Mental aerobics: The half-sheet response

Mental aerobics is the process of stimulating the mind through wellplanned, specific, and direct exercise routines. The half-sheet response, one type of mental aerobics, has many uses. Also, it encourages inclusion, expression, understanding, thinking, feedback, insight, and comparison. It serves as a form of entertainment, a way to test, and a means for taking attendance. Weaknesses include the possibility that it will be viewed as a gimmick, used just for attendance, or used without feedback. With enough time to write, avoidance of overuse, and substantial planning, it can stimulate and motivate students, and it can form an important bond between instructor and students.     

Combining Economic and Conjoint Analysis to Determine Optimal Academic Services

In today's era of global competition, organizations must manage their functions and activities in a manner such that they are responsive to customers' needs and can provide excellence in service to the customer while also being efficient and cost conscious. These issues are extremely common in corporate organizations, but such concerns are equally relevant in service industries, including institutions of higher education. This study is conducted at a private, undergraduate institution of higher education. We utilize focus group evaluation and conjoint analysis combined with economic analysis in the form of a newly designed preferred utility economic cost diagram to pick the ideal services that should be provided to enrolled students at the institution. The package of ideal services accounts for preferred utility expressed by students and a new methodology (preferred utility function) to balance these against financial considerations to optimize services and financial gains for a college adult education program. This combination of focus groups and mathematical techniques can be easily employed by educational institutes.     

Portfolios, Accountability, and an Interpretive Approach to Validity

How can the results of classroom-based portfolio assessment be communicated outside the classroom? How might a portfolio-based assessment system be designed and implemented? How can we evaluate the merits of portfolio-based assessments?     

A First Course in Mind, Brain, and Education

ABSTRACT— We describe what may well be the first course devoted explicitly to the topic of Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE). In the course, students examine four central topics (literacy, numeracy, emotion/motivation, and conceptual change) through the perspectives of psychology, neuroscience, genetics, and education. We describe the pedagogical tools we use to develop the skills critical for synthesizing information across the disciplines associated with MBE.     

Using peer and self-assessment to develop modelling skills with students aged 11 to 16: A socio-constructive view

Eight Welsh secondary schools participated in an action research project which developed approaches to teaching and assessing mathematical thinking skills involved in practical modelling situations. The development of the metacognitive and strategic skills necessary for successful modelling is discussed from a socio-constructivist perspective as a process of acculturation as well as cognitive construction. Learning to model involves socialization into the consensual realities of a wider mathematical culture and the teacher plays a pivotal role in the generation of this consensus through the legitimization of linguistically expressed subjectivities. Assessment is an integral part of this process. Participation in peer and self-assessment was found to involve the student in a recursive, self-referential learning process which supports the explicit development of metacognitive skills.     

Measurement Problems

History teaches the continuity of science; the developments of tomorrow have their genesis in the problems of today. Thus any attempt to look forward is well begun with an examination of unsettled questions. Since a clearer idea of where we are going smoothes the path into the unknown future, a periodic review of such questions is prudent. The present day, lying near the juncture of the centuries, is well suited for such a review. This article reports 16 unsolved problems in educational measurement and points toward what seem to be promising avenues of solution.     

Faculty dynamation: Guided empowerment

Dynamation is the integrative process whereby the sum total of all learning, knowledge, experiences, and feelings are brought to bear on productive, creative action and problem solving. In this paper, we describe some of the benefits of dynamation, outline a general approach to it-including the importance of friendship (the core of the empowerment process)- and explain several key incentives that will encourage faculty, through dynamation, to engage in growth activities. Throughout the article we discuss ten techniques developers can use. Our focus is on informal facilitator-enhanced (guided) empowerment. That is, we look at growth that is likely to result when developers work with faculty with the goal of growth, change, and development.Richard L. Weaver II is a professor in the Department of Interpersonal and Public Communication at Bowling Green State University. Darrell Mullins is an assistant professor in the Communication Department at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. Howard W. Cotrell is an associate professor in the Instructional Media Center at Bowling Green State University. Thomas A. Michel is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Business at Fordham University, Bronx, New York.