As state budget allocations for higher education decrease, "specialty" programs such as gerontology must continually demonstrate their productivity. State and private universities increasingly rely on student credit hours (SCH) or tuition generated, which is making it difficult for many gerontology programs to expand. The School of Aging Studies…

Purpose: Aims to assess whether a university can become a true learning organization. Design/methodology/approach: Focuses on the need for, and challenges of, transforming universities into true learning organizations. Findings: Observes that few of the underlying values that serve as the underpinnings of the learning organizations are actually…

Introductory science courses often give undergraduates their first and, for many students, their last formal exposure to a deeper understanding of science. Thus, introductory courses might be the only opportunity to provide a basic level of scientific literacy for the educated lay public. In this article, the author discusses the challenges and…

Geoff Teece has recently (in "BJRE", 27, 2005, pp. 29-40) come to the defence of modern religious education and contended that many of the criticisms brought against it are based on mistaken interpretations. More particularly, Teece accuses Andrew Wright of misinterpreting the position of Professor John Hick and of failing to appreciate…

The establishment of the European Higher Education Area has involved specifying lists of professional competencies that programs are expected to develop, and with this the need for procedures to measure how every course within a higher education program is aligned with the program's competencies. We propose an instrument for characterizing this…

This paper examines the articulation of goals and means of sociological instruction in course syllabi. Three questions guide this inquiry. First, do sociology instructors articulate common learning goals? Second, what pedagogical means do instructors commonly employ to meet these goals? Third, to what extent have sociology instructors incorporated…

This paper starts from the premise that using learning outcomes to organise the curriculum has been demonstrated to be beneficial to both students and teachers. Accepting, however, that there are legitimate concerns over the extent to which the use of learning outcomes can inhibit originality and critical thinking of students, this paper uses the…

This paper presents interviews with Dr. Jon Mueller and Dr. Paula Harris. Dr. Jon Mueller is a professor of Psychology at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. Dr. Paula Harris is a professor in the Department of Language, Literature, and Arts at Jackson Community College in Jackson, Michigan. In these interviews, they present a…

To succeed professionally, a technology manager in higher education must align institutional goals with the skill set of campus technologists and the resources available for information technology (IT) support. Getting a firm grasp on any of these parameters is not easy. Resources are often committed to multiyear projects or hidden by opaque…

As student data analysis reports become more sophisticated, these reports reveal greater details on low performance skills. Availability of models and programs depicting detailed instructions or guidance for utilizing data to impact classroom instruction, in an effort to increase student achievement, has been lacking. This study examines the…

This article is concerned with understanding continuity and stability in teaching, and their significance. It looks particularly at the work of Anthony Giddens on structure and agency, that of Martin Heidegger on the limits of discursive and theoretical analysis, and the communitarian strand within ethics. It applies this discussion to…

This article presents the results on the effects of professional development in context by examining how much average change over time there is in different dimensions of teaching practice. In particular, three years of data on teaching practice are used to describe trends and differences across teachers and schools in the three broad aspects of…

This study deals with the issue of incorporating values education in music education in Hong Kong's primary and secondary schools. It includes the development of the state's cultural and national identity since its handover from the United Kingdom to the People's Republic of China (PRC). Thirty primary and secondary school music teachers were…

This article contrasts two major attempts at educational reform with regard to literacy. Starting with a brief background to the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy, together with an analysis of research into effective literacy teaching, it presents qualitative research carried out in the form of a comparative study of the National…

Educational technologies, specifically computer and the Internet technologies, have apparently become powerful tools in the classroom as they change the way we teach and learn today. That is why pedagogies of school reform are now highly influenced by and built around the "constructivist" theories of learning, assuming the use of…