media." The course design is based on socio-cultural theories of learning and considers the role of social capital in entrepreneurial networks. By integrating student teams into the communities of practice of local start-ups, we offer…