For decades, research and public discourse about gender and science have often assumed that women are more likely than men to “leak” from the science pipeline at multiple points after entering college. We used retrospective longitudinal methods to investigate how accurately this “leaky pipeline” metaphor has described the bachelor’s to Ph.D. transition in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields in the U.S. since the 1970s. Among STEM bachelor’s degree earners in the 1970s and 1980s, women were less likely than men to later earn a STEM Ph.D. However, this gender difference closed in the 1990s. Qualitatively similar trends were found across STEM disciplines. The leaky pipeline metaphor therefore partially explains historical gender differences in the U.S., but no longer describes current gender differences in the bachelor’s to Ph.D. transition in STEM. The results help constrain theories about women’s underrepresentation in STEM. Overall, these results point to the need to understand gender differences at the bachelor’s level and below to understand women’s representation in STEM at the Ph.D. level and above. Consistent with trends at the bachelor’s level, women’s representation at the Ph.D. level has been recently declining for the first time in over 40 years.
As a trusted partner to more than 725 college campuses nationwide, our mission at Barnes & Noble College is to work
closely with our campus partners to enhance the academic and social experience for those we serve – students, faculty,
staff, alumni and communities. Given that student career readiness is a core goal for colleges/universities and their students,
we partnered with Gen Y consulting company Why Millennials Matter to conduct this initial nationwide study. Our goal is to
gather insight, share strategies and build programs to help the students we serve succeed in and out of the classroom, and
to help our campus partners’ achieve their retention, recruitment and career placement outcomes.
Using the chronicles of three friends, this chapter presents a counterstory that sets the stage for the examination of racism in teacher education, within the United States of America, using critical race theory (CRT) as an analytical tool. The setting of these chronicles is during a time when postracial rhetoric in the United States was at its highest—just after the 2008 election of President Barack Obama. The three friends take the readers on a journey through their graduate experience in teacher education and into their first faculty position in teacher education. Their experiences, as students and junior faculty, are akin to what many faculty and students of color and their White allies experience daily in teacher education programs across the United States. The analysis of their chronicle, using CRT, reveals that postracial discourse has disguised racism and racial microaggression in teacher education. Racial microaggression is as pernicious as other forms of racism and, through its passiveaggressive orientation, validates institutional and individual lack of attention to issues of race.
This report is part of a wider three-year program of research, Vocations: the link between post-compulsory education and the labour market, which is investigating the educational and occupational paths that people take and determining how their study relates to their work. Previously the authors theorised that vocational streams, whereby people study for a field of practice rather than a specific job, could support occupational progression; for example, a ‘care’ vocation could include workers within aged care, mental health, child care and disability care.
This report looks specifically at mid-level qualifications, such as diplomas, advanced diplomas and associate degrees, and how they assist entry to and progression in the labour market. In order to explore these issues, the authors analyse data from the Student Outcomes Survey and the Survey of Education and Work. In addition, they undertake case studies of mid-level qualifications in engineering and finance and also examine the roles of physician assistants in health, and veterinary technologists in agriculture, to see how mid-level qualifications can be strengthened.
One of the important questions to consider in a review of policy for postsecondary education is what kind of system do we need. To provide a reasonably complete answer to that question would require addressing many different dimensions of postsecondary
education including structures, processes, and relationships. In this paper, I will concentrate on two important and closely related subsidiary questions within the broader question of what kind of system we need. Those subsidiary questions are what is the most appropriate mix of different types of postsecondary institutions, and what should be their relationships with one another?1 As those are pretty large questions, within them my principal focus will be even narrower, on the balance and relationship between universities and community colleges.
As so many of us try to juggle teaching virtually or in a hybrid format this year, I’ve decided to focus my energy on technology that will help me no matter the setting. These three tech tools have had a huge impact on me, my staff, and my students.
In the summer of 2012, the Administration Committee proposed and agreed to the creation of a working group whose mandate would be to set recommendations on online teaching and learning based on the University’s particular situation. The Working Group on E-Learning was created in the fall and started meeting in November 2012.
The E-Learning Working Group met twice a month and heard the views of different people. It also undertook detailed research to learn about the benefits of e-learning and blended learning and reviewed what other institutions are doing on e-learning.
This paper explores the potential of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), to provide new insights into community service-learning (CSL) in higher education. While CSL literature acknowledges the influences of John Dewey and Paolo Freire, discussion of the potential contribution of cultural-historical activity theory, rooted in the work of Russian psychologist
Lev Vygotsky, is noticeably absent. This paper addresses this gap by examining four assumptions
associated with activity theory: the rejection of a theory/practice divide, the development of
knowledge as a social collaborative activity, the focus on contradictions in and across activity
systems, and the interventionist approach
aimed at transformation.
There has been a signifi cant growth in the number and types of degrees offered by a wider variety of Canadian post-secondary institutions. This expansion of degree access is the legitimate response to various forces, both social and post secondary. However, as a result, there has been some confusion regarding the meaning and value of the new degrees offered by the increasing variety of institutions. Several provinces are now recognizing this confusion through initiatives to “redesign”
their provincial post-secondary systems and this may ultimately reduce the diversity and the confusion. However, this paper examines the forces that have led to this proliferation of degrees and institutions and discusses the problems and controversies that are brewing regarding the recognition of these new degrees for further study and the proposals for system redesign. In particular, it is proposed that an examination of both the substance of various degrees and the nature of the institution offering the credential can provide a context for understanding the meaning of various degrees. Recommendations to help resolve the growing concerns in this area are provided for nonuniversity degree-granting institutions, Canadian universities, and for
provincial governments developing degree granting policies as part of system redesign initiatives.
