Since the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) was launched, it has completed and published more than 140 research studies – and funded dozens more that are currently underway – that explore a wide range of trends and issues involving Ontario’s postsecondary system. Drawing mainly from HEQCO’s own research, this @Issue paper:
• Describes how the definition of student success has gradually broadened at
Ontario colleges and universities;
• Summarizes some of the underlying institutional and student population factors that also impact
on most current measures of student success;
• Provides broad observations about some recent findings as they relate to the awareness,
utilization and impact of various student service, course-based and other initiatives designed to
promote student success;
• Recommends what can be measured – as well as how and what outcomes can be expected – when it
comes to initiatives and interventions designed to improve student success.
Culturally authoritative texts such as Text Revision of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual-IV [DSM-IVTR](
American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2004) describe literate impossibility for individuals with disability labels associated
with severe developmental disabilities. Our qualitative research challenges the assumptions of perpetual subliteracy
authoritatively embedded within the DSM-IV-TR (APA, 2004). U. S. education policy also confronts, at least rhetorically, assumed
hopelessness with reading and writing remediation in schools. Most recently, the federal government has directed national
concern toward issues of literacy acquisition and child failure through the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). One
description of NCLB provided by the U.S. Department of Education (2004) suggested universal literacy was a primary objective.
However, our research suggests that the NCLB statute appears to emphasize a restrictive standardization as the route to
universal literacy that would in fact leave out many people with severe developmental disabilities.
The plight of Concordia professor Homa Hoodfar in Iran has once again brought up the question of what universities can do to protect scholars detained abroad.
Barely a day had passed since Alexander Sodiqov had been jailed in Central Asia and his colleague Edward Schatz was already mulling a public campaign to bring Mr. Sodiqov home. “Right away, one of the things we wanted to do was start a petition,” said Dr. Schatz, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Mr. Sodiqov, a doctoral student working with Dr. Schatz, was detained in Tajikistan for nearly three months in 2014.
The purpose of the lecture was to pose the question whether education is possible today. The author begins by contrasting two prevalent responses to the question: (1) that it is obviously possible since we can see all around us teachers and students working in classrooms, and (2) that it is obviously not possible because the educational system has been subverted to serve the ends of a global economic order. The author argues that while there is evidence to support both responses, they dismiss, in effect, the question of education’s possibility and thus undermine its authentic enactment. The article describes an approach to keeping the question open and in public view.
Two weeks ago, I received a rape threat in my campus office.
I am an academic, an instructor of political science, a researcher, and an administrator, and I received an anonymous phone call describing in explicit and vulgar detail exactly how and where the man on the phone would rape me.
The police were called, my phone number was removed from the university website, and I have taken steps to remain safe in my office, but the vulnerability remains.
he vulnerability. I was made to feel vulnerable in my office — my professional space — which is perhaps the one place in my life where I feel most empowered and assertive.
As I sat in my office the next day, I wondered how many of my male colleagues have received an anonymous rape threat on their office phones. As a woman in academe, I am held to the same standards as my male counterparts, and yet I am also being threatened with sexual violence while I am working. Just add that to the list of things female academics must deal with, all while still teaching, publishing, and serving their departments and universities.
Abstract
This review examines recent theoretical and empirical developments in the leadership literature, beginning with topics that are currently re-ceiving attention in terms of research, theory, and practice. We begin by examining authentic leadership and its development, followed by work that takes a cognitive science approach. We then examine new-genre leadership theories, complexity leadership, and leadership that is shared, collective, or distributed. We examine the role of relationships through our review of leader member exchange and the emerging work on followership. Finally, we examine work that has been done on sub-stitutes for leadership, servant leadership, spirituality and leadership, cross-cultural leadership, and e-leadership. This structure has the ben-efit of creating a future focus as well as providing an interesting way to examine the development of the field. Each section ends with an identi-fication of issues to be addressed in the future, in addition to the overall integration of the literature we provide at the end of the article.
The focus of this project is on the assessment of transferable skills, and specifically resilience. Resilience has been defined as “the capacity of the person, family, or community to prevent, minimize, overcome, or thrive in spite of negative or challenging circumstances” (Wagnild & Young, 1993). In this report, Social Research and Demonstration Corporation (SRDC) investigates the most appropriate measures to assess resilience as a learning outcome of Ontario’s postsecondary education (PSE) system. The long-term aim is to support the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) in its efforts to determine the role of PSE in enhancing resilience as a transferable skill.
Students don’t always like working in groups. Ann Taylor, an associate professor of chemistry at Wabash College, had a class that was particularly vocal in their opposition. She asked for their top 10 reasons why students don’t want to work in groups and they offered this list (which I’ve edited slightly).
For many years, critics of the SAT have cited a verbal question involving the word "regatta" as an example of how the test may favor wealthier test-takers, who also are more likely to be white. It's been a long time since the regatta question was used -- and the College Board now has in place a detailed process for testing all questions and potential ques questions that may favor one group of students over another.
Background/Context: Despite burgeoning racial and ethnic heterogeneity within the United States, many students grow up in racially
homogeneous schools and neighborhoods. This lack of interracial interaction appears to play a substantial role in shaping students racial attitudes and world views upon entering college.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The aim of the study was to examine the relationships among multiple forms of precollege exposure to racial/ethnic diversity and racial attitudes (e.g., perceptions of workplace discrimination) upon entering college.
