Academic Innovations Research Articles

Implementation, Sustainability, and Scaling Up of Social-Emotional and Academic Innovations in Public Schools

Many attempts at bringing successful educational programs and products “to scale” as part of school reform, particularly in urban districts, have been disappointing. Based on the experiences of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) and reviews of literature addressing implementation failures, observations about failures to “scale up” are presented. These include persistent structural features in educational settings that are too often unrecognized, the perpetuation of a narrow and decontextualized “programs and packages” perspective, poor management of time and other resources, and inadequate attention to characteristics of the adults who must carry out planned reforms. Several assumptions essential for success are identified, including the need to incorporate social and emotional learning as an integral part of academics and the ways in which diversity provides an ever-changing context for implementation. Concluding thoughts center around three points: the need to prepare professionals with the array of skills needed to lead efforts at scaling up school reform, the importance of an action-research perspective, and the need to better document the stories of educational innovation and scaling up efforts so that contextual details can enrich an understanding of what is required for success.

The Problem of the Past in the Modern University: Catholics and Classicists, 1860-1900

Between 1860 and 1900 Americans witnessed a revolution that ushered in a new type of university and a new academic order. During those years, the increasingly nonsectarian, scientific, and utilitarian university supplanted the denominationally affiliated liberal arts college as America's preeminent institution of higher learning. Many of the architects of this new university, whose ranks included university presidents, faculty, and civic leaders, christened it a “modern” institution of higher education, wrapping their academic innovations in the rhetoric of progress. Conversely, they often depicted their opponents and those associated with older collegiate traditions as academic relics wedded to retrograde practices and enamored of past ages. The popularity of the idea of progress in the late nineteenth century and its formative role in the rise of the modern university are well known. Less clear is the fate of representatives and elements of the older academic order during this period. If indeed the universities of the late nineteenth century were “modern” and “progressive,” what was to be the fate of the past—and educators and scholars committed to the wisdom of the past—within those institutions and higher education more generally?

INVESTING IN R&D AND THE FUTURE OF LIBRARIES

It is hard to recall a recent library conference or an issue of library literature that hasn't in one fashion or another alluded to changes in publishing technologies, innovations in research tools for business and scholarships, the evolution of scholarly communications, or the ongoing introduction of computer‐based technologies to the library. For those of us in the academic environment, these changes and innovations are manifested in the growing use of personal computers on campus, the expanding number of Internet linkages, the developing design of scholar workstations, the increasing presence of online bibliographic resources and library catalogs, and the small but expanding number of electronic journals. All of these technological innovations are influencing the ways scholars and students work and exchange information. Accordingly, these developments are challenging the ways librarians think about and provide services and information/knowledge resources to meet the needs of their user populations. In response to these challenges, libraries are investing a disproportionately small part of their budgets for research focusing on the future, and a disproportionately small amount of time to the development of strategies for innovation. Efforts to position libraries in a leadership role in this rapidly changing environment require a stronger investment in such research and development.

Correlates of the adoption of curriculum-integrated computing in higher education

The diffusion of curriculum-integrated computing (CIC) throughout a typical liberal arts curriculum can be understood in terms of the innovation diffusion model and certain correlates of actual time since adoption of computing in classroom work. Of four primary variables, [scores of instructors on a measure of innovativeness (Kirton Adaption-Innovation Scale, KAI); years teaching experience; ratings of the value of computing in the classroom setting; and total number (out of 12) of academic innovations currently being used], only the rated value of computing was significant ( r = 0.51). The tendency for early adopters of CIC to undervalue eight sources of information about academic innovativeness and the seeming failure of KAI scores to predict the adoption of computing were interpreted in terms of the Midgely and Dowling theory of innovativeness.

State coordinating agencies and academic innovation: a policy sector perspective

This paper explores how coordinating departments of higher education diffuse academic innovations. Both the type of change they favor and their dissemination strategies are linked to their political position in a legislatively-mandated policy sector.

The Institutionalization of Academic Innovations: Two Models

The Institutionalization of Academic Innovations: Two Models

So what's new?

The new universities … what is new about them ? Of course, they are among the most recent universities to be founded. But why then are they distinguished from a whole series of other institutions that became universities at about the same time, starting with Southampton in 1952 and ending with Newcastle in 1963? Of course, they claim to have initiated radical academic innovations. Yet far more radical innovation has taken place elsewhere. The difference is more fundamental than this, and centres on the role of the state in their creation. The new universities are new because they were founded as universities to start with, with powers to create and award their own degrees.

The Problem of Size

N O PROBLEM exercises university leaders more these days than the problem of size-large size. The public confidence in education and the contribution which education has made to the public have produced a growth pattern that now threatens to expand the modern university into an institutional Gargantua, albeit one devoid of the humanistic ideas of Rabelais' hero. The trick, if this problem is to be solved, is to devise new organizational arrangements which retain the benefits of large, diversified universities and at the same time to revive those humanistic values traditionally associated with small, liberal-arts colleges. The most promising solution yet advanced calls for the establishment of within the general framework of a large university. The advantages of a university can thus be coupled with the advantages of a college: specialization and research can be fostered while undergraduates receive broad, cross-disciplinary training in a setting that makes education personal. This scheme is a harbinger of hope. Nevertheless, at this time, when the attractions of the small college are being offered as the answer to the problem of large size, it is essential to recognize that the problems of smallness rival the problems of bigness. We need to know not only what we are getting away from but also what we are getting into. The cluster colleges already in existence share three characteristics that will probably typify the cluster-college movement. All have initiated academic innovations which encourage independent study, student-formed seminars, tutorials, community government, and close student-faculty working relations. These colleges promote education that is personal. And to the extent that all of them try to achieve traditional goals in new ways, they are innovative institutions. The second characteristic shared by cluster colleges, though with variations, is a residential arrangement in which facilities and programs combine to keep the student in a climate of learning. Faculty studies,