Updated 05/05/05

GLOSSARY

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Accreditation A formal status granted to an institution meeting or exceeding stated educational quality criteria. The purposes of accreditation are to assess and enhance the educational quality of an institution, assure consistency in institutional operations, promote institutional improvement and provide for public accountability

Articulation Arrangements: Agreements between or among two- and four- year institutions that detail the rules for transferring degrees and credits.

Assessment: The process of describing and monitoring performance of students or educational programs against a specified set of criteria.

Concentration: Cluster of courses offering in-depth experience in a single field.

Course: Formal unit of undergraduate curriculum.

Curriculum: The process and substance of an educational program, comprising the purpose, design, conduct and evaluation of educational experiences. It gives shape to an institution's particular intellectual beliefs and aspirations, negotiated by faculty in light of their specialized knowledge and in the context of social expectation and students' needs, and manifested in a body of courses that present the knowledge, principals, values, and skills intended as consequences of an undergraduate education.

Discipline: Conceptual framework for understanding a general body of knowledge and how it is acquired.

General Education: The cultivation of the knowledge, intellectual skills, and attitudes that citizens and workers use throughout their lives.

Humanities: Disciplines that study human cultures and expressions.

Integrative Learning: Moving beyond the course format to general open-ended kind of questions, or applying material learned in one course to issues in other courses.

Interdisciplinary Courses: A process or program designed to answer questions, resolve problems or issues, or examine a topic that is too broad or complex to be dealt with adequately through a single discipline or field of study.

Learning: An exercise of constructing personal knowledge that requires the learner to be mentally active rather than passive; interpreting rather than recording information.

Liberal Education: Program designed to foster capacities of analysis, critical reflection, problem solving, communication, and synthesis of knowledge from different disciplines by providing students with an intellectual and social context for recognizing the continuity between the past and future and for drawing on reason and experience about human nature to develop and question values and to communicate the results of this process of thinking.

Measurement: The process of gathering and quantifying information. Assessment occurs when measurements are analyzed according to established criteria and standards of performance.

Multicultural Education: Course design principle based on the idea that cultural differences has consequences in the classroom, that some difference are privileged over others, and that educational reform is necessary to bring equity into education.

Multimedia: Collective term for types of information including text and images consisting of graphs, charts, drawings, photographs, animation, audio, and video; generally used in connection with computers.

Occupational Education: Level of training less complex and theoretical than Professional Education but more so than Vocational Training, designed to prepare students for skilled crafts, usually but not always requiring licensure.

Pedagogy: Methods of teaching and interaction employed by an instructor; may encourage students either in passive absorption of information or in active construction of meanings for course material.

Professional Education: System of formal education that prepares novices for highly skilled occupations such as law, medicine, and engineering, through a combination of theory and practice culminating in an award of certification, licensure, or other formal credential.

Virtual Classroom: Courses or entire degree programs delivered in whole or in part electronically via a combination of World Wide Web pages, Internet newsgroups, e-mail, Telnet, and video conferencing.

Vocational Training: Preparation for jobs that call for extensive practical experience and training but have few requirement for theory, technical knowledge, or liberal arts education.

Writing Across the Curriculum: Pedagogical movement based on the concept that the faculty as a whole, not just one academic department, is responsible for students' writing skills; it encourages a combined assignments for classes in writing and discipline-based subject areas.

Higher Education Info

GLOSSARY