National training packages have become the mandated framework for course delivery in Australia’s vocational education and training sector. Each training package contains: qualifications that can be issued, industry-derive d competencies , and assessment guidelines but do not contain an endorsed curriculum component or learning outcomes. All public and private vocational education and training providers must use training packages, or industryendorsed competencies in cases where they do not exist, if they are to receive public funding for their programs. This article describes the operation of Australia’s national training packages and considers some of their strengths and weaknesses, many of which may be shared by similar
systems elsewhere. Argues that training packages may result in poorer student learning outcomes, and that they may threaten the end of effective credit transfer between the vocational education and training and higher education sectors. Suggests that national training packages are not a good model for other countries and that Australia’s current vocational education and training policy needs to be reviewed.
A lot of Ontario teens are feeling anxious and depressed, and their numbers have grown. That’s the take-away from a large-scale study that’s been tracking students in the province for the last 20 years. One-third of the students in the survey were found to have moderate to severe symptoms of psychological distress – an alarming leap from two years earlier, when only one-quarter of students met the same threshold.
Now comes the hard part: figuring out why high schoolers are increasingly describing their lives as overwhelming, anxiety-inducing and stress-filled, and how to help them early because the higher up the grades you go, the worse the situation tends to get. Grade 12s, for instance, were four times more likely than Grade 7s to report high levels of stress, and more than twice as likely to rate their mental health as fair or poor. Older teens were significantly more likely to think about suicide. Yet they were no more likely than younger teens to seek help.
OISE/UT Guidelines for Theses and Orals
The United States is at a crossroads in its policies towards the family and gender equality. Currently America provides basic support for children, fathers, and mothers in the form of unpaid parental leave, child-related tax breaks, and limited public childcare. Alternatively, the United States’ OECD peers empower families through paid parental leave and comprehensive investments in infants and children.
Graduate school, the job market, the tenure track, and every other stage in an academic career are so fraught with challenge that you cannot afford to dawdle too long on foolish ventures or waste time holding out for perfection when "pretty darn good" will do.
The first supreme hurdle — the one that scares off many potential academics and cripples the progress of others — is, of course, the dissertation. What counts as a dissertation and how long you should take to complete it vary across disciplines, institutions, and committees. But that you must complete it — and that others must approve it before you can move on — is essential.
With a mandate to prepare students for the labour market, ‘communication’ figures prominently among the essential employability skills that Ontario’s colleges are expected to develop in students prior to graduation. As a result, many colleges have instituted measures to help shore up the skills of students who are admitted to college yet who do not possess the expected ‘college-level English’ proficiency. Several have addressed this challenge by admitting these students into developmental communication classes, which are designed to build their skills to the expected college level.
omen and African Americans—groups targeted by negative stereotypes about their intellectual abilities—may be
nderrepresented in careers that prize brilliance and genius. A recent nationwide survey of academics provided nitial support for this possibility. Fields whose practitioners believed that natural talent is crucial for success had ewer female and African American PhDs. The present study seeks to replicate this initial finding with a different, and rguably more naturalistic, measure of the extent to which brilliance and genius are prized within a field. Specifically, e measured field-by-field variability in the
emphasis on these intellectual qualities by tallying—with the use of a ecently released online tool—the frequency of the words “brilliant” and “genius” in over 14 million reviews on ateMyProfessors.com, a popular website where students can write anonymous evaluations of their instructors. his simple word count predicted both women’s and African Americans’ representation across the academic pectrum. That is, we found that fields in which the words “brilliant” and “genius” were
used more frequently on ateMyProfessors.com also had fewer female and African American PhDs. Looking at an earlier stage in students’ ducational careers, we found that brilliance-focused fields also had fewer women and African Americans obtaining achelor’s degrees. These relationships held even when accounting for field-specific averages on standardized athematics assessments, as well as several competing hypotheses concerning group differences in epresentation. The fact that this naturalistic measure of a field’s focus on brilliance predicted the magnitude of its gender and race gaps speaks to the tight link between ability beliefs and diversity.
Purpose: The purpose of this study is to determine the effects of peer-level tardiness on individual-level socio-emotional outcomes utilizing nationally representative, longitudinal data.
This paper reports the results of an analysis of persistence in post-secondary education (PSE) for college students in Ontario based on the extremely rich YITS-B dataset that has been used for other recent studies at the national level. We calculate hazard or transition rates (and cumulative transition rates) with respect to those who i) graduate, ii) switch programs, and iii) leave PSE (perhaps to return later). We also look at the reasons for switching and leaving, subsequent re-entry rates among leavers, and graduation and persistence rates once switchers and re-entrants are taken into account. These patterns are then probed in more detail using hazard (regression) models where switching and leaving are related to a variety of individual characteristics, family background, high school outcomes, and early pse experiences. Student pathways are seen to be varied. Perhaps the single most important finding is that the proportion of students who either obtain a degree or continue to be enrolled somewhere in the PSE system in the years after entering a first program remains close to the 80 percent mark for the five years following entry. Seventy-one percent of students graduate within five years of starting, while another 6 percent are still in the PSE system.
