bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Why the Basic Structure?
Authors: Hodgson Louis-Philippe
Published: May 2013

John Rawls famously holds that the basic structure is the ‘primary subject of justice.’ By this, he means that his two principles of justice apply only to a society's major political and social institutions, including chiefly the constitution, the economic and legal systems, and (more contentiously) the family structure. This thesis — call it thebasic structure restriction— entails that the celebrated difference principle has a narrower scope than one might have expected. It doesn't apply directly to choices that individuals make within the basic structure. Individuals can live up to the demands of justice simply by obeying whatever rules are set by, and by doing what is necessary to sustain, the basic structure; they needn't attempt to benefit maximally the worst off through their personal choices. Nor does the principle apply to interactions taking place beyond the basic structure, on the international stage. International actors can live up to the demands of justice by observing a comparatively modest ‘duty of assistance’ toward severely destitute societies; they needn't make it their aim to benefit maximally the world's poorest individuals.
Ectoplasm Earth
Authors: Tiehen Justin
Published: May 2013

What does it mean to say that the mental is nothing over and above the physical? In other words, what exactly is the thesis of physicalism about the mental? The question has not received the philosophical attention it deserves. If that sounds woefully uninformed, it's probably because you are mistaking my restricted thesis of physicalism about the mental for the unrestricted thesis of physicalism simpliciter. Physicalism simpliciter is the doctrine that everything is physical; equivalently, that there is nothing over and above the physical. Physicalism simpliciter has been the subject of intense philosophical scrutiny. There are ongoing debates over how ‘the physical’ should be defi ned for the purpose of formulating the thesis, over how the ‘nothing over and above’ clause should be understood, and over various other matters yet.
Responsibility, Tracing, and Consequences
Authors: Khoury Andrew C.
Published: May 2013

Some accounts of moral responsibility hold that an agent's responsibility is completely determined by some aspect of the agent's mental life at the time of action. For example, some hold that an agent is responsible if and only if there is an appropriate mesh among the agent's particular psychological elements. It is often objected that the particular features of the agent's mental life to which these theorists appeal (such as a particular structure or mesh) are not necessary for responsibility. This is because there appear to be cases in which an agent acts at an earlier time which causes her to lack the appropriate psychological features at some later time and yet, intuitively, she is responsible at that later time. Instead, it is thought, we must adopt a tracing principle that allows us to account for responsibility in these cases by tracing back from the later consequence to some earlier action. My project here is twofold.
Listening to the Voice on the Page: Joshua Steele and Technologies of Recording
Authors: Chao Noelle
Published: May 2013

Joshua Steele’s Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech (1775) put forth a system for recording the voice in print that used a modified musical staff with additional markings to indicate emphasis and force. Steele’s method may have failed to become the established practice that he hoped it would, but his technology for recording has the potential to transform how scholars approach eighteenth-century practices of reading and listening.
“It was impossible to know these People”: Secondary Qualities and the Form of Character in A Journal of the Plague Year
Authors: Thompson Helen
Published: May 2013

When H. F., the first-person narrator of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, writes that the flight of the upper classes from London in June 1665 “filled me with very serious Thoughts,” the epistemological and figural provenance of his account of his “Thoughts” shows Defoe’s affinity with the discourse of empiricism. In what follows, I suggest that the plague compels a formal articulation of character that belies the apparently unimpeded alliance of “Sensation” and “Ideas,” a form of character that proceeds from Locke’s countervailing insistence upon a reality that cannot be sensed. The mechanical or corpuscular philosophy advanced by Robert Boyle—whose foundational development of particulate matter theory was central to Locke’s education in the 1660s—entails an etiology of the plague that never crosses the threshold of perception.
“Without the Help of Glasses”: The Anthropocentric Spectacle of Nehemiah Grew’s Botany
Authors: Coppola Al
Published: May 2013

This article takes issue with a widely-held critical consensus about early modern natural philosophy, which posits that scientific apparatuses and prostheses, particularly the microscope, were enthusiastically embraced by natural philosophers, who prized them for opening up vast new regions of the knowable to the scientific observer while cultivating a “culture of fact” that sought the epistemological ground for knowledge in the ostensibly certain and manifest ocular proofs that these new prostheses provided. The botanical publications of Nehemiah Grew act as a case study to reveal that a sustained program among some mainstream natural philosophers to reject the use of microscopes and other instruments of perspectival dislocation, in favor of an “anthropocentric visuality” that instead grounded all facts in the proportionate range of the visible that was available to the unassisted human eye. Although Grew has been hailed as a father of microscopy, in fact his intention was to “first give a proof, How far it was possible for us to go, without the help of Glasses.”
What the Eye Cannot See: Interior Landscapes in Mansfield Park
Authors: Park Julie
Published: May 2013

Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) indicates the wide-ranging significance that popular devices for perceptual illusion such as the camera obscura carry when it constructs one of its morally pregnant moments around the “ha-ha” at Mr. Rushworth’s estate. A sunken ditch that creates the illusion of a boundary-less perspective, the ha-ha functions as a model for the dark room—camera obscura--of the heroine’s mind. Like the ha-ha, Fanny’s mind neutralizes the boundaries that exclude her and allows her to inhabit the space that belongs to others. It is through this novel’s renderings of Fanny’s interior life through the narrative technique of free indirect discourse that we may witness the way fiction and landscape design came to function as related mediums for the invisible pains and pleasures of the imagination by the time the long eighteenth century came to a close.
The Limits of the Senses in Johnson’s Scotland
Authors: Mack Ruth
Published: May 2013

This essay focuses on scientific viewing in Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, particularly on Johnson’s account of that viewing as a means of accessing the “life and manners” of those around him. In Johnson’s inconsistent attempts at precision, and in his meditations on those attempts, we can see him probing a distinction between theory and practice at the heart of the seventeenth-century empiricism on which his basic practice of observing is based. Recovering this side of Johnson’s philosophical argument figures Johnson as an important early theorist of observational practices we now associate with the discipline of anthropology.
Feeling Things: The Novel Objectives of Sentimental Objects
Authors: Lake Crystal B.
Published: May 2013

By treating eighteenth-century it-narratives as self-conscious miscellanies of newly established literary conventions and by focusing on their scenes of sensory defamiliarization, this essay suggests that it-narratives function as more than just critiques of mass consumption in the literary marketplace. Rather, it-narratives ironically foreground depictions of the five senses, especially touch, as a means to theorize how the rise of realist fiction ushered in a dramatic epistemological shift. Specifically, when read in the context of philosophical works by John Locke and David Hartley, it-narratives emerge as sophisticated meditations on the ways fiction’s pretensions to verisimilitude threatened to refashion readers’ sensual and empirical engagement with the world around them.
The Tactility of Authorial Names
Authors: Brewer David A.
Published: May 2013

In the 1760s, authorial names, far from being merely linguistic phenomena, were routinely treated as marks, which is to say, as the visible traces of a touch. Reconstructing these seemingly eccentric practices can give us an unprecedented sort of access to a then pervasive conception of authorship that has been strenuously ignored by modern scholarship, one in which authorial reputations—and the names that stood in for them—were dependent on being handled, both literally and figuratively, by others. Indeed, this tactile subjection, far from being a bad thing, was what enabled the sociable wit that still largely defined what “literature” was.
Charlotte Smith’s Tactile Poetics
Authors: Girten Kristin M.
Published: May 2013

While attending to visual features of Charlotte Smith’s poetic works, scholars have neglected to acknowledge that sight is regularly accompanied, and at times supplanted, by touch within them. This article aims to determine the significance, and contexts (aesthetic, empirical, and educational), of Smith’s recurring depiction of haptic perception. Smith’s tactile poetics presents an important challenge to the principles of distance informing common definitions of aesthetic pleasure in the mid- to late eighteenth century. I contend that, in so doing, her poetics radically reconfigures the self, transforming it from a compartmentalized, closed, fixed, and detached entity into one that is highly responsive to and intimately entwined with its environment. The consequence of this reconfiguration, as this article demonstrates, is a profound shift that facilitates an inclusive ontology of kinship wherein one’s experience and understanding of self are inseparable from the experience and understanding of others.
Burke, Biomedicine, and Biobelligerence
Authors: Barney Richard A.
Published: May 2013

This essay examines how in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke formulates a physiological model based on both ocular and immunological reflex in order to articulate the most “natural” means by which Britons could protect themselves against the dangers of the French uprising. On the one hand, Burke draws from his account of visual trauma first developed in his theory of the sublime in the Philosophical Enquiry (1757; 2nd ed. 1759), whose description of the eye’s function stressed the body’s therapeutic recovery, along with tangible social and political benefits. On the other, he deploys an extensive vocabulary of contagion and vulnerable self-immunization, whose precarious logic often undermines the prospect of securing Britain’s safety. In the historical context of Britain’s emerging endorsement of inoculation’s medical utility, the result is an intricate, often volatile physio-politics that, in Burke’s subsequent arguments in Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795–97), produces an ever more urgent political aggression, including his repeated calls for “a long war” on France.
Introduction: Subject Theory and the Sensational Subject
Authors: Powell Manushag N. , Swenson Rivka
Published: May 2013

