As spring semester winds down on college and university campuses across the country, faculty thoughts often turn to what we’re doing over the summer — research, course redesign, family vacations, recharging, perhaps teaching a course or two. But then academic reality rears its head and our thoughts are forced from their Summer Happy Place to somewhere far more mundane: The Assessment Mire.
If where you teach is anything like my university, in addition to the assessment work we do for our own courses (grading piles of student essays, projects, and tests) there is often a layer of institutional assessment on top of that. We use various assignments to assess the outcomes in our institution’s core curriculum, for example, and then we aggregate the data to see how students across the university are doing with the core’s various dimensions.
This report provides a systems perspective on the state of skills and higher education in Canada and identifies areas where the sector could improve in producing highly skilled graduates. I
Christopher Manfredi, provost and vice-principal, academic, at McGill University, stood before a room of his peers and made a bold statement: “Social sciences and humanities cured cancer.” To the 50 university presidents, vicepresidents and deans gathered at the workshop hosted by Universities Canada in Montreal last March, it was an example of how administrators might pitch the ongoing value of the liberal arts to a Canadian public facing rapid economic, digital, environmental and social change.
In his opening remarks at the two-day event, Universities Canada president Paul Davidson made reference to “ongoing and misguided assaults on the value of a liberal arts degree in popular media.” Dr. Manfredi, a political scientist and former dean of McGill’s faculty of arts, picked up this thread in his panel talk. He suggested reports on declining program enrolment in the humanities and social sciences, and the supposedly dire employment prospects of graduates in these fields, have created a false crisis. Instead of approaching the situation as though they’re putting out a fire, university administrators and faculty should focus instead on crafting “a good story.”
Schools are also looking to encourage domestic students to benefit from international students’ presence.
As the blip-blip-bloop of the classic Skype ringtone connects me with Zack (Guanglong) Pang at Wilfrid Laurier University, it occurs to me that a little box like this on a computer screen may be the only window through which this international student has seen his family for the past few years – they live half a world away in his hometown of Shenyang, an industrial city in the northeastern part of China. Mr. Pang, who at the time of this interview was finishing his bachelor of science degree at Laurier and preparing for a master’s in geography at York University starting this fall, cheerfully returns my wave at the screen.
The first “teaching machine” was invented nearly a century ago by Sydney Pressey, a psychologist at Ohio University, out of spare typewriter parts. The device was simple, presenting the user with a multiple-choice question and a set of answers. In “teach mode,” the machine would advance to the next question only once the user chose the correct answer. Pressey declared that his invention marked the beginning of “the industrial revolution in education”—but despite his grand claims, the teaching machine failed to gain much attention, and soon faded into obscurity.
This study aimed to identify and rank the personal, family-related, social, and academic correlates of depressive symptoms in first-year college students. A questionnaire that included the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) was administered to 389 first-year college students (mean age = 18.9; SD = 3.38; 59.4% female). Eight variables contributed uniquely to the variance of depressive symptoms and were, in decreasing order of importance: (1) the absence of personal goals, (2) a high level of anxiety and (3) of dysfunctional thoughts regarding success, (4) a lack of emotional adjustment to college, (5) being female, (6) receiving little warmth and encouragement of autonomy from one’s mother and (7) from one’s father, and (8) being attracted to members of the same or both sexes. These results suggest that a multimodal intervention is required to support students’ mental health.
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).
From tracking the use of crack cocaine in Brazil to examining the effects of air pollution on children in Mexico to exploring
the impact of mining operations on local economies, the most recent phase of the Canada-Latin America and the Caribbean
Research Exchange Grants (LACREG) program supported more than 30 international research projects in a wide range of
disciplines and countries.
An analysis of more than 2,000 college classes in science, technology, engineering and math has imparted a lesson that might resonate with many students who sat through them: Enough with the lectures, already.
Published March 29 in the journal Science, the largest-ever observational study of undergraduate STEM education monitored nearly 550 faculty as they taught more than 700 courses at 25 institutions across the United States and Canada.
The Liberal government is moving to make it easier for international students to become permanent residents once
they have graduated from Canadian postsecondary institutions.
Immigration Minister John McCallum said he intends to launch federal-provincial talks to reform the current Express Entry program, a computerized system that serves as a matchmaking service between employers and foreign skilled workers. Thousands of international students have been rejected for permanent residency because the program favours prospective skilled workers from abroad.
