Educators view critical thinking as an essential skill, yet it remains unclear how effectively it is being taught in college. This meta-analysis synthesizes research on gains in critical thinking skills and attitudinal dispositions over various time frames in college. The results suggest that both critical thinking skills and dispositions improve substantially over a normal college experi-ence. Furthermore, analysis of curriculum-wide efforts to improve critical thinking indicates that they do not necessarily produce incremental long-term gains. We discuss implications for the future of critical thinking in edu-cation.
KEYWORDS: critical thinking, college students, changes in critical thinking
In the mid-1980s as a further education lecturer I was mocked by some more traditional colleagues for using “lantern slides”, their term for the then newfangled technology of the overhead projector, or OHP. These Luddites strutted the corridors with coffee-tinted sheaves of notes stuffed untidily under their arms. They would sweep into the classroom, fling their pencil-written papyri on the lectern and, without so much as a glance at their students, commence reading out loud.
Perhaps we in higher ed should consider motivating students to graduate by focusing more on what they have left to do than what they have already done, argues Alexandra W. Logue. July 26,
One of the biggest differences between the experience I had as a student and the experience students have in my classroom has to do with assignments. When I was a student, assignments often had no discernible relationship to what we were doing in class. Oh, we would have to write about a text we read for class. But once the assignment was given out, we were generally on our own — there were no opportunities to work on it in class, to reflect on the skills the assignment asked us to practice, to share and workshop our ideas with our classmates.
The courses I teach are different. A sequence of major assignments form the backbone of the semester. Almost everything we do in class is explicitly linked to one or more of those assignments. We break them down into stages, work on them collaboratively, and discuss the challenges students might face along the way. Like many teachers, I design assignments not just to assess performance, but also to give students opportunities to practice and develop important skills.
Audio, visual, textual—most people are willing and eager to identify themselves as a certain type of learner. And it follows pretty quickly that they learn better and faster when teachers approach a lesson in their “style.” Based on that logic, many school districts have poured money into training and materials to help teachers tailor their lessons to the various learning styles of their students. But haste makes waste, write Harold Pashler of the University of California, San Diego; Mark McDaniel of Washing-ton University, St. Louis; Doug Rohrer of the University of South Florida; and Robert A. Bjork of the University of California, Los Ange-les. There just isn’t sufficient evidence to support customizing education in this way.
Ice crystallized on the windshield, then a tire burst on the way to school, making you late. By the time you arrived, the computer (with the video clip and presentation cued up) froze. Minutes later, Jason pulled the fire alarm while you tried to catch up on parent emails. During lunch duty, a student was punched in the nose. Your nose is stuffy while you explain to the principal right before an IEP meeting why your plans haven't been submitted yet. The day trudges along. . . At last, the final bell rings, and in your first quiet moment of the day, thoughts of leaving the teaching profession suddenly seem, well, right.
It's that moment when you want to say, "I quit!"
While much literature has considered feedback and professional growth in formative peer reviews of teaching, there has been little empirical research conducted on these issues in the context of summative peer reviews. This ar- ticle explores faculty members’ perceptions of feedback practices in the summative peer review of teaching and reports on their understandings of why constructive feedback is typically non-existent or unspecific in summative reviews. Drawing from interview data
with 30 tenure-track professors in a research-intensive Canadian university, the findings indicated that reviewers rarely gave feedback to the candidates, and when they did, comments were typically vague and/or focused on the positive. Feedback, therefore, did not contribute to professional growth in teaching. Faculty members suggested that feedback was limited because of the following: the high-stakes nature of tenure, the demands for research productivity, lack of pedagogical expertise among academics, non-existent criteria for evaluating teaching, and the artificiality of peer reviews. In this article I argue that when it comes to summative reviews, elements of academic culture, especially the value placed on collegiality, shape feedback practices in important ways.
