This chapter examines how the three most common types of engagement found among adolescents attending high-performing high schools relate to indicators of mental and physical health.
This paper examines whether intermediary bodies are useful in advancing government goals for quality and sustainability in higher education systems. It explores the evidence about intermediary bodies through case studies of England, Israel, New Zealand and the United States. It also treats the case of Ontario, whose best-known intermediary bodies have been the Ontario Council on University Affairs and the colleges’ Council of Regents.
The theoretical literature on intermediary bodies in higher education suggests that intermediary bodies are potentially useful actors in policy and administration. Many intermediary bodies were established to manage growth but in recent years have been reoriented to managing fixed or declining resources and flat or declining enrolments.
Outcomes‐based education (OBE), namely the emphasis in education systems on learning outcomes and their assessment, has had one of the largest and most significant impacts on postsecondary education (PSE) in recent decades. Not only does OBE present clear statements to describe students’ skills and abilities, it also provides the vehicle by which postsecondary institutions can assess and improve the quality of their programs and demonstrate the value of these programs to both employers and the general public.
Instructors of large classes must contend with numerous challenges, among them low student motivation. Research in evolutionary biology, echoed by work in other disciplines, suggests that aspects of the classroom incentive structure – such as grades, extra credit, and instructor and peer acknowledgment – may shape motivations to engage in studies and to collaborate with peers. Specifically, the way that incentives are distributed in relative quantity (the slope of competition; the proportion of benefits earned through performance relative to peers) and space (the scale of competition; the proportion of peers with whom one is competing) may affect strategies to cooperate or to compete with others.
Legal uncertainty is a topic often raised in discussing unresolved Aboriginal land claims, such as those in British Columbia. Mining and Aboriginal Rights in Yukon examines legal uncertainty on Aboriginal rights in a different way, and in an under-examined Northern context. We examine what we identify as growing legal uncer-tainty in Yukon. This topic is not one that would have been expected a few years ago. In Yukon, modern land claims agreements with 11 out of the territory’s 14 First Nations once seemed to have established a high degree of certainty on Aboriginal claims. This certainty was even seen as a significant advantage for Yukon in the global competition for mining investment.
Welland, Ont.-based Niagara College offers tourism, hospitality and business courses at its campus in Taif, which opened in 2014, while Ottawa's Algonquin College offers 10 programs, including business, accounting and electrical engineering technician, at a campus opened in 2013 in the city of Jazan.
The Local 242 OPSEU rep said faculty members are uncomfortable with the school's association in Saudi Arabia, a country with a "horrible" human rights record, he said. Ramkissoonsingh said staff has been against the Saudi expansion since day one, and have continued to feel uncomfortable as their course material is taught at the segregated campus.
Two years ago, Niagara College successfully bid to open a campus in Saudi Arabia. At the time, the school said they expected an annual injection of $8 million to the college budget, said Ramkissoonsingh.
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.
Faculty members at various institutions debate the pros and cons of shielding freshmen from themselves (or least their performance) in the form of "covered" or "shadow" grades on transcripts.
Can college students text and tweet their way to a better grade?
In “Mobile Phones in the Classroom: Examining the Effects of Texting, Twitter and Message Content on Student Learning,” Jeffrey H. Kuznekoff, assistant professor in the department of integrative studies at Miami University (Ohio) at Middletown, explores if texting, tweeting and note taking can be combined. The article [1] appears in the most recent edition of Communication Education, a journal of the National Communication Association.
For many faculty members, instructors, practitioners, administrators and policy makers, the language used to describe and discuss online and flexible learning is confusing. What on earth is a “flipped classroom”? What is the difference between “blended learning” and “fully online” learning? Why do some programs not have “instructors” but do have “mentors, coaches and guides”? It can be confusing.
Let’s look at the language of online and flexible learning and help understand what is being said when key terms are being used.
Multiculturalism is a huge part of the Canadian identity. We see it from coast to coast in the faces of our fellow citizens, a huge mosaic – not a melting pot, we proudly point out – of diversity from around the world.
In 1971, under the leadership of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, we became the first country in the world to officially adopt a multiculturalism policy. By so doing, Canada affirmed the value and dignity of all Canadian citizens. This policy became law in 1988, when Prime Minister Brian Mulroney enacted the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, ensuring, among other things, that every Canadian receives equal treatment by the government regardless of their racial or ethnic origins, their language, or their religious affiliation.
Attention now turns to the upcoming report of the fundamental science review panel chaired by David Naylor.
