Education

Postgraduate Eeducation

2007-11-04T15:23:00.000+08:00

Postgraduate education (often known in North America as graduate education, and sometimes described as quaternary education) involves studying for degrees or other qualifications for which a first or Bachelor's degree is required, and is normally considered to be part of tertiary or higher education. In North America this level is generally referred to as graduate school.
The organization and structure of postgraduate education is very different in different countries, and also in different institutions within countries. This article sets out the basic types of course and of teaching and examination methods, with some explanation of their history.
In some programs in the traditional German system, there is no legal distinction between "undergraduate" and "postgraduate". In such programs, all education aims towards the Master's degree, whether introductory (Bachelor's level) or advanced (Master's level). The aim of the Bologna process is to abolish this system.

Types of postgraduate qualification

There are four main types of qualification studied for at the postgraduate level: academic and vocational degrees, and academic and vocational certificates and diplomas.

Degrees

The term "degree" in this context means the moving from one stage or level to another (from the Latin "de-" + "gradus", through Old French "degre"), and first appeared in the 13th century.
History

Although systems of higher education go back to Ancient Greece, China, and India, the concept of postgraduate education depends upon the system of awarding degrees at different levels of study, and can be traced to the workings of the European mediæval universities.
University studies took six years for a Bachelor degree and up to twelve additional years for a master's degree or doctorate. The first six years taught the faculty of the arts, which was the study of the seven liberal arts: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music theory, grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The main emphasis was on logic. Once a Bachelor of Arts degree had been obtained, the student could choose one of three faculties — law, medicine, or theology — in which to pursue master's or doctor's degrees. Theology was the most prestigious area of study, and considered to be the most difficult.
The degrees of master (magister) and doctor were for some time equivalent, "the former being more in favour at Paris and the universities modelled after it, and the latter at Bologna and its derivative universities. At Oxford and Cambridge a distinction came to be drawn between the Faculties of Law, Medicine, and Theology and the Faculty of Arts in this respect, the title of Doctor being used for the former, and that of Master for the latter."[1] Because theology was thought to be the highest of the subjects, the doctorate came to be thought of as higher than the master's.[2]
The main significance of the higher, postgraduate degrees was that they licensed the holder to teach ("doctor" comes from the Latin "docere", meaning "teach"; "magister" is Latin for "master", and is also the root of "magistrate").

Modern situation

In most English-speaking countries, the hierarchy of degrees is as follows:

Associate's degree (chiefly in the United States of America) or Foundation degree (in the UK) Usually two years (20 courses or 60 semester credit-hours); often an intermediate degree before finishing Bachelor's. In the UK, a foundation degree is typically 240 credits (whereas a full Bachelor with honours is 360 credits).
Bachelor's degrees (undergraduate degrees; first degrees). Usually three or four years (40 courses or 120 semester credit-hours); in a few cases, a degree called "bachelor" is in fact a postgraduate degree — see, for example, Bachelor of Civil Law, Bachelor of Philosophy. An Honours Bachelor's degree may be conferred upon those completing a four-year program, to differentiate it from a three-year Bachelor's.
Master's degrees These are sometimes placed in a further hierarchy, starting with degrees such as the Master of Arts and Master of Science, then Master of Philosophy, and finally Master of Letters. In many fields such as clinical social work, or library science in North America, a Master's is the terminal degree.
First Professional degrees First professional degrees are required for professional licensure or entrance to a specific career. These degrees require a bachelor's degree for admission into the program, followed by three to four years of specialized study. They are mainly found in North America; elsewhere professional education for careers such as law and medicine is mainly undertaken through specialised undergraduate degrees and post-university vocational courses that do not confer academic degrees. Graduates in some cases are called doctor and the degree program sometimes includes the word doctor.
Doctorates These are often further divided into academic and professional doctorates. An academic doctorate can be awarded as a Ph.D. (Philosophiæ Doctor), or as a DSc (Scientiae Doctor). The scientiae doctor degree can be also be awarded in specific fields, such as a Dr.sc.math (Doctor scientiarum mathematicarum, Doctor of Mathematics), Dr.sc.agr. (Doctor scientiarum agrariarum, Doctor of Agricultural science), etc. In some parts of Europe, doctorates are divided into the Ph.D. or 'junior doctorate', and the 'higher doctorates' such as the DSc, which is generally awarded to highly distinguished professors. A doctorate is the terminal degree in most fields. In the United States, there is little distinction between a Ph.D. and D.Sc.

In the UK and countries whose education systems were founded on the British model, such as the U.S., the master's degree was for a long time the only postgraduate degree normally awarded, while in most European countries apart from the UK, the master's degree almost disappeared. In the second half of the 19th century, however, U.S. universities began to follow the European model by awarding doctorates, and this practice spread to the UK. Conversely, most European universities now offer master's degrees parallelling or replacing their regular system, so as to offer their students better chances to compete in an international market dominated by the American model.

Honorary degrees

Most universities award honorary degrees, usually at the postgraduate level. These are awarded to a wide variety of people, such as artists, musicians, writers, politicians, businesspeople, etc., in recognition of their achievements in their various fields. (Recipients of such degrees do not normally use the associated titles or letters, such as "Dr".)

Non-degree qualifications

Postgraduate education can involve studying for qualifications such as postgraduate certificates and postgraduate diplomas — normally held to be lower than degrees. They are sometimes used as steps on the route to a degree, or as part of training for a specific career, or as a qualification in an area of study too narrow to warrant a full degree course.

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Educational technology

2007-10-23T18:14:00.000+08:00

Educational technology is a field of study within education. The term Educational technology is often associated with instructional technology or learning technology, but educational technology is a broader term, or field of study encompassing the other two. Consider the differences between "Instructional" and "Educational." Educational technologies may include systems other than those related to instruction (e.g. registration or library systems).
The words educational and technology in the term educational technology have the general meaning. Educational technology is not restricted to the education of children, nor to the use of high technology. The particular case of the meaningful use of high-technology to enhance learning in K-12 classrooms and higher education is known as technology integration. The term is distinct from technology education: educational technology is about using technology to educate, whereas technology education is learning about technology. Several universities have recently opened tracks for graduate programs in the field of Educational Technology.

History

One of the earliest fields of study within educational technology was instructional systems design (ISD). This was developed by the United States military during World War II, in order to train large numbers of people more effectively. In a common ISD model, the ADDIE Model, the steps involved are: analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation.

Theories and practices

Three main theoretical schools have been present in the educational technology literature. These are Behaviorism, Cognitivism and Constructivism. Each of these schools of thought are still present in todays literature but have evolved as the Psychology literature has evolved.

Behaviorism

This theoretical framework was developed in the early 20th century with the animal learning experiments of Edward L. Thorndike. Many Psychologists like B.F.Skinner, and Ivan Pavlov used these theories to describe and experiment with human learning. While still very useful this philosophy of learning has lost favor with educators. But Behavior learning theory (e.g Classical Conditioning and Operant conditioning) is still very useful to explain lower level unconscious implicit memory and learning.

Cognitivism

Cognition and learning is about the mechanisms by which people process information. Since the Cognitive Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, learning theory has undergone a great deal of change. Much of the empirical or psychological framework of Behaviorism was retained even though a new paradigm was begun. Like the Behavioral learning theories of the past, Cognitive learning theory is based on objective, empirical data. Cognitive theories look beyond behavior to explain brain-based learning.
New cognitive frameworks are emerging that complement and even explain the behavioral theories of previous eras. Today researchers are concentrating on topics like Cognitive load, Situated learning, and Information Processing Theory. These theories of learning are very useful as they guide the design of instructional technologies.

Constructivism

Constructivism is the belief that students can guide their own learning through collaboration of others with similar ability and experiences. Technology allows for collaboration amongst a variety of people through a variety of sources, such as video-conferencing, blogging, smartboards, etc… Constructivist learning requires students to utilize their prior knowledge and experiences to formulate new, related, and/or adaptive concepts in learning. These new concepts are linked to the prior knowledge therefore, proving that all learning is connected. Constructivists’ believe that one learns by problem solving and incorporating real life experiences into newly acquired knowledge. The role of the teacher then becomes that of a facilitator of knowledge. Educators, from the constructivist’s perspective, must make sure that the prior learning experiences are appropriate and related to the concepts needed to be taught.
Constructivists rely on the importance of laying the ground work for learning. Jonassen (1997) suggests "well-structured" environments are useful for novice learners as "ill-structured" environments are useful for more advanced learners. Educators utilizing technology when teaching with the Constructivist perspective should choose technologies that reinforce prior learning perhaps in a problem-solving environment. Students are encouraged to self-reflect to make connections (prior knowledge to current experiences) and validate what is being learned.

