Dr. Maxine Atkinson shares her thoughts and challenges on how application is a crucial step to teaching foundational concepts. “One of the challenges we all face when teaching a foundational concept is making sure that student comprehension is strong and that they will be able to apply the concept throughout the course.”
Increasingly, says Robert Dingwall, UK universities are taking a more paternal role in the lives of their students, taking — or perhaps resuming — more active roles in addressing their charges’ mental health, criminal conduct and self-care.
How do you teach someone to be entrepreneurial? That’s the challenge presented to Heidi Neck, the Jeffry A. Timmons Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Babson College and director of the Babson Entrepreneur Experience Lab, every day. We asked her some questions in the wake of her new textbook on those issues won an award.
The Gates Foundation is regrouping after its latest school improvement disappointment, but it’s not bowing out of the education reform business. As the philanthropic powerhouse led by Bill and Melinda Gates explained in their latest annual letter to the public, it ended its effort to overhaul teacher evaluation systems after determining that these efforts were failing to generate intended results.
The first-ever “Social Science FOO Camp” was held a couple weeks ago at the Facebook headquarters in California. What’s a Social Science Foo Camp? According to Tom Kecskemethy, director of the AAPSS, “its a hard-to-describe ‘un-conference,’ for the uninitiated.” Follow Tom in this post as he shares his perspective on the FOO camp and explains what he learned.
Academics have been disengaged, disengaged themselves, or never been engaged with the challenges of working in, and for, very complex organizations, says our Robert Dingwall. Their distaste for administration in its various forms is a liability.
How well do sociology departments in the UK teach sociology that originated in the UK? Asking that surprisingly hard question may produce usable insights for academic Britain, argues our Robert Dingwall.
As sociology has drifted further and further from any conservative touchstones, argues Robert Dingwall, it has become less and less able to understand the society that provides its subsistence.
In recent years there has been an increased focus on how research papers and supplemental data can be preserved openly. Andy Tattersall, Liz Such, Joe Langley and Fiona Marshall argue equal attention should also be paid to curating communication outputs aimed at engaging non-academic audiences.
Michael Burawoy, whose embrace of public sociology and the public at work lead him to describe his influential academic niche as “industrial […]
To address research credibility issues, we must reform the role of metrics, rankings, and incentives in universities.
In recent years there has been an increased focus on how research papers and supplemental data can be preserved openly. Andy Tattersall, Liz Such, Joe Langley and Fiona Marshall argue equal attention should also be paid to curating communication outputs aimed at engaging non-academic audiences.
A new people has emerged in the digital age, that of ‘internet famous’ celebrities. And that new people has a class of […]
Xenotransplantation is a fascinating subject – for obvious reasons, as it involves transplanting organs or other body parts across species boundaries (in […]
