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Two reviews are presented of "The International Encyclopedia of Higher Education," which was edited by Asa S. Knowles. The encyclopedia contains articles on national systems of higher education of 198 countries and territories, 282 topical essays on international and cross-national issues, and 142 descriptions of study fields. Also included are about 700 short entries providing information on: educational associations, committees and other organizations, centers/institutes conducting research on higher education, documentation and information centers, and reports on higher education policy. Two of the 10 volumes are devoted to author, institution, and subject indexes, a list of acronyms, and a cross-referenced glossary of commonly used academic terms in English and other languages. Short bibliographies for each country, including largely English-language materials are also provided. The encyclopedia consists of approximately 1,300 entries by 588 authors from 69 countries. In the first review, Philip G. Altbach describes the encyclopedia's scope, evaluates the guide, and provides a state-of-the-art review on the status of the field of comparative higher education. Altbach closes with 6 specific suggestions for improving the encyclopedia: (1) disseminate national bibliographic data to the international audience; (2) reduce reliance on American work and become less parochial; (3) economize on production of the encyclopedia in various ways; (4) make group entries by category rather than alphabetically; (5) select more authors from outside U.S.; (6) emphasize comparative insights to national problems. The second review by Ulrich Teichler, addresses primarily the international scope of the encyclopedia and echoes several of the suggestions made by the first reviewer. (SW)

This document is a book review of "Bias in Mental Testing" by Arthur R. Jensen. Jensen discusses intelligence as a phenotypic construct. The problem of ethnic differences in phenotypic intelligence is emotionally charged, which makes rational consideration of the issues difficult. The reviewer disagrees with the author's predisposition to propose and stress genetic explanations for test bias, to the exclusion of other explanations, and disagrees with his account of the various tests of the Spearman hypothesis. The reviewer also disagrees with Jensen's test theory discussion and cites several statistical errors in the book. Jensen's use of first principal component and first principal factor without discrimination as an operational definition of the general factor is questioned. Despite the criticisms, the reviewer believes that the data presented are generally sound and that those that bear on test bias cannot easily be dismissed. (DWH)