Introduction to Sensational Subjects special issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation .
Understanding Ritual in Colonial Wabanakia
Authors: Bilodeau Christopher J.
Published: May 2013

Cet article avance l’idée que les Indiens wabénaqui du nord de la Nouvelle Angleterre et du sud du Québec conservèrent une interprétation globale de l’activité rituelle au cours de la période coloniale. Lors de la période de crise entre les années 1670 et 1700, époque où les missions wabénaquises prirent racine, les Indiens croyaient à l’importance des rites en tant qu’outils capables de lutter contre les problèmes auxquels ils se heurtaient, et ainsi embrassèrentils le baptême, et ensuite la messe, en tant que rites fondamentaux des missions. Ils continuèrent cependant de concevoir la pratique rituelle catholique de la même façon que la pratique rituelle wabénaqui, dans la mesure où ils interprétaient la messe ou tout rituel chrétien en général comme étant non exclusif, et non pas nécessairement lié à l’ordre moral et à la doctrine de foi que les Jésuites attachaient aux rites catholiques. Cette attitude leur permit de continuer à adopter d’autres rites, dans la mesure où ils les trouvaient efficaces et adaptés à leurs besoins. C’est ainsi qu’entre les années 1710 et 1720, pendant les périodes de tension et de guerre contre les Anglais de la Nouvelle Angleterre, un rituel particulièrement puissant fit son chemin en wabénaquia: la danse du calumet. Un grand nombre de wabénaquis soutenaient son adoption. Certains pensaient que ce rite pouvait remplacer le rituel catholique, qu’ils trouvaient désormais inutile, tandis que d’autres Indiens faisaient valoir que le rite pouvait se pratiquer de façon concomitante avec le catholicisme. Toutefois, au plan de la pratique rituelle, les wabénaquis considéraient le rituel catholique et ce nouveau rituel du calumet comme étant interchangeables. Rien n’empêchait donc les wabénaquises de s’approprier de nouvelles activités rituelles tant qu’ils pensaient que ces dernières pouvaient fonctionner en leur faveur.
Entre velléité et opiniâtreté: La création du ministère des Colonies en France (1858–1894)
Authors: D’Andurain Julie
Published: May 2013

Even before the colonial expansion of the Third Republic, the question of forming a separate Ministry of the Colonies had already been raised. The creation of this ministry had been delayed for a long time due to the existence of an undersecretary for Colonial Affairs. The project of determining the duties and limits of a new ministry covering colonial issues in their entirety became a constitutional necessity in the early 1890s. Despite hesitations in the Senate, the parliamentary deputies of the “parti colonial” under the leadership of Eugène Etienne, the “pope of the colonialists,” organized themselves to create this indispensible ministry. However, the Ministry of Colonies appeared to be a “rump ministry” in its early years, due to the heavy influence of the “parti colonial” and the lack of a definitive settlement of the structure and role of the colonial army.
Linguistique coloniale au XIX e siècle: Le discours racialiste dans la recherche française sur les langues créoles
Authors: Krämer Philipp
Published: May 2013

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a strong racist discourse was displayed in texts about Creole languages. Authors such as Mauritius-born Charles Baissac established explanations about the emergence of Creole languages and their specific structure, arguing that these particularities can only be seen as a result of contact between two races of different physical, mental, and social predispositions. As shown in Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” scientific work in philology (and other disciplines) cannot be separated from structures of power and domination. Creole languages formed an urgent problem for colonial France as they initially emerged from the prestigious French language and yet had to be integrated into the paradigm of inferiority of colonized peoples and cultures. Linguistic descriptions of Creoles are therefore marked with a strong effort to reconcile the French heritage of these languages with the claim of domination over the community of Creole speakers.

