Discipline cost indices and their applications

Differences in institutional reporting and accounting often reduce the comparability in expenditure data among institutions. This particularly affects interinstitutional comparisons of discipline unit costs, that is, expenditures per credit hour or expenditures per weighted credit hour. To overcome this comparability problem, discipline cost indices have been developed to permit accurate interinstitutional comparisons of relative costs among disciplines. This paper documents how discipline cost indices have been derived, using expenditure data collected from five peer institutions, and how these indices have been implemented in a research university's budget allocation process. Institutional researchers and academic budget planners are the intended audience.Presented at the Thirty-first Annual Forum of the Association for Institutional Research, San Francisco, May 26–29, 1991.     

Comparative education research: poststructuralist possibilities [1]

Various authors have charted the changing and intertwined emphases in comparative education over the last four decades, including modernisation and development, socially critical and neo-Marxist perspectives, and ethnography and phenomenology. Ideas from postpositivist thinking—postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism—have been particularly challenging to comparative education, because they disrupt the power structures that imbue much of comparative education and challenge the metanarratives of progress, modernity, dominance and subordination that have been the life blood of the major sets of ideas in the field. In order to examine in part the way in which comparative education is opening itself up to these challenging paradigms, we examine the shifts, developments and omissions in the use of poststructural theoretical frameworks and methodologies in comparative education in the period 1991–1999 and provide a constructive contribution to the debates about the future directions of comparative education in a rapidly internationalising and globalising world.     

Disabled Readers' Performance on Tasks of Phonological Processing,Rapid Naming,and Letter Knowledge Before and After Kindergarten

The importance of early identification of children at risk for reading failure is clearly established in the literature. The purpose of this longitudinal retrospective study was to further define the relationship between the development of prereading skills and later reading outcome in two groups of children; a group of reading‐disabled children and a group of their normally reading peers. Children's alphabetic knowledge, phonological awareness, and rapid naming skills were explored at the beginning of kindergarten and again prior to first grade as a function of later reading outcomes. Results indicate that differences found between the groups in all measures at prekindergarten age diminish by prefirst grade with the exception of phonological awareness abilities. Findings have direct implications for screening children at risk for reading difficulties and the time‐sensitive nature of these tasks during the preliteracy period.