American Educational Research Journal

Bruce Wilshire’s The Moral Collapse of the University: Professionalism, Purity, and Alienation challenges the internal constituencies of research universities to assess the moral condition of their institutions. His critique emanates from a university apocalyptic literature which has been most prolific during the three undergraduate curricular crises of this century. The proponents of this genre often create negative caricatures in their desire to right perceived injustices. Although Wilshire falls victim to the myopia of absolutism, he calls attention to ethical problems and issues. His thesis centers on restoring the intergenerational task of teaching to undergraduate studies within a professoriate wedded to a research production ethos. His moral argument centers on the redefinition of education against the inroads of professionalism, specialism, and careerism. His quintessential plea is to restore the moral integrity of the mentor-learner relationship. Only with such a restoration may the university revive from its moral collapse. While the author finds both Wilshire’s metaethical discussion and descriptive ethical demonstrations weak, he supports the idea of a new professional ethic for the professoriate.

The metaphor of the teacher as expert is gaining saliency. This article reassesses the appropriateness of that metaphor through a theoretical and historical critique which points out that expertise has been used to buttress professional privilege and to widen the distance between those who know and those who do not. The article examines expertise as a general social phenomenon and then analyzes the appropriateness of the conception of the expert teacher. The author concludes that the metaphor is questionable because it diminishes the moral and social responsibilities of teachers and tends to turn students and the wider public into passive receivers of expert service.

Women and minorities continue to be underrepresented in quantitatively based fields of study. Additionally, selection by all students of such majors is declining. Math/Science major choice is of concern in light of the occupational demands created by advancing technology as well as the potential gaps in occupational and economic attainment of women and minorities. This article reports the analysis of a longitudinal model of math/science major choice upon entrance to college for black and white, female and male students. The model was tested using a sample drawn from the “High School and Beyond” data base. The model included background characteristics of students, ability, and an array of high school experience factors to explain choice of quantitative major. Significant predictors of major choice for the subgroups included sophomore choice of major, mathematics attitudes, math and science completed by senior year, and various parental factors. However, there were differences across groups and the model explained nearly twice as much variance for the black male, black female, and white male subgroups compared with the white female subgroup. Recommendations include broadening our ways of researching migration into and out of the mathematics/science pipeline. Argument is made for a focus on success of students enrolled in low level college mathematics classes as a way of augmenting the mathematics/scientific pipeline.

Expert, beginning, and novice teachers viewed three television monitors, each focusing on a work group of a junior high science class, simultaneously. Participants expressed their thoughts as they viewed the monitors, indicated the monitor to which they were referring, and answered questions about classroom management and instruction. Differences among the groups were found in their perceptions, monitoring, and understanding of classroom events characterized by simultaneity, multidimensionality, and immediacy. This study illustrates how more than content knowledge is required for successful teaching, and that learning to teach requires a great deal of time. Findings from this study have implications for the development of preservice and inservice training programs, which may require redesign to facilitate the development of pedagogical expertise.

Math and social studies differ in the usual instructional pattern found in elementary classrooms, in the goals sought, and of course in the actual content. Based on documented differences in the two fields, we expected pupils to hold different ideas about how to learn each subject and to express different reasons for positive and negative experiences in each subject. Sixty fifth grade pupils from 11 classrooms were interviewed to explore their attitudes and conceptions about learning math and social studies. The interviews included pupils’ definitions of each school subject, descriptions of typical classroom activities, probes regarding how each subject was actually learned, and descriptions of times liked and disliked in each subject. Students’ conceptions and attitudes regarding math and social studies were different. Consistent with expectations, pupils characterized positive and negative experiences in math in regard to their success or ability to do the work while social studies experiences were evaluated more in terms of whether they were interesting or boring. Among other differences, more students thought they could learn social studies on their own than math.

Audio-tutorial science lessons were provided to 191 first and second grade children (instructed), and interviews were conducted periodically to assess changes in science concept under standing from grades one through twelve. A similar sample (n = 48) not receiving audio-tutorial lessons in grades one and two (uninstructed) was also interviewed periodically from grades one through twelve. Instructed students showed substantially more valid concept understandings and fewer invalid concepts (misconceptions) than uninstructed students in grades two, seven, ten, and twelve. Concept maps prepared from interview transcripts showed wide variation in knowledge for both groups, and concept maps scored using a scoring algorithm also showed significant differences favoring instructed students. The data show the lasting impact of early instruction in science and the value of concept maps as a representational tool for cognitive developmental changes.

Drawing on the theoretical and empirical work of decision making, achievement, and attribution theorists, Eccles and colleagues (1983) proposed an integrative theoretical model of achievement behaviors (e.g., persistence, choice, and performance). Defining achievement behavior as the intention to study more mathematics, the present study sought to determine the extent to which the key constructs within the psychological component of the model—expectations for success and task value—directly influence intention and serve as mediators for indirect influence of prior constructs. For males, expectations and value were the dominant influences and mediated the indirect influence of other variables. For females, expectations did not influence intention; dominant effects came from value, goals, and self-concept with value and goals serving as mediators of indirect influences.

This study investigated the effects of a theoretically based Logo environment on creativity. Seventy-three eight-year-old children were tested to assess pretreatment level of creativity and achievement and were randomly assigned to one of three groups: Logo computer programming, comparison (nonLogo creativity treatment), or nontreatment control. After 25 weeks of treatment, the Logo programming group had significantly higher scores than either of the other groups on the total assessment of figural creativity, and both the Logo and comparison group had significantly higher scores than the control group on verbal creativity. Certain aspects of both figural and verbal creativity (e.g., originality) were more strongly affected than other aspects (e.g., fluency). This extends previous research by indicating that certain Logo environments can enhance creativity in verbal, as well as figural, domains. These results militate against the sole acceptance of a domain-specific hypothesis of Logo’s influence on creative performance (i.e., enhancement of figural associative networks); instead, both this domain-specific hypothesis and a process-based hypothesis (i. e., metacomponential enhancement) received some support. An implication is that certain computer environments may offer unique opportunities for the enhancement of both figural and verbal creativity.

This experiment explored how expert credit administrators and trained, but not yet expert, credit administrators (i.e., trained nonexperts, TNEs) differ in their ability to generate and verify inferences. Subjects read a case study describing a bank that appeared to be growing rapidly but, because of quality control problems, was heading for major difficulty. Subsequently, they performed a retelling task, a recognition task, and a problem identification/justification task. For each task, dependent measures were derived to detect the ability to retrieve explicit facts about the case and the ability to infer and reason about the case. Results showed that experts and TNEs did not differ in their ability to encode or retrieve the facts given explicitly in the case. However, for each task, marked differences appeared for inferencing and reasoning ability. Taken together, the data argue that the ability to reason within a complex domain is not simply the result of acquiring the requisite declarative knowledge. Rather, reasoning ability depends on problem solving practice and real-world experience in the domain. Implications for instruction are discussed.

Students differing in ages and teachers differing in experience were exposed to extremely brief samples of teacher behavior when talking about, and talking to, students for which they held high or low expectations. Judgments of teacher characteristics as well as those of the unseen student with whom the teacher was involved were collected. An expectancy detection effect was found such that when teachers were involved with their high-expectancy student, raters judged the unseen student more positively than when teachers were involved with their low-expectancy student. This detection was facilitated differentially by the teachers’ verbal and nonverbal behavior. Ratings of teacher characteristics showed similar expectancy effects but only for older raters. Findings demonstrate the detectability of teachers’ expectancy-related behavior. We discuss the implications of young students’ detecting teacher expectancies from brief samples of behavior and the educational significance of the observed discrepancies between verbal and nonverbal communications.