Instructional Technique and Technologies

Problem Based Learning and Inquiry-based learning are active learning instructional techniques used to teach learners. Technology can be incorporated into project, problem, inquiry based learning as they all have a similar educational philosophy. All three are student centered, typically involving real world scenarios in which students are actively engaged in critical thinking activities. Both the process students engage in and end products of all the learning theories can be implemented with a number of technological tools.
Learners should be guided during the instructional process, but after initial instruction has taken place these more active techniques may be used. Quite often an instructor will introduce material through a lecture and then offer a think quest or web quest as reinforcement. These teaching strategies would be beneficial because they provide students with a structured presentation of the problem or project. During the first phase students begin the inquiry process, they can brainstorm using web mapping software or an interactive whiteboard to record their initial thoughts and create a plan of action. Both of these products promote student interaction and input into the developmental process.
"We find that when you put the two, (inquiry based learning and true technology integration) together there's a synergy created that really boosts students' learning" (Brannigan, 2002). Incorporating technology into project, problem, and inquiry based learning will make these educational theories applicable to today’s changing society.

Engaged Learning in Technology

The Encyclopedia of Educational Technology [1] places the theories and practices of educational technology into six categories: cognition and learning, analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. In today’s society technology is an ever increasing factor in many aspects of life. From our homes to businesses it continues to drive society. In education, technology is a compelling force that needs to be coupled with the curriculum to create an engaged learning atmosphere that allows learners to become skilled technicians with an endless passion for learning. With the use of technology students will become engaged learners who are responsible for their own learning. They engage in the learning process by problem solving, reflecting, synthesizing, evaluating, and continuously applying their new skills.
According to NCREL, learning should be authentic and set up to be challenging, multidisciplinary, and real world based. Assessment is an ongoing process connecting the curriculum and instruction. This assessment is achieved through observations, interviews, examining artifacts, and presentation both by students and teachers. Teachers are facilitators who guide the students in the process of their learning. They need to construct meaningful, interactive, lessons that engage the students in the curriculum.
Teachers need to be fully aware of the technology that engages students on a daily basis, and use that technology as a stepping stone to build upon in the classroom.
The use of this technology begins early. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 31 percent of children age three and under are already using computers. Sixteen percent use them several times a week, 21 percent can point and click with a mouse by themselves, and 11 percent can turn on the computer without assistance. What's more, a third of children -- many as young as 11 years old -- use blogs and social networking sites at least two or three times a week. Yet two-thirds of parents don't even know what a blog is, according to a report by NCH Children's Charities and Tesco Telecoms.
The information found in these studies, confirms the importance of technology in the classroom.
Technology is a powerful tool that can be used in the engaged learning process. This process creates a classroom that is an environment for a continuous learning community.

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Behavior modification

2007-10-07T12:21:00.000+08:00

Behavior modification is a technique of altering an individual's behaviors and reactions to stimuli through positive and negative reinforcement of adaptive behavior and/or the extinction of maladaptive behavior through positive and negative punishment.

Description

While founded in behaviorism, behavior modification has long been used by psychotherapists, parents, and caretakers of those with special needs who don't necessarily have a behaviorist "philosophy." It involves some of the most basic methods to alter human behavior, through operant reward and punishment. Classical conditioning, which aims to affect changes in behavior through associations between stimuli and responses, can also be a component of behavior modification, but it is generally less useful in applied settings because it focuses solely on basic involuntary reactions to stimuli and not on conscious learning associated with a behavior's function or context.Strictly following behavioral principles, there is no analysis of the individual's thoughts, but many argue that the therapy can be improved with cognitive components. In recent years, the concept of punishment has had many critics, though these critiques tend to not apply to negative punishment (time-outs) and usually apply to the addition of some aversive event. The use of positive punishment in certified behavior analysts is restricted to extreme circumstances when all other forms of treatment have failed and when the behavior to be modified is a danger to the person or to others. In clinical settings positive punishment is usually restricted using a spray bottle filled with water as an aversive event. When mis-used, extreme punishment can lead to affective (emotional) disorders, as well as to the target of the punishment eventually focusing only on avoiding punishment (i.e., "not getting caught") rather than improving behavior.

Techniques

Therapy cannot be effective unless the behaviors to be changed are understood within a specific context. Therefore, a functional assessment is needed before performing behavior modification. One of the most simple yet effective methods of functional assessment is called the "ABC" approach, where observations are made on Antecedents, Behaviors, and Consequences. In other words, "What comes directly before the behavior?", "What does the behavior look like?", and "What comes directly after the behavior?" Once enough observations are made, the data are analyzed and patterns are identified. If there are consistent antecedents and/or consequences, then an intervention should target them in order to increase or decrease the target behavior.Many techniques in this therapy are specific techniques aimed at specific issues.The only way of giving positive reinforcement in behavior modification is in providing compliments, approval, encouragement, and affirmation; a ratio of five compliments for every one complaint is generally seen as being the most effective in altering behavior in a desired manner.

Criticism

Behavior modification is critiqued in person-centered psychotherapeutic approaches such as Rogerian Counseling and Re-evaluation Counseling[1]. The argument is that these methods involve connecting with the human qualities of the person to promote healing and that behaviorism is denigrating to the human spirit.[citation needed]Further criticism extends to the presumption that behavior increases only when it is reinforced. This premise is at odds with research conducted by Albert Bandura at Stanford University. His findings indicated that violent behavior is imitated, without being reinforced, in studies conducted with children watching films showing various individuals 'beating the daylights out of Bobo'. Bandura believed that human personality and learning is the result of the interaction between environment, behavior and psychological process. While Behaviorism continues to grow as a science by including environmental factors, for example, it could be criticized for being reductionist.

Behavior modification in nature

Behavior Modification can refer to a parasitic organism directly affecting its host's behavior (as opposed to gross biology) in a way which enhances the probability of its transmission.
fasciola hepatica and Dicrocoelium dendriticum modify ant behavior so they can be transmitted to their host ruminant.
toxoplasma gondii can modify rodent behavior so they are attracted to cats, resulting in their transmission to the host feline.

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Alternative education

2007-10-01T12:54:00.000+08:00

Alternative education, also known as non-traditional education or educational alternative, describes a number of approaches to teaching and learning other than mainstream or traditional education. Educational alternatives are often rooted in various philosophies that are fundamentally different from those of mainstream or traditional education. While some have strong political, scholarly, or philosophical orientations, others are more informal associations of teachers and students dissatisfied with some aspect of mainstream or traditional education. Educational alternatives, which include charter schools, alternative schools, independent schools, and home-based learning vary widely, but often emphasize the value of small class size, close relationships between students and teachers, and a sense of community.

Terminology

Other words used in place of alternative by many educational professionals include non-traditional, non-conventional, or non-standardized, although these terms are used somewhat less frequently and may have negative connotations and multiple meanings. Those involved in forms of education which differ in their educational philosophy (as opposed to their intended pupil base) often use words such as authentic, holistic, and progressive as well. However, these words each have different meanings which are more specific or more ambiguous than simply alternative.

Overview

While pedagogical controversy is very old, "alternative education" presupposes some kind of orthodoxy which the alternative is in opposition to. In general, this limits the term to the last two or perhaps three centuries, with the rise of standarized and, later, compulsory education at the primary and secondary levels. Many critics in this period have suggested that the education of young people should be undertaken in radically different ways than ones in practice. In the 19th century, the Swiss humanitarian Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, the American transcendentalists Amos Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, the founders of progressive education John Dewey and Francis Parker, and educational pioneers such as Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner (founder of the Waldorf schools), among others, all insisted that education should be understood as the art of cultivating the moral, emotional, physical, psychological, and spiritual aspects of the developing child. Anarchists such as Leo Tolstoy and Francisco Ferrer y Guardia emphasized education as a force for political liberation, secularism, and elimination of class distinctions.
More recently, social critics such as John Caldwell Holt, Paul Goodman, Frederick Mayer, George Dennison and Ivan Illich have examined education from more individualist, anarchist, and libertarian perspectives, that is, critiques of the ways that they feel conventional education subverts democracy by molding young people's understandings. Other writers, from the revolutionary Paulo Freire to American educators like Herbert Kohl and Jonathan Kozol, have criticized mainstream Western education from the viewpoint of their varied left-liberal and radical politics.

Modern forms

A wide variety of educational alternatives exist at the elementary, secondary, and tertiary levels of education. These generally fall into four major categories: school choice, alternative school, independent school, and home-based education. These general categories can be further broken down into more specific practices and methodologies.

