A national survey of college faculty provided data for an analysis of class size norms in postsecondary institutions, and the institutional and academic variables associated with class size differences. Institutional characteristics considered include public versus private control, Carnegie classification, and institution size. Course academic…

Within the last several years, between 400 and 500 faculty development programs have been instituted in colleges and universities. However, there is no clear agreement on what faculty development programs should be doing. This paper examines the major approaches to faculty development that institutions can use and the role of institutional…

This study examined the use of concept maps for Web-based applications in higher education. The purpose of the project was to design concept maps that could serve as prototypes for navigating and searching Internet resources. It also explored the value of concept mapping as a method of bibliographic retrieval for the ERIC database. Following an…

The use of of the Automatic Interaction Detector (program AID3 of the OSIRIS statistical package) to study a university program is discussed. The performance of students who took general physics lecture and laboratory concurrently is compared to the performance of those who took them separately. Five years of data are analyzed, covering 1,997…

Teaching and learning activities that occurred in large university classes were studied with attention to the extent students are being involved and whether that involvement makes a difference in their attitudes and performance. At the University of Texas at Austin, 19 large (100 students and larger) classes, representing the college of liberal…

Reported are the impacts of a series of workshops for instructional improvement conducted by the Faculty Development Organization of Wittenberg University, a private, undergraduate institution of 2300 students. The impacts delineated are the results of an evaluation of these workshops. The impacts examined were extracted from the expected outcomes…

The growth in computing power available to institutional researchers today is more than matched by the increase in the demand for information. A significant part of this demand involves minor variations of a few routine questions. Nearly all administrators from the vice president to the department chairman want information about "their"…

Key concepts from theory and research on student learning are discussed, and a conceptual framework to promote the design of local instructional improvement efforts is presented. The objective is to advocate that institutional researchers focus more directly on the basic issues of teaching and learning and to suggest that improving instructional…

The needs of evening students at Shelby State Community College campuses were surveyed in 1984, with attention to reasons for continuing one's education, employment status, preferred class times, and preferred teaching formats. Sixty-five questions were included dealing with students' perceived personal, academic, and career development concerns.…

The effects of student instructional preference on performance in an engineering course offered both by Personalized Instruction (PSI) and lecture/discussion methods were explored in a study of 113 university sophomores and juniors. In lieu of random assignment to instruction mode, this study employed self-selection, the most common situation in…

Canadian journals in psychology, education, and higher education were reviewed to assess the contribution of psychology to Canadian higher education. Over 100 articles were selected, plus books and monographs published between 1970 and 1980. The articles were grouped according to whether they dealt with cognition and learning; instruction; student…

The purpose of the study was to determine to what extent the administrators, counseling staff, and full-time faculty members of the Frederick Campus of Tidewater Community College were aware of and influenced by career education in the development of new and modification of existing programs. A four page, 12-item, locally constructed questionnaire…