While much literature has considered feedback and professional growth in formative peer reviews of teaching, there has been little empirical research conducted on these issues in the context of summative peer reviews. This article explores faculty members’ perceptions of feedback practices in the summative peer review of teaching and reports on their understandings of why constructive feedback is typically non-existent or unspecific in summative reviews. Drawing from interview data with 30 tenure-track professors in a research-intensive Canadian university, the findings indicated that reviewers rarely gave feedback to the candidates, and when they did, comments were typically vague and/or focused on the positive. Feedback, therefore, did not contribute to professional growth in teaching. Faculty members suggested that feedback was limited because of the following: the high-stakes nature of tenure, the demands for research productivity, lack of pedagogical expertise
among academics, non-existent criteria for evaluating teaching, and the artificiality of peer reviews. In this article I argue that when it comes to summative reviews, elements of academic culture, especially the value placed on collegiality, shape feedback practices in important ways.
Administrators at many colleges and universities have had online courses at their institutions for many years, now. One of the hidden challenges about online courses is that they tend to be observed and evaluated far less frequently than their face-to-face course counterparts. This is party due to the fact that many of us administrators today never taught online courses ourselves when we were teaching. This article provides six "secrets" to performing meaningful observations and evaluations of online teaching, including how to use data analytics, avoid biases, and produce useful results even if observers have never taught online themselves.
The educational benefits of embedding hands-on experience in higher education curriculum are widely recognized (Beard & Wilson, 2013). However, to optimize the learning from these opportunities, they need to be grounded in empirical learning theory. The purpose of this study was to examine the characteristics of internships in Ontario colleges and universities, and to assess
the congruence between the components of these internships and Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning framework. Information from 44 Ontario universities and colleges, including 369 internship program webpages and 77 internship course outlines, was analyzed. The findings indicated that internship programs overemphasize the practical aspect of the experience at the expense
of linking theory and practice. To optimize experiential education opportunities, recommendations include establishing explicit learning activities consistent with each experiential learning mode, including practice, reflection, connecting coursework and practical experience, and implementing creative ideas in practice.
There’s a lot of talk these days about evidence-based instructional practices, so much that I’ve gotten worried we aren’t thinking enough about what that means. Let me see if I can explain with an example.
Recently I’ve been trying to locate the evidence that supports quizzing, wondering if it merits the evidence-based label. Tracking down this evidence in our discipline-based research is challenging because although quizzing has been studied across our disciplines, it’s not easily searchable. My collection of studies is good, but I know it’s not complete. As you might suspect, the results are mixed; they are more positive than negative, but still, a significant number of researchers don’t
find that quizzes affect learning outcomes.
“Stereotype threat” is a well-known social psychological construct in which people live down or up to the expectations others have of them based their gender, race, age, or other such characteristics. As professors we are careful — or we should be — not to translate our personal beliefs about students’ capabilities into our expectations of how they will perform academically, but we rarely think about how students’ expectations of us affect our performance.
In particular, faculty who are women and/or members of racial minority groups run the risk of becoming stereotype threatened: feeling anxiety about whether they will either confirm or disprove students’ stereotypical beliefs.
If you don’t think students — or all people — have ideas about what a professor looks and sounds like, try this exercise: Ask a few people who don’t know you’re an academic to describe the “average” professor. Undoubtedly they will paint a picture of an older white male who may or may not be wearing a tweed jacket.
THE PAUCITY OF WOMEN IN SCIENCE HAS BEEN documented over and over again. A 2012 Report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology reported that a deficit of one million engineers and scientists will result in the United States if current rates of training in science, technology, math, and engineering (STEM) persist (President’s Council
of Advisors on Science and Technology, 2012). It’s not hard to see how this hurts the United States’ competitive position—particularly if women in STEM meet more gender bias in the U.S. than do women elsewhere, notably in India and China.
