Knowing how to use sources effectively often poses considerable challenges for first year undergraduate students for whom English is a second language (L2). In this longitudinal case study we investigated the selection and self-reported use of source materials by thirteen first year L2 undergraduate students from a range of disciplines enrolled at…

As part of Lumina Foundation's state productivity initiative in higher education, the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) hosted a discussion of state level higher education cost studies in May 2008. After subsequent conversations with Jane Wellman, Executive Director of the Delta Cost Project, and SHEEO representatives from four…

Until recently, there has been no credible, reliable source for instructional cost data on a national basis for two-year colleges in the United States. To fill this need, the Kansas Study of Community College Instructional Costs and Productivity was designed and implemented as a national data collection and reporting consortium. Based on the…

Ten years ago this October, the members of the political science community might have heard a short, but quite fascinating, "cri de coeur" about the prevailing practices of the discipline in the United States at the turn of the century. Circulating as an e-mail message shortly after the 2000 APSA Annual Meeting, it popped up in the inboxes of a…

A mixture of integrative learning and interdisciplinary studies, appropriately conceived and well grounded in academic disciplines, constitutes the most effective education for a complex world. But how exactly should interdisciplinary studies and integrative learning be conceived? In this article, the author sketches a focused vision for…

Magic has to do with the supernatural and the unnatural. It is indifferent to natural law and science and is aloof from scientific inquiry. Its existence depends upon unquestioning faith. Granted such faith, it is extraordinarily potent. If it does not move mountains, it convinces the faithful that it can. It can damage health and perhaps, restore…

This article explores the attitudes of writers within the tradition of critical pedagogy towards disciplines in higher education. With particular focus on Henry Giroux's work, it contrasts his portrayal of disciplines as closed, limiting and elitist with an alternative one of disciplines as complex, permeable and contested spaces. Critical…

Geography, the academic discipline, is in a continual state of change. The major paradigm shifts within the subject are well documented as are calls for unity at times of perceived fragmentation. Changes within the school subject of geography have received less coverage but are equally significant in terms of the future position of the subject…

This article seeks to make a compelling case for authors' rights training through emphasis on academic librarians' dual roles as both authors and as liaisons to research and teaching faculty. Using the example of the Rights Well Workshop developed at Oregon State University Libraries, the article demonstrates the value of training librarians as…

As new ways of creating and interpreting texts complicate ideas of how and why writing happens, the field of rhetoric and composition needs to be more conscious of how our institutional responsibilities and scholarly attention to college writing has limited its vision of writing and literacy. It is time to move beyond consolidating our identity as…

There is a confusion over and inchoate understanding of how the past is made understandable through postmodernist historical orientation. The purpose of the article is to outline the characteristic features of the postmodernist movement in social sciences, to explain its confrontation with history, to document its critique of the conventional…

Using the data collected by the CCCC Committee on the Major, the authors demonstrate how quickly the writing major is growing, map the commonalities among various majors, discuss some of the problems in developing a major, and raise questions about what a writing major should be. (Contains 3 figures, 2 tables and 8 notes.)

This paper describes the introduction of an open-access preprint server in China covering 43 disciplines. The system includes mandatory deposit for state-funded research and reports on the repository and its effectiveness and outlines a novel process of peer-review of preprints in the repository, which can be incorporated into the established…

Concerns about adolescent literacy continue to be highlighted in regards to the challenges of reading and learning from academic text. Recent efforts to address these concerns have led to an examination of the disciplines and their specialized ways of thinking and using language. In this article I discusses a metalinguistic protocol in a…

Due to a general development in education brought about by democracy, Portugal has witnessed tremendous development in Higher Education (HE) since the beginning of the 1980s. Nevertheless, the percentage of graduates among the Portuguese population still ranks far below most European countries. This is why academic performance in HE 1st cycle…