Using the "peer reviewed" limiter in ERIC searches

I knew ERIC database had implemented the "peer reviewed" classification fairly recently, and I believe I tell students this when I meet with classes, but in case some of you were not aware, I am forwarding a note from one of the truly knowledgeable people in the new ERIC structure...

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"Just to clarify why this is happening, at this time ERIC applies the peer-reviewed designator to journals indexed from 2005 forward (note that some of these titles may also include the peer-reviewed status for the period 2002-2004). Limiting a search to peer-reviewed articles is helpful for locating peer-reviewed current materials, but to find older records we recommend not using the limiter.

ERIC obtains information about the peer-reviewed status of a publication from the publisher. When the information is not available from the publisher we use Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory."

Best regards,

Nancy Cawley
Communications Lead, ERIC Project
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Ulrich's is available in our A-Z list of databases BTW

A Big Kerfuffle over Student Choice in Reading

Nancie Atwell's advocacy of student choice in reading (see article in NY Times) elicited a huge flurry of mis-informed comment. Her video-taped response is on her publisher's page. Nancy Atwell has been one of my heroines ever since I reviewed her book, The Reading Zone, for the June '07 Education Review.

Projections of Education Statistics to 2018

This updated report has also been added to the Statistics tab in my Education guide.
"It includes statistics on enrollment, graduates, teachers, and expenditures in elementary and secondary schools, and enrollment and earned degrees conferred expenditures of degree-granting institutions. For the Nation, the tables, figures, and text contain data on enrollment, teachers, graduates, and expenditures for the past 14 years and projections to the year 2018. For the 50 States and the District of Columbia, the tables, figures, and text contain data on projections of public elementary and secondary enrollment and public high school graduates to the year 2018."

The end of the university as we know it??

A provocative but balanced article, "College for $99 a Month," in the Washington Monthly by think tank analyst Kevin Carey (policy director of Education Sector). There's been a fair amount of controversy over this model & this particular company, but it is, probably, an inevitable "disruptive innovation" to the higher education model. Good article...well worth the read.
An excerpt:
"Like Craigslist, StraighterLine threatens the most profitable piece of a conglomerate business: freshman lectures, higher education’s equivalent of the classified section. If enough students defect to companies like StraighterLine, the higher education industry faces the unbundling of the business model on which the current system is built. The consequences will be profound....Regional public universities and non-elite private colleges are most at risk from the likes of StraighterLine. They could go the way of the local newspaper, fatally shackled to geography, conglomeration, and an expensive labor structure, too dependent on revenues that vanish and never return."

The company's founder has been frustrated by the push back from students and faculty at institutions with which he has tried to partner (in order to get accreditation cover for courses students complete online). "But neither the regulatory nor the psychological obstacles match the evolving new reality... The accreditation wall will crumble, as most artificial barriers do. All it takes is for one generation of college students to see online courses as no more or less legitimate than any other—and a whole lot cheaper in the bargain—for the consensus of consumer taste to rapidly change. The odds of this happening quickly are greatly enhanced by the endless spiral of steep annual tuition hikes, which are forcing more students to go deep into debt to pay for college while driving low-income students out altogether. If Burck Smith doesn’t bring extremely cheap college courses to the masses, somebody else will."

How children learn about race

Children start drawing conclusions about race very early and explicit discussions about the topic are found to be one of the most powerful ways to change attitudes. Findings from a series of studies at UT-Austin are discussed in this article from Newsweek.

Education doctoral programs and others not assessed by NRC

This article in the Chronicle today discusses the exclusions from the National Research Council's recent survey of doctoral programs. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Excluded fields appear to have granted more than a quarter of all research doctorates from 2001 to 2005 to U.S. citizens and permanent residents—27 percent, according to our calculations, based on data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates, conducted for the National Science Foundation and other government agencies. But African-American, American Indian, and Mexican-American people, as well as women, are disproportionately likelier to have received Ph.D.'s in fields that are not included in the NRC's assessment, relative to white men and Asian-American people. For example, 54 percent of African-American women, 49 percent of American Indian women, 43 percent of Mexican-American women, 42 percent of African-American men, and 34 percent of women in general were awarded doctorates in fields not currently assessed by the NRC.

What accounts, then, for this seemingly odd pattern of doctorates awarded to people in various demographic groups by fields included and excluded in the current NRC assessment? The exempted fields—including education, business, social work, psychological counseling, library science, home economics, and subfields of the health and agricultural sciences—share a professional and applied orientation as opposed to a basic research one. Many also emphasize public scholarship, a tradition that favors the interweaving of intellectual pursuit with social improvement.