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"Shifting Sands: Flimsy Food Findings" examines how irreproducible science affects select areas of government policy and regulation governed by different federal agencies. This second report focuses on "Food Frequency Questionnaire" and irreproducible research in the field of nutritional epidemiology, which informs the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) policies and regulations. The report finds compelling circumstantial evidence that the nutritional epidemiology literature--specifically the literature that relies on Food Frequency Questionnaires (FFQs)--has been affected by statistical practices that have rendered the underlying research untrustworthy. [Introduction by Peter W. Wood. For report #1 see, ED616199.]

This report, intended primarily for civics reformers considering how best to defend and improve traditional American civics education, surveys a selection of different civics offerings, both the traditional and the radical. Surveyed providers include organizations such as the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, We the People, and Hillsdale College's 1776 Curriculum. The report assesses both how they approach civics education and their ideological content. The report will also judge each organization's effectiveness--although no one knows exactly what is being taught in each classroom in America, much less precisely what students take from their education. Finally, it will provide recommendations about how civics reformers should build upon this existing array of civics curriculum resources to work most effectively to reclaim America's civics education.

"Shifting Sands: Unsound Science and Unsafe Regulation" examines how irreproducible science affects select areas of government policy and regulation governed by different federal agencies. This first report on "PM[subscript 2.5] Regulation" focuses on irreproducible research in the field of environmental epidemiology, which informs the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) policies and regulations. It focuses upon scientific research that associates airborne fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter (PM[subscript 2.5]) with mortality, heart attacks, and asthma. [Introduction by Peter W. Wood.]

The study in this report focuses on four historical periods and five textbooks. The four historical periods are: (1) The European Settlement of North America (1492-1660); (2) Colonial America (1660-1763); (3) The Nation's Founding (1763-1789); and (4) The New Deal (1933-1940). Three of the 5 textbooks are intended for regular high school American history classes and the remaining 2 are intended for Advanced Placement American history classes. While the study does not provide a comprehensive judgment of how American history textbooks cover American history, but its selective analysis provides a window into the general operations of American history textbooks.

America's most popular science curriculum, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), fails students. This report details how the popular curriculum omits basic tenets of science, including the scientific method, and provides recommendations to correct deficiencies in the NGSS.

Since 2014 the College Board has continued to revise and develop the Advanced Placement European, United States, and World History examinations. It keeps getting in trouble. Many critics have excoriated the College Board for teaching history grossly politicized to the left--history without the history of freedom, history that teaches hatred of America and Europe, and history to promote social justice activism and the welfare state. Some progressive critics have criticized the World History exam for being "too Eurocentric." Critics also censure the College Board for micromanaging what history will be taught: the College Board's latest rounds of history Course and Exam Descriptions are far more detailed and intrusive than their predecessors. The College Board possess is no small educational niche, but an effective monopoly on advanced placement history testing. More than 900,000 students now take AP History examinations each year: in 2019, 100,655 took European History, 496,573 took United States History, and 313,317 took World history. The College Board markets its "advanced placement" tests for college readiness: "Students with AP on their high school transcripts show exposure to rigorous, college-level curricula--a key element of college readiness." This essay largely consists of critiques of the latest round of College Board advanced placement history examinations. David Randall outlines what advanced placement history examinations should be, so that the reader may judge how badly the College Board's examinations fall short of that ideal. He ends the essay with recommendations to provide the College Board with competition from new providers of standardized assessments. It may also serve as recommendations to such new providers, when they emerge.

In the last twenty years a body of "social justice educators" has come to power in American higher education. These professors and administrators are transforming higher education into advocacy for progressive politics. They also work to reserve higher education jobs for social justice advocates, and to train more social justice advocates for careers in nonprofit organizations, K-12 education, and social work. "Social Justice Education in America" draws upon a close examination of 60 colleges and universities to show how social justice educators have taken over higher education. The report includes recommendations on how to prevent colleges and universities from substituting activism for learning.

