Surviving the Doctoral Dissertation: A Solution‐Focused Approach

The authors discuss the application of solution‐focused counseling in support groups designed to help graduate students cope with the demands of writing a doctoral dissertation.     

Appropriateness of Teachers' Test-Preparation Practices

What two standards can teachers and administrators use to decide whether a particular way of preparing students for a test is appropriate? How do five commonly used test-preparation practices stack up to these standards? How do educators and school board members view these five practices?     

The Disengaged Academic: the Retreat from Citizenship

Citizenship education has developed against the backdrop of civic disengagement. However, as attention has focused on the incorporation of citizenship education into the school curriculum, the responsibilities of citizenship incumbent on the academic community within higher education has been largely overlooked. This paper examines the reasons for the apparent decline of academic citizenship through an analysis of three elements of citizenship. It argues that the erosion of academic self‐governance has led to the decline of political literacy in academic life and that a range of other forces, including under‐funded massification and research audit, have damaged social and moral responsibility and the responsibilities implied by community involvement. It is concluded that adjustments to reward and recognition structures and professorial leadership are vital if the academic is not to become increasingly disengaged from the service role.     

千兆位：无线技术的未来

随着消费者对高品质的多媒体、语音和数据等服务需求的增加，以及通信技术本身要求的上升，对千兆位速率和更长距离链接的需求变得迫在眉睫。面对这些，我们该如何应对？[编者按]     

A Normativist Account of Language‐Based Learning Disability1,2

Research on learning disabilities (LD) depends upon a conceptual framework that specifies what it should explain, what kinds of data are needed, and how these data are to be arranged in order to provide a meaningful explanation. An argument is made that LD are no different in this respect than any other form of human illness. In this article, a theory of LD based on weak normativism drawn from the philosophy of medicine is presented. This theory emphasizes that cultural values (norms) determine which aspects of human experience and function are instances of ill health. Thus, ill health is fundamentally normative. However, the experiences and behaviors themselves arise out of the natural world and therefore can be explained by a culturally neutral natural science. Data from a longitudinal study of specific language impairment are used to show that academic achievement is culturally evaluated, that low achievement is disvalued, and that therefore actions are taken to help the poor achiever. Spoken language abilities in kindergarten are associated with judgments of the adequacy of fourth grade academic achievement and are mediated by reading prior to fourth grade and also via a path that is independent of reading. It is argued that poor academic achievement may be viewed as a disvalued state consistent with an illness, whereas language and reading skills can be viewed as basic causal systems that can explain the child's learning performance. Properties of this causal system are value free, except that they can inherit disvalue by their association with poor achievement. It remains to be determined whether the notion of LD is to be equated with poor achievement and therefore serve as a type of illness or whether it is to be viewed as a particular cause of poor achievement and thus functions as a type of disease associated with poor achievement. The conceptual framework lays out the alternative meanings for LD and the choice between these alternatives will ultimately depend on how it is used in the LD research community.