This paper seeks to address the challenges faced by international students pursuing a post-secondary education in Ontario, and to consider more broadly the growing internationalization agenda within education. OUSA recognizes the benefits both of international students coming to Ontario, both in economic and socio-cultural terms, and for Canadian students undertaking a period of study abroad. However, it is evident that increasing internationalization requires institutions, governments and students to address various concerns that impact the ability of international students to succeed, and to ensure we are building strong intercultural university communities. To this end, we offer recommendations in the following areas, aimed at improving the international student experience:
Background/Context: There is little question that education is changing, seemingly quickly and in some cases dramatically. The mechanisms through which individuals learn are shifting from paper-based ones to electronic media. Simultaneously, the nature of what individuals must learn is evolving, in good part due to an exponential accumulation of knowledge and of technology to access, share, and exploit that knowledge. Finally, how education is organized, offered, and administered is undergoing transformation, most apparentlybut not onlyin higher education. With potentially seismic changes in the mechanisms,
nature, and organization of education must also come changes in educational assessment.
The provincial government is ordering colleges to pull back on proposed salary hikes that would see senior executives get raises as high as 50 per cent, following a five-year pay freeze.
Advanced Education Minister Deb Matthews said the proposed raises are based on unfair comparisons, and equate running a college to running larger, more complex organizations.
Existing estimates of the labor-market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies. International comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital, and evidence incorporating direct measures of cognitive skills is mostly restricted to early-career workers in the United States. Analysis of the new PIAAC survey of adult skills over the full lifecycle in 22 countries shows that the focus on early-career earnings leads to underestimating the lifetime returns to skills by about one quarter. On average, a one-standard-deviation increase in numeracy skills is associated with an 18 percent wage increase among prime-age workers. But this masks considerable heterogeneity across countries. Eight countries, including all Nordic countries, have returns between 12 and 15 percent, while six are above 21 percent with the largest return being 28 percent in the United States. Estimates are remarkably robust to different earnings and skill measures, additional controls, and various subgroups. Intriguingly, returns to skills are systematically lower in countries with higher union density, stricter employment protection, and larger public-sector shares.
Résumé
With a shift towards performance-based funding for public institutions and growing competition across all of higher education, demonstrating on-time completion and positive student outcomes is a major challenge facing today’s colleges and universities. Modern students and their families are expecting institutions to provide the tools and support to ensure students secure the necessary skills and competencies to prepare them for a successful life.
Institutions across the country are seeing students arrive on campus not academically prepared for college-level coursework. In fact, nearly 60% of students need remediation1. Students often take courses that not related to their degree program. Or, they are unsure about which degree program is even best for their interests and skills. Consequently, over 40% of students who begin college never graduate.
They should be used to inform and encourage, not to penalize.
With reference to Gerald Walton’s opinion piece, in which he declares that “academic underperformers must be called out,” I would like to suggest an alternative, more helpful approach to the problem he identifies. As dean of the faculty of arts at the University of Manitoba, from 1999 to 2004, it was my task to implement Article 35 of our collective agreement, which called for meaningful annual performance evaluations. The trick was to do that in a positive way rather than a destructive one.
Teaching tool or distraction? One of the most vexing issues for faculty today is what to do about cell phones in the classroom. According to a study conducted by Dr. Jim Roberts, a marketing professor at Baylor University, college students spend between eight to ten hours daily on their cell phones. Regardless of whatever “no cell phone” policies we attempt to enforce in our classrooms, many of our students are sneakily checking Instagram or texting friends when they’re supposed to be engaged in solving matrices or analyzing Shakespeare.
Since the mid-1980’s, student unions across Canada and within the United States have been advocating to governments and Universities-alike for increased safety measures for those affected by sexual violence and harassment. Student unions have played a crucial role in creating campus culture and social expectations. We have also been at the forefront of programming and processes around staff training to combat sexual violence, gendered-violence, and sex-based harassment, bystander intervention, and health and protective services. We offer important peer-to-peer and survivor services as well, recognizing that survivors prefer to seek peer support. Therefore we offer much to be listened to on this topic and have been given great opportunities over the past year to speak to some of these issues.
Best Practices in Measuring the Impact of Student Success Strategies
Purpose of Study: This study investigates the association among two aspects of organizational culture (professional community and teacher collaboration), teacher control over school and classroom policy, and teacher job satisfaction. We use the term Collective Pedagogical Teacher Culture to refer to those schools with strong norms of professional community and teacher collaboration.