What will it take for students to succeed beyond high school? How are schools preparing students for the reality of
college-level work?
One method that has gained popularity in the United States is allowing students to take college-level courses that apply toward their high school credits and can also be transferred to colleges, if they choose to pursue postsecondary education. This is known as a dual-credit program, and it is widely used and popular in the United States.
Education Pays 2013: The Benefits of Higher Education for Individuals and Society documents differences in the earnings and employment patterns of U.S. adults with different levels of education. It also compares health-related behaviors, reliance on
public assistance programs, civic participation, and indicators of the well-being of the next generation. Financial benefits are easier to document than nonpecuniary benefits, but the latter may be as important to students themselves, as well as to the society in which they participate. Our goal is to call attention to ways in which both individuals and society as a whole benefit
from increased levels of education.
Inside Higher Ed’s fourth annual survey of college and university faculty members and campus leaders in educational technology aims to understand how these groups perceive and pursue online learning and other issues related to technology-enabled education.
Despite great diversity in community colleges across the nation, most are facing declining resources that threaten to cripple the quality of programs and services provided. The Great Recession exacerbated trends that were already obvious in many colleges, including dwindling state appropriations, shrinking property values, and demands to restrain tuition increases to protect our long-cherished mission of accessibility. In many cases, rural community colleges have been hardest hit due to aging, tax resistant populations, barriers rooted in generational poverty, and shortage of growth-oriented businesses and industries. While resources have declined, deferred maintenance has increased, resulting in deteriorating buildings, laboratories that do not reflect industry standards, and infrastructure issues ill-suited for training skilled workers who can compete in our high tech, global society.
Students' understanding and participation in "work" affects their university in many ways. Employment can serve as both a motivator and hindrance to academic success. It can teach valuable lessons while also detracting from academic work. It is the number one reason why students attend post-secondary school. Unfortunately, numerous barriers stand in the way of increasing the employment rates of highly educated youth. These barriers must be treated as distinct yet interconnected, and necessitate multifaceted approaches. This OUSA policy paper outlines how government, employers, educators, and students can work together to overcome barriers and move towards a more prosperous, productive future.
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
Keywords Schools, Leadership, Development, Educational philosophy, Integration
Abstract This paper looks at the central role of school leadership for developing and assuring the quality of schools, as corroborated by findings of school effectiveness research and school improvement approaches. Then, it focuses on the growing importance placed on activities to prepare school leaders due to the ever-increasing responsibilities they are facing. In many countries, this has led to the design and implementation of extensive programs. In this paper, international trends in school leader development are identified. As