Richard J. Light

Draws on years of research and interviews with undergraduates to explore the choices students make to obtain an enriching college experience.

Making the Most of College

What choices can students in America make and what can teachers and university leaders do to improve more students' experiences and help them make the most of their time and monetary investment? Two Harvard University presidents invited Richard Light and his colleagues to explore these and other questions, resulting in ten years of interviews with 1,600 Harvard students. Filled with practical advice, Making the Most of College presents strategies for academic success.

Allison Jegla

"Becoming Great Universities arose from co-author Richard J. Light's visits over the past twenty years to more than 250 campuses and his conversations with presidents, administrators, faculty, and students. Light and co-author Allison Jegla have distilled the topics arising from these conversations into the ten chapters that frame their book, with emphasis on the prospect of promoting a culture of continuous innovation for creating value for students. This book is precisely about the university's teaching and student development mission-not research. The overwhelming evidence in the higher education literature asserts that it is on the teaching and education side that our colleges and universities are most challenged, and therefore that is where the greatest improvements can and must be made. Light and Jegla's message to higher education leaders is that improving performance depends to a great extent on their purposeful development of the institution's culture as a community, and on leveraging this culture through the encouragement of constructive working relationships across all sectors of campus, including administration, staff, faculty, and students. Their chapters cover the following topics: how to help students from under-resourced backgrounds; how to encourage students to invest their time and talents beneficially; how to attract students from non-traditional backgrounds to campus; how to improve learning outcomes through innovative teaching; how to assess learning; how to productively elicit student opinions, ideas, and advice; how to facilitate constructive interaction among students from differing backgrounds; how to build opportunities for lifelong learning; and how to inspire students to think globally. Throughout their book, Light and Jegla emphasize practical lessons for promoting measures of innovation on each front. With a broad spectrum of institutions in mind, the authors present dozens of no-cost or low-cost, actionable initiatives that faculty, university leaders, and even students can implement, always in the spirit of working toward their campus's sustained improvement over time"--

Small Steps for Sustained Excellence

Becoming Great Universities

Larry V. Hedges

Heidi Hartmann

Social science research often yields conflicting results: Does juvenile delinquent rehabilitation work? Is teenage pregnancy prevention effective? In an effort to improve the value of research for shaping social policy, social scientists are increasingly employing a powerful technique called meta-analysis. By systematically pulling together findings of a particular research problem, meta-analysis allows researchers to synthesize the results of multiple studies and detect statistically significant patterns among them. Meta-Analysis for Explanation brings exemplary illustrations of research synthesis together with expert discussion of the use of meta-analytic techniques. The emphasis throughout is on the explanatory applications of meta-analysis, a quality that makes this casebook distinct from other treatments of this methodology. The book features four detailed case studies by Betsy Jane Becker, Elizabeth C. Devine, Mark W. Lipsey, and William R. Shadish, Jr. These are offered as meta-analyses that seek both to answer the descriptive questions to which research synthesis is traditionally directed in the health and social sciences, and also to explore how a more systematic method of explanation might enhance the policy yield of research reviews. To accompany these cases, a group of the field's leading scholars has written several more general chapters that discuss the history of research synthesis, the use of meta-analysis and its value for scientific explanation, and the practical issues and challenges facing researchers who want to try this new technique. As a practical resource, Meta-Analysis for Explanation guides social scientists to greater levels of sophistication in their efforts to synthesize the results of social research. "This is an important book...[it is] another step in the continuing exploration of the wider implications and powers of meta-analytic methods." —Contemporary Psychology

A Casebook

Meta-Analysis for Explanation

Judith D. Singer

John B. Willett

Do students who work longer and harder learn more in college? Does joining a fraternity with a more academic flavor enhance a student's academic performance? These are just some more than fifty examples that Richard Light Judith Singer and John Willett explore in By Design, a lively nontechnical sourcebook for learning about colleges and universities.

Richard J. Light

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