THE PAUCITY OF WOMEN IN SCIENCE HAS BEEN documented over and over again . A 2012 Report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology reported that a deficit of one million engineers and scientists will result in the United States if current rates of training in science, technology, math, and engineering (STEM) persist (President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, 2012) . It’s not hard to see how this hurts the United States’ competitive position—particularly if women in STEM meet more gender bias in the U .S . than do women elsewhere, notably in India and China .
The philosophical halls are ringing lately with an argument over the virtue of graduate-student publication. J. David Velleman, a professor of philosophy at New York University, started the clamor in July when he posted "The publication Emergency" on a philosophers’ blog, "The Daily
Nous."
Velleman makes a simple but radical two-part proposal:
First, philosophy journals "should adopt a policy of refusing to publish work by graduate students."
Second, to give teeth to the ban, Velleman suggests that philosophy departments "adopt a policy of
discounting graduate-student work in tenure-and-promotion reviews."
W e’ve all read the startling stories about lax standards in higher education. As faculty members, we’ve struggled with the growing expectation among undergraduates that a minor amount of work should be the norm for collegelevel courses. In their 2011 book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that half of the students in the study’s sample "had not taken a single course during the prior semester that required more than 20 pages of writing, and one-third hadn’t taken one that required even 40 pages of reading per week."
Tioga High School senior Emily Kennedy studies a child development college course online in Groveland, as part of
a collaboration with Columbia College.
The Early Childhood Education Report 2017 is the third assessment of provincial and territorial frameworks for early childhood education in Canada. Nineteen benchmarks, organized into five equally weighted categories, evaluate governance structures, funding levels, access, quality in early learning environments and the rigour of accountability mechanisms.
Results are populated from detailed provincial and territorial profiles developed by the researchers and reviewed by provincial and territorial officials. Researchers and officials co-determine the benchmarks assigned. We are pleased to welcome Nunavut and Yukon as new participants in this edition. ECEReport.ca includes the profiles for each jurisdiction, including the federal government, plus the methodology that shapes the report, references, charts and figures and materials from past reports.
Innovation cannot be taught like math, writing or even entrepreneurship, writes Deba Dutta. But it can be inculcated with the right skills, experiences and environments.
The past few years have ushered in more strident calls for accountability across institutions of higher learning. Various internal and external stakeholders are asking questions like "Are students learning what we want them to learn?" and "How do the students' scores from one institution compare to its peers?" As a result, more institutions are looking for new, more far-reaching ways to assess student learning and then use assessment findings to improve students' educational experiences.
However, as Trudy Banta notes in her article An Accountability Program Primer for Administrators, “just as simply weighing a pig will not make it fatter, spending millions simply to test college students is not likely to help them learn more.” (p. 6)
While assessing institutional effectiveness is a noble pursuit, measuring student learning is not always easy, and like so many things we try to quantify, there’s much more to learning than a number in a datasheet. As Roxanne Cullen and Michael Harris note in their article The Dash to Dashboards, “The difficulty we have in higher education in defining and measuring our outcomes
lies in the complexity of our business: the business of learning. A widget company or a fast-food chain has clearly defined goals and can usually pinpoint with fine accuracy where and how to address loss in sales or glitches in production or service. Higher education is being called on to be able to perform similar feats, but creating a graduate for the 21st century workforce is a very
different kind of operation.” (p. 10)
This special report Educational Assessment: Designing a System for More Meaningful Results features articles from Academic Leader, and looks at the assessment issue from a variety of different angles. Articles in the result include:
• The Faculty and Program-Wide Learning Outcome Assessment
• Assessing the Degree of Learner-Centeredness in a Department or Unit
• Keys to Effective Program-Level Assessment
• Counting Something Leads to Change in an Office or in a Classroom
• An Accountability Program Primer for Administrators
Whether you’re looking to completely change your approach to assessment, or simply improve the
efficacy of your current assessment processes, we hope this report will help guide your discussions
and eventual decisions.
Rob Kelly
Editor
Academic Leader