{"id":60161,"date":"2012-06-12T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-12T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/education-professor-earns-lifetime-achievement-award\/"},"modified":"2012-06-12T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-06-12T00:00:00","slug":"education-professor-earns-lifetime-achievement-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2012\/06\/education-professor-earns-lifetime-achievement-award\/","title":{"rendered":"Education professor earns lifetime achievement award"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\tGeorge Willis honored by American Education Research Association<\/p>\n

KINGSTON, R.I. — June 12, 2012 \u2014 溏心vlog免费B站 professor George Willis has spent more than 40 years researching ways to advance knowledge of education, and those efforts recently earned him national recognition from the American Education Research Association.<\/p>\n


\nWillis is a 2012 recipient of the AERA\u2019s Division B Lifetime Achievement Award, an honor that was formally announced April 14 at the organization\u2019s annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia. <\/p>\n


\nAlso receiving a lifetime achievement award was Cheryl Craig, of the University of Houston.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cI had kind of a funny reaction,\u201d Willis said. \u201cI knew I was under consideration, but the committee\u2019s deliberations dragged on more than two months longer than expected, so I surmised there was some kind of deadlock. I wasn\u2019t really expecting the award, so when they finally told me, my feeling was mostly relief. Only later did it hit me how much my work must have influenced many Division B colleagues across the United States and elsewhere. The validation is gratifying.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nWillis has spent most of his professional life trying to use qualitative research to improve the American educational system. He is the author of Qualitative Evaluation: Concepts and Cases in Curriculum Criticism (1978) and Curriculum: Alternative Approaches, Ongoing Issues (with Colin March, 1995), which were described by Arizona State University professor emeritus Thomas Barone as \u201camong the most important in the field of curriculum studies over the last 50 years.\u201d <\/p>\n


\nMany of his efforts have been met with resistance as the desire for standardized testing and calculable progress has grown. <\/p>\n


\n\u201cThe nation is now undergoing a fetish with standardized testing and accountability,\u201d he said. \u201cIt expects to get the improvements it wants through the use of what is, in effect, an engineering model, but sound educational practice is consistent with an organic model. So people who want to centralize education or take a one-size-fits-all approach do not understand what education fundamentally is, strange as that seems in a nation where almost every adult has had considerable experience with schooling. <\/p>\n


\n\u201cThey\u2019re looking for a silver bullet that doesn\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nWillis said the classic approach to educational research is based on the scientific method, seeking a curriculum that produces results and then using control groups to measure its true effectiveness. <\/p>\n


\nWillis understands the desire to use such an approach, but says it is imperfect.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cIt\u2019s all perfectly logical,\u201d he says. \u201cThe problem is it doesn\u2019t cover personal feelings inside of people.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nInstead, Willis argues the task of education studies professionals is one of bringing three focal points — the nature of subject matter, the nature of the individual — and the nature of the environment) into an appropriate balance. It is a daunting task, to be sure.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cToday everybody wants to improve education, but very few are willing to do the hard intellectual work required in the first place,\u201d he said. \u201cConstantly upping stress levels for students and teachers to improve test scores is a sure loser.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n溏心vlog免费B站 Department of Communications & Marketing photo by Michael Salerno Photography.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

George Willis honored by American Education Research Association KINGSTON, R.I. — June 12, 2012 \u2014 溏心vlog免费B站 professor George Willis has spent more than 40 years researching ways to advance knowledge of education, and those efforts recently earned him national recognition from the American Education Research Association. Willis is a 2012 recipient […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60163,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60161\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}