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has analyzed college common readings since 2010. The limitations of college common reading selections derive from their institutional frameworks. Non-academic mission statements steer selection committees away from intellectually challenging books toward those promoting progressive beliefs or activism; the selection committees are usually run or dominated by activist "co-curricular" administrators rather than professors; and common reading programs are frequently integrated with programs of service-learning and civic engagement, which are designed to promote student activism rather than to educate. NAS advocates for systematic reform of college common reading programs. They also advocate external supervision of common reading programs at public universities, to guarantee their intellectual diversity. This year's report has added two sections of practical advice for working within the system as it currently exists. One section provides advice for authors wishing to market their books to common reading selection committees; the second provides advice for selection committee members who want to persuade their colleagues to choose classic books. While the NAS can still call for thoroughgoing reform of common reading programs, the NAS believes these new sections will forward useful, if marginal, reforms within the current system. "Beach Books 2018-2019" is organized into the following sections: (1) an introductory essay summarizing the report; (2) an analysis of the 2018-2019 selections; (3) advice to would-be authors and to selection committee members; and (4) appendices with full data, including an expanded list of 150 books the NAS recommends for colleges and universities with common reading programs. [For the previous edition, "Beach Books: 2017-2018. What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read outside Class?," see ED595199.]

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has analyzed college common readings since 2010. Common reading selections partly reflect the constraints on their selection committees. Each year colleges admit large number of students who have not yet read a college-level book and some of whom have never read a full-length adult book at all. Faculty and staff members on selection committees all over the country have reported this problem. Another constraint is that common reading programs largely leave students the voluntary choice of whether to read the common readings, and there is no academic requirement to motivate students to read the assigned book. College common reading committees overwhelmingly prefer to select their readings from a narrow subsection of books: politically progressive, designed to promote activism, confined to American authors, literarily mediocre, juvenile, recently published, and mostly nonfiction. Non-academic mission statements steer selection committees away from intellectually challenging books toward books that promote progressive belief and/or activism; the selection committees are usually run or dominated by activist "co-curricular" administrators rather than professors; and common reading programs are frequently integrated with programs of servicelearning and civic engagement, which are designed to promote student activism rather than to educate students to think. "Beach Books 2017-2018" collects intensive data on 498 college common reading selections in 2017-2018 at 481 institutions, but it also surveys eleven years of college common reading programs, between 2007-2008 and 2017-2018. The report presents this data in part to the American public as a whole, to support its efforts to reform college common reading programs. "Beach Books 2017-2018" is organized into the following sections: (1) an introductory essay summarizing the report's conclusions; (2) an analysis of the 2017-2018 selections, including explorations of the implications of the #MeToo movement for common reading selections; (3) an analysis of the eleven years of selections between 2007/2008 and 2017/2018; (4) recommendations for how to reform college common reading programs; and (5) appendices with our full data, including an expanded list of 140 books the NAS recommends for colleges and universities with common reading programs. [For the previous edition, "Beach Books: 2016-2017. What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read outside Class?," see ED580915.]

Serious history instruction in K-12 U.S. schools has been in decline for decades. History education in Massachusetts has, until now, fared somewhat better than in the nation at large. In 1993 the commonwealth enacted the Massachusetts Education Reform Act--a bipartisan plan to improve education--which mandated core standards and assessments in history and social science, among other disciplines. The Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Framework (the 2003 Framework) produced under this mandate contained strong, flexible grade-by-grade standards for core essential knowledge. In 2009, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (the State Board) suspended the 2003 Framework, and it never went into effect. In 2016, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) instead launched a rewrite of the 2003 Framework, in good measure to realign Massachusetts history education around service-learning and civic engagement. In 2017 the DESE presented the revisions to the State Board, which approved them to be posted for public comment in January 2018. This paper contends that the January 2018 Public Comment Draft of the Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Framework (2018 Revision) eviscerates the 2003 Framework. Among other things, the 2018 Revision eliminates the standards-based and curricular linkage to the already developed Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) test for U.S. history, while substituting meaningless expectations for each grade. This paper recommends that the Massachusetts State Board reject the 2018 Revision in its entirety and immediately put into effect both the 2003 Framework and its accompanying MCAS test. [Preface By Paul Reid, co-author with William Manchester.]

