Drawing on a large body of empirical evidence, former Harvard President Derek Bok examines how much progress college students actually make toward widely accepted goals of undergraduate education. His conclusions are sobering. Although most students make gains in many important respects, they improve much less than they should in such important areas as writing, critical thinking, quantitative skills, and moral reasoning. Large majorities of college...

Mindful Learning shows how successful teachers put caring into action to provide both personal support and instructional enrichment. Using this approach, teachers integrate efforts to care for students as people - the "affective" portion of the curriculum - with efforts to extend their understanding of content - the "academic" dimension of instruction. Each chapter of Mindful Learning illustrates strategies that help students maximize academic learning...

"In many public schools, students are spending up to 28 percent of instructional time on testing and test prep. Starting this year, the introduction of the Common Core State Standards Initiative in 45 states will bring an unprecedented level of new, more difficult, and longer mandatory tests to nearly every classroom in the nation up to five times a year--forcing our national testing obsession to a crisis point. Taxpayers are spending extravagant...