School choice

The public school options include entirely separate schools in their own settings as well as classes, programs, and even semi-autonomous "schools within schools." Public school choice options are open to all students in their communities, though some have waiting lists. Among these are charter schools, combining private initiatives and state funding; and magnet schools, which attract students to particular themes, such as performing arts.

Alternative school

An alternative school is an educational establishment with a curriculum and methods that are nontraditional.[1]
Many such schools were founded in the United States in the 1970s as an alternative to mainstream or traditional classroom structure. [2] A wide range of philosophies and teaching methods are offered by alternative schools; some have strong political, scholarly, or philosophical orientations, while others are more ad-hoc assemblies of teachers and students dissatisfied with some aspect of mainstream or traditional education. In 2003 there were approximately 70 alternative schools in the United Kingdom. In the UK public funding is not available for alternative schools and therefore alternative schools are usually fee-paying institutions. [3] In the USA an increasing number of public school systems are offering alternative streams (language-immersion, Montessori, Waldorf), but the majority of alternative schools are still independent and thus without governmental support.

Popular education

Popular education was related in the 19th century to the workers' movement [citation needed]. Such experiences have been continued through-out the 20th century, such as the folk high schools in Scandinavian countries, or the "popular universities" in France

Independent school

Independent, or private, schools have more flexibility in staff selection and educational approach. The most plentiful of these are Montessori schools, Waldorf schools (the latter are also called Steiner schools after their founder), and Friends schools. Other independent schools include democratic, or free schools such as Sands School, Summerhill School and Sudbury Valley School, Krishnamurti schools, open classroom schools, those based on experiential education, as well as schools which teach using international curriculum such as the International Baccalaureate and Round Square schools. An increasing number of traditionally independent school forms now also exist within state-run, public education; this is especially true of the Waldorf and Montessori schools. The majority of independent schools offer at least partial scholarships.

Home-based education

Families who seek alternatives based on educational, philosophical, or religious reasons, or if there appears to be no nearby educational alternative can decide to have home-based education. Some call themselves unschoolers, for they follow an approach based on interest, rather than a set curriculum. Others enroll in umbrella schools which provide a curriculum to follow. Many choose this alternative for religious-based reasons, but practitioners of home-based education are of all backgrounds and philosophies.

Correctional Education

Other

There are also some interesting grey areas. For instance, home-educators have combined to create resource centers where they meet as often as five or more days a week, but their members all consider themselves home-educated. In some states publicly run school districts have set up programs for homeschoolers whereby they are considered enrolled, and have access to school resources and facilities.Also, many traditional schools have incorporated methods originally found only in alternative education into their general approach, so the line between alternative and mainstream education is continually becoming more blurred.There are a number of education-based after school options which are available to students. For example, Policy Debate, or a number of other types of debate, offer students the opportunity learn skills which are not taught in classrooms. In debate, students are taught how to read and think critically, how to analyze books, newspaper and magazine articles, and how to speak persuasively. Students are also exposed to politics, world news, public policy, philosophy, economics, and international relations.

Internationally

Australia

Preshil, in Kew, Australia, was established in the 1930s. It is one of the few alternative schools in Australia that is unaffiliated with any doctrinal or theological movement. Its primary school has run since established by Margaret Lyttle in 1931, and the secondary school since the late 1970s. See also Village School, Vic; Currambena Primary, NSW; Melbourne Community School, Vic; Collingwood College, Vic; Fitzroy Community School, Vic; Lynall Hall, Vic; Berengarra, Vic Candlebark School, Vic and Brisbane Independent School, Qld.

etc.

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Adult education

2007-09-18T12:23:00.000+08:00

Adult education is the practice of teaching and educating adults. This is often done in the workplace or through 'extension' or 'continuing education' courses at secondary schools, or at a college or university. Other learning places include folk high schools, community colleges, and lifelong learning centers. The practice is also often referred to as 'Training and Development'. It has also been referred to as andragogy (to distinguish it from pedagogy). A difference is made between vocational education, mostly done in workplaces and mostly related to upskilling, and non-formal adult education, that can include learning skills or learning for personal development.
Educating adults differs from educating children in several ways. One of the most important differences is that adults have accumulated knowledge and experience that can either add value to a learning experience or hinder it.
Another important difference is that adults frequently must apply their knowledge in some practical fashion to learn effectively; there must be a goal and a reasonable expectation that the new knowledge will help them further that goal. One example, common in the 1990s, was the proliferation of computer training courses in which adults (not children or adolescents), most of whom were office workers, could enroll. These courses would teach basic use of the operating system or specific application software. Because the abstractions governing the user's interactions with a PC were so new, many people who had been working white-collar jobs for 10 years or more eventually took such training courses, either at their own whim (to gain computer skills and thus earn higher pay) or at the behest of their managers.
In the United States, a more general example is that of the high-school dropout who returns to school to complete general education requirements. Most upwardly-mobile positions require at the very least a high school diploma or equivalent. A working adult is unlikely to have the freedom to simply quit their job and go "back to school" full time. Public school systems and community colleges usually offer evening or weekend classes for this reason. In Europe this is often referred to as "second-chance", and many schools offer tailor-made courses and learning programmes for these returning learners.
Those adults who read at the very lowest level get help from volunteer literacy programs. These programs provide one to one tutoring and small group sessions for adults at the 6th grade level or below. Public libraries, nonprofit organizations and school systems administer these programs across the country. ProLiteracy Worldwide is the national organization which provides training, tutor certification and accreditation for local volunteer programs. States often have state organizations such as Literacy Florida!Inc.which provide field services for volunteer literacy programs.
In the U.S.A., the equivalent of the high school diploma earned by an adult through these programs is to pass the General Education Development (GED) test.
Another fast-growing sector of adult education is English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), also referred to as English as a Second Language (ESL)or English Language Learners (ELL). These courses are key in assisting immigrants with not only the acquisition of the English language, but the acclimation process to the culture of the United States.

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Deterrence of academic dishonesty

2007-09-01T12:31:00.000+08:00

Punishments for academic dishonesty vary according to the age of the party involved and the nature of the infraction. In high school, a standard penalty for cheating is a failing grade; in college, it can result in expulsion or dismissal (At the University of Virginia for instance, there are no lesser penalties than dismissal for breaches of the honor code). In rare instances, college professors have been fired when it was discovered that they plagiarized during college or graduate school.[citation needed] All parties involved in the dishonesty—not just the individual whose grade is increased by it—can be punished.
Historically the job of preventing cheating has been given to the teacher. It used to be that in college the professor acted in loco parentis and was able to regulate student behavior as a parent.[63] Thus, professors who discovered cheating could assign essentially any punishment they deemed appropriate. This system often had no recourse by which students could appeal judgments. Generally, proctors were hired to patrol exams. If a case was particularly serious, a dean or other top-level administrator might have been involved. Against this inconsistent and paternalistic system students at some schools rebelled and demanded to be treated as gentlemen.

Honor codes

First at the College of William and Mary in 1779, and then followed by schools like the University of Virginia in the 1850s and Wesleyan University in 1893, the students, with the agreement of faculty who declared themselves dedicated to ideals of democracy and human character, created honor codes. [64] B. Melendez of Harvard University defined an honor code as a code of academic conduct that includes a written pledge of honesty that students sign, a student controlled judiciary that hears alleged violations, unproctored examinations, and an obligation for all students help enforce the code.[65] This system relied on student self-enforcement, which was considered more becoming of young gentlemen than the policing by proctors and professors that existed previously. Of interest, the military academies of the US took the honor code one step further than civilian colleges, disallowing "tolerance", which means that if a cadet or midshipman is found to have failed to report or outright protected someone engaged in academic dishonesty (as well as other dishonesties or stealing), that individual is to be expelled along with the perpetrator.

Mixed judicial boards

However, many people doubted the advisability of relying on an abstract notion of honor to prevent academic dishonesty. This doubt has perhaps led to the realty that no more than a quarter of American universities have adopted honor codes.[66] Moreover, many professors could not envisage a student run trial process that treated faculty accusers fairly. In response to these concerns, in the middle of the twentieth century, many schools devised mixed judicial panels composed of both students and faculty. This type of academic integrity system was similar to the traditional faculty control system in that it relied on professors to detect cheating, except in this system cheaters were brought before centralized boards of students and faculty for punishment. By the 1960s over a quarter of American universities had adopted this system of mixed judicial boards.[67] Still, though, over half of American universities continued to use faculty-centered control systems.