America faces a growing crisis about who can say what on our college campuses. At root this is a crisis of authority. In recent decades university administrators, professors, and student activists have quietly excluded more and more voices from the exchange of views on campus. This has taken shape in several ways, not all of which are reducible to violations of "academic freedom." The pages in this report are parts of a single chart that compares fourteen published statements on academic freedom in twenty-five categories. The oldest of the statements is the 1915 "Declaration of Principles" from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The newest is the April 29, 2017 "Statement of Principles: Free Expression on Campuses issued by Students for Free Expression." In addition to the chart, the report includes: (1) an annotated Timeline of Academic Freedom, with notable events such as Supreme Court decisions and riots; (2) a list of significant Other Resources by organizations such as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the Heterodox Academy; and (3) a Select Bibliography.

"Beach Books 2016-17," which covers 348 colleges and universities, continues the National Association of Scholars' long-running record of providing the most comprehensive information about colleges and universities that assign common readings to incoming freshmen. Although there are several databases of common reading assignments, Beach Books is the only series that categorizes the books according to their main subjects and tracks trends in genres, publication dates, and additional themes. Beach Books also examines the larger administrative programs that have developed around common readings, such as library guides, lectures, and social media campaigns. The National Association of Scholars believes that common reading programs are a good idea in principle. At a time when core curricula have largely disappeared, a common reading assignment can provide at least an abbreviated substitution that may introduce students to rigorous intellectual standards, inspire them to read further and better than they otherwise would, and foster intellectual friendship on campus. The choice of a classic work can also serve to introduce students to the tradition formed by the best works of Western civilization. This report offers critiques of common readings as they actually are, so as to offer guidance for how they may reform themselves along this better model. Yet while many colleges and universities declare that common readings are important because they set academic expectations, begin conversations, and encourage critical thinking, they usually embed these goals within larger aims to foster community on campus and student activism in the outside world. Common reading programs are dedicated to these non-academic goals. It's in their mission statements. This year the report focuses on common reading programs' administrative structures. While previously noted that common reading programs are associated with administrative sponsors such as Offices of Diversity, this background in depth had not been explored--until now. Discoveries have caused substantial revisions to recommendations for common reading programs. [For the previous edition, "Beach Books: 2014-2016. What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read outside Class?," see ED580914.]

