Academic advising as teaching

This short essay proposes establishing faculty-led advising seminars for advisees in order to increase the effectiveness of the academic advising system. Through the seminars, the advising function would be integrated into the course-credit system, thus enhancing the perceived importance of advising for faculty and students alike. Also through the seminars, students would systematically study and reflect on the nature of higher education, thereby creating firmer bases for choices. After briefly describing the organization and operation of such a system, the essay explores some of its implications for coherence and cumulative qualities of students' educational experiences, the distribution of teaching responsibilities among faculty, and faculty development and colleagueship.He is the author of two books on Latin American economic development and history and of numerous articles on economics, history, and higher education.     

Teacher Preparation and Inner-City Schools: Sustaining Educational Failure

This article argues that the great majority of teacher education programs have become a sustaining part of urban education's cycle of failure, in particular through the values, stereotypes, and curricular and pedagogical patterns that teacher education inculcates in incipient teachers about difference, minorities, and urban schools and communities. Teacher education's capability lies chiefly in how it understands and treats programmatic minority students, how it encourages a negative perception of urban teaching itself, and how it discourages its students from understanding difference and diversity through the use of an assimilatory multiculturalism, leaving its students stereotypically uninterested in and/or unprepared for urban teaching.     

Short-cycle higher education: Purposes and issues

This article deals with a worldwide movement called short-cycle higher education - a level of education placed between post-compulsory/post-secondary education and university degree completion. Three types of short-cycle institutions are examined and evaluated: (1) extensions of secondary education, (2) expansions of universities and other senior institutions, and (3) units separated from existing schools.Purposes of short-cycle higher education are next discussed, and finally, major issues are identified, and directions taken by various nations contrasted. Particular attention is given to the relationship between short-cycle and university education referred to as articulation and transfer.     

Editorial Comment

Editorial Introduction

Editorial Comment     

A generalization of the Peano-Baker method

An improvement of the Peano-Baker iterative method (matrizant method) for solving a system of first order linear differential equations with variable coefficients is presented. The new method utilizes the structure of the matrix of coefficients to define iterative schemes which may converge much more rapidly than the traditional method.     

THE EPISTEMIC VALUE OF CURIOSITY

A bstract .  In this essay, Frederick Schmitt and Reza Lahroodi explore the value of curiosity for inquiry and knowledge. They defend an appetitive account of curiosity, viewing curiosity as a motivationally original desire to know that arises from having one's attention drawn to the object and that in turn sustains one's attention to it. Distinguishing curiosity from wonder, the authors explore several sources of the epistemic value of curiosity. First, curiosity is tenacious: curiosity whether a proposition is true leads to curiosity about related issues, thereby deepening our knowledge. Second, it is to some extent biased in favor of topics in which we already have a practical or epistemic interest. Third, and most important, curiosity is largely independent of our interests: it fixes our attention on objects in which we have no antecedent interest, thereby broadening our knowledge. Schmitt and Lahroodi elucidate the value of curiosity by outlining its role in levels of development — an approach indebted to John Dewey's explanation of the value of curiosity. Finally, they raise some questions about the implications of their account for educational practice.     

The moderating effect of instructional conceptions on the effect of powerful learning environments

This study aimed at experimentally investigating the moderating role of instructional conceptions on the effectiveness of powerful learning environments (PLE) designed in line with the four-component instructional design model (4C/ID-model). The study also investigated the influence of learning in a 4C/ID PLE on students’ instructional conceptions. To achieve its goal, a study with a one by one by two pre-test post-test quasi-experimental design was done. Three functionally equivalent classes of students from three similar (secondary technical) schools were randomly exposed to three different treatments. The participants consisted of 129 (47, 41, 41) students. The treatments were one control group with a regular method of teaching, and two experimental groups: a 4C/ID PLE with ICT, and a 4C/ID PLE without ICT. The instructional conceptions questionnaire was administered both in the pre-and the post-test to assess students’ instructional conceptions. Pre- and post-tests contain retention and transfer items. Technical teachers were trained to implement the interventions. In contrast to expectation, findings show no moderating effects of students’ instructional conceptions on the learning environments. Finally, the results indicate that students’ instructional conceptions positively change after implementation of the three interventions. The theoretical, research, and practical implications of the results for the instructional design and technology community as well as educational practice are discussed.     

Social Equity and Access to a Philippine STEM School

Like most developing countries in the world, there is a huge gap in opportunities to access quality science education between students from the high- and low-socioeconomic strata of Philippine society. In establishing its own science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) high school, despite limited public funding in 1964, the government embarked on a hopeful project for continuously building up its scientific and technological work force to support modern economic development. The initial focus on elite talent development, however, eventually had to give way to legislative reforms that address issues of social equity. Greater accessibility for scholarships by underprivileged students in the provinces was accomplished, first, through the regionalization of its admission system and then, later, through its transformation into a network of science high schools across the nation. In my home country, sustaining equitable access to STEM education also means enhancing school participation through partnerships with community constituents and the private sector.