Student due process rights

Starting in the 1960s the U.S. Supreme Court began chipping away at the in loco parentis doctrine, giving college students more civil liberties such as the right of due process in disciplinary proceedings (Dixon v. Alabama Board of Education, 1961).[68] In Cooper v. Blair (1973), specifically academic misconduct was ruled to require due process, being a disciplinary matter and not an educational matter. The due process rights of students in academic misconduct cases is not to the same degree as in a court of law. For instance, the student has no right to representation and the burden of proof is not necessarily stringent. In the "General Order on Judicial Standards of Procedure and Substance in Review of Student Discipline in Tax Supported Institutions of Higher Education", (1968) student due process rights were laid out as follows:
The student should be given adequate notice in writing of the specific ground or grounds and the nature of the evidence on which the discipline proceedings are based. The student should be given an opportunity for a hearing in which the disciplinary authority provides a fair opportunity for hearing of the student's position, explanations, or evidence. No disciplinary action may be taken on grounds which are not supported by any substantial evidence. These new rules put an end to the old faculty based system of policing academic dishonesty, now students were entitled to an impartial hearing. While schools using the old honor code method or the mixed judicial system were not affected by these decisions, schools using the faculty based system generally instituted systems that relied on a committee of faculty and administrators or a dean to run the academic misconduct hearings.

Modified honor codes

Recently, Donald L. McCabe and Linda Klebe Trevino, two experts in the field of academic dishonesty, have proposed a new way of deterring cheating that has been implemented in schools such as the University of Maryland. Modified honor codes put students in charge of the judicial hearing process, making it clear that it is the students' responsibility to stop cheating amongst themselves, but at the same time students still have proctored exams and are not allowed to take pledges of good conduct in place of professor oversight.[69] The researchers who advocate this type of code seem to think that the normal honor code is something of a special case that is not applicable to many schools.[70] According to supporters of this system, schools with a large student body, a weak college community, or no history of student self-governance will not be able to support a full honor code. However, while modified honor codes seem to be more effective than faculty or administration run integrity codes of conduct, research shows that schools with modified codes still have higher rates of cheating than schools with full honor codes.[71].

Comparison of different systems of enforcement

Research has shown that there is a strong correlation between forms of academic integrity system and levels of cheating at a school. Several studies have found students who attend schools with honor codes are less likely to cheat than students at schools with traditional integrity codes.[72] Another study found that only 28% of schools with honor codes have high levels of cheating, whereas 81% of schools with mixed judicial boards have high rates of cheating.[73] Whereas faculty or administration run codes of conduct tend to rely on policing and punishment to deter students from cheating, honor codes tend to rely on and cultivate student senses of honor and group peer pressure to deter academic misconduct.[74] As mentioned above in the section on causes of cheating, increased enforcement or punishment is rarely effective at discouraging cheating, whereas there is a high correlation between peer pressure and academic honesty. The modified honor code attempts to cultivate peer disapproval of cheating while maintaining the traditional proctor system, although critics argue that the proctor system undermines the creation of an atmosphere of student self-policing, reducing the effectiveness of the honor code, possibly explaining why modified honor codes have not been as effective as the original version.

Faculty issues in deterring academic dishonesty

There are, unfortunately, limitations to relying on the faculty to police academic dishonesty. One study found that up to 21% of professors have ignored at least one clear cut case of cheating.[75] Another study revealed that 40% of professors "never" report cheating, 54% "seldom" report cheating, and that a mere 6% act on all cases of academic misconduct that confront them.[76] A third survey of professors found that while 79% had observed cheating, only 9% had penalized the student.[77] According to a manual for professors on cheating,
the reasons for this lack of action include unwillingness to devote time and energy to the issue, reluctance to undergo an emotional confrontation, and fear of retaliation by the student, of losing students, of being accused of harassment or discrimination, and even of being sued for these offenses and/or defamation of character.[78]
There are other reasons as well. Some professors are reluctant to report violations to the appropriate authorities because they believe the punishment to be too harsh.[79]
Others do not report academic misconduct because of postmodernist views on cheating. Postmodernism calls into question the very concepts of "authorship" and "originality." From the perspective of cultural studies and historicism, authors themselves are simply constructs of their social surroundings, and thus they simply rewrite already written cultural stories. Moreover, in the field of composition studies, students are being encouraged more and more to do group work and participate in ongoing collective revision. The postmodernist view is that "the concept of intellectual malpractice is of limited epistemological value. Under the ironic gaze of postmodernism, the distinctions between guilt and innocence, integrity and deceit permeating the scandal debates appear irrelevant."[80] One professor wrote in an article in The English Journal that when he peeked in on an unproctored class taking a test and saw several students up and consulting with one another, he decided that they were not cheating, but were using non-traditional techniques and collaborative learning to surmount the obstacles teachers had put in their way.[81] Issues of cultural relativism also affect professors' views on cheating; the standard objection being that "students from certain Middle Easter, Asian, and African cultures are baffled by the notion that one can 'own' ideas, since their cultures regard words and ideas as the property of all rather than as individual property."[82]
Another issue teachers may have with deterring cheating is that they may decide that it is not their job. The argument that "they're professors, not policemen" is often heard in academia.[83] In economic terms, some professors believe they are being paid to provide learning, and if the student loses that learning through cheating, he is only cheating himself out of the money he paid.[84]

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Effects of academic dishonesty

2007-09-01T12:29:00.000+08:00

Cheating in academia has a host of effects on students, on teachers, on individual schools, and on the educational system itself.
For instance, students who engage in neutralization to justify cheating, even once, are more likely to engage in cheating in the future, potentially putting them on a road to a life of dishonesty.[56] Indeed, one study found that students who are dishonest in class are more likely to engage in fraud and theft on the job when they enter the workplace [57]. Students are also negatively affected by academic dishonesty after graduation. A university diploma is an important document in the labor market. Potential employers use a degree as a representation of a graduate's knowledge and ability. However, due to academic dishonesty, not all graduates with the same grades actually did the same work or have the same skills. Thus, when faced with the fact that they do not know which graduates are skilled and which are the "lemons" (see The Market for Lemons), employers must pay all graduates based on the quality of the average graduate. Therefore, the more students who cheat, getting by without achieving the required skills or learning, the lower the quality of the average graduate of a school, and thus the less employers are willing to pay a new hire from that school. Because of this reason, all students, even those that do not cheat themselves, are negatively affected by academic misconduct.
Academic dishonesty also creates problems for teachers. In economic terms, cheating causes an underproduction of knowledge, where the professor's job is to produce knowledge. [58] Moreover, a case of cheating often will cause emotional distress to faculty members, many considering it to be a personal slight against them or a violation of their trust. Dealing with academic misconduct is often one of the worst parts of a career in education, one survey claiming that 77% of academics agreed with the statement "dealing with a cheating student is one of the most onerous aspects of the job."[59]
Academic misconduct can also have an effect on a college's reputation, one of the most important assets of any school. An institution plagued by cheating scandals may become less attractive to potential donors and students and especially prospective employers. Alternately, schools with low levels of academic dishonesty can use their reputation to attract students and employers.
Ultimately, academic dishonesty undermines the academic world. It interferes with the basic mission of education, the transfer of knowledge, by allowing students to get by without having to master the knowledge.[60] Furthermore, academic dishonesty creates an atmosphere that is not conducive to the learning process, which affects honesty students as well.[61] When honest students see cheaters escape detection, it can discourage student morale, as they see the rewards for their work cheapened. Cheating also undermines academia when students steal ideas. Ideas are a professional author's "capital and identity", and if a person's ideas are stolen it retards the pursuit of knowledge. [62]

Causes of academic dishonesty

2007-09-01T12:21:00.000+08:00

There are a variety of causes of academic misconduct. Researchers have studied the correlation of cheating to personal characteristics, demographics, contextual factors, methods of deterring misconduct, even stages of moral development.

