PARTICIPATION AND CONTENT IN COMMUNITY AND TECHNICAL COLLEGE BOARD MEETINGS

This study examined meetings of North Carolina community and technical college boards of trustees, focusing on the participation and contributions to the content of those meetings by board members. The boards represented smallest to largest institutions, in the eastern, central and western regions of the State. They met morning, mid‐day, afternoon and evening on a monthly, bi‐monthly, and tri‐monthly schedule from August 1986 through February 1987. Attendance was high, with few late arrivals or early departures. All agendas, ranging from 6 to 18 items, were completed in 50 to 115 minutes, with limited comments or questions by trustees. Members initiated little during the meetings and provided little evidence of use of sources of information from other than their college personnel.

It is suggested that meeting at least monthly for at least 1 1/2 hours (mean for the study was 73 minutes) could encourage more initiating contributions by members. Boards should consider regular examination of the processes of their subcommittee and full board meetings to determine their effectiveness and member satisfaction with them. Orientation of new board members should stress the importance of members seeking relevant information to contribute or undergird their participation in board meetings.     

Learning about bones at a science museum: examining the alternate hypotheses of ceiling effect and prior knowledge

Groups of children at a science museum were pre- and post-assessed with a type of concept map, known as personal meaning maps, to determine what new understandings, if any, they were gaining from participation in a series of structured hands-on activities about bones and the process of bones healing. Close examination was made regarding whether children??s prior knowledge or a ceiling effect was influencing results. Children made significant gains in vocabulary and concepts related to both bones and the bone healing process. Many children also demonstrated that their comprehension moved from a novice level to a transitional level of understanding. Prior to participation, children were more uniformly unacquainted with ideas about the healing process of bones than they were about bones; this led to more consistent learning gains related to the healing process. There was some indication of a ceiling effect occurring when children revealed what they had learned about bones, but not when they revealed what they had learned about the bone healing process. Although the prior knowledge theory was not statistically supported, data did show that children with greater understanding prior to the Busy Bones Lab activities end up with correspondingly greater understanding. This suggests that addressing concepts related to bones prior to a lab experience may bring more children to a higher level of understanding before engaging in the lab experience.     

Four Ages of Our Relationship with the Reality: An educationalist perspective

In this article, I try to make sense conventional notions of ‘premodernism’, ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ as ways of relating to reality, and apply them to education. I argue for the additional notion of ‘neo-premodernism’ to make sense of recent attempts to engineer social reality. Each of these four approaches coexists and constitutes the four ages: the age of prayer (premodernism), the age of reason (modernism), the age of social engineering (neo-premodernism) and the age of responsibility (postmodernism). I try to trace these ages in modern schooling and critically analyze their consequences and the power relations between teachers and students.