Discusses the triangular relationship between the teacher (I), student (Thou), and subject matter (It), highlighting David Hawkins' essay, "I, Thou, and It" (1974). Notes that while each element of the triangle is essential, subject matter is the central concern of Hawkins' latest essays. Discusses implications for teaching, learning, and teacher…

Dewey hoped that democratic schools could teach students to transform society. Many contemporary educational scholars promote similar visions. Notes the unlikeliness of Dewey's practices of collaboration ever directing such broad efforts of social change. Thus, many visions of democratic education may be misleading regarding the kind of strategies…

Uses the African American campaign for equality and access to explore the historical origins of high-stakes testing. Explains that instead of promoting equality, as proponents of standardized tests argued, greater reliance on such tests widened the distance between advantaged and disadvantaged African American students, shaping paradoxical…

Explores correlates of academic giftedness for eighth graders, using data from the 1988 National Education Longitudinal Study. Students who are self-reliant, spend more time on homework and leisure reading, and come from families with high parental educational aspirations and family socioeconomic status are much more likely to be academically…

Reviews two books on the influence of school desegregation on students, "The Other Boston Busing Story: What's Won and Lost across the Boundary Line" (Susan Eaton) and "Finding One's Place: Teaching Styles and Peer Relations in Diverse Classrooms" (Stephan Plank). Both books describe students' reactions to desegregated schooling and the role of…

Describes institutional tracking in Japan, examining the process of advancing from middle school to high school to college (accounting for social origin effects). Results support a tournament-like mobility for people in Japan's higher education system, where those who move down do not move up again. Results also suggest that social origin matters,…

Examined how students' grades were affected by disruptions at the beginning of the school year. Data from student-parent interviews in a large urban district indicated that disruption was widespread in ninth grade. Students who experienced more turbulence received significantly lower grades. Significant levels of between-school differences in…

Depression-era vocational programs trained local workers and "warehoused" the unemployed. Examines Depression-era enrollments in federal vocational programs and analyzes mechanisms affecting the match between federal policy goals and local policy outcomes in three southern states. Black enrollments responded to funding differences. White…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the potential of a constructivist approach to context-based video instruction for enhancing learning. To achieve this purpose, the authors examined whether video-based instruction that was developed using constructivist theory can affect student learning (i.e., comprehension and retention) and…

Business school deans at institutions accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business were surveyed on distance education programs offered at their respective schools. This study examined sixteen characteristics of the distance education programs: the number of offerings, the question of not offering distance education,…

Tools for measuring cognitive engagement within online groups have been concerned only with measuring an individual participant's cognitive engagement, without any concern for measuring cognitive engagement within groups. There remains a serious need for a scheme that measures cognitive engagement of groups and the validation of such a scheme…

This study investigated the effects of using Socratic questioning to enhance students' critical thinking (CT) skills in asynchronous discussion forums (ADF) in university-level distance learning courses. The research effort empirically examined two coherent subjects: (a) the efficacy of teaching and modeling Socratic questioning for developing…

The author conducted two experiments to assess effectiveness of interactive e-learning. Students in a fully interactive multimedia-based e-learning environment achieved better performance and higher levels of satisfaction than those in a traditional classroom and those in a less interactive e-learning environment.

A classification rule was developed to predict undergraduate students' withdrawal from or completion of fully online general education courses. A multivariate technique, predictive discriminant analysis (PDA), was used. High school grade point average and SAT mathematics score were shown to be related to retention in the online university courses.…

This article describes a study of the relation between learning style, as measured by the Kolb Learning Style Inventory, and online communication behavior, as measured by analysis of transcripts of computer-mediated conferencing (CMC) interaction using a previously developed tool. Analysis of over fifty-nine hundred sentences, generated by forty…