Incentives to cheat

There are in fact several reasons that induce students to engage in academic dishonesty. Some scholars claim that there are students who have a pathological urge to cheat. The writer Thomas Mallon noted that many scholars of literature found that plagiarism by people like Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Charles Reade was perpetrated in a way similar to kleptomania, that is, a psychological disease that is associated with uncontrollable stealing even when it is against the interests of the thief.[11] However, it is probable that most cheaters make a rational choice to commit academic misconduct.
It has also been claimed that business scandals in the real world make students believe that dishonesty is an acceptable method to attain success in contemporary society.[12] Academic dishonesty, in this case, would be practice for the real world. For these students, there would be a dichotomy between success and honesty, and their decision is that: "It is not that we love honesty less, but that we love success more."[13] However, with the recent rise in corporate ethics related dismissals in the business world, this approach to cheating may be losing its appeal, if it ever really had any.[14]
Anyway, recent studies have indicated that academic dishonesty does not seem to hold a clear link to academic success. One study showed that students given an unexpected opportunity to cheat did not improve their grades significantly from the control group.[15] Another study showed that students who were allowed to bring cheat sheets to a test did not improve their grades.[16] While this fact may conflict with the common perception of cheating (one survey found only 13% of males and 46% of females think that cheating does not help grades[17]), it is often apparent to professors and members of academic conduct committees when a paper has been plagiarized by its inferior quality. Indeed, it is not uncommon that if the student had written the paper himself, it would have been significantly better. Possibly of most significance in casting doubt on the relation between academic dishonesty and higher grades is the fact that nationally on average, one third of grade A students have cheated.[18] Why would a student who regularly gets As decide to cheat, since they cannot receive anything better than an A? The answer is that academic dishonesty acts as a shortcut. Even if a plagiarized paper receives a relatively low grade, that grade is high given how much time and effort went into the paper. In the study mentioned above in which students were allowed to bring crib sheets to a test but did not improve their scores the researcher concluded that the students used the crib notes as alternatives to studying, rather than as compliments to studying, and thus spent less time preparing for the exam.[19] Academic dishonesty is more of a way to get by without having to work hard than a shortcut to success.

Demographic and personal causes

Extensive studies have found that no personal characteristics correlate well with cheating, that is, there are no people "born to cheat".[20] Indeed, one experiment found that there was no relationship between how a student performed on a morality test and his likelihood of cheating (that is, students at a pre-conventional stage of morality are as likely to cheat as those at a post-conventional stage). Demographic variables are also generally not strongly correlated with cheating, with a few minor exceptions. It has been found that younger students are somewhat more likely to cheat: one study finding the highest incidence of cheating occurs during Sophomore year at college.[22] Also, while it was found that men cheated slightly more often than women in the 1960s, that gap has disappeared in recent years.[23] Another demographic variable that affects cheating behavior is academic achievement, in that students who perform poorly tend to cheat more than students who perform well.[24]. For instance, low grades and low SAT scores have a correlation with high levels of cheating.[25] In addition, parental education shows a weak but positive correlation with cheating; students whose parents received college degrees are slightly more likely to cheat than are students whose parents did not attend college.[26]. Generally though, race, nationality, and class all show little correlation with academic misconduct. There is also no correlation between how religious someone is and the likelihood that that person will cheat. A comparison between students of different religions yielded similar results, although the study did show that Jews tend to cheat less than members of other religions (since the study was done in the early 60s, it is possible that Jews were benefiting from the above-mentioned relationship between cheating and parental college education).[27]. One of the strongest demographic correlations with academic misconduct in the United States is with language. Students who speak English as a second language have been shown to commit academic dishonesty more and are more likely to be caught than native speakers, since they will often not want to rewrite sources in their own words, fearing that the meaning of the sentence will be lost through poor paraphrasing skills.[28] In the University of California system, international students make up 10% of the student body but comprise 47% of academic dishonesty cases.

Contextual causes

Academic misconduct is more easily traced to the academic and social environment of the student than to his or her background. These contextual factors can be as broad as the social milieu at school to as narrow as what instructions a teacher gives before an exam.
Contextual factors that individual teachers can affect often makes the least difference on cheating behavior. A study found that increasing the distance between students taking an exam has little effect on academic misconduct, and that threatening students before an exam with expulsion if they cheat actually promotes cheating behavior.[30] Indeed, increased exam proctoring and other methods of detecting cheating in the classroom are largely ineffective. According to one survey of American college students, while 50% had cheated at least once in the previous six months, and 7% had cheated more than five times in that period, only 2.5% of the cheaters had been caught.[31] As teachers invent more elaborate methods of deterring cheating, students invent even more elaborate methods of cheating (sometimes even treating it as a game), leading to what some teachers call a costly and unwinnable arms race.[32] Increased punishment for academic misconduct also has little correlation with cheating behavior. It has been found that students with markedly different perceptions of what the severity of the punishment for cheating were all equally likely to cheat, probably indicating that they thought that increased penalties were immaterial since their cheating would never be discovered.[33] However, if a professor makes clear that he disapproves of cheating, either in the syllabus, in the first class, or at the beginning of a test, academic dishonesty can drop by 12%.[34]
Teachers can, however, accidentally promote cheating behavior. A study found a correlation between how harsh or unfair a professor is perceived as and academic misconduct, since students see cheating as a way of getting back at the teacher.[35] Also, students who see themselves in a competition, such as when the teacher is using a grade curve, are more likely to cheat.[36]
The most important contextual causes of academic misconduct are often out of individual teachers' hands. One very important factor is time management. One survey reported two-thirds of teachers believed that poor time management was the principal cause of cheating.[37] Often social engagements are to blame. It has been found that there is a strong correlation between extracurricular activities and cheating, especially among athletes, even those on intramural teams.[38] It has also been found that student cheating rates rise significantly the more time students spend playing cards, watching television, or having a few drinks with friends.[39] Relatedly, fraternity or sorority membership is also strongly correlated with academic misconduct.[40]
One of the most important causes of academic misconduct is the contextual factor of an environment of peer disapproval of cheating, that is, peer pressure. Psychologists note that all people tend to follow the norms of their peer group, which would include norms about academic dishonesty.[41] Thus, students who believe that their peers disapprove of cheating are less likely to cheat. Indeed, multiple studies show that the most decisive factor in a student's decision to cheat is his perception of his peers' relationship with academic dishonesty.[42] For instance, on average 69% of students cheat at colleges with low community disapproval of academic misconduct, whereas only about 23% of students cheat at colleges with strong community disapproval of academic misconduct.[43] Peer pressure works both ways, as a study found that there is a 41% increase in the probability of a student cheating if she has seen someone else cheat.[44] However, even if most students strongly disapprove of cheating, there has to be a community in order for those norms to be enforced via peer pressure. For instance, larger schools, which usually have much higher cheating rates than small schools, tend to have a weaker community, being more split up into different peer groups that exert little social pressure on each other.[45] Another measure of a college community, how many students live on campus, further shows a significant relation with a school's cheating rate.[46] Relatedly, many professors argue that smaller classes reduce cheating behavior.[47]

Ethical causes

No matter what the demographic or contextual influences are on a student who decides to engage in cheating behavior, before she can cheat she must overcome her own conscience. This depends both on how strongly someone disapproves of academic dishonesty and what types of justifications the student uses to escape a sense of guilt. For instance, students who personally do not have a moral problem with academic misconduct can cheat guilt-free. However, while many students have been taught and have internalized that academic dishonesty is wrong, it has been shown that on average a third of students who strongly disapprove of cheating have in fact cheated.[48] People who cheat despite personal disapproval of cheating engage in something called "neutralization", in which a student rationalizes the cheating as being acceptable due to certain mitigating circumstances.[49] According to psychologists of deviant behavior, people who engage in neutralization support the societal norm in question, but "conjure up" reasons why they are allowed to violate that norm in a particular case.[50] Neutralization is not a simple case of ex post facto rationalization, but is rather a more comprehensive affair, occurring before, during, and after the act of cheating.[51] Researchers have found four major types of neutralization of academic dishonesty, which they categorize by type of justification. Denial of responsibility, that is, the accusation that others are to blame or that something forced the student to cheat, is the most common form of neutralization among college students who cheated, with 61% of cheaters using this form of justification.[52] Condemnation of condemner, that is, that the professors are hypocrites or brought it on themselves, is the second most common form of college student neutralization at 28%.[53] The third most popular form of neutralization among college students is the appeal to higher loyalties, where the student thinks her responsibility to some other entity, usually her peers, is more important than doing what she knows to be morally right. About 6.8% of cheaters in higher education use this form of neutralization.[54] Denial of injury - that nobody is worse off for the cheating - is the fourth most popular kind of neutralization at 4.2% of cheaters.[55]

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Academic dishonesty

2007-08-29T12:22:00.000+08:00

Academic dishonesty or academic misconduct is any type of cheating that occurs in relation to a formal academic exercise. It can include:

Plagiarism - The adoption or reproduction of ideas or words or statements of another person without due acknowledgment.
Self Plagiarism - The submission of the same work for academic credit more than once without permission.
Fabrication - The falsification of data, information, or citations in any formal academic exercise.
Deception - Providing false information to an instructor concerning a formal academic exercise, e.g. giving a false excuse for missing a deadline or falsely claiming to have submitted work.
Cheating - Any attempt to give or obtain assistance in a formal academic exercise without due acknowledgment. Sabotage - Acting to prevent others from completing their work. This includes cutting pages out of library books or willfully disrupting the experiments of others.

Academic dishonesty has been documented in most every type of educational setting, from elementary school to graduate school, and has been met with varying degrees of approbation throughout history. Today, educated society tends to take a very negative view of academic dishonesty.

