Distance Education for Doctoral Students: An Overview of the National Cluster Format for Students in the Doctoral Program for Child and Youth Studies.
This paper offers an oVerview of the telecommunications and delivery techniques involved in providing distance education to graduate students in doctoral programs. Good distance education should ensure variety of format and successful communication; it can come via audiobridge, videotapes, audiotapes, the tBlephone, electronic mail, electronic library access, electronic bulletin boards, and electronic classrooms. In the case of Nova Southeastern University (Florida), distance education graduate students in the so-called "National Cluster" are given several days of telecommunications training with particular focus on UNIX commands relevant to electronic mail and the Internet. A study of National Cluster students was begun there to identify degree of growth in their computer expertise, degree of computer use in pursuing their studies, and degree of effect technology use has had on career status and professio-,a1 or personal interactions. A copy of the survey is appended. (Author/BEW) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ***********************************************************************
A Model of School Learning
This job is inherently difficult because behavior is complex and has a multiplicity of causes. To deal with it, educational psychologists have evolved a number of concepts which they find useful in classifying the phenomena of behavior. Textbooks in the field are commonly organized around such concepts as maturation, individual differences, learning, thinking, motivation, and social development. These are useful categories, but because they overlap or refer to different levels of organization in the subject matter, it is difficult to build them into an integrated account of the process of school learning. What is needed is a schematic design or conceptual model of factors affecting success in school learning and of the way they interact. Such a model should use a very small number of simplifying concepts, conceptually independent of one another and referring to phenomena at the same level of discourse. It should suggest new and interesting research questions and aid in the solution of practical educational problems. With the aid of such a framework, the often conflicting results of different research studies might be seen to fall into a unified pattern.
A Psychometrician Views Human Ability
IN the newspapers and popular magazines there has recently been a rash of articles on tests and testing. Many of these articles are profoundly disturbing to a professional tester like me. It is not that the writers occasionally lambaste testing and all its works. Some of the criticism is cogent and healthy, and may serve a useful purpose in deflating the wild claims of wrongheaded optimists who have lately wandered into the testing business. What does worry the conscientious psychometrician (psychometrician is simply the $64 word for a person who puts the most serious part of his mind on the making of tests and all the paraphernalia that goes with them) is that the typical hostile critic of testing berates the tester for ideas he (the tester) does not hold and for a point of view he regards as fanciful if not fallacious. What worries him even more is that his very defenders have a curious habit of unwittingly ascribing to him opinions and attitudes that he himself regards as intellectually impossible.