Teaching. So many things have been said about teaching. "Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students." "A good teacher can inspire hope, ignite the imagination, and instill a love of learning." "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." Whoa. That is some heavy stuff right there. Makes being a teacher sound noble, important, and oh so awesome, does it not?
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.
Change in education is easy to propose, hard to implement, and extraordinarily difficult to sustain (Hargreaves & Fink, 2006, p. 1).Sound familiar? I am sure it does if you have spent any time in a school leadership role!
Continuous, sustainable educational improvement is possible. However, it is most dependent on successful leadership. Andy Hargreaves and Dean Fink make such a case in their book Sustainable Leadership and further note a relevant truism: Making leadership sustainable is difficult too (p. 1). This easy-to-read text is full of such principles, each of which makes the book a powerful and timely read. This book addresses one area of school leadership that is a most important, yet often neglected subject in education today: educational improvement as correlated with leadership sustainability. Kouzes and Posner (1995), support such an integrated concept in their classic read The Leadership Challenge by relating the following: There are monumental differen es... (preview
truncated at 150 words.)
There is no substantial gap in what we need to know in order to improve schools and student learning and achievement on a very wide scale. In this brief paper I will (1) encapsulate what we obviously know; (2) what we should know but fail to understand (which thus makes finding the solution less likely); and (3) identify the action implications for teachers themselves, principals, district leaders, and system leaders.
Preamble
This investigation arose as a result of the Brock University Administration’s handling of a series of complaints laid under the University’s Respectful Work and Learning Environment Policy [RWLEP]1 against five members of Brock University (henceforth referred to as the respondents), namely Drs. Ana Isla and Cathy Van Ingen (members of the Brock University Faculty Association), Dr. June Corman (then Associate Dean of Social Studies and hence not a member of the Faculty Association), and teaching assistants Ian Wood and Tim Fowler (members of CUPE Local 4207). The complaints were filed by Brock University Roman Catholic Chaplains, Brs. Raoul Masseur and German McKenzie.
Students waste about one-fifth of class time on laptops, smartphones and tablets, even though they admit such behavior can harm their grades, a new report [1] found.
The average student uses those devices for “nonclass purposes” -- in other words, texting, emailing and using social media -- 11.43 times in class during a typical day. Since the survey was first conducted in 2013 [2], the number of times students check their devices has increased from 10.93, according to the results.
Most universities still offer Learning Management Systems (LMS) as the ‘one size fits all’ technology solution for all teachers across all disciplines. Using LMS across diverse campuses has resulted in efficiencies-of-scale for administrators, however LMS integration into teacher practices is minimal (e.g., Conole & Fill, 2005) and teachers’ creative space can be limited for discipline-based innovation. Together, these realities indicate that there are significant barriers to the effective use of LMSs, especially for teaching and learning purposes.
To overcome such barriers, the complex and less visible internal space of teacher beliefs must be understood in relation to teachers’ pedagogical contexts and the affordances they can identify. This paper reports on the findings of six qualitative case studies of teachers at different stages of LMS integration and the extent to which teachers reconciled their beliefs. The results highlight the need for technology environments that better accommodate teacher diversity.
Keywords: teacher beliefs, teacher diversity, affordances, LMS, university teacher education
Wilfrid Laurier University (Laurier) recognizes an individual’s right to work, study and live in an environment of mutual respect and understanding that is free from discrimination and all forms of Gendered and Sexual Violence. As such, Laurier is committed to addressing Gendered and Sexual Violence within the University Community through education, awareness, prevention, support and
accountability. Laurier acknowledges that deeply held social attitudes contribute to the perpetuation of Gendered and Sexual Violence and operate to minimize the understanding of the extent and impact of Gendered and Sexual Violence in our communities.
Elementary and high schools spend so much time on the content-laden curriculum that students are unprepared for the analytic and conceptual thinking they'll need at university
Has Ontario’s educational system taught a decade of students not to think? There is growing evidence that the combination of standardized testing with a content-intensive curriculum that’s too advanced – both introduced by the Conservative government between 1997 and 1999 – has done exactly that.
A dramatic indication that there could be a serious problem was the performance of my introductory physics class on their November test last year. It was identical to one given in 1996, but the class average over this 10-year period had plummeted from 66 to 50 percent. There is about a five-percent fluctuation in this test grade from year to year due to variation in student ability
and the difficulty of the questions but, when I looked at the class average over the many times I have taught the course since 1981, I found that four of the five lowest grades have occurred in the last four years, with the lowest this year. When I enquired elsewhere at Trent University, I found the same pattern in the mathematics department, where the first test in linear algebra was down some 15 percent from its historic mean, and the calculus average had dropped nine percent from the year before.
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.
Background/Context: PISA has come up with an ingenious solution to the problem of how to measure student achievement across national school systems with different curricula. Instead of measuring how well students learn what they are taught in each system, it measures a set of economically useful skills that no one teaches.