Intelligence and Achievement of Jewish Day School Students

The title of my contribution could as well be “Cassandra Lives,” though one might hope that even this precarious reading of the future may have a more salutary effect than those of the star-crossed ancient seer.     

Factors underlying distance learner satisfaction with televised college‐level courses

Abstract

Two investigations were conducted to identify the major dimensions of distance learner satisfaction with live‐broadcast, interactive (one‐way video, two‐way audio) televised college‐level courses. In the first study, factor analyses were used to explore the responses of 201 currently enrolled students to the Telecourse Evaluation Questionnaire. The analyses identified seven distinct dimensions of course satisfaction. A comparable study was conducted one year later using a different sample of 177 distance learners who were also enrolled in the televised courses. A factor analysis of these data validated the original results in that, as predicted, seven comparable dimensions were identified. Overall results are discussed in terms of the practical benefits the research offers to both program personnel and evaluation researchers.     

Making judgments as the basis for workplace learning: towards an epistemology of practice

Workplace learning has emerged as a significant site of adults' informal experiential learning, with implications for the provision and shape of formal education. There are, however, a prohibitive number of variables encumbering research into such learning. We can bypass the variables by focusing on phenomenal accounts of how professionals (in this instance) make judgements at work, underpinned by an organic logic derivable from Dewey. This article shows how to characterize a new epistemology of practice through both empirical and conceptual innovation, and thus advances the detail of this new informal workplace learning. This epistemology deals in five characteristics central to lifelong learning anyway, namely: the contingent (rather than exclusively formal, sustained, and systematic studies); the practical (rather than exclusively the theoretical); the process (rather than exclusively the assimilation of content); the particular (rather than the exclusively universal and a priori as the ‘context’); and the affective and the social domains (rather than exclusively the cognitive domain). Our fieldwork so far shows, through interview findings, how these are prominent in professional workplace judgments, and what prospects there are for further research on judgment as a site of ‘organic’ learning for adults.