Private Wealth and Public Education

Review Article—Equal Opportunity and the Mythology of Schooling Review of John E. Coons, William H. Clune HI, and Stephen D. Sugarman, Private Wealth and Public Education .     

Preventive Maintenance Study: A Key Component in Engineering Education to Enhance Industrial Productivity and Competitiveness

We suggest that a chief contributor to the continued economic success of the western economies will be the productivity gains available through efficient preventive maintenance planning. We further argue that this fact is largely unrecognized and that engineering curricula need to be modified to include a substantive component dealing with equipment reliability and maintenance. The strong connections between manufacturing equipment availability and industrial productivity have not been widely recognized. Maintenance is usually viewed as a necessary inconvenience and the very substantial benefits of efficient maintenance planning are not generally incorporated in productivity calculations. In this paper, we describe the formulation of maintenance planning problems and illustrate with some numerical examples the potential productivity gains that are attainable using preventive maintenance strategies. We then argue that engineering students should be taught how to obtain these benefits.     

The Unmistakable Professional Promise of a Young Educational Psychology Researcher and Scholar

This article focuses on the early research domains investigated by Michael Pressley, along with the integrations and initiatives that were inspired by them. These research domains include verbal and imagery elaboration memory strategies, and developmental aspects of them; interrogative elaboration; pictorial strategies for language and literacy skill development (including the mnemonic keyword method of vocabulary learning and pictorial strategies for remembering text information); and memory strategy monitoring and test preparation. The article is liberally sprinkled with personal accounts and anecdotes of Mike's early career experiences (as a graduate student, postgraduate researcher, and young professor). From the very beginning, there was no mistaking the professional promise of this young educational psychology researcher and scholar.     

DETERMINING THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE IDEAL PROFESSOR: AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH

In a recently conducted study it was found that an effective college teacher could be characterized chiefly in terms of "research,""teaching," and "service to the university." The present experiment corroborated these findings using a relatively unknown approach to data collection, analysis, and interpretation. A free-response method of data collection, in conjunction with nonmetric multidimensional scaling, produced results highly similar to those of the previous study. In addition, the solution permitted a straight-forward means of assessing the performance of individual faculty members.     

Written Indicators of Empathy in Human-Relations Training: A Validational Study

This study was conducted to determine if empathic level of functioning as assessed by written measures is predictive of oral functioning. Forty participants, run in four groups with counterbalanced order, responded in writing and orally to stimulus statements. Correlations between oral and written scores were very high and statistically significant for the total sample and the high- and low-functioning subgroups. Only very small differences were found between written and oral group means. Thus, we concluded that written measures can yield a reliable estimate of empathic level of oral functioning, making it possible to obtain a quick, economical, and reliable estimate of level of functioning without the time-consuming and cumbersome process of taping. This finding has particular relevance for training-program evaluations and comparisons in which large numbers of people need to be tested.