First published in 1955, "Personal Influence" reports the results of a pioneering study conducted in Decatur, Illinois, validating Paul Lazarsfeld's serendipitous discovery that messages from the media may be further mediated by informal "opinion leaders" who intercept, interpret, and diffuse what they see and hear to the personal networks in which they are embedded. This classic volume set the stage for all subsequent studies of the interaction of mass media and interpersonal influence in...

With four simple truths as his framework, Charles Murray, the bestselling coauthor of The Bell Curve, sweeps away the hypocrisy, wishful thinking, and upside-down priorities that grip America’s educational establishment.Ability varies. Children differ in their ability to learn academic material. Doing our best for every child requires, above all else, that we embrace that simplest of truths. America’s educational system does its best to ignore it.Half of the childr...

This volume presents theoretical, methodological, and empirical advances in understanding, and also in the effects of understanding, individual and societal values.

A powerful and unassailable argument for reforming America's schooling methods and ideas—by one of America's most important educators, the bestselling author of Cultural Literacy."A penetrating and compelling analysis of how, despite the good intentions of educators, bad ideas and failed theories now characterize American education." —The Indianapolis StarFor over fifty years, American schools have operated under the assum...

In this provocative examination of the fall of the profession of social work from its original mission to aid and serve the underprivileged, Harry Specht and Mark Courtney show how America's excessive trust in individualistic solutions to social problems have led to the abandonment of the poor in this country.A large proportion of all certified social workers today have left the social services to enter private practice, thereby turning to the middle class -- those who can afford p...

In Great Minds In Management Ken G. Smith and Michael A. Hitt have brought together some of the most influential and original thinkers in management. Their contributions to this volume not only outline their landmark contributions to management theory, but also reflect on the process of theory development, presenting their own personal accounts of the gestation of these theories. The result is not only an ambitious and original panorama of the key ideas in management theory presen...

Curriculum and Imagination describes an alternative ‘process’ model for designing developing, implementing and evaluating curriculum, suggesting that curriculum may be designed by specifying an educational process which contains key principles of procedure.This comprehensive and authoritative book:offers a practical and theoretical plan for curriculum-making without objectivesshows that a curriculum can be best planned and developed at school level ...

Arguing that traditional, test-based evaluation has a negative effect on many students, this book describes new methods of assessing student performance.

This book contains a collection of 16 essays covering various topics related to the field of education.

This book offers students a comprehensive, theoretical, and practical guide to communication theory. Croucher defines the various perspectives on communication theory—the social scientific, interpretive, and critical approaches—and then takes on the theories themselves, with topics including interpersonal communication, organizational communication, intercultural communication, persuasion, critical and rhetorical theory and other key concepts. Each theory chapter includes a sample undergra...

"This book makes the reader think deeply about the role of curriculum planning and its connection to assessment in this age of accountability."—J. Jeannette Lovern, Associate Professor of Curriculum and InstructionEastern Kentucky University"For educators who want students and schools to be successful, this book provides a clear and proven process to accomplish this goal. It is succinct, yet packed with what′s really important to create, develop, assess, ...

Over the last decade the transformation in the field of education that is occurring under the twin banners of "standards" and "accountability" has materially affected every aspect of schooling, teaching, and teacher education in the United States. Teaching By Numbers, offers interdisciplinary ways to understand the educational reforms underway in urban education, teaching, and teacher education, and their impact on what it means to teach. Peter Taubman maps the totality of the tra...