Links for 10/12/10

Jade Thompson

I'm Jade Thompson and my husband, Andy Thompson, is running for the Ohio House of Representatives. I am a teacher at Marietta High School. Imagine my chagrin when my friends and colleagues began showing me the awful attack ads against my husband which they had received in the mail. Now imagine my dismay when I saw that those defamatory mailers were paid for by the Ohio Education Association - my teachers' union. In effect, they are using my union dues to attack my husband! This is a new low, even for the OEA…

Robert J. Sternberg

If we are looking for qualities like creativity—which we hear so much about today—but teach students primarily in a way that rewards how well they memorize, then we are setting them and ourselves up for failure…

Steve Kolowich

The goal is to eventually lure journals away from a subscriber-based model that limits access to articles and costs libraries a fortune. Open-access journals eliminate the steep prices of print, but their growth has been limited by the absence of a revenue stream to support the costs associated with peer review. The idea that top universities might help subsidize these costs was seen by some as a key step toward creating a revenue stream to replace subscriber fees.
But while the original signatories' establishment of reimbursement funds has been "timely" as promised, slow uptake by faculty and other universities suggests that COPE is not going to tip the scales in favor of open-access publishing anytime soon…

Doug Lederman

In the report, published today by the American Institutes for Research, Mark D. Schneider, a vice president there and former commissioner of the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics, cites data suggesting that 30 percent of first-year students at four-year colleges do not return to their original institution for a second year, and that states and the federal government provided more than $9 billion in aid to institutions and students to support those students…

The critique of the report... centers on its focus on students who return to their original institution, thus ignoring the many transfer students…

Adelman argues, the transcript-based National Education Longitudinal Study suggests that 94 percent of first-time fall enrollees at four-year colleges enroll in some kind of postsecondary institution at some point the next year…