A new movement in American higher education aims to transform the teaching of civics. This report is a study of what that movement is, where it came from, and why Americans should be concerned. What we call the "New Civics" redefines civics as progressive political activism. Rooted in the radical program of the 1960s' New Left, the New Civics presents itself as an up-to-date version of volunteerism and good works. Though camouflaged with soft rhetoric, the New Civics, properly understood, is an effort to repurpose higher education. The New Civics seeks above all to make students into enthusiastic supporters of the New Left's dream of "fundamentally transforming" America. The transformation includes de-carbonizing the economy, massively redistributing wealth, intensifying identity group grievance, curtailing the free market, expanding government bureaucracy, elevating international "norms" over American Constitutional law, and disparaging our common history and ideals. New Civics advocates argue among themselves which of these transformations should take precedence, but they agree that America must be transformed by "systemic change" from an unjust, oppressive society to a society that embodies social justice. The New Civics hopes to accomplish this by teaching students that a good citizen is a radical activist, and it puts political activism at the center of everything that students do in college, including academic study, extra-curricular pursuits, and off-campus ventures. New Civics builds on "service-learning," which is an effort to divert students from the classroom to vocational training as community activists. By rebranding itself as "civic engagement," service-learning succeeded in capturing nearly all the funding that formerly supported the old civics. In practice this means that instead of teaching college students the foundations of law, liberty, and self-government, colleges teach students how to organize protests, occupy buildings, and stage demonstrations. These are indeed forms of "civic engagement," but they are far from being a genuine substitute for learning how to be a full participant in our republic. New Civics has still further ambitions. Its proponents want to build it into every college class regardless of subject. The effort continues without so far drawing much critical attention from the public. This report aims to change that. In addition to our history of the New Civics movement and its breakthrough moment when it was endorsed by President Obama, we provide case studies of four universities: the University of Colorado, Boulder (CU-Boulder), Colorado State University in Fort Collins (CSU), the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley (UNC), and the University of Wyoming in Laramie (UW). We make four recommendations to state legislators across the country: (1) Mandate a course in traditional American civics as a graduation requirement at all colleges and universities that receive public funding. If the institution itself is unwilling or unable to offer such a course, students must be permitted without penalty to meet the requirement by taking a qualified civics course at another institution; (2) Establish a public body to set the guidelines for the required civics course, which should at a minimum teach the history, nature, and functions of our institutions of self-government, and which should aim to foster commitment to our form of self-government. The public body should also be charged with reviewing and approving civics textbooks to be used in these courses; (3) Require that the traditional civics requirement be met only through classroom instruction. Service learning, civic engagement, or analogous extra-curricular activities will not be accepted as a substitute, supplement, or alternative; and (4) End funding for service-learning and civic engagement programs and bureaucracies. The following are appended: (1) The New Civics Infrastructure; (2) Sample Civics Syllabi; (3) Civic Literacy; (4) Alternate Civic Activity and Community Partners; (5) Glossary; (6) University of Colorado, Boulder; (7) Colorado State University; (8) University of Northern Colorado; and (9) University of Wyoming. Contains an index. [Contributions to this report were provided by Ashley Thorne. The Anschutz Foundation provided major support for the making of "Making Citizens."]

Social media and user-generated content (UGC) are increasingly important features of journalistic work in a number of different ways. However, their use presents major challenges, not least because information posted on social media is not always reliable and therefore its veracity needs to be checked before it can be considered as fit for use in the reporting of news. We report on the results of a series of in-depth ethnographic studies of journalist work practices undertaken as part of the requirements gathering for a prototype of a social media verification 'dashboard' and its subsequent evaluation. We conclude with some reflections upon the broader implications of our findings for the design of tools to support journalistic work., Comment: CHI 2017, best paper award

This document extends the National Association of Scholars' (NAS's) critique of the College Board from Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH) to Advanced Placement European History (APEH). The College Board distorts APEH in the same way that it distorted the first version of APUSH. The traditional history of Europe tells how Europeans, uniquely, articulated the ideals of freedom, put them into practice, and created the modern world. APEH's leftist skew transforms the history of Europe into a story of a generic modernization process that turned Europe into a secular, well-governed welfare state. This skew disserves American high school students by presenting a badly distorted history of Europe that ignores or minimizes the parts of Europe's history that contradict its progressive narrative. Throughout this report, lists of topics missing from the APEH framework are provided to illustrate APEH's exclusion of key themes and subject areas from its curriculum. A large number of missing subjects make clear the scale and the distorting character of APEH's omissions. However, the range of topics and significant events is too large to permit a truly comprehensive approach. The point in noting so many omissions is not that they all should be corrected in detail, but that APEH should change its examination to include whole categories of history that it currently neglects. This report focuses primarily on the substance of APEH's distortions of European history and secondarily on how APEH's framework gets rid of most reasons to study the subject. Recommendations for revising APEH are included.

