Graduate School of Education
At the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, we are here for change. We’re here because we believe in the power of education to build communities, bridge barriers, improve lives, and heal society. Here, we convene an ambitious and diverse community of leaders and pioneers, connecting them to one another and to a world that will benefit from their work. We equip them with immersive, real-world-based learning and research opportunities that bring them results. And we mobilize them to fulfill the promise of education in the classrooms, boardrooms, governments, and learning settings where true innovation and real transformation become possible. We offer vibrant array of high-quality master’s and doctoral degree programs.
- Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education
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- Dissertations (GSE)
- Graduate School of Education Dissertations
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- Learning at the Bottom of the Pyramid
- Literacy.org
- Penn Center for Minority-Serving Institutions
- Penn Child Research Center
- PennCLO
Search results
Review of R.V. Kail, Jr. and J.W. Hagen (Eds.), Perspectives on the Development of Memory and Cognition, and D.G. Bobrow and A. Collins (Eds.), Representation and Understanding: Studies in Cognitive Science
The use of narrative and other prose forms as a tool for investigating mental processes is not new. Psychologists such as Jean Piaget and F.C. Bartlett both used stories in research on complex cognitive skills in children and adults. However, with the advent of Ebbinghaus' monumental work on memory using "non-sense syllables," theoretical psychology turned away from the use of meaningful material. With the use of nonsense syllables, researchers hoped to isolate the variables of memory and individual content associations. Recently, there has been a renewal of interest in the study of narrative and memory due to the recognition that narrative taps certain processes that syllables and isolated words do not. In addition, narrative and memory studies have generated interest among those researchers concerned with the applicability of memory studies to educational settings.
Addressing Literacy Issues: Dan Wagner
The following is a video archive of All Children Reading: An International Literacy Day Event.
On Being an Adolescent in Zawiya. Review of Susan S. Davis and Douglas A. Davis, Adolescence in a Moroccan Towan: Making Social Sense
Although adolescence is a well-accepted stage of life in Western society, the issue of whether it exists as a separate life stage in all cultures remains an open and important question. As part of the cross-cultural Harvard Adolescence Project directed by Beatrice and John Whiting, this book is an assessment of traditional concepts of adolescence in Morocco. Based on 11 months of intensive fieldwork, as well as multiple years of work in the same village, the authors used ethnographic observation, interviews, and psychological testing to collect a wide array of data on about 50 families including 150 children in the rural Moroccan town of Zawiya. Recurring themes in the lives of these adolescents, including maturity, self-awareness, gender, hierarchy, and ambivalence, are interwoven into a discussion of the basic social organization of Moroccan life.
A Look Into the Bridges to the Future Initiative in India
A look into the Bridges to the Future Initiative.
US Student Debt: Borrowing the Long and Lending the Short of it
Financing options fail to live up to the promises made by politicians, says Alan Ruby.
Tracing ‘21st Century Literacies’ in College and Career Ready State Standards: A Multi-State Scalar Analysis
This presentation brings together resources of sociocultural literacy studies (Heath, 1983; Street, 1984; Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanic, 1999) and policy attribute analysis (Porter, Floden, Freeman, Schmidt, & Schwille, 1988) to examine how the meaning of “21st century skills/literacies” - as emphasized in recent college and career-readiness (CCR) standards - is framed and negotiated across state and district scales.
New Technologies for Adult Literacy and International Development
Few areas of social and economic development have received as much attention and as few proportionate resources as adult literacy. Across the world – in both industrialized and developing countries alike – it is widely acknowledged that at most, 5 percent of national education budgets is spent on the roughly 50 percent of the adult population in need of increased literacy skills. For several centuries, it has been variously claimed that literacy – a key (if not the key) product of schooling – would lead to economic growth, social stability, a democratic way of life, and other social 'good things.' Detailed historical reviews have not been so kind to such generalizations (see several chapters in Wagner, Venezky & Street, 1999; also UNESCO, 2005), in that literacy 'campaigns,' in particular, were often more politically inspired than practically implemented (Wagner, 1986). General notions of national economic growth have been said to have a similar set of positive consequences for the poor. However, both universal literacy and universal economic growth have suffered from what has been called at times 'development fatigue' – namely, that governments and international agencies have come to feel that significant toil and funding have led to only limited return on investment.