Scrutiny: students’ attention to performance measures ‘plays to the UK’s strengths’
Chinese students have an increasingly “open attitude” when applying to university, with many now focusing on institutions’ teaching quality and student satisfaction scores, according to the director of the British Council in China.
Carma Elliot said that there had “traditionally been a strong preference among Chinese students for ‘elite’institutions, but there was now a more open attitude to the widest range of options available”.
Universities are intensely human places and are not immune from the worst impulses of human nature; and while violent incidents on university campuses may belie the ideal of the quad as a place of calm reflection and civil discussion, such incidents take place.
The Ministry’s consultation paper speaks to the risk of violence in the education sector, the sector in which the 15,000 professors and academic librarians we represent work.
n 2014, StudentsNS welcomed its first non-university member: the Student Association of the Nova Scotia Community College Kingstec Campus in Kentville. This report explores fees, funding and accountability structures at the College, as well as student financial assistance to college students. We seek to identify opportunities to improve or expand access, affordability, student voice and quality of education, with an emphasis on the first three values in particular. We find that the Nova Scotia Community College has prioritized access and affordability and delivered important outcomes, attracting more students from communities that are traditionally underrepresented in post-secondary education, and notably mature learners. The College also has relatively low cost programs because of their shorter length and lower fees. However, College students’ debt levels remain higher than the national average, are leading to elevated default rates and have been neglected by the Province as compared with university students’ debt. In terms of student voice and accountability, the College and the Province need to work harder to ensure transparency to the public and meaningful student participation in decision-making. We identify a number of modest policy changes that the College and the Province could pursue to address these challenges and help the College better serve Nova Scotians and deliver on its mandate.
Higher education's approach to fostering students' innovation potential has focused mostly on developing innovation leadership among a select cadre of students, originally in entrepreneurship and more recently in social sector innovation. But what about the rest of our graduates: what capability do all our graduates need if they're going to engage effectively with innovation in the workplace? Can elements of this capability be adapted to enhance their roles as community members and global citizens as well?
In order to develop the capability for workplace innovation in all our students, we're going to have to begin tackling the challenge in the space where all of them already participate – within our teaching and learning environments.
As women move up the leadership ranks in higher education, they find fewer and fewer female peers. That’s been fairly well documented by the American Council on Education and other sources, and is no surprise to those of us in the executive-search industry.
Why that’s the case is a topic fraught with complexity. There is the matter of stepping up and Leaning In to be sure, but there is also sexism — sometimes the overt kind and sometimes the subtle kind that occurs all along the leadership trajectory and affects who is mentored, who is labeled "leadership material," and who gets the kind of opportunities and assignments that lead most directly to advancement.
Of the many factors that limit women’s advancement, two are things we ought to be able to resolve: how candidates present themselves in job interviews and how search committees interpret those interviews.
This paper briefly tells the story, through four critical stages, of the developing complexity of our theories-in-action (SchOn, 1991) as teacher-researchers over a period of 18 months. These theories-in-action are related to the ways in which teacher and student purposes (Brown and Coles, 1996) act as organisingfoci through which intuitive ways of knowing (Bruner 1974, Fischbein 1982, Gattegno 1987) are accessed. The parallels between our learning, as teacher-educator and teacher, and the learning of our students are marked. We share this journey to illustrate a way of working which we value for our own learning but ask the question 'what is it that the readers of such research accounts learn? '
Premier Kathleen Wynne is set to announce a sweeping review of how students are assessed in Ontario, including possible changes to EQAO tests in math and literacy and what skills are measured on report cards.
Sources told the Star Wynne will unveil plans Wednesday to create a panel of experts who will report back to the government this winter with recommendations. The announcement comes a day after the province’s 2 million students headed back to class after the summer break.
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.
How should colleges cater to professors nearing retirement? With 10,000 Americans turning 65 each day the population of tenured faculty is growing older—at some prestigious universities, one in three academics are 60 or older.[1] Between 1995 and 2015, the number of post-secondary aged 65 or older tripled, shooting from 4.4 percent to 11.6 percent according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (figures include teachers at trade schools as well as colleges).[2] This demographic shift may allow universities to retain the deep knowledge base of older faculty, but also open up a wealth of questions: about the need for adequate positions for younger faculty;[3] and about planning for this older cohort as they edge towards retirement.[
If we don’t move quickly, Canada risks seeing many of these young, bright minds take their talents elsewhere.
Ambitious, skilled and often multilingual, international students are a great source of talent. They fill jobs and create
new ones through innovation and entrepreneurship — Silicon Valley is a prominent, international example. Research by the Conference Board of Canada shows immigrants help expand and diversify Canada’s global trade. International students could do the same, helping Canada trade in markets such as Asia, where economic growth is greater than in the U.S. and EU — Canada’s largest trading partners.
This article examines regional differences in the math and reading skills of immigrant children aged 15 based on data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). It also examines regional differences in high-school and university completion rates among young immigrants who came to Canada before the age of 15 using National Household Survey (NHS) data. Throughout the article, comparisons are made with the children of the Canadian-born (third- or higher-generation Canadians).
Women in the sciences who earn PhDs are less likely than their male counterparts to pursue tenure-track positions at research universities. Moreover, among those who become STEM researchers, men have been found to publish more than women. These patterns raise questions about when sex differences in publication begin. Using data from a survey of doctoral students at one large institution, this study finds that men submitted and published more scholarly works than women across many fields, with differences largest in natural/biological sciences and engineering. Potential contributing factors are considered, including sex differences in faculty support, assistantships, family responsibilities, and career goals.
Keywords: career development; doctoral students; equity; faculty development; gender studies; graduate education; higher education; publications; regression analyses; research; secondary data analysis; sex; STEM; survey research; women’s issues
WHEN a story is passed on from one person to another, each man repeating, as he imagines, what he has heard from the last narrator, it undergoes many successive changes before it at length arrives at that relatively fixed form in which it may become current throughout a whole community. To discover the principles according to which successive versions in such a process of change may be traced, presents problems of considerable interest, both for psychology and for sociology. Moreover, precisely the same type of problems confront investigators who endeavour to study the diffusion of decorative and representative art forms, of music, of social customs, institutions, and beliefs, and in fact, of almost every element which enters into the varied and complex life of man in society.
A number of programs are exploring options for applied scholarship within the PhD.
This report is the first in a series of reports examining teenagers’ use of technology. Forthcoming reports will focus on how American adolescents use social media and mobile phones to create, maintain and end their friendships and romantic relationships. This report is a collaborative effort based on the input and analysis of the following individuals.
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.
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.
What will the scale-up of the internet of things, the rising sharing economy and a zero marginal cost society mean for civilization? Nothing short of historic.
This article was written in response to concerns that have been expressed about the possible consequences of an increasing number of countries overtaking the United States in educational attainment. International statis-tics on educational attainment were analyzed, questions about comparabil-ity of data were discussed, and the impact of different approaches to the organization of higher education on attainment rates was examined. The author concluded that comparing the rate of attainment of subbaccalaure-ate credentials between the United States and other countries is proble-matic both because of definitional issues, and as a consequence of the major transfer function of American community colleges. The article explains how colleges that previously offered short term vocational training in many European countries have evolved into vocationally-oriented bacca-laureate granting institutions that have enabled their nations to achieve rapidly rising levels of baccalaureate degree attainment. It suggests that the experience of these countries may provide useful lessons—and cautions—for policy makers and educational leaders with respect to expanding the role of community colleges in awarding baccalaureate degrees.
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.