Background/Context: There is little question that education is changing, seemingly quickly and in some cases dramatically. The mechanisms through which individuals learn are shifting from paper-based ones to electronic media. Simultaneously, the nature of what individuals must learn is evolving, in good part due to an exponential accumulation of knowledge and of technology to access, share, and exploit that knowledge. Finally, how education is organized, offered, and administered is undergoing transformation, most apparentlybut not onlyin higher education. With potentially seismic changes in the mechanisms,
nature, and organization of education must also come changes in educational assessment.
Quiet at School, a new book by Robert J. Coplan and Kathleen Moritz Rudasill, illuminates the complexity of a teacher's work and provides practical strategies for teachers to positively impact the educational experience of shy children. The book begins by helping the reader understand what constitutes shyness and why it is critical that teachers are thinking about how they respond. By clearly describing what shyness is and what it isn’t, the authors dispel common misconceptions and, importantly, resist positioning shyness as a weakness. Instead, they illustrate potential positive and negative outcomes associated with this trait.
Many proponents of online education have speculated that the digital learning environment might be a meritocracy, where students are judged not on their race or gender, but on the comments they post.
A study being released today by the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford University, however, finds that bias appears to be strong in online course discussions.
The study found that instructors are 94 percent more likely to respond to discussion forum posts by white male students than by other students. The authors write that they believe their work is the first to demonstrate with a large pool that the sort of bias that concerns many educators in face-to-face instruction is also present in online education.
The primary factors that shape the health of cal treatments or the conditions they experience. Th conditions have come to be known as the social determinants of health.The importance to health of living conditions was established in the mid-1800s and has been enshrined in Canadian government policy documents since the mid-1970s. In fact, Canadian contributions to the social determinants of health concept have been so extensive as to make Canada a “health promotion powerhouse” in the eyes of the international health community. Recent reports from Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, the Canadian Senate, and the Public Health Agency of Canada continue to document the importance of the social determinants of health.
At a time of increasingly complex societal challenges and tight fiscal constraints, all participants agreed that social finance offers an opportunity for Canada to mobilize new sources of capital to generate positive social and financial returns. Despite recent advancements in the field of social finance, Canada remains in the early adoption stage and has yet to reach a stage of maturity. Participants agreed that transformational change takes time and commitment; as such, it should such change, reporting that there is increasingly more openness to innovation and more permission to think differently.
The Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW) is an internationally recognized, peer-based, educational development program involving 24 hours of structured intensive instruction designed to strengthen instructors’ skills in planning, teaching, feedback and critical reflection through a student-focussed process. For over 30 years, the ISW has been offered at more than 100 institutions worldwide as a method of facilitating the development of student-centred, reflective instructors (Day, 2004). Although based on best pedagogical principles for teaching adult learners (Day, 2005), little empirical research has been performed to assess the impact on faculty of participating in the ISW (Macpherson, 2011). Research performed to
date has typically shown that individuals who participate in this workshop report that it is transformative to their teaching in the classroom (Macpherson, 2011). The present study sought to extend these findings by conducting a pre-post analysis of ISW and non-ISW participants. The goal of this research was to investigate the influence of the ISW on developing a student-centred approach to teaching in university and college faculty.
This research report represents the first phase of a multi-year collaborative research initiative of the Association of Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology of Ontario.1 The initiative is designed to develop a cohesive picture of the pathways from secondary school to college. The major purpose of this phase of the research was to identify secondary school students’
perceptions of Ontario colleges and of college as a possible post-secondary educational destination for them, and to determine the factors that have shaped these perceptions. A second purpose was to identify secondary school student achievement patterns, graduation rates and course enrolments in order to consider their influence on current and future college enrolments.
In order to redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission makes the following calls to action.
Canadian higher education has in the past few years succumbed to a mood of despair and defensiveness. Until just a few years ago, it was characterized by a confident, forward-looking energy, secure in the notion that it was the preeminent engine of national development. Since then, we have seen our relative salaries decline; our plant, equipment, and libraries erode; our jobs threatened; and the value of our contribution to Canadian society severely questioned. A number of explanations could be given for this dramatic reversal of our fortunes, with emphasis ranging from demographics to poor public relations, from economic stagnation to short-sighted political manoeuvering. One popular explanation is that Canadian higher education is now (justly) paying off debts it incurred in a Faustian compact with homo economicus. We financed our tremendous growth of yesteryear, this explanation purports, on promises of contributing substantially (or worse, by ourselves, delivering) unprecedented economic growth and industrial expansion. Now that industrial expansion has come to a standstill (and even declined), the primary case for generous funding of higher education is at best called into question, and at worst severely undermined.
The line between collaboration and cheating is fuzzy. It’s still clear at the edges, but messy in the middle. When students are working in groups, searching for a solution to a problem, looking through possible answers for the best one, or sorting out material to include in a presentation, that’s collaboration. When one student in the group solves the problem and everyone else copies the answer, that’s cheating. When one student fails to deliver material she or he’s been assigned and the rest of the group covers, that’s cheating.