History of Academic Dishonesty

Academic dishonesty dates back to the first tests. Scholars note that cheating was prevalent on the Chinese civil service exams thousands of years ago, even when cheating carried the penalty of death for both examinee and examiner.[1] Before the founding of the MLA and the APA at end of the 19th century, there were no set rules on how to cite properly borrowings from others' writings, which may have caused many cases of plagiarism out of ignorance."[2].
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, cheating was widespread at college campuses in the United States, and was not considered dishonorable among students.[3] It has been estimated that as many as two-thirds of students cheated at some point of their college careers at the turn of the century. Fraternities often operated so-called essay mills, where term papers were kept on file and could be resubmitted over and over again by different students, often with the only change being the name on the paper. At that time, college students, usually white privileged men, were expected by their parents and by society to live the life of the young gentleman, and were required to fulfill a number of social obligations (make connections with the future elite, find a suitable mate, become independent) that were considered far more important than grades. Accordingly, cheating was commonly used by students to put more time towards fulfilling their social obligations at the expense of their academic ones. As higher education in the U.S. trended towards meritocracy, however, a greater emphasis was put on anti-cheating policies, and the newly diverse student bodies tended to arrive with a more negative view of academic dishonesty.

Academic dishonesty today

Academic dishonesty is endemic in all levels of education. In the United States, studies show that 20% of students started cheating in the first grade[4] Similarly, other studies reveal that currently in the U.S., 56% of middle school students and 70% of high school students have cheated.[5]The first scholarly studies in the 1960s of academic dishonesty in higher education found that nationally in the U.S., somewhere between 50%-70% of college students had cheated at least once.[6] While nationally, these rates of cheating in the U.S. remain stable today, there are large disparities between different schools, depending on the size, selectivity, and anti-cheating policies of the school. Generally, the smaller and more selective the college, the less cheating occurs there. For instance, the number of students who have engaged in academic dishonesty at small elite liberal arts colleges can be as low as 15%-20%, while cheating at large public universities can be as high as 75%.[7] Moreover, researchers have found that students who attend a school with an honor code are less likely to cheat than students at schools with other ways of enforcing academic integrity.[8] As for graduate education, a recent study found that 56% of MBA students admitted cheating, along with 54% of graduate students in engineering, 48% in education, and 45% in law.While research on academic dishonesty in other countries is minimal, anecdotal evidence suggests cheating could be even more common in countries like Japan.

Plagiarism is the adoption or reproduction of the ideas or words or statements of another person without due acknowledgment. This can range from borrowing without attribution a particularly apt phrase, to paraphrasing someone else's original idea without citation, to wholesale contract cheating. When plagiarizing, students will often turn to the Internet, due the ease of copying and pasting from websites such as Wikipedia. Other more old fashioned forms of plagiarism such as paper mills and passing off obscure articles or chapters of books of others as original work also still occur. Plagiarized papers are often riddled with gross inconsistencies such as referencing non-existent sections of the essay, changes in spelling and grammar customs, or the argument changing in mid-paragraph.
Self Plagiarism is the submission of the same work for academic credit more than once without permission. For instance, submitting the same paper to two different courses is an example of self plagiarism. The practice is sometimes acceptable if permission is sought ahead of time.
Fabrication is the falsification of data, information, or citations in any formal academic exercise. This includes making up citations to back up arguments or inventing quotations. Fabrication predominates in the natural sciences, where students sometimes fudge numbers to make experiments "work". It includes data falsification, in which false claims are made about research performed, including selective submitting of results to exclude inconvenient data to generating bogus data.
Deception is providing false information to a teacher/instructor concerning a formal academic exercise. Examples of this include taking more time on a take-home test than is allowed, giving a dishonest excuse when asking for a deadline extension, or falsely claiming to have submitted work. This type of academic misconduct is often considered softer than the more obvious forms of cheating, and otherwise honest students sometimes engage in this type of dishonesty without considering themselves cheaters. It is also sometimes done by students who have failed to complete an assignment to avoid detection for doing so.
Sabotage is when a student prevents others from completing their work. This includes cutting pages out of library books or willfully disrupting the experiments of others. Sabotage is usually only found in highly competitive, cutthroat environments, such as at extremely elite schools where class rankings are highly prized.
Cheating is any attempt to give or obtain assistance in a formal academic exercise without due acknowledgment. Cheating can take the form of crib notes, looking over someone's shoulder during an exam, or any forbidden sharing of information between students regarding an exam or exercise. Many elaborate methods of cheating have been developed over the years. For instance, students have been documented hiding notes in the bathroom toilet tank, in the brims of their baseball caps, or up their sleeves. Also, the storing of information in graphing calculators, pagers, cell phones, and other electronic devices has cropped up since the information revolution began. While students have long surreptitiously scanned the tests of those seated near them, some students actively try to aid those who are trying to cheat. Methods of secretly signaling the right answer to friends are quite varied, ranging from coded sneezes or pencil tapping to high pitched noises beyond the hearing range of most teachers. Cheating differs from most other forms of academic dishonesty, in that people can engage in it without benefiting themselves at all. For example, a student who illicitly telegraphed answers to a friend during a test would be cheating, even though the student's own work is in no way affected. Another example of academic dishonesty is a dialogue between students in the same class but in two different time periods, both of which a test is scheduled for that day. If the student in the earlier time period informs the other student in the later period about the test; that is considered academic dishonesty, even though the first student has not benefitted himself.

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Education psychology

2007-08-27T16:46:00.000+08:00

Educational psychology is the study of how humans learn in educational settings, the effectiveness of educational interventions, the psychology of teaching, and the social psychology of schools as organizations. Although the terms "educational psychology" and "school psychology" are often used interchangeably, researchers and theorists are likely to be identified as educational psychologists, whereas practitioners in schools or school-related settings are identified as school psychologists. Educational psychology is concerned with the processes of educational attainment in the general population and in sub-populations such as gifted children and those with specific disabilities.

Educational psychology can in part be understood through its relationship with other disciplines. It is informed primarily by psychology, bearing a relationship to that discipline analogous to the relationship between medicine and biology. Educational psychology in turn informs a wide range of specialities within educational studies, including instructional design, educational technology, curriculum development, organizational learning, special education and classroom management. Educational psychology both draws from and contributes to cognitive science and the learning sciences. In universities, departments of educational psychology are usually housed within faculties of education, possibly accounting for the lack of representation of educational psychology content in introductory psychology textbooks (Lucas, Blazek, & Raley, 2006).

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Quadrivium

2007-08-23T15:31:00.000+08:00

The quadrivium comprised the four subjects, or arts, taught in medieval universities after the trivium. The word is Latin, meaning "the four ways" or "the four roads": the completion of the liberal arts.
At many medieval universities, this would have been the course leading to the degree of Master of Arts (after the BA). After the MA the student could enter for Bachelor's degrees of the higher faculties, such as Music. To this day some of the postgraduate degree courses lead to the degree of Bachelor (the B.Phil and B.Litt degrees are examples in the field of philosophy, and the B.Mus remains a postgraduate qualification at Oxford and Cambridge universities).
In medieval educational theory, the quadrivium consisted of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. These followed the preparatory work of the trivium, made up of grammar, logic (or dialectic, as it was called at the times), and rhetoric. In turn, the quadrivium was considered preparatory work for the serious study of philosophy and theology.[1]
The subject of music within the quadrivium was originally the classical subject of harmonics, in particular the study of the proportions between the musical intervals created by the division of a monochord. A relationship to music as actually practised was not part of this study, but the framework of classical harmonics would substantially influence the content and structure of music theory as practised both in European and Islamic cultures.
In modern applications of the liberal arts as curriculum in colleges or universities, the quadrivium may be considered as the study of number and its relationship to physical space or time: arithmetic was pure number, geometry was number in space, music number in time, and astronomy number in space and time. Morris Kline classifies the four elements of the quadrivium as pure (arithmetic), stationary (geometry), moving (astronomy) and applied (music) number.[2]
This schema is sometimes referred to as classical education, but it is more accurately a development of the 12th and 13th centuries, with classical elements often recovered through Islamic classical scholarship, rather than an organic growth from the educational systems of antiquity.

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Trivium (education)

2007-08-23T15:26:00.000+08:00

For the band of the same name, see Trivium (band).For any other uses see, see Trivium (disambiguation).In medieval universities, the trivium comprised the three subjects taught first: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The word is a Latin term meaning “the three ways” or “the three roads” forming the foundation of a medieval liberal arts education.