Still, contradictions and nuances in the texts of late-nineteenth-century research on Creole languages, carried out often by native speakers who had grown up in the colonies, may help to identify statements that transport an individual view of the triangular relation between language, race, and mind. Even in its not quite institutionalized state as a discipline, early creolistics displays a remarkable degree of cross-national connections that demonstrate how difficult it is to classify philological branches along national affiliation.
Alfred Martineau et la « genèse » du protectorat. Le cas indien (1745–1761)
Authors: Vaghi Massimiliano
Published: May 2013

Alfred Martineau was a prominent colonial officer during the Third French Republic, and a scholar in history and international politics. His studies dealt with the problem of the origins of the “modern” form of colonialism in the second half of the nineteenth century, besides Ancien Régime French colonization. He saw the roots of “modern” European colonial rule in the activities of Dupleix and Bussy in eighteenth-century India. By underscoring the importance of both French officers, Martineau noticed important differences in the colonial activities of the two. According to Martineau, while Dupleix supported the idea of direct military conquest, Bussy favored a method of “indirect” colonization that was in some way the harbinger of the nineteenth-century model of protectorates. Yet in the light of the sources at our disposal today, the differences in the action of the two French colonizers are much less marked than in the frame depicted by Martineau. Both Dupleix and Bussy, in fact, used both coercion and more conciliatory policies toward indigenous India rulers. Dupleix and Bussy welded the usual economic and trade interests to the necessities of governance, in a similar way to French protectorates in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Changements et opportunités dans l’architecture en Indochine pendant la période de Vichy
Authors: Herbelin Caroline
Published: May 2013

World War Two was a period of extensive changes in architecture in colonial Indochina despite the very trying conditions of the time. This period was marked by the reshaping of architecture’s role in the colony’s politics and by the evolution in architectural practices that anticipated, to a certain extent, postcolonial times. This article explains these transformations by considering two factors: first, the growing strength and diversity of private architects, among whom emerged the first generation of Vietnamese architects trained at the Indochinese School of Fine Art; and second, the particular way which the Vichyite government of Admiral Decoux (1884–1963) then facing a difficult situation, used architecture both to restore French prestige and to increase nationalism among the colonized.
Se souvenir de l’Indochine L’écriture des femmes engagées dans l’armée française, entre mémoire de guerre et récit de voyage
Authors: Jauneau Elodie
Published: May 2013

From 1945 to 1954, France was at war in Vietnam. Many women who enlisted in the French armed forces after 1940 joined the French Far Eastern Expedition Corps and served well beyond Europe. In 1954, the French-Vietnam war ended in a double loss for French soldiers—a personal as well as a military defeat. With more women serving in and with the military after World War II, women’s memories of military service also included the testimony of veterans of the war in Indochina. Many of these women recalled their personal war experiences, sometimes immediately afterward, sometimes many years after the conflict. These memories of women at war are a previously unexplored set of sources of historical memories of the French-Vietnam war, which up to now have been produced mainly, if not exclusively, by men. This study thus shows how feminine authors in the French military expressed their views, between memories of war and travel accounts.
Reading and Reading Instruction for Children from Low-Income and Non-English-Speaking Households
Authors: Lesaux Nonie K.
Published: May 2013

Summary
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Although most young children seem to master reading skills in the early grades of elementary school, many struggle with texts as they move through middle school and high school. Why do children who seem to be proficient readers in third grade have trouble comprehending texts in later grades? To answer this question, Nonie Lesaux describes what is known about reading development and instruction, homing in on research conducted with children from low-income and non-English-speaking homes. Using key insights from this research base, she offers two explanations. The first is that reading is a dynamic and multifaceted process that requires continued development if students are to keep pace with the increasing demands of school texts and tasks. The second lies in the role of reading assessment and instruction in U.S. schools.

Lesaux draws a distinction between the “skills-based competencies” that readers need to sound out and recognize words and the “knowledge-based competencies” that include the conceptual and vocabulary knowledge necessary to comprehend a text’s meaning. Although U.S. schools have made considerable progress in teaching skills-based reading competencies that are the focus of the early grades, most have made much less progress in teaching the knowledge-based competencies students need to support reading comprehension in middle and high school. These knowledge-based competencies are key sources of lasting individual differences in reading outcomes, particularly among children growing up in low-income and non-English-speaking households.

Augmenting literacy rates, Lesaux explains, will require considerable shifts in the way reading is assessed and taught in elementary and secondary schools. First, schools must conduct comprehensive reading assessments that discern learners’ (potential) sources of reading difficulties—in both skills-based and knowledge-based competencies. Second, educators must implement instructional approaches that offer promise for teaching the conceptual and knowledge-based reading competencies that are critical for academic success, particularly for academically vulnerable populations.
Adolescent Literacy: Learning and Understanding Content
Authors: Goldman Susan R.
Published: May 2013

Summary
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Learning to read—amazing as it is to small children and their parents—is one thing. Reading to learn, explains Susan Goldman of the University of Illinois at Chicago, is quite another. Are today’s students able to use reading and writing to acquire knowledge, solve problems, and make decisions in academic, personal, and professional arenas? Do they have the literacy skills necessary to meet the demands of the twenty-first century? To answer these questions, Goldman describes the increasingly complex comprehension, reasoning skills, and knowledge that students need as they progress through school and surveys what researchers and educators know about how to teach those skills.