This article makes the case that Canadian universities—both within and be- yond their campuses—must broaden their visions of third-age learners. Ca- nadian third-age learners—defined for the purposes of this article as persons seeking formalized education who are in the stage of life beginning at retire- ment—are more numerous, active, financially stable, and diverse as well as healthier and better educated than at any other time in our history. It follows that Canadian universities have much to offer and gain by both deepening and broadening their involvement with these learners. I argue that universi- ties must consider multi-pronged forms of collaboration and must be motivated, at all times, not by short-sighted financial concerns but by their core obligation to serve the public good by fostering community engagement.
In this interview, Zwieback deconstructs why it’s so tempting to blame a person or team for every mishap. To counter this habit, he outlines principles and tactics to help dynamic companies shift from identifying culprits to learning to make improvements that matter. Any fast-growing company that seeks to adapt with real accountability and honesty will gain from Zwieback’s methodology to prioritize resilience over punishment.
In the minds of students and the general public, the primary activity of a university is the pursuit of learning: a place where teachers teach, and students learn. It seems obvious that the core mission of the university is the transmission of knowledge, and in the popular imagination, simply placing bright eager minds in close proximity to leading professors will enable this alchemical process to happen. However, the reality of the practice and place of learning in today’s university is much more complicated.
There are quite a few moments in our lives when we feel hurt or offended, which usually come from the way other people make us feel. Often we may take into account any remark or comment we hear, and assume that if a certain thing is said or done it is to personally offend us; the children haven’t cleaned their room? They obviously don’t care about me; my coworkers are being inconsiderate? It's apparent that they don’t want to work with me. However, these are often thoughts that have no basis in reality, and they only cause us harm and prevent us from progressing in life. The following 8 tips should be read whenever you feel anger, pain or disappointment, as they’ll help you stop taking things personally, see the full picture, and feel more peaceful and secure.
Multiple and competing priorities within a dynamic and changing academic environment can pose significant challenges for new faculty. Mentorship has been identified as an important strategy to help socialize new faculty to their roles and the expectations of the academic environment. It also helps them learn new skills that will position them to be successful in their academic ca-reer. In this article, the authors report on the implementation and evaluation of a mentorship circle initiative aimed at supporting new faculty in the first two years of their academic appointment. Participants reported that the men-torship circle provided them with a culture of support, a sense of belonging, and a safe space to discuss concerns and learn strategies from both mentors and fellow mentees as they adjusted to their new position. The interdisci-plinary nature of the mentorship circle further facilitated faculty members’ capacity to navigate their role as new faculty and foster colleagueship.
The ACHA-National College Health Assessment II (ACHA-NCHA II) is a national research survey organized by the American College Health Association (ACHA) to assist college health service providers, health educators, counselors, and administrators
in collecting data about their students' habits, behaviors, and perceptions on the most prevalent health topics.
ACHA initiated the original ACHA-NCHA in 2000 and the instrument was used nation wide through the spring 2008 data collection period. The ACHA-NCHA now provides the largest known comprehensive data set on the health of college students, providing
the college health and higher education fields with a vast spectrum of information on student health. A revised survey, the ACHA-NCHA-II, has been in use since the fall 2008 data collection period.
This report was commissioned by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) as part of a multi-year effort to improve the quality of education and skills training in Canada while enhancing young people’s ability to succeed in the 21st century job market. Opinions in the paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCCE or its members.
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.
In recent years educators and policymakers have set a goal that students graduate from high school ready for college and careers. However, as a nation we are far from achieving this goal, particularly for low-income and minority students. For example, in states where all eleventh-graders take the ACT®, only 27 percent of low-income students in 2010 met the ACT College Readiness Benchmark in reading, with 16 percent meeting the Benchmark in mathematics, and 11 percent meeting the Benchmark in science.
Efforts to improve students’ academic preparation have often been directed at the high-school level, although for many students, gaps in academic preparation begin much earlier. Large numbers of disadvantaged students enter kindergarten behind in early reading and mathematics skills, oral language development, vocabulary, and general knowledge. These gaps are
likely to widen over time because of the “Matthew effects,” whereby those who start out behind are at a relative disadvantage in acquiring new knowledge.
Canada’s colleges and institutes foster innovation that supports economic growth and social development. They improve the productivity of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and community partners through the development of new and improved technologies, processes, products and services.
This fact sheet provides a summary of the Colleges and Institutes Canada 2014-15 Survey of Applied Research Activity based on 113 responses from our members.
Mental health problems are on the rise among UK academics amid the pressures of greater job insecurity, constant demand for results and an increasingly marketised higher education system.
University counselling staff and workplace health experts have seen a steady increase in numbers seeking help for
mental health problems over the past decade, with research indicating nearly half of academics show symptoms of psychological distress.
With tuition prices continuing to climb and middle-class America’s earnings stagnant for more than a decade, colleges and universities continue to face pressure from government, governing boards, students and their families to provide proof of the value of a bachelor’s degree. Students historically have had little more to go on than anecdotal information when it came to the jobs and earnings they could expect upon graduation from a specific college or university.