When I recently returned to my department after a decade in administration, I looked forward to reconnecting with former olleagues, getting to know the grad students, going to lectures and colloquia, teaching undergrads, and yes, even serving on departmental committees. But when I moved into my faculty office and began my work schedule, I had only one question as I looked around my department: Where did everybody go?
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.
Community colleges that want students to graduate increasingly focus not just on academic needs, but on transportation, housing and food issues.
A report released today by the Wisconsin HOPE Lab and the Association of Community College Trustees reveals that many community college students are dealing with a lack of basic needs.
The report -- "Hungry and Homeless in College" -- surveyed more than 33,000 students at 70 two-year institutions in 24 states and found that two-thirds struggle with food insecurity, half are housing insecure, one-third are regularly hungry and 14 percent are homeless. The report defines food insecurity as the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, and homelessness as a person without a place to live or residing in a shelter, automobile or abandoned building.
Every year, some 55,000 students make transfers between post-secondary institutions within Ontario (ONCAT Annual Report 2016-17). Some students decide to transfer mid-degree to enter specific programs with courses they could not take elsewhere. Others may transfer for a variety of reasons, whether it be to make university more affordable, to be closer to family, or to improve the student’s mental health. The choice to transfer institutions is one made with the student’s academic and personal best interests in mind, and oftentimes the student has little to no control over the circumstances driving their decision.
Many post-secondary institutions in Canada over the past decade have made the transition from college to university status. The researchers on this team were hired in the midst of such a transition at one western Canadian institu- tion. As new faculty we were navigating the normal tides of adjusting to a new faculty position, but our induction occurred in a shifting
institutional context. Our research question, “What is the new faculty experience in a transitional institution?” guided a five-year focused ethnography, beginning as a self- study of the research team and expanding into 60 interviews with 31 partici- pants over several years. The results demonstrate that a more complex theory is required to reflect the experience of new faculty than has appeared previ- ously in the literature. We propose a framework of competing discourses.
Ontario is moving forward with postsecondary education for thousands of French-speaking students by creating a new stand-alone French-language university, l'Université de l'Ontario français. This historic addition to Ontario's postsecondary sector will offer a range of university degrees and education, entirely in French. The university will promote the linguistic, cultural,
economic and social well-being of its students as well as Ontario's growing French-speaking community.
Low performing and underachieving schools in the United States have long been characterized as desolate wastelands fraught with academic failures, unfulfilled aspirations, and uninspired students and teachers. Powerless to Powerful: Leadership for School Change shifts this narrative of failure and powerlessness. Instead, it focuses on the connections and transformational power of change agency to achieve collective ownership for organizational and personal success for those who are important in
schools: students and teachers.
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.
The purpose of this non-experimental, cross-sectional, descriptive research was to survey faculty and staff perceptions of mentorship in a postsecondary institution in order to determine gaps and strengths in the current mentorship
environment. The anecdotal activities we present reflect our educational practice environment through the work of our Mentorship Team. Data were collected utilizing Zachary’s Mentor Culture Audit tool. The culture building block measured 4.65 on a 7-point Likert scale, suggesting the presence of a weak mentorship culture. However, the infrastructure building block measured only 3.41, showing that organizational resources and supports are below average. We also present eight hallmark category results to further identify strengths and gaps. This is the first assessment of our mentoring culture at an organizational level. Other postsecondary institutions may benefit from formally assessing the gaps in and strengths of their mentorship culture toassist them with acquiring adequate resources to further develop and sustain their mentoring activities.
Media and policy commentary have focused lately on Canadian employers’ apparent inability to find employees with the desired labour market skills. To explore this issue further, HEQCO reviewed and summarized the current discourse surrounding a “skills gap” in The Great Skills Divide: A Review of the Literature and conducted an analysis of Canadian job advertisements geared toward recent postsecondary graduates in Bridging the Divide, Part I: What Canadian Job Ads Said. In the latter publication, 316 job advertisements for entry-level positions requiring postsecondary education were examined to ascertain the education credentials, work experience and essential skills employers were seeking. To follow-up on Bridging the Divide, Part I, the current report analyzes survey responses from 103 employers that posted job advertisements included in the preceding study.
In particular, employers were asked if they had filled the advertised position or, if not, the reasons for being unable to find someone to hire. Those employers that had filled the position were also asked about the successful candidates’ qualifications and performance on the job so far.