Successfully reading to learn requires the ability to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information from multiple sources, Goldman writes. Effective readers must be able to apply different knowledge, reading, and reasoning processes to different types of content, from fiction to history and science, to news accounts and user manuals. They must assess sources of information for relevance, reliability, impartiality, and completeness. And they must connect information across multiple sources. In short, successful readers must not only use general reading skills but also pay close attention to discipline-specific processes.

Goldman reviews the evidence on three different instructional approaches to reading to learn: general comprehension strategies, classroom discussion, and disciplinary content instruction. She argues that building the literacy skills necessary for U.S. students to read comprehensively and critically and to learn content in a variety of disciplines should be a primary responsibility for all of the nation’s teachers. But outside of English, few subject-area teachers are aware of the need to teach subject-area reading comprehension skills, nor have they had opportunities to learn them themselves. Building the capacity of all teachers to meet the literacy needs of today’s students requires long-term investment and commitment from the education community as well as society as a whole.
The Importance of Infrastructure Development to High-Quality Literacy Instruction
Authors: Cohen David K. , Bhatt Monica P.
Published: May 2013

Summary
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Although the education community has identified numerous effective interventions for improving the literacy of U.S. schoolchildren, little headway has been made in raising literacy capabilities. David K. Cohen and Monica P. Bhatt, of the University of Michigan, contend that a major obstacle is the organizational structure of the U.S. education system. Three features in particular—the lack of educational infrastructure, a decentralized governance system, and the organization of teaching as an occupation—stymie efforts to improve literacy instruction.

The authors emphasize that the education system in the United States has always been a patchwork of local school systems that share no common curricula, student examinations, teacher education, or means of observing and improving instruction. Although localities have broad powers over education, few have built the capability to judge or support quality in educational programs. The quality criteria that have developed chiefly concern teachers, not teaching. The decentralization and weak governance of U.S. schooling also deprives teachers of opportunities to build the occupational knowledge and skill that can inform standards for the quality of work, in this case instruction. And, unlike practitioners in other professions teachers have little opportunity to try to strengthen teaching quality by setting standards for entry to the occupation.

Cohen and Bhatt review six types of organizational reforms undertaken over the past several decades to improve literacy and other academic outcomes for U.S. students. After briefly describing accountability, comprehensive school reforms, knowledge diffusion, improvement of human capital, and market-based reforms, the authors turn to the Common Core State Standards, an effort initiated by state governors and school leaders to raise student achievement. The authors conclude that the fundamental question about the Common Core, as with the other reforms they discuss, is whether educators and policy makers can mobilize the capability to help states and localities invent, adapt, and implement reliable ways to improve instruction.
Technology Tools to Support Reading in the Digital Age
Authors: Biancarosa Gina , Griffiths Gina G.
Published: May 2013

Summary
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Advances in digital technologies are dramatically altering the texts and tools available to teachers and students. These technological advances have created excitement among many for their potential to be used as instructional tools for literacy education. Yet with the promise of these advances come issues that can exacerbate the literacy challenges identified in the other articles in this issue.

In this article Gina Biancarosa and Gina Griffiths characterize how literacy demands have changed in the digital age and how challenges identified in other articles in the issue intersect with these new demands. Rather than seeing technology as something to be fit into an already crowded education agenda, Biancarosa and Griffiths argue that technology can be conceptualized as affording tools that teachers can deploy in their quest to create young readers who possess the higher levels of literacy skills and background knowledge demanded by today’s information-based society.

Biancarosa and Griffiths draw on research to highlight some of the ways technology has been used to build the skills and knowledge needed both by children who are learning to read and by those who have progressed to reading to learn. In their review of the research, Biancarosa and Griffiths focus on the hardware and software used to display and interface with digital text, or what they term e-reading technology. Drawing on studies of e-reading technology and computer technology more broadly, they also reflect on the very real, practical challenges to optimal use of e-reading technology.