Description
Grammar is the mechanics of a language; logic (or dialectic — logic and dialectic were synonymous at the time) is the "mechanics" of thought and analysis; rhetoric is the use of language to instruct and persuade. (As Latin was both a second language and the international language of scholarship and thought, it had to be learned intentionally and thoroughly.) These were considered preparatory fields for the quadrivium, which was made up of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. In turn, the quadrivium was considered preparatory work for the serious study of philosophy and theology. The trivium was the beginning of the liberal arts. At many medieval universities this would have been the principal undergraduate course

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Modern interpretations of classical education

2007-08-23T15:23:00.000+08:00

Much of the current and modern renaissance of classical education is owed to the Dorothy Sayers essay "The Lost Tools of Learning", in which she describes the three stages of the trivium, grammar, logic and rhetoric, as tools by which a student can then analyze and master every other subject.
"The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home," by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer (W.W. Norton, 1999), is a modern reference on classical education, particularly in a homeschool setting. It provides a history of classical education, an overview of the methodology and philosophy of classical education, and annotated lists of books, divided by grade and topic, that list the best books for classical education in each category.
"The Grammar of Our Civility: Classical Education in America," by Lee T. Pearcy (2005) provides a theoretical and historical account of classical education in the United States and suggests the need for a distinctly American approach to ancient Greece and Rome.
Marva Collins has successfully taught a rapid-fire classical education to inner-city deprived children, many of them labeled as "retarded."
Also of note is "A New Trivium and Quadrivium," an article by Dr. George Bugliarello (Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Vol. 23, No. 2, 106-113 (2003)). In it, he argues that the scope of the classical liberal education is inadequate for today's society, and that people should also be conversant with the basic facts of science and technology, since they now form a much more important part of our lives than did the tertiary studies of antiquity. He argues for a new synthesis of science, engineering, and the humanities in which there is a balance between what can be done and what ought to be done, between human desires and earthly consequences, and between our ever-increasing power to affect our surroundings and the ever-present danger of destroying the ecological and environmental systems which allow us to exist.
No discussion of classical education could be complete without mentioning Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins, both of the University of Chicago, who set forth in the 1930s to restore the "Great Books" of Western civilization to center stage in the curriculum. Although the standard classical works—such as the Harvard Classics—most widely available at the time, were decried by many as out of touch with modern times, Adler and Hutchins sought to expand on the standard "classics" by including more modern works, and by trying to tie them together in the context of what they described as the "Great Ideas," condensed into a "Syntopicon" index and bundled together with a new "five foot shelf" of books as "The Great Books of the Western World." They were wildly popular during the Fifties, and discussion groups of aficionados were found all over the USA, but their popularity waned during the Sixties and such groups are relatively hard to find today. Extensions to the original set are still being published, encompassing selections from both current and older works which extend the "great ideas" into the present age and other fields, including civil rights, the global environment, and discussions of multiculturalism and assimilation.
There still exist a number of informal groups and professional organizations which take the classical approach to education seriously, and who undertake it in earnest. Within the classical Christian education movement, David Hicks, author of Norms and Nobility, the Society for Classical Learning, the Association of Classical and Christian Schools, and the CiRCE Institute, founded by Andrew Kern, co-author with Gene Edward Veith of Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America, play a leading role.
In addition to many middle-schools and high schools across the country, there are at present several universities or colleges in the United States wherein such an Oxonian classical education is taking place:
St. John's College (two campuses, one in MD and one in NM); Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, CA; New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, ID; and, The Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, in La Mirada, CA. Gutenberg College in Eugene, OR At each of these institutions some variation of the Canon of Western Great Books is used as the primary course material, and tutor-lead "Socratic discussions" are the primary vehicle for ingestion and digestion of the selected works.
A more traditional, but less common view of classical education arises from the ideology of the Renaissance, advocating an education grounded in the languages and literatures of Greece and Rome. The demanding and lengthy training period required for learing to read Greek and Latin texts in their original form has been crowded out in most American schools in favor of contemporary subjects. Latin is taught at some schools, but Greek rarely.

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Educational Philosophy

2007-08-23T14:46:00.000+08:00

Classical education

2007-08-16T12:24:00.000+08:00

Classical education as understood and taught in the Middle Ages of Western culture is roughly based on the ancient Greek concept of Paideia. China had a completely different tradition of classical education, based in large part on Confucian and Taoist traditions. This article concerns the Western tradition.

The overall organization
Classical education developed many of the terms now used to describe modern education. Western classical education has three phases, each with a different purpose. The phases are roughly coordinated with human development, and would ideally be exactly coordinated with each individual student's development.
"Primary education" teaches students how to learn.
"Secondary education" then teaches a conceptual framework that can hold all human knowledge (history), and then fills in basic facts and practices of the major fields of knowledge, and develops the skills (perhaps in a simplified form) of every major human activity.
"Tertiary education" then prepares a person to pursue an educated profession, such as law, theology, military strategy, medicine or science.

Primary education
Primary education was often called the trivium, which covered grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
Logic and rhetoric was often taught in part by the Socratic method, in which the teacher raises questions and the class discusses them. By controlling the pace, the teacher can keep the class very lively, yet disciplined.

Grammar
Grammar consists of language skills such as reading and the mechanics of writing. An important goal of grammar is to acquire as many words and manage as many concepts as possible so as to be able to express and understand clearly concepts of varying degrees of complexity. Very young students can learn these by rote especially through the use of chant and song. Their minds are often referred to as "sponges", that easily absorb a large number of facts. Classical education traditionally included study of Latin and Greek, which greatly reinforced understanding of grammar, and the workings of a language, and so that students could read the Classics of Western Civilization in the words of the authors. In the modern renaissance of classical education, this period refers to the upper elementary school years.

Logic
Logic (dialectic) is the art of correct reasoning. The traditional text for teaching logic was Aristotle's Logic. In the modern renaissance of classical education, this logic stage (or dialectic stage) refers to the junior high or middle school aged student, who developementally is beginning to question ideas and authority, and truly enjoys a debate or an argument. Training in logic, both formal and informal, enables students to critically examine arguments and to analyze their own.

Rhetoric
Rhetoric debate and composition (which is the written form of rhetoric) are taught to somewhat older (often high school aged) students, who by this point in their education have the concepts and logic to criticize their own work and persuade others. According to Aristotle "Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic." It is concerned with finding "all the available means of persuasion." The student has learned to reason correctly in the Logic stage so that they can now apply those skills to Rhetoric. Students would read and emulate classical poets such as Ovid and others in learning how to present their arguments well.

Secondary education
Secondary education, classically the quadrivium or "four ways," classically taught astronomy, arithmetic, music and geometry, usually from Aristotle and Euclid. Sometimes architecture was taught, often from the works of Vitruvius.
History was always taught to provide a context, and show political and military development. The classic texts were from ancient authors such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Cicero and Tacitus.
Biographies were often assigned as well; the classic example being Plutarch's "Lives." Biographies help show how persons behave in their context, and the wide ranges of professions and options that exist. As more modern texts became available, these were often added to the curriculum.
In the Middle Ages, these were the best available texts. In modern terms, these fields might be called history, natural science, accounting and business, fine arts (at least two, one to amuse companions, and another to decorate one's domicile), military strategy and tactics, engineering, agronomy, and architecture.
These are taught in a matrix of history, reviewing the natural development of each field for each phase of the trivium. That is, in a perfect classical education, the historical study is reviewed three times: first to learn the grammar (the concepts, terms and skills in the order developed), next time the logic (how these elements could be assembled), and finally the rhetoric, how to produce good, humanly useful and beautiful objects that satisfy the grammar and logic of the field.
History is the unifying conceptual framework, because history is the study of everything that has occurred before the present. A skillful teacher also uses the historical context to show how each stage of development naturally poses questions and then how advances answer them, helping to understand human motives and activity in each field. The question-answer approach is called the "dialectic method," and permits history to be taught Socratically as well.
Classical educators consider the Socratic method to be the best technique for teaching critical thinking. In-class discussion and critiques are essential in order for students to recognize and internalize critical thinking techniques. This method is widely used to teach both philosophy and law. It is currently rare in other contexts. Basically, the teacher referees the students' discussions, asks leading questions, and may refer to facts, but never gives a conclusion until at least one student reaches that conclusion. The learning is most effective when the students compete strongly, even viciously in the argument, but always according to well-accepted rules of correct reasoning. That is, fallacies should not be allowed by the teacher.
By completing a project in each major field of human effort, the student can develop a personal preference for further education and professional training.

Tertiary education
Tertiary education was usually an apprenticeship to a person with the desired profession. Most often, the understudy was called a "secretary" and had the duty of carrying on all the normal business of the "master." Philosophy and Theology were both widely taught as tertiary subjects in Universities however.
The early biographies of nobles show probably the ultimate form of classical education: a tutor. One early, much-emulated classic example was that Alexander the Great was tutored by Aristotle.