The Trudeau government tabled its second budget on March 22, promising to address economic challenges facing the country and cultivate a nimble workforce through investment in education and skills development. Among its many elements, the budget expands the Canada Student Loans and Grants program and earmarks $90 million over two years for Indigenous students. However, the budget included no new funding for the three major research granting councils – the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research – dismaying many in the research community.
Jobs paranoia is widespread in Canada. Elementary pupils are coming home after receiving the “job talk” from their teachers, typically emphasizing the importance of getting good grades so they can get into a high-quality university – rarely a college, a polytechnic institute or an apprenticeship program. Parents worry about enrolling their children in the “right” schools and academic programs. There is growing concern about the transition from school to work. News media, television programs and movies offer tales of underemployed university and college graduates, intense competition for decent jobs and chronic youth unemployment.
Ontario is reviewing its university funding model, an enrolment-based formula through which the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities distributes a $3.5B annual provincial operating grant to the province’s 20 publicly assisted universities.
We examined the existing model in our June 2015 paper The Ontario University Funding Model in Context. We observed that the model is a relatively small (27 %) component of total university system revenues. We concluded that this small slice of funding must be managed in a focussed and strategic way if it is to be effective in shaping behaviour towards desired provincial objectives (HEQCO, 2015).
The Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance is pleased to be presenting our first issue of “Habitats,” a series of case studies researched and written by Ontario university students. Municipal affairs are an important part of the student experience, affecting everything from how students live during their time at school, to how they get to class, to how they interact with their broader community environment. Such topics are always of great interest to students, and OUSA’s members have been eager to explore them in-depth. However, their very nature as local issues can make them difficult to examine in a broader context.
According to a new survey of more than 4,000 undergraduates at 10 community colleges across the nation, half of all community college students are struggling with food and/or housing insecurity. Fully 20 percent are hungry and 13 percent are homeless. These numbers are startling and indicate the need for a multi-pronged, comprehensive set of institutional, state, and local policies to alleviate the barriers presented by poverty, so as to improve educational success.
This paper seeks to address the systemic barriers that impact the ability of Aboriginal peoples to access, persist and succeed in post-secondary education. Given histories of discrimination and chronic underfunding of Aboriginal education at both the K-12 and post-secondary level, OUSA believes that action must be taken by all levels of government and institutions. This
is particularly pressing as recent figures have shown that the attainment gap for Aboriginal peoples1 may in fact be widening. OUSA affirms the importance of self-determination for Aboriginal peoples, and stresses that any policy intervention must be undertaken in direct partnership and consultation with Aboriginal communities.
Prior knowledge is essential for learning because it helps us make sense of new ideas and information. But when that prior knowledge is incomplete, confused, or flawed, it can create barriers to learning. Consider the following scenarios.
According to Statistics Canada, 25% of Canadian college students drop out of post-secondary training. Many instructors comment that college students are increasingly hard-pressed to keep up with assignments and readings. Would improving student performance through Essential Skills (ES) training enable students to become more effective, and therefore less likely to drop out? In January 2012, Douglas College recruited students into the National Framework for Essential Skills Research Project. In total, 143 students were tested using the Test of Workplace Essential Skills (TOWES) and Canadian Literacy Evaluation (CLE). Of these, almost two-thirds tested below the minimum Level 3 recommended for success in work, learning, and life. Since only those that scored a Level 2 in Document Use were eligible to participate in the project, 66 students were invited to take part in weekly study sessions. Of these, 37 students chose to participate. Following 10 weeks of study sessions, students were tested again. The results indicate that almost all the students moved positively within Level 2 and 75% moved from Level 2 to Level 3 or Level 2(3).
n 2005, for the first time in a half-century, the Government of Ontario made an investment of $6.2 billion into post-secondary education over five years that began a process of strengthening the Ontario higher education system. The Reaching Higher plan focused on areas in post-secondary education that were in dire need of attention after years of neglect: enhanced student financial assistance; increased enrolment and outreach to underrepresented groups; and improved accountability for student and public dollars.
While there have been large and measurable successes over the past five years of considerable commitment from the Ontario government, there are also areas where goals were set and plans were laid out, but results did not come to fruition. Students understand the reality that sought-for improvements, particularly to the quality of education, were unattainable in the university sector despite record funding, due to unforeseen enrolment pressures and a rate of cost inflation that is consistently higher than the province’s normal rate of inflation or growth in government spending.