Topic Review
1978–79 Boston College Basketball Point Shaving Scandal
The 1978–79 Boston College basketball point shaving scandal involved a scheme in which members of the American Mafia recruited and bribed several Boston College Eagles men's basketball players to ensure the team would not win by the required margin (not cover the point spread), allowing the gamblers in the know to place wagers against that team and win.
  • 897
  • 08 Nov 2022
Topic Review
2021 Columbia University Strike
The 2021 Columbia University strike was a labor strike involving graduate students at Columbia University in New York City . The strike, which began on March 15, 2021, was organized by the Graduate Workers of Columbia–United Auto Workers Local 2110, a labor union representing student workers at the university. This union was formed in December 2016 and has had a contentious relationship with the university since its founding, with the university only agreeing to recognize the union in 2019. That same year, the union and university began to negotiate a labor contract, but disagreements between the two entities have prevented an agreement from being made. The main issue concerns union recognition, with the university recognizing only fully-funded doctoral students as union members, while the union also recognizes master's students and undergraduate teaching assistants as members. Additional issues include disagreements over health benefits and child care, among others. While the union voted in March 2020 to authorize strike action, these plans were postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in February 2021, still without a labor contract, the union announced their intent to strike the following month. The strike began on March 15 as an open-ended strike action, with no set end date. The strike coincided with a tuition strike that had been coordinated by the local chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America. Picketing and other forms of protest were held at numerous Columbia locations throughout New York City, and multiple elected officials and politicians announced their support for the strikers. On April 19, a contract proposal was submitted for ratification by the union members, but it was rejected in a rank-and-file vote. Following this, a vote was held in early May to determine the future of the strike, with a majority of voters choosing to end the strike, which officially ended on May 13. Following the end of the strike, on July 3, new leaders for the union were elected who promised to continue to push for a labor contract with the university. Additionally, the name of the union was changed to the Student Workers of Columbia. While negotiations were set to resume on August 25, a disagreement between who should be allowed to attend the meeting caused an impasse, with Columbia pushing for a closed-door meeting with a limited number of attendees and the union wanting the negotiations open to all members. On September 15, the union initiated another strike authorization vote and filed an unfair labor practice charge against the university.
  • 842
  • 15 Nov 2022
Topic Review
21st Century Skills and Mobile-Technology-Supported Inquiry-Based Learning
The development of 21st-century skills is paramount. Among these skills, which encompass collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity, Mobile-Technology-Supported Inquiry-Based Learning (mIBL) in Science Education emerges as a potent method for their enhancement.
  • 1.5K
  • 14 Nov 2023
Topic Review
A COVID-19 Education Recovery Program
As a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, many students have developed substantial educational delays, both cognitively and social-emotionally. To counter such negative effects of the school closures, several policies and support strategies on attainment and social-emotional well-being have been proposed and implemented. In the Netherlands, the focus is on using evidence-based interventions to boost educational achievement. The question is, however, how evidence-based the interventions really are. 
  • 1.1K
  • 23 Jun 2021
Topic Review
A healthy socioemotional foundation in education
In the early school years, the emphasis is more and more on cognitive output factors. Non-cognitive development is receiving less attention than before, though such factors are important determinants of academic success. This study focuses on socioemotional characteristics, more specifically, on attitudes, behavior, and relationships of 6500 grade 2 pupils who participated in the representative Dutch large-scale cohort study COOL5-18. The results showed that the teachers rated their pupil’s work attitude as lower than their behavior and popularity. They were more positive regarding their relationship with the pupils. More important was that there were differences according to the pupils’ social and ethnic/immigrant backgrounds: ethnic minority/immigrant pupils scored less positive on all non-cognitive characteristics than native Dutch pupils, and the higher the parental educational level, the more favorable their children performed on the non-cognitive characteristics. These findings are discussed and possible solutions are presented.
  • 565
  • 20 Apr 2022
Topic Review
A Primer for Design and Systems Thinkers
Teaching students to think in complex systems and design is presumably intricate, creative, and nonlinear. However, due to the overwhelming number of standardized tools and frameworks, the process sometimes ends up being procedural and deductive. Conformity to rigid procedures loses the intention of creative problem-solving towards tackling wicked problems.
  • 217
  • 25 Jan 2024
Topic Review
Abecedarian Approach
The Abecedarian Approach is an early intervention and contains a broad-spectrum adult/child curriculum. The Approach has been studied in three longitudinal randomized controlled trials in the USA, starting in 1972 and continuing today. Recent research studies in multiple countries have examined the Abecedarian Approach during the first three years of life. The collective findings from these studies lead to the conclusion that human development is malleable, especially in the years before school entry, and that high-quality early intervention exerts positive, early, and long-lasting influences on cognitive development, social development, and mental health. 
  • 1.6K
  • 30 Jul 2021
Topic Review
Abecedarian: An Impossible Model Preschool Program
The primary goal of pre- and early-school programs is to prevent young children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds to start school already with educational delays. The programs offer compensatory stimulation activities which are supposed to be not available in the home situation; the focus is on language development. Proponents claim that such programs can be effective, provided they are of high quality. The belief in their success is very much based on the outcomes of a few so-called model programs from the 1960s and 1970s. One of these programs is the Carolina Abecedarian Project, a small single-site project started in 1972. Four cohorts of in total 111 children and their poor, Black parents participated in this experiment with a random allocated treatment and control group. The children were followed from 6 weeks after birth to 6 years of age, that is, when they entered school. They were regularly tested and observed, and then after the program had ended again until they were 40 years of age.
  • 388
  • 14 Jan 2024
Topic Review
Academic Help-Seeking and Outsourced Support in Higher Education
The growth in online higher education has seen the ‘unbundling’ of some services as universities have partnered with private companies in an effort to enhance their services. 
  • 69
  • 18 Dec 2023
Topic Review
Academic Migration and Epistemological Value
The internationalisation of higher education (IoHE) has become a prominent topic in higher education research. While there is increasing institutional and governmental commitment to IoHE, it is important to consider the actual outcomes of these processes critically. Despite the significant issues raised by the academic migration of professors, researchers, and post-docs regarding migratory trajectories and epistemological aspects of scholarly work, this area of research remains understudied. This research adopted a qualitative approach, drawing on semi-structured interviews with migrant scholars pursuing academic careers in Portugal. The findings suggest that a complex interplay of factors influences the pursuit of an academic career by migrants, including the influence of institutional and governmental policies regarding science and the impact of marketisation of higher education institutions that have jeopardised academic career possibilities.
  • 231
  • 24 Jul 2023
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