The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) placed a new focus and accountability on the achievement levels of English learners by requiring that they develop English proficiency and meet the same academic standards that all children are expected to meet by year 2014. Administrators and teachers are looking at ways English learners might progress more…

The Boston University PT3 grant project proposed first to train faculty to use technology and then to sustain the gained expertise in a curriculum development project. Education faculty gains in integrating technology into their teaching and their modeling of that use were clearly demonstrated in phase one of the project (the initial two years of…

In 1994, fresh from a two-year stint with Teach for America, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin inaugurated the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) in Houston with an enrollment of 49 5th graders. By this Fall, 75 KIPP schools will be up and running, setting children from poor and minority families on a path to college through a combination of hard work,…

In 2000, Canada launched the Youth in Transition Survey (YITS) in conjunction with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Since then, the 30 000 Canadian students that participated in PISA 2000 have been interviewed every two years to collect information about their…

Describes the Coastal Georgia Writing Project, a part of the National Writing Project. Argues that more two-year college English teachers should join the National Writing Project network. (HB)

This paper describes a unique graduate-level course that prepares teachers of introductory statistics at the college and high school levels. The course was developed as part of a graduate degree program in statistics education. Although originally taught in a face-to-face setting, the class has been converted to an online course to be accessible…

This report documents the upward trend in "secret shopping" among today's prospective student Web users, along with the latest changes in electronic communications technologies used by college and university admissions offices. The report is based on a survey of college and university enrollment and admissions officers across the U.S. in March…

The author is dismayed to find that the liberal-arts curriculum--the so-called "core"--is under attack, especially at two-year schools. It "is" under attack, from legislators with no understanding of the aims of higher education; from administrators focused short-sightedly on the bottom line; from chamber-of-commerce types who read "college" as…

College expectations play an important role in students' success at an institution. Braxton et al. (1994) found that if expectations are met, students are more likely to persist than if they are unmet. One potential contributor to college expectations is media (Tobolowsky, 2001). Prior research concludes that colleges that play in bowl games…

Every year the author and his colleagues take their grade 12 English students to see four plays at one of Canada's major theaters. Chatting about the series on the last day of class, his students asked him if he had seen "the blue glow from the back row." Laughing at his bewilderment, they told him that during the performances so many students…

The Council on Social Work Education accreditation standards requires that the social work curricula include content on practice evaluation. To meet this requirement, many schools have a course devoted to clinical evaluation. The desired outcome of these courses is that students not only learn the content but also retain it and implement…

Reviews the importance of assessment in placing students in two-year college composition courses and describes the development of the objective English Qualifying Examination used at Northern Virginia Community College. Includes sample test items. (MKM)

Population growth and demographic trends in North American urban centers combined with job markets demanding higher levels of education have placed considerable pressure in recent years on postsecondary institutions to provide better access to undergraduate and graduate degree programs (Levin 2004; Zhang 2005). Kwantlen University College,…

With interest in university-college partnerships increasing, this paper presents an example of an effective college-church partnership. A Christian college partnered with 19 urban churches to offer precollege activities for urban youth in grades 7 through 12. As expected, the level of poverty associated with young people's neighborhoods (i.e.,…

The common understanding within the mathematics community is that the role of the college algebra course is to prepare students for calculus. Though exceptions are emerging, the curriculum of most college algebra courses and the content of most textbooks on the market both reflect that assumption. This article calls that assumption into question…