The authors conclude by presenting four recommendations to help schools and school systems meet some of the challenges that come with investing in e-reading technology: use only technologies that support Universal Design for Learning; choose evidence-based tools; provide technology users with systemic supports; and capitalize on the data capacities and volume of information that technology provides.
The Role of Out-of-School Factors in the Literacy Problem
Authors: Waldfogel Jane
Published: May 2013

Summary
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When U.S. children enter school, their reading skills vary widely by their socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, and immigrant status. Because these literacy gaps exist before children enter school, observes Jane Waldfogel, the disparities must arise from conditions outside of schools—from the children’s families and communities. And the same out-of-school factors may continue to influence reading skills as children progress through school.

Waldfogel examines how specific out-of-school factors may contribute to literacy gaps at school entry and to the widening of the gaps for some groups thereafter. Some factors are important across groups. For instance, differences in parenting help explain black-white literacy gaps as well as gaps associated with socioeconomic status. Other factors differ by group. For instance, key influences on early literacy for immigrant children are the language spoken at home, parental proficiency in English, and whether a child participates in preschool.

What happens to early gaps in literacy during the school years also varies by group. Reading gaps for Hispanic children tend to close or stabilize after a few years, perhaps because of such out-of-school factors as strong families, less crime, or better peer group attitudes in Hispanic communities. But black-white gaps and gaps between children from socioeconomically disadvantaged and more advantaged families tend to widen during the school years. An important challenge for future research is to understand why that is the case.

Waldfogel concludes that addressing early literacy gaps, and later gaps, requires tailoring policy responses depending on which group is being targeted. But across all groups, one important conclusion holds. Although out-of-school factors contribute—sometimes in major ways—to literacy disparities, says Waldfogel, schools have a responsibility to try to close such gaps. Research on the out-of-school sources of literacy problems can support schools in this effort by helping practitioners and policy makers better understand which children are likely to encounter problems in literacy and why, as well as what schools and others can do to address those problems.
Improving Reading in the Primary Grades
Authors: Duke Nell K. , Block Meghan K.
Published: May 2013

Summary
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Almost fifteen years have passed since the publication of the National Research Council’s seminal report Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children , which provided research-based recommendations on what could be done to better position students in prekindergarten through third grade for success in grade four and above. This article by Nell Duke and Meghan Block first examines whether specific key recommendations from the report have been implemented in U.S. classrooms. They find that recommendations regarding increased access to kindergarten and greater attention to and improvement of students’ word-reading skills have been widely adopted. Others have not. Vocabulary and comprehension, long neglected in the primary grades, still appear to be neglected. Contrary to the report’s recommendations, attention to building conceptual and content knowledge in science and social studies has actually decreased in the past fifteen years. In other words, the easier-to-master skills are being attended to, but the broader domains of accomplishment that constitute preparation for comprehension and learning in the later grades—vocabulary knowledge, comprehension strategy use, and conceptual and content knowledge—are being neglected. Near stagnation in fourth-grade students’ comprehension achievement is thus unsurprising.

The authors then turn to research and reviews of research on improving primary-grade reading published since 1998, when Preventing Reading Difficulties was issued. They discuss several instructional approaches identified as effective in improving word-reading skill, vocabulary and conceptual knowledge, comprehension strategies, and reading outside of school; they discuss advances in interventions for struggling readers, and in whole-school literacy reform.

Duke and Block then identify three key obstacles that have prevented widespread adoption of these best practices in teaching reading. The first obstacle is a short-term orientation toward instruction and instructional reform that perpetuates a focus on the easier-to-learn reading skills at the expense of vocabulary, conceptual and content knowledge, and reading comprehension strategies. The second is a lack of expertise among many educators in how to effectively teach these harder-to-master reading skills, and the third is the limited time available in the school day and year to meet unprecedented expectations for children’s learning. Policy makers, the education community, and parents must attend to these three challenges if they wish to see meaningful improvements in the reading skills of American children.
Access and Success with Less: Improving Productivity in Broad-Access Postsecondary Institutions
Authors: Jenkins Davis , Rodríguez Olga
Published: May 2013

Achieving national goals for increased college completion in a time of scarce resources will require the postsecondary institutions that enroll the majority of undergraduates—community colleges and less-selective public universities—to graduate more students at a lower cost. Davis Jenkins and Olga Rodríguez examine research on how these “broad-access” institutions can do so without sacrificing access or quality.

Research indicates that the strategies broad-access institutions have relied on in the past to cut costs—using part-time instructors and increasing student-faculty ratios—may in fact reduce productivity and efficiency. The limited evidence available suggests that some of the most popular strategies for improving student success are not cost-effective. New strategies to cut costs and improve college success are therefore imperative.