When it comes to Canadian universities, the level of funding doesn’t predict performance, according to a new report from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO). In its newest and most comprehensive analysis of Canadian postsecondary systems, HEQCO finds that Ontario and Nova Scotia are top performers overall despite lower per-student operating costs, while other provinces that spend the same or in some cases considerably more money achieve average or below average performance.
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
A DISCUSSION of educational leadership in these troublous times might concern itself with an attempt to review our social and economic ills, to show their relationship to education, and to propose the way out by means of economic and social reconstruction. I shall assume that all of you are familiar with current discussion concerning the maladjustments in our society. I shall take it
for granted, as well, that you are conversant with the opposed points of view of those who see the
need for complete reorganization of our economic life, our government, and indeed the whole social
order, and those who believe that progress lies in the more gradual evolution of our society. I
feel sure that you will agree with me that leaders in education and in all other walks of
life will need to cooperate in finding and putting into effect those changes which will contribute to the common good. I take it, as well, that you would agree that those of us who work in the field of education must depend for guidance on experts in economics, in government, in psychology, in sociology, and in anthropology if we are to have a sound basis in fact for our thinking with respect to social change.
To develop and conduct feasibility testing of an evidence-based and theory-informed model for facilitating performance feedback for physicians so as to enhance their acceptance and use of the feedback.
After one too many students called me by my first name and sent me email that resembled a drunken late-night Facebook post, I took a very fogeyish step. I began attaching a page on etiquette to every syllabus: basic rules for how to address teachers and write polite, grammatically correct emails.
Over the past decade or two, college students have become far more casual in their interactions with faculty members. My colleagues around the country grumble about students’ sloppy emails and blithe informality.
Mark Tomforde, a math professor at the University of Houston who has been teaching for almost two decades, added etiquette guidelines to his website. “When students started calling me by my first name, I felt that was too far, and I’ve got to say something,” he told me. “There were also the emails written like text messages. Worse than the text abbreviations was the level of informality, with no address or signoff.”
This report covers the combined results for the summer 2014, autumn 2014, and spring 2015 Ohio State Graduation Survey administrations. An invitation to the Graduation Survey was sent to all undergraduate, Master's, and professional degree recipients who were scheduled to graduate in the summer, autumn, or spring terms of the 2014-2015 academic year.
ABSTRACT
This working paper seeks to explore the reasons why educational attainment in the immigrant population varies between North America and Europe. Specifically, the examples of Canada and Switzerland are used as Canada has an immigrant population with a typically higher rate of post-secondary education than that of the domestic population, while in Switzerland the opposite is true. Analysis shows that while differences in immigration policy play a significant role, there are many other variables which affect educational attainment in immigrants, such as the education level of the parents, source region and home language.
RÉSUMÉ
Le présent document de travail tente d‟explorer les raisons pour lesquelles le niveau de formation de la population immigrée varie entre l‟Amérique du Nord et l‟Europe. Il s‟attache plus particulièrement aux exemples du Canada et de la Suisse, les diplômés de l‟enseignement post-secondaire étant typiquement plus nombreux dans la population immigrée que dans la population autochtone au Canada, tandis qu‟en Suisse, c‟est l‟inverse qui s‟observe. L‟analyse montre que si les différences en termes de politiques d‟immigration jouent un rôle important, il existe également de nombreuses autres variables qui influent sur le niveau de formation de la population immigrée, telles que le niveau de formation des parents, la région d‟origine et la langue parlée à la maison.
Since 1981 the Canadian Federation of Students has been the progressive and democratic voice of Canada’s college and university students. Today the Federation comprises over 400,000 graduate, undergraduate and college students from over 60 students’ unions from Newfoundland and Labrador to British Columbia.
In recent years, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) has launched several studies that analyze and conceptualize the differentiation of the Ontario postsecondary education system (Weingarten & Deller, 2010; Hicks, Weingarten, Jonker & Liu, 2013; Weingarten, Hicks, Jonker & Liu, 2013). Similarly, in the summer of 2012, the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities (MTCU) initiated several projects to identify ways to drive innovation and improve the productivity of the postsecondary sector.
Within this context, in June 2013 HEQCO began to look at what it called ‘the proliferation of public policy schools.’ Anecdotally, there has been much discussion about the rise of public policy programs. Findings from a preliminary scan of existing graduate public policy programs and their establishment dates demonstrated that there has been a proliferation in the number of public policy programs in Canada, starting with Carleton University in 1953 and ending with the University of Calgary in 2011. In roughly the past decade, there has been a one-third increase in the number of such graduate programs. This trend mirrors what has happened elsewhere, in particular in the United States.
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.