Many countries strive to make postsecondary education maximally accessible to their citizens under the assumption that educated citizens boost innovation and leadership, resulting in social and economic benefits. However, attempts to increase access, especially in contexts of stagnant or diminishing financial support, can result in ever-increasing class sizes. Two aspects of large classes are extremely worrisome. First, economic and logistical constraints have led many such classes to devolve into settings characterized by lectures, readings and multiple-choice tests, thereby denying students experience and exercise with important transferable skills (e.g., critical thought, creative thought, self-reflective thought, expressive and receptive communication). Second, such classes are depicted as cold and impersonal, with little sense of community among students.
When it comes to assessment, there are enough perspectives, stakeholders, tools and methodologies to make your head spin. To be sure, despite the admirable goal of improving student learning by assessment, the trend toward greater accountability is often viewed as something that is imposed upon higher education institutions; infringing on an institution’s autonomy and stifling faculty members’ academic freedom without providing truly meaningful data to justify the additional workload it generates.
Meanwhile, others accept the fact that assessment is here to stay and strategies that, with careful planning, it’s entirely possible to design exactly the type of assessment systems you need to get precisely the type of information required for an accurate picture of learning outcomes.
Author of a new book on how family matters for college women's success argues that four-year public institutions are increasingly dependent on active -- and wealthy -- parents, and that can harm students with less-involved parents.
Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) occupy a unique position in teaching and learning in higher education. Typically, individuals arrive at graduate school already socialized into disciplinary ways of knowing. GTA pedagogical professional development offers opportunities for GTAs to engage with current “best practices” and different pedagogical ways of knowing, and to initiate new and innovative practices. Research has demonstrated that as content knowledge and expertise develop, experienced instructors do not always recognize the ways that their expertise (e.g., how they organize materials or knowledge) can interfere with student learning (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, & Norman, 2010). GTAs are therefore well positioned to scaffold learning for content novices such as undergraduate students. The teaching preparation and pedagogical development of GTAs is not just a resource to support learning; in fact, the teaching and instructional skills that GTAs acquire can be transferred to professional domains outside academia (Osborne, Carpenter, Burnett, Rolheiser, & Korpan, 2014; Rose, 2012). GTA professional development has never been just training to fulfill a particular niche or to achieve a singular goal such as teaching; however, the current post-secondary climate of accountability and quality enhancement does bring the goals and purposes of GTA professional development into view.
Internationally, a growing number of interprofessional education (IPE) offices are being established within academic institutions. However, few are applying educational improvement methodologies to evaluate and improve the inter- professional (IP) learning opportunities offered.
The University of Manitoba IPE Initiative was established in 2008 to facilitate the development of IP learn- ing opportunities for pre-licensure learners. The research question for this sec- ondary analysis was: what, if any, changes in the number and attributes of IP learning opportunities occurred in the academic year 2008–2009 compared to 2011–2012? The Points for Interprofessional Scoring (PIPES) tool was used to quantify the attributes of each IP learning opportunity. Most notably in 2012, eight (73%) of 11 IP learning opportunities achieved the highest PIPES score (> 55), compared to only four (36%) in 2009. The concept of the PIPES score is introduced as an educational improvement strategy and a potential predictor of achieving the desired educational outcome: collaborative competence.
Nous cherchons à mesurer l’effi cience d’approches inductive ou déductive à court et à long terme sur l’apprentissage par des élèves de 1re secondaire de savoirs relatifs au complément du nom. Dans le cadre de cette expérimentation, les résultats montrent que l’approche déductive permet une appropriation signifi cativement plus grande, mais uniquement pour des aspects morphologiques. Par ailleurs, il semble que l’approche pédagogique ait moins d’incidence sur l’apprentissage que l’effet-enseignant, peu importe l’approche préconisée par l’enseignant. La discussion des résultats portera sur l’importance
de différentes variables de l’intervention éducative autre que l’approche pédagogique. Mots clés : approche déductive, approche inductive, approches pédagogiques, complément du nom, effet-enseignant, grammaire.
We attempt to measure the ef ficiency of inductive or deductive approaches to short and long-term learning of knowledge about the “complément du nom” by French as a fi rst language secondary 1 students. Our results show that, in the context of our experiment, the deductive approach allows greater appropriation of morphological aspects. Moreover, it seems that the
pedagogical approach has less impact on the learning than the teacher effect, regardless of the approach used. We will discuss our results in putting forward the importance of some conditions of the educative intervention. Keywords: complément du nom, deductive approach, grammar, inductive approach, pedagogical approaches, learning, teacher effect.
Questions are a common way for teachers to check for understanding, right? The answer we’re looking for is "yes." Who hasn't questioned a group of students to determine whether or not they understood the content? Unfortunately, not all questions are created equally. We propose four over-arching questions that can be used to scaffold students' thinking about complex texts. You can tailor these questions to any book that your students are reading:
What does the text say?
How does the text work?
What does the text mean?
What does the text inspire you to do?
In the Fall of 2011, the Toronto School of Theology (TST) within the University of Toronto (UofT) underwent a rigorous quality assurance review of its academic programs by its theological accrediting agency in North America, the Association of Theological Schools (ATS). In all, twenty-one scholars from university-related or free-standing accredited theological institutions with an intimate knowledge of North American theological education—in teams of three, one for each of the six member-institutions of the Toronto School of Theology, and one for the TST consortium itself—strongly affirmed the quality of the programs, including the Doctor of Theology (ThD) research degree program.