Some believe that redesigning courses to make use of instructional technologies will lead to better outcomes at lower cost, although the evidence is mixed. Recently, a growing number of institutions are going beyond redesigning courses and instead changing the way they organize programs and supports along the student’s “pathway” through college. These efforts are promising, but their effects on cost per completion are not yet certain. Meager funding has so far hampered efforts by policy makers to fund colleges based on outcomes rather than how many students they enroll, but some states are beginning to increase the share of appropriations tied to outcomes.

Jenkins and Rodríquez argue that as policy makers push colleges to lower the cost per graduate, they must avoid providing incentives to lower academic standards. They encourage policy makers to capitalize on recent research on the economic value of postsecondary education to measure quality, and urge colleges and universities to redouble efforts to define learning outcomes and measure student mastery.
Making College Worth It: A Review of the Returns to Higher Education
Authors: Oreopoulos Philip , Petronijevic Uros
Published: May 2013

Despite a general rise in the return to college, likely due to technological change, the cost-benefit calculus facing prospective students can make the decision to invest in and attend college dauntingly complex. Philip Oreopoulos and Uros Petronijevic review research on the varying costs and benefits of higher education and explore in full the complexity of the decision to invest in and attend college. Optimal college attainment decisions are different for all prospective students, who diverge in terms of what they are likely to get out of higher education and what specific options might be best for them. Earnings of college graduates depend in important measure on the program of study and eventual occupation they choose. Students uninterested in or unable to complete a four-year college degree appear to benefit from completing a two-year degree.

Prospective students may also face both financial constraints, which prohibit them from taking advantage of more education, and information problems and behavioral idiosyncrasies, such as reluctance to take on debt, which keep them from making optimal decisions about attending college. In their discussion of how student debt figures in the college investment, the authors note that some students borrow too little and, as a result, underinvest in their education. Carefully calculating the return on the college investment can help determine the “appropriate” amount of debt.

Students are more likely to benefit from postsecondary education the more informed they are about the expenses associated with college and the potential options for financial aid, which can be extremely complex. To make the best college investment, Oreopoulos and Petronijevic stress, prospective students must give careful consideration to selecting the institution itself, the major to follow, and the eventual occupation to pursue. For any particular program at a particular school, anticipated future labor market earnings, the likelihood of completion, the costs, and the value of any student debt must all be factored into the assessment.
Financial Aid Policy: Lessons from Research
Authors: Dynarski Susan , Scott-Clayton Judith
Published: May 2013

In the nearly fifty years since the adoption of the Higher Education Act of 1965, financial aid programs have grown in scale, expanded in scope, and multiplied in form. As a result, financial aid has become the norm among college enrollees. Aid now flows not only to traditional college students but also to part-time students, older students, and students who never graduated from high school. Today aid is available not only to low-income students but also to middle- and even high-income families, in the form of grants, subsidized loans, and tax credits. The increasing size and complexity of the nation’s student aid system has generated questions about effectiveness, heightened confusion among students and parents, and raised concerns about how program rules may interact. In this article, Susan Dynarski and Judith Scott-Clayton review what is known, and just as important, what is not known, about how well various student aid programs work.

The evidence, the authors write, clearly shows that lowering costs can improve college access and completion. But this general rule is not without exception. First, they note, the complexity of program eligibility and delivery appears to moderate the impact of aid on college enrollment and persistence after enrollment. Second, for students who have already decided to enroll, grants that tie financial aid to academic achievement appear to boost college outcomes such as persistence more than do grants with no strings attached. Third, compared with grant aid, relatively little rigorous research has been conducted on the effectiveness of student loans. The paucity of evidence on student loans is particularly problematic both because they represent a large share of student aid overall and because their low cost (relative to grant aid) makes them an attractive option for policy makers.

Future research is likely to focus on several issues: the importance of program design and delivery, whether there are unanticipated interactions between programs, and to what extent program effects vary across different types of students. The results of this evidence will be critical, the authors say, as politicians look for ways to control spending.
Student Supports: Developmental Education and Other Academic Programs
Authors: Bettinger Eric P. , Boatman Angela , Long Bridget Terry
Published: May 2013

Low rates of college completion are a major problem in the United States. Less than 60 percent of students at four-year colleges graduate within six years, and at some colleges, the graduation rate is less than 10 percent. Additionally, many students enter higher education ill-prepared to comprehend college-level course material. Some estimates suggest that only one-third of high school graduates finish ready for college work; the proportion is even lower among older students. Colleges have responded to the poor preparation of incoming students by placing approximately 35 to 40 percent of entering freshmen into remedial or developmental courses, along with providing academic supports such as summer bridge programs, learning communities, academic counseling, and tutoring, as well as student supports such as financial aid and child care. Eric Bettinger, Angela Boatman, and Bridget Terry Long describe the role, costs, and impact of these college remediation and academic support programs.

