Looking back, looking forward: Re-searching the conditions for curriculum integration in the middle years of schooling

In Australia, and internationally, integration is a widely promoted middle school curriculum reform strategy. Integration is claimed to engage students by providing opportunities to work on a few cross-disciplinary objectives, to apply knowledge across the subject boundaries and to work on tasks with meaning and relevance. While these curriculum goals enjoy a certain popularity among middle school reformers and curriculum integration adherents, in practice, the prevalence of integration is patchy and provisional. In this article, we (re) examine two of our studies of middle school integration over the past decade to explore the reasons for this apparent disparity between the rhetoric and the reality. In our re-search for integration, we look back at our data to identify enabling and inhibiting conditions for curriculum reform and develop a list of key program characteristics. Finally, we look forward, drawing on the notion of institutional resilience to speculate on the reasons why some middle school programs seem to flourish while others wither.     

Les six étapes de l'apprentissage des structures

Sans résuméPublié, avec illustrations, sous forme d'un petit livre, par O.C.D.L., Paris.     

What do Universities Really owe Industry? The Case of Solid State Electronics at Stanford

It is widely argued that, in the United States, the Department of Defense dictated the intellectual contours of academic science and engineering during the Cold War. However, in important ways, American science was also deeply influenced by industry. Between 1955 and 1985, Stanford University embraced three waves of industrial innovation in solid state technology (transistors, integrated circuits, and VLSI systems). As this essay shows, it was these transfers that enabled Stanford engineers to make significant contributions to the expanding fields of microelectronics and computing.     

The role of objectives in guiding the organization of information learned from text

This study was designed to identify how objectives influence the organization of the information recalled from text. Three hypotheses were investigated: (1) that objectives affect the sequence of attention to information in text, (2) that they affect the sequence in which information is rehearsed during a review period, or (3) that they serve as a set of cues at retrieval. One hundred college students read objectives either before or after reading a passage (varying the opportunity for objectives to affect the sequence of attention). They then either had or did not have a review period (varying the opportunity to use objectives to sequence rehearsal and also varying the presence of the objectives in memory at the time of retrieval). One hundred more students read the passage in control conditions with objectives available throughout the reading or with no objectives available. Results showed that students given objectives after reading but before a review period had more clustering by objectives in free recall than did those who never saw objectives, supporting the hypothesis that organization by objectives occurs during rehearsal. No evidence was found to support the notion that organization by objectives occurs during encoding or retrieval phases.     

Improving writing skills: Which approaches and what target skills?

This article presents a critical overview of recent trends in research on writing skills. Part one defines criteria for the studies reviewed here and is based on current cognitive writing models. The treatments examined were all designed to change writer activity by influencing the main constituent features of writing: knowledge and cognitive functions. The following two sections deal with the effects of treatments aimed at the acquisition of knowledge or expert skills. Part four focuses on the effects on writing skills of interaction between peers or immature and expert writers. The final section examines computer aids to writing. The conclusion stresses the need for carefully controlled studies drawing on well-defined theoretical frameworks.     

ACADEMIC EXCHANGES: EXPERIENCE AND TRENDS

The coincidence that much of Eastern Europe is democratizing at the same time that much of Western Europe is moving towards greater integration gives the universities in both regions the chance to profit from both phenomena and to train their graduates in ways that will enable them to contribute to their further development. One of the best forms of preparation is student mobility. A listing of the perceived priorities and aims of student mobility is followed by a brief statement of the engagement of the Technical University of Budapest (TUB) in mobility and exchange activities.