Kaleidoscope has proved most helpful, Sternberg said, in helping admissions officers choose among the upper middle group of applicants. He noted that the mean SAT scores of the incoming freshman class at Tufts have improved every year since Kaleidoscope was introduced, and so has student body diversity. In the first year of its implementation, for the Class of 2011, Tufts admitted 30 percent more African Americans and 15 percent more Latinos than the year before. Today, people of color represent about 26 percent of the undergraduate student body of 5,000.

Melinda Burns reviews Robert Sternberg’s book, College Admissions for the 21st Century.

As Burns explains, Kaleidoscope is an extra section on the Tufts college application, a voluntary take-home test that about two-thirds of prospective students elect to complete. It measures creativity and critical thinking skills in addition to grades (which can be inflated) and standardized test scores (which have a strong class bias).

The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe. There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom.

So says New York Times columnist David Brooks in his column The Medium Is the Medium (log-in required).

Free books help kids cultivate a nerd identity which helps keep them from falling behind over the summer? Well if it works.

And so amid all the lists (even our own), to round out the year, we offer a new installment of our annual “Year in Reading” series – an anti-list, as it were. Acknowledging that few readers, if any, read exclusively newly published books, we’ve asked our regular contributors and distinguished guests to name, from all the books they read this year, the one(s) that meant the most to them, regardless of publication date. Grouped together, these considerations, squibs, and essays will be a chronicle of reading and good books from every era. We hope you find in them seeds that will help your year in reading in 2010 be a fruitful one.

For The Millions‘ A Year in Reading 2009, the site asked the following seven authors what book(s) touched their hearts this year.

• Hari Kunzru, author of My Revolutions
• Julie Klam, author of Please Excuse My Daughter
• Phillip Lopate, author of Notes on Sontag
• Stephen Dodson, coauthor of Uglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit, proprietor of Languagehat.
• Mark Sarvas, author of Harry, Revised, proprietor of The Elegant Variation.
• Diane Williams, author of It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature, editor of NOON
• Jonathan Lethem, author of Chronic City

Also see: The Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far): An Introduction

What books did you read and love this year (regardless of publication date)? My vote goes to The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

With this book, PM and blogger Meri Williams takes readers through the process of project management. Chapter one gives an overview of the discipline and makes a case for its necessity. Chapters 2 – 5 cover a typical project life cycle: discovery, initiation, planning, change management, and closing a project.

It’s not just a book about managing projects, however. Williams puts an emphasis on management as we typically think about the word. Interpersonal skills and communication are consistent themes in each chapter. Williams reminds us in one chapter that not everyone is a techno-savvy e-mail or instant messaging junkie. In another, she points out that we should clear convey our definition of “complete.”

At just over 200 pages (including the index), The Principles of Project Management is by no means a definitive look at the practice. You won’t become a Certified Project Management Professional after reading it.

What Williams has achieved, however, is a fantastic step-by-step guide to making your next project run smoothly.