Education in Credo: Terms and Concepts

Process, beginning at birth, of developing intellectual capacity, skills, and social awareness, especially by instruction. In its more restricted sense, the term refers to the process of imparting literacy, numeracy, and a generally accepted body of knowledge. Any process, either formal or informal, that shapes the potential of a maturing organism. Informal education results from the constant effect of environment, and its strength in shaping values and habits can not be overestimated.

From Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
A branch of philosophy concerned with virtually every aspect of the educational enterprise. It significantly overlaps other, more mainstream branches (especially epistemology and ethics, but even logic and metaphysics).

From Gale Encyclopedia of Children's Health
Multicultural education is a philosophy and methodology aiming to replace dominant cultural paradigms in the classroom with a multiplicity of views encompassing all students' cultural backgrounds. Multicultural education is essentially an effort to translate a pluralistic worldview into educational practices and theories. Thus a multicultural curriculum, unlike traditional programs, strives to present more than one perspective of a historical event or a cultural phenomenon.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Online training delivered to personal computers over the Internet, with the advantage that classes can be taken at any time and in any place, so that students are able to learn at their own pace.

Term commonly referring to institutions of pre-college formal education. It also properly includes colleges, universities, and many types of special training establishments.

From The Essentials of Philosophy and Ethics
Learning is the ‘acquisition of knowledge’, or perhaps the development of skills in the application of already existent knowledge.

From Key Concepts in Education
In schools, it usually means the full range of subjects taught, taken as a whole experience.

Inability to meet a certain minimum criterion of reading and writing skill.

Test that attempts to measure innate intellectual ability, rather than acquired ability.

In psychology, the general mental ability involved in calculating, reasoning, perceiving relationships and analogies, learning quickly, storing and retrieving information, using language fluently, classifying, generalizing, and adjusting to new situations.

From Key Concepts in Education
Most children learn to talk fairly easily. In contrast, learning to read and write is a laborious process. It is the ability to read and write which makes a person ‘literate’, with varying degrees of fluency.

From The Social Science Jargon-Buster
Pedagogy focuses on strategies, techniques, and approaches used to facilitate learning.

From The Concise Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science
Any use of students to coach or tutor one another is usually called “peer tutoring,” although when their ages differ, the students are not really members of the same peer group.

Government grants aimed at improving education for the children of low-income families by providing school tuition that can be used at public or private schools.

Professional preparation of teachers, usually through formal course work and practice teaching. Although the concept of teaching as a profession is fairly new, most teachers in industrialized nations today are college or university educated.