Modern interpretations of classical education
Much of the current and modern renaissance of classical education is owed to the Dorothy Sayers essay "The Lost Tools of Learning", in which she describes the three stages of the trivium, grammar, logic and rhetoric, as tools by which a student can then analyze and master every other subject.
"The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home," by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer (W.W. Norton, 1999), is a modern reference on classical education, particularly in a homeschool setting. It provides a history of classical education, an overview of the methodology and philosophy of classical education, and annotated lists of books, divided by grade and topic, that list the best books for classical education in each category.
"The Grammar of Our Civility: Classical Education in America," by Lee T. Pearcy (2005) provides a theoretical and historical account of classical education in the United States and suggests the need for a distinctly American approach to ancient Greece and Rome.
Marva Collins has successfully taught a rapid-fire classical education to inner-city deprived children, many of them labeled as "retarded."
Also of note is "A New Trivium and Quadrivium," an article by Dr. George Bugliarello (Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Vol. 23, No. 2, 106-113 (2003)). In it, he argues that the scope of the classical liberal education is inadequate for today's society, and that people should also be conversant with the basic facts of science and technology, since they now form a much more important part of our lives than did the tertiary studies of antiquity. He argues for a new synthesis of science, engineering, and the humanities in which there is a balance between what can be done and what ought to be done, between human desires and earthly consequences, and between our ever-increasing power to affect our surroundings and the ever-present danger of destroying the ecological and environmental systems which allow us to exist.
No discussion of classical education could be complete without mentioning Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins, both of the University of Chicago, who set forth in the 1930s to restore the "Great Books" of Western civilization to center stage in the curriculum. Although the standard classical works—such as the Harvard Classics—most widely available at the time, were decried by many as out of touch with modern times, Adler and Hutchins sought to expand on the standard "classics" by including more modern works, and by trying to tie them together in the context of what they described as the "Great Ideas," condensed into a "Syntopicon" index and bundled together with a new "five foot shelf" of books as "The Great Books of the Western World." They were wildly popular during the Fifties, and discussion groups of aficionados were found all over the USA, but their popularity waned during the Sixties and such groups are relatively hard to find today. Extensions to the original set are still being published, encompassing selections from both current and older works which extend the "great ideas" into the present age and other fields, including civil rights, the global environment, and discussions of multiculturalism and assimilation.
There still exist a number of informal groups and professional organizations which take the classical approach to education seriously, and who undertake it in earnest. Within the classical Christian education movement, David Hicks, author of Norms and Nobility, the Society for Classical Learning, the Association of Classical and Christian Schools, and the CiRCE Institute, founded by Andrew Kern, co-author with Gene Edward Veith of Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America, play a leading role.
In addition to many middle-schools and high schools across the country, there are at present several universities or colleges in the United States wherein such an Oxonian classical education is taking place:
St. John's College (two campuses, one in MD and one in NM); Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, CA; New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, ID; and, The Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, in La Mirada, CA. Gutenberg College in Eugene, OR At each of these institutions some variation of the Canon of Western Great Books is used as the primary course material, and tutor-lead "Socratic discussions" are the primary vehicle for ingestion and digestion of the selected works.
A more traditional, but less common view of classical education arises from the ideology of the Renaissance, advocating an education grounded in the languages and literatures of Greece and Rome. The demanding and lengthy training period required for learing to read Greek and Latin texts in their original form has been crowded out in most American schools in favor of contemporary subjects. Latin is taught at some schools, but Greek rarely.

Education System

2007-08-11T10:31:00.000+08:00

Education encompasses teaching and learning specific skills, and also something less tangible but more profound: the imparting of knowledge, positive judgement and well-developed wisdom. Education has as one of its fundamental aspects the imparting of culture from generation to generation (see socialization). Education means 'to draw out', facilitating realisation of self-potential and latent talents of an individual. It is an application of pedagogy, a body of theoretical and applied research relating to teaching and learning and draws on many disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, sociology and anthropology.
The education of an individual human begins at birth and continues throughout life. (Some believe that education begins even before birth, as evidenced by some parents' playing music or reading to the baby in the womb in the hope it will influence the child's development.) For some, the struggles and triumphs of daily life provide far more instruction than does formal schooling (thus Mark Twain's admonition to "never let school interfere with your education"). Family members may have a profound educational effect — often more profound than they realize — though family teaching may function very informally.
1. Education systems
Schooling occurs when society or a group or an individual sets up a curriculum to educate people, usually the young. Schooling can become systematic and thorough. Sometimes education systems can be used to promote doctrines or ideals as well as knowledge, and this can lead to abuse of the system.

1.1. Primary education
Primary or elementary education consists of the first years of formal, structured education that occur during childhood. In most countries, it is compulsory for children to receive primary education (though in many jurisdictions it is permissible for parents to provide it). Primary education generally begins when children are four to eight years of age. The division between primary and secondary education is somewhat arbitrary, but it generally occurs at about eleven or twelve years of age (adolescence); some educational systems have separate middle schools with the transition to the final stage of secondary education taking place at around the age of fourteen. In the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, etc., schools which provide primary education are referred to as primary schools. Primary schools in these countries are often subdivided into infant schools and junior schools.

1.2. Secondary education
In most contemporary educational systems of the world, secondary education consists of the second years of formal education that occur during adolescence. It is characterised by transition from the typically compulsory, comprehensive primary education for minors to the optional, selective tertiary, "post-secondary", or "higher" education (e.g., university, vocational school) for adults. Depending on the system, schools for this period or a part of it may be called secondary or high schools, gymnasiums, lyceums, middle schools, colleges, or vocational schools. The exact meaning of any of these varies between the systems. The exact boundary between primary and secondary education varies from country to country and even within them, but is generally around the seventh to the tenth year of education. Secondary education occurs mainly during the teenage years. In the United States and Canada primary and secondary education together are sometimes referred to as K-12 education. The purpose of secondary education can be to give common knowledge, to prepare for either higher education or vocational education, or to train directly to a profession.

1.3. Higher education
Higher education, also called tertiary, third stage or post secondary education, often known as academia, is the non-compulsory educational level following the completion of a school providing a secondary education, such as a high school, secondary school, or gymnasium. Tertiary education is normally taken to include undergraduate and postgraduate education, as well as vocational education and training. Colleges and universities are the main institutions that provide tertiary education (sometimes known collectively as tertiary institutions). Examples of institutions that provide post-secondary education are vocational schools, community colleges and universities in the United States, the TAFEs in Australia, CEGEPs in Quebec,and the IEKs in Greece. They are sometimes known collectively as tertiary institutions. Tertiary education generally results in the receipt of certificates, diplomas, or academic degrees. Higher education includes teaching, research and social services activities of universities, and within the realm of teaching, it includes both the undergraduate level (sometimes referred to as tertiary education) and the graduate (or postgraduate) level (sometimes referred to as graduate school). In the United Kingdom post-secondary education below the level of higher education is referred to as further education. Higher education in that country generally involves work towards a degree-level or foundation degree qualification. In most developed countries a high proportion of the population (up to 50%) now enter higher education at some time in their lives. Higher education is therefore very important to national economies, both as a significant industry in its own right, and as a source of trained and educated personnel for the rest of the economy.

1.4. Adult education
Lifelong, or adult, education has become widespread in many countries. However, education is still seen by many as something aimed at children, and adult education is often branded as adult learning or lifelong learning. Adult education takes on many forms, from formal class-based learning to self-directed learning. Lending libraries provide inexpensive informal access to books and other self-instructional materials. The rise in computer ownership and internet access has given both adults and children greater access to both formal and informal education.

1.5. Alternative education
Alternative education, also known as non-traditional education or educational alternative, is a broad term which may be used to refer to all forms of education outside of traditional education (for all age groups and levels of education). This may include both forms of education designed for students with special needs (ranging from teenage pregnancy to intellectual disability) and forms of education designed for a general audience which employ alternative educational philosophies and/or methods.
Alternatives of the latter type are often the result of education reform and are rooted in various philosophies that are commonly fundamentally different from those of traditional compulsory education. While some have strong political, scholarly, or philosophical orientations, others are more informal associations of teachers and students dissatisfied with certain aspects of traditional education. These alternatives, which include charter schools, alternative schools, independent schools, and home-based learning vary widely, but often emphasize the value of small class size, close relationships between students and teachers, and a sense of community.
In certain places, especially in the United States, the term alternative may largely refer to forms of education catering to "at risk" students, as it is, for example, in this definition drafted by the Massachusetts Department of Education.

copas(www.wikipedia.com)