According to a growing body of research, the effects of remedial courses are considerably nuanced. The courses appear to help or hinder students differently by state, institution, background, and academic preparedness. The mixed findings from earlier research have raised questions ranging from whether remedial programs, on average, improve student academic outcomes to which types of programs are most effective. Administrators, practitioners, and policy makers are responding by redesigning developmental courses and searching for ways to implement effective remediation programs more broadly. In addition, recent research suggests that colleges may be placing too many students into remedial courses unnecessarily, suggesting the need for further examining the placement processes used to assign students to remedial courses.

The authors expand the scope of remediation research by discussing other promising areas of academic support commonly offered by colleges, including advising, tutoring, and mentoring programs, as well as supports that target the competing responsibilities of students, namely caring for dependents and balancing employment with schoolwork. They conclude that the limited resources of institutions and equally limited funds of students make it imperative for postsecondary institutions to improve student academic supports and other services.
Transitions from High School to College
Authors: Venezia Andrea , Jaeger Laura
Published: May 2013

The vast majority of high school students aspire to some kind of postsecondary education, yet far too many of them enter college without the basic content knowledge, skills, or habits of mind they need to succeed. Andrea Venezia and Laura Jaeger look at the state of college readiness among high school students, the effectiveness of programs in place to help them transition to college, and efforts to improve those transitions.

Students are unprepared for postsecondary coursework for many reasons, the authors write, including differences between what high schools teach and what colleges expect, as well as large disparities between the instruction offered by high schools with high concentrations of students in poverty and that offered by high schools with more advantaged students. The authors also note the importance of noncurricular variables, such as peer influences, parental expectations, and conditions that encourage academic study.

Interventions to improve college readiness offer a variety of services, from academic preparation and information about college and financial aid, to psychosocial and behavioral supports, to the development of habits of mind including organizational skills, anticipation, persistence, and resiliency. The authors also discuss more systemic programs, such as Middle College High Schools, and review efforts to allow high school students to take college classes (known as dual enrollment). Evaluations of the effectiveness of these efforts are limited, but the authors report that studies of precollege support programs generally show small impacts, while the more systemic programs show mixed results. Dual-enrollment programs show promise, but the evaluation designs may overstate the results.

The Common Core State Standards, a voluntary set of goals and expectations in English and math adopted by most states, offer the potential to improve college and career readiness, the authors write. But that potential will be realized, they add, only if the standards are supplemented with the necessary professional development to enable educators to help all students meet academic college readiness standards, a focus on developing strong noncognitive knowledge and skills for all students, and the information and supports to help students prepare and select the most appropriate postsecondary institution.
For-Profit Colleges
Authors: Deming David , Goldin Claudia , Katz Lawrence
Published: May 2013

For-profit, or proprietary, colleges are the fastest-growing postsecondary schools in the nation, enrolling a disproportionately high share of disadvantaged and minority students and those ill-prepared for college. Because these schools, many of them big national chains, derive most of their revenue from taxpayer-funded student financial aid, they are of interest to policy makers not only for the role they play in the higher education spectrum but also for the value they provide their students. In this article, David Deming, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence Katz look at the students who attend for-profits, the reasons they choose these schools, and student outcomes on a number of broad measures and draw several conclusions.

First, the authors write, the evidence shows that public community colleges may provide an equal or better education at lower cost than for-profits. But budget pressures mean that community colleges and other nonselective public institutions may not be able to meet the demand for higher education. Some students unable to get into desired courses and programs at public institutions may face only two alternatives: attendance at a for-profit or no postsecondary education at all.

Second, for-profits appear to be at their best with well-defined programs of short duration that prepare students for a specific occupation. But for-profit completion rates, default rates, and labor market outcomes for students seeking associate’s or higher degrees compare unfavorably with those of public postsecondary institutions. In principle, taxpayer investment in student aid should be accompanied by scrutiny concerning whether students complete their course of study and subsequently earn enough to justify the investment and pay back their student loans. Designing appropriate regulations to help students navigate the market for higher education has proven to be a challenge because of the great variation in student goals and types of programs. Ensuring that potential students have complete and objective information about the costs and expected benefits of for-profit programs could improve postsecondary education opportunities for disadvantaged students and counter aggressive and potentially misleading recruitment practices at for-profit colleges, the authors write.