Beijing Declaration Face the future – Explore the unknown

<正>Chinese Academy of Sciences and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina stand united in their endeavor to promote the scientific spirit and to increase scientific excellence. The oldest academy in the West and the strongest academy in the East make the following declaration on the role and value of basic research and scientific advancement.Humankind is facing a broad range of serious challenges which are of global nature and effect. Examples are climate change, resource shortage or an uneven development, which     

Explaining calibration accuracy in classroom contexts: the effects of incentives, reflection, and explanatory style

A 2 × 2 quasi-experimental design was used to investigate the impact of extrinsic incentives and reflection on students’ calibration of exam performance. We further examined the relationships among attributional style, performance, and calibration judgments. Participants were 137 college students enrolled in an educational psychology course. Results differed as a function of exam performance. Higher-performing students were very accurate in their calibration and did not show significant improvements across a semester-length course. Attributional style did not significantly contribute to their calibration judgments. Lower-performing students, however, were less accurate in their calibration, and students in the incentives condition showed significant increases in calibration. Beyond exam scores, attributional style constructs were significant predictors of calibration judgments for these students. The constructs targeting study and social variables accounted for most of the additional explained variance. The qualitative data also revealed differences by performance level in open-ended explanations for calibration judgments.     

The Rise of the For-Profit Sector in US Higher Education and the Brazilian Effect*

What accounts for the rapid growth in the For-Profit (FP) higher education sector in the US? How will its growth influence educational opportunity and degree attainment rates in a country that first pioneered a mass higher education built largely on expanding public colleges and universities? The current US experience is a version of what I call the ‘Brazilian Effect’: when public higher education cannot keep pace with growing public demand for access and programmes, governments often allow FP's to rush in and help fill the gap, becoming a much larger and sometimes dominant provider. This is the pattern in many developing economies such as Brazil, Korea, Poland and other parts of the world. Despite new federal regulations intended to better regulate For-Profits, my prediction is that they will continue to grow over the long-term in the US not so much because they meet societal demands for diverse forms of higher education, but because of the inability of the public sector to return to the levels of public subsidies they had in the past. The result now, and in the future, is a kind of policy default: the future tertiary market will not be the result of a well thought out policy at the national or state levels, but a quasi-free market consequence that will foster lower quality providers and fail to meet national goals for increasing the educational attainment level of Americans. This article discusses how higher education policymaking is about broad issues of socioeconomic mobility and economic competitiveness, but it is also about money, big business, and political influence.     

The learning outcomes race: the value of self-reported gains in large research universities

This article explores the geographies of difference at LI-NSU, a Mexican university program where English is the predominant language of instruction. The interactions between LI-NSU students and students from other programs are marked by themes of national identity and symbolically charged views of English, creating a contested ‘poetics of space’ within the classroom and beyond. The article questions the impact that English-only classrooms may have on student identity in contexts where English is not the official or dominant language.     

Print Media

Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters (New York: Crowell, 1971—$7.50)

Douglass McMurtrie with the assistance of John Adamson (eds) The Invention of Printing: A Bibliography (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970—price not known)

Jim Allee Hart, Views on the News: The Developing Editorial Syndrome 1500-1800 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970—$7.95)

Louis M. Lyons, Newspaper Story: One Hundred Years of the Boston Globe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971—$9.95)

Michael L. Johnson, The New Journalism: The Underground Press, the Artists of Nonfiction, and Changes in the Established Media (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1971—$6.95/2.95)     

Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Revising Promotion and Tenure Standards According to Boyer

If one acknowledges that scholarship comes in many shapes and forms, and if one agrees with Boyer's argument that it is time to reconsider scholarship in light of the role of faculty members within departments, colleges, and universities, the next logical step then is to see if Boyer's principles can be effectively applied in a university setting. At the 1995 NAPEHE conference, Boyer acknowledged that the next step, as indicated by the title of the Carnegie Foundation's forthcoming sequel Scholarship Assessed, is to identify ways to fairly and equitably evaluate faculty scholarship within the context of the professoriate in general, and in higher education institutions in particular. The authors argue the case for differential application of standards within and among universities, based upon the diversity of missions and goals. Following that, examples are given for how Boyer's classifications have been applied to promotion and tenure standards at one comprehensive land grant university in the midwest. Administrator and faculty (new and old) commentary provide sup port for the new standards.     

Daily Intragroup Contact in Diverse Settings: Implications for Asian Adolescents' Ethnic Identity

This study examined the daily‐level association between contact with same‐ethnic others and ethnic private regard among 132 Asian adolescents (mean age = 14 years) attending four high schools ranging in ethnic composition diversity. The data suggest a positive daily‐level association between contact with same‐ethnic others and ethnic private regard for adolescents, who were highly identified with their ethnic group and who attended predominantly White or ethnically heterogeneous schools. In addition, using time lag analyses, contact with same‐ethnic others yesterday was positively related to ethnic private regard today, but ethnic private regard yesterday was unrelated to contact with same‐ethnic others today, suggesting that adolescents' identity is responsive to their environments. The implications of these findings for the development of ethnic identity are discussed.     

The Digital Divide as a Complex and Dynamic Phenomenon

The purpose of this article is to propose a fruitful analytical framework for data supposedly related to the concept of the so-called "digital divide." The extent and the nature of this divide depend on the kind of access defined. Considering the possession of hardware, growing divides among different categories of income, employment, education, age, and ethnicity can be proved to have existed in the 1980s and 1990s according to official American and Dutch statistics. If only by effects of saturation, these gaps will more or less close. However, it is shown that differential access of skills and usage is likely to increase. The growth of a usage gap is projected. Multivariate analyses of Dutch official statistics reveal the striking effect of age and gender as compared to education. The usage gap is related to the evolution of the information and network society. Finally, policy perspectives are discussed.     

Redefining Leadership: Lessons from an Early Education Leadership Development Initiative

This study examined how experienced early educators developed as change agents in the context of a leadership development program. Unlike in many other professions, experienced early educators lack opportunities to grow throughout their careers and access the supports they need to lead change in their classrooms, organizations, the profession, and beyond. This qualitative study brings a relational and entrepreneurial leadership theory lens to its analysis of the experiences of 43 early educators as they co-created pathways forward as leaders for change. The study defines leadership as a process of influencing change to improve early care and education, and not reserved just for those with a formal leadership position. Results show how educators came to see themselves as leaders and pursued different paths to making change and driving improvement. The study offers a new conceptual mapping of a leadership development ecosystem for supporting educators’ capacity to identify as leaders as well as lead improvement and innovation. The paper concludes with lessons learned and recommendations for strengthening the leadership infrastructure to support early educator leadership for change and innovation.