Factors Related to Degree Completion

The Toolbox Revisited is a data essay that follows a nationally representative cohort of students from high school into postsecondary education, and asks what aspects of their formal schooling contribute to completing a bachelor's degree. The core question is not about access to higher education or about academic persistence, but about completion of academic credentials—the culmination of opportunity, guidance, choice, effort, and commitment. To answer the question, The Toolbox Revisited uses the most recently completed national grade-cohort longitudinal study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics.


A Case for PreK-3 Alignment

An issue brief published by the New America Foundation makes the case for transforming preschool, kindergarten and the first three years of elementary school into a PK-3 "continuum of learning."


Improving Relationships within the Schoolhouse

To improve their practice, educators learn new teaching methods, update their subject knowledge, and scrutinize their students' progress.  However, one of the greatest obstacles to improvement is isolation. Authors in the March issue of Educational Leadership call for breaking through the isolation by forging collaborative relationships and exchanging what Roland Barth calls “craft knowledge” in order to move the profession forward.


Examining the Teaching Life

In light of sound principles about how learning works, we need to assess teaching practices and professional development activities. A school is in business to cause and promote learning. It should, therefore, model for all institutions what it means to be a learning organization. For a school to be a model learning organization, all faculty members should be professional learners. This article calls for school leaders to create job requirements that make learning about learning mandatory.


Information Literacy Competency Standards

Information literacy forms the basis for lifelong learning, and developing lifelong learners is central to the mission of higher education institutions. The ability to recognize when information is needed and having the ability to locate, evaluate and effectively use the needed information is the definition of information literacy and a skill common to all disciplines, to all learning environments and to all levels of education.

The Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education provides a framework for assessing the informational literate individual. It also provides higher education an opportunity to articulate its information literacy competencies with those of K-12 so that a continuum of expectations develops for students at all levels.


Advocates Push for Improved Preschool Education

Education advocates are quietly building momentum for the next big thing: preschool for all of Arizona children younger than 5. Better education for the state's youngest children is high on Gov. Janet Napolitano's to-do list. Advocates say better schooling for the very young could close the learning gap between rich and poor students and raise the state's reputation, brought down by national test scores and a high dropout rate. Many Republican lawmakers, however, are still debating the merits of the state paying for full-day kindergarten; preschool isn't even on their agenda.