Designed for middle school students, this award winning, six-day teaching unit helped students learn about the concepts of specialization, interdependence, efficiency, and profit. At the onset of the lesson the students were already familiar with the concepts of scarcity, goods, services, profits, supply, demand, and opportunity costs. The unit's…

There has been a decline in the enrollment in sociology courses and a decline in the number of students choosing to major in sociology. To counteract this decline, departments need to continue to offer a traditional academic sociology curriculum, but also need to offer stronger training in research methods and statistics, interdisciplinary…

The need for the skills and services provided by college institutional researchers even during a period of financial constraint, which prevents having a distinct institutional research office, is addressed. It is suggested that institutional researchers can be utilized in management and administrative functions. For example, the academic vice…

Utilizing the HIPPS (Hypothesis, Involvement, Participation, Practice, and Sharing) method in community college social science courses provides students with the opportunity to develop research, critical thinking, and writing skills. The HIPPS method includes the following stages: (1) Hypothesis Formation by Students, in which the professor poses…

The University of Tennessee Knoxville's (UTK) predoctoral training program, which is designed to increase the participation of women and minorities in educational research, is described. The program consists of six student associates (second-year doctoral in education and home economics), six field associates (individuals with doctorates who are…

Library use instruction designed specifically for limited-English-proficient (LEP) students is discussed briefly and library skill activities used with this population at Union County College (New Jersey) are described. It is noted that many students from other countries have had little or no exposure to libraries because of either limited…

Currently available World Wide Web search engines determine a site's qualification as a response to a search request by matching keywords in the request to keywords representing the site. The returned sites are given a score and ranked according to the match on keywords. Many of these retrieved sites can be irrelevant to the user's true…

The behavioral and social sciences offer the best perspective on changing individual and group behaviors and stopping the spread of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Social psychologists interested in basic research and/or theoretical issues have an opportunity to study naturally occurring independent variables. A potential area for…

This paper contains two reports on using competency based techniques in curriculum development. The first, on Clayton Junior College in Georgia, describes a 1975-77 study designed to identify competencies which faculty members reasonably expect from students having completed the general education portion of the core curriculum, to discover the…

A student assignment designed for a business French course is described. The assignment, a student research paper, is intended to promote both active learning and integration of skills. It is short and completed early in the course. Students are assigned topics and must research, organize, and summarize in French. It is expected that each student…

Two naturalistic research studies observed 45 eleventh grade students carrying out research paper assignments, and a third such study focused on 26 third grade students. The studies took place in Alberta (Canada) in 1993, Texas in 1996, and Washington state in 1999. From data analyzed in the interviews and written documents, the initial findings…

Australian education and training and vocational education and training (VET) research are in a state of crisis. Both the higher education and VET sectors are now squeezed and subject to contradictory objectives, multiple accountabilities, heightened expectations, and diminished resources in an environment of uncertainty and frustration. The…

This document contains 162 papers and innovative sessions, two poster sessions presented at a conference on human resource development (HRD). A program overview, author index, and a keyword index are also included. The papers are grouped by the conference's 56 symposia, which were devoted to the following topics: HRD with International and…