Hundreds of American colleges and universities continue to assign a summer reading to entering freshmen--typically one book, which the students are asked to read outside their courses. Many institutions embed the common reading in a larger program of campus activities: typically, they invite the common reading author to help open the academic year by speaking on campus at convocation. The book usually is chosen by a committee or by student vote, although occasionally by presidential or decanal fiat. The book sometimes is associated with a larger school theme for the academic year, such as Hesston College's (Kansas) "Be the Change: Caring that Matters." On other occasions it is associated with an administrative sponsor within the university, such as its Office of Diversity, and thus is selected to promote that sponsor's institutional mandate. Colleges devote substantial administrative resources to supporting the common reading programs: librarians write reading guides and publish them on the library web site, the common reading programs themselves usually devote several pages of their websites to their latest selection and promote the reading through social media, and the school sponsors lectures and other related events throughout the academic year. Most colleges see the key purpose of a common reading program as fostering community on campus and student activism in the outside world. Many also declare that common reading is important because it sets academic expectations, begins conversations, and encourages critical thinking, but these goals are meant to be achieved within the matrix of community and activism. Although there are several databases of common reading assignments, the annual Beach Books reports by the National Association of Scholars are the most comprehensive. Beach Books is the only series that categorizes the books according to their main subjects and track trends in genres, publication dates, and additional themes. This study covers more than 350 colleges and universities for the academic years 2014-2015 and 2015-16. Presented are the results of research in terms of findings, facts, characteristics, and recommendations. [For the previous edition, "Beach Books: 2013-2014. What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside Class?," see ED558530.]

From Harry Potter to American Horror Story, fanfiction is extremely popular among young people. Sites such as Fanfiction.net host millions of stories, with thousands more posted each day. Enthusiasts are sharing their writing and reading stories written by others. Exactly how does a generation known more for videogame expertise than long-form writing become so engaged in reading and writing in these communities? Via a nine-month ethnographic investigation of fanfiction communities that included participant observation, interviews, a thematic analysis of 4,500 reader reviews and an in-depth case study of a discussion group, we found that members of fanfiction communities spontaneously mentor each other in open forums, and that this mentoring builds upon previous interactions in a way that is distinct from traditional forms of mentoring and made possible by the affordances of networked publics. This work extends and develops the theory of distributed mentoring. Our findings illustrate how distributed mentoring supports fanfiction authors as they work to develop their writing skills. We believe distributed mentoring holds potential for supporting learning in a variety of formal and informal learning environments.

The shallow water equations provide a useful analogue of the fully compressible Euler equations since they have similar characteristics: conservation laws, inertia-gravity and Rossby waves and a (quasi-) balanced state. In order to obtain realistic simulation results, it is desirable that numerical models have discrete analogues of these properties. Two prototypical examples of such schemes are the 1981 Arakawa and Lamb (AL81) C-grid total energy and potential enstrophy conserving scheme, and the 2007 Salmon (S07) Z-grid total energy and potential enstrophy conserving scheme. Unfortunately, the AL81 scheme is restricted to logically square, orthogonal grids; and the S07 scheme is restricted to uniform square grids. The current work extends the AL81 scheme to arbitrary non-orthogonal polygonal grids and the S07 scheme to arbitrary orthogonal spherical polygonal grids in a manner that allows both total energy and potential enstrophy conservation, by combining Hamiltonian methods (work done by Salmon, Gassmann, Dubos and others) and Discrete Exterior Calculus (Thuburn, Cotter, Dubos, Ringler, Skamarock, Klemp and others). Detailed results of the schemes applied to standard test cases are deferred to Part 2 of this series of papers.

Young people worldwide are participating in ever-increasing numbers in online fan communities. Far from mere shallow repositories of pop culture, these sites are accumulating significant evidence that sophisticated informal learning is taking place online in novel and unexpected ways. In order to understand and analyze in more detail how learning might be occurring, we conducted an in-depth nine-month ethnographic investigation of online fanfiction communities, including participant observation and fanfiction author interviews. Our observations led to the development of a theory we term distributed mentoring, which we present in detail in this paper. Distributed mentoring exemplifies one instance of how networked technology affords new extensions of behaviors that were previously bounded by time and space. Distributed mentoring holds potential for application beyond the spontaneous mentoring observed in this investigation and may help students receive diverse, thoughtful feedback in formal learning environments as well., Comment: 14 pages, to be published in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 2016