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.
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.
More than half of black college students fail to complete thier degree work - for reasons that have little to do with innate ability or environmental conditions. The problem, a social psychologist argues, is that they are undervalued, in ways that are sometimes subtle and somes not.
Background/Context: Past research has examined many factors that contribute to the blackwhite achievement gap. While researchers have shown that teacher perceptions of students academic ability is an important contributing factor to the gap, little research has explored the extent to which teacher perceptions of students academic ability are sustained over time or the extent to which teacher ratings of students social and behavioral skills are related to their perceptions of academic ability. The current study focuses on whether teacher perceptions of students academic ability and social and behavioral skills differ by student race and the extent to which ratings at the beginning of the school year explain racial differences in perceptions of academic ability at the end of the year.
Purpose: There are two research questions addressed in this study: (1) To what extent do kindergarten teachers rate black and white students academic ability and social and behavioral skills differently? And (2) to what extent do test scores, fall teacher perceptions of students academic ability, and social and behavioral skills explain racial differences in teacher evaluations of students academic ability in the spring of kindergarten?
Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race brings together work from across several subfields of linguistics and offers a complex, global examination of the connections between race and language. As a whole, this anthology seeks to make sense of our historical moment, a unique time in which “we are constantly orienting to race while at the same time denying the evidence that shows the myriad ways that American society is fundamentally structured by it” (p. 3). This historical moment was concretized in the national consciousness with the election and presidency of Barack Obama. For Smitheran and Alim, Obama’s linguistic choices as he developed a social and racial public identity served as a starting point for their theorizing of race and language, which they began in their first book, Articulate While Being Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the US (2012). In Raciolinguistics, an expanded line of inquiry goes beyond the case of Obama to ask, “what does it mean to speak as a racialized subject?” This question became a topic for several conferences and scholarly movements at UCLA and Stanford, incorporating theoretical threads from race and ethnic studies as well as anthropology. In this text, however, the authors embrace a unique analytical approach, studying race as a sociolinguistic construction on an international scale.
One of the most frequent questions faculty ask about the flipped classroom model is: “How do you encourage students to actually do the pre-class work and come to class prepared?”
This is not really a new question for educators. We’ve always assigned some type of homework, and there have always been students who do not come to class ready to learn. However, the flipped classroom conversation has launched this question straight to the top of the list of challenges faculty face when implementing this model in their classrooms. By design, the flipped model places more emphasis on the importance of homework or pre-class work to ensure that in-person class time is effective, allowing the instructor and the students to explore higher levels of application and analysis together. If students are unprepared, it leads to frustration, stress, and anxiety for everyone.
One of the most frequent questions faculty ask about the flipped classroom model is: “How do you encourage students to actually do the pre-class work and come to class prepared?”
This is not really a new question for educators. We’ve always assigned some type of homework, and there have always been students who do not come to class ready to learn. However, the flipped classroom conversation has launched this question straight to the top of the list of challenges faculty face when implementing this model in their classrooms. By design, the flipped model places more emphasis on the importance of homework or pre-class work to ensure that in-person class time is effective, allowing the instructor and the students to explore higher levels of application and analysis together. If students are unprepared, it leads to frustration, stress, and anxiety for everyone.
One of the most frequent questions faculty ask about the flipped classroom model is: “How do you encourage students to actually do the pre-class work and come to class prepared?”
Engagement in a continuous, systematic, and well-documented student learning assessment process has been gaining importance throughout higher education. Indeed, implementation of such a process is typically a requirement for obtaining and maintaining accreditation. Because faculty need to embrace learning assessment in order for it to be successful, any misconceptions about the nature of assessment need to be dispelled. One way to accomplish that is to “rebrand” (i.e., change perceptions) the entire process.
Lori Ernsperger's Recognize, Respond, Report: Preventing and Addressing Bullying of Students with Special relevant. The book addresses research-based strategies for combating bullying as it applies to students with N deiesdasb iilsi ttiiems ewlyh oa nadre roaftthene ro dviesrtliollos ktehde ianv tahilea bwlied elirt erreasteuarrec hin oton ab uclolyhiensgi vaen dst rparteevgeyn tsihoanp.e Tdh bey a huethr oorw dno eexs pneorti epnucrep oarntd t oe xipnterrotdisuec aes n ae w30 s-tyreaatre gvieetse rbaunt of public schools and academia.
Lori Ernsperger's Recognize, Respond, Report: Preventing and Addressing Bullying of Students with Special relevant. The book addresses research-based strategies for combating bullying as it applies to students with N deiesdasb iilsi ttiiems ewlyh oa nadre roaftthene ro dviesrtliollos ktehde ianv tahilea bwlied elirt erreasteuarrec hin oton ab uclolyhiensgi vaen dst rparteevgeyn tsihoanp.e Tdh bey a huethr oorw dno eexs pneorti epnucrep oarntd t oe xipnterrotdisuec aes n ae w30 s-tyreaatre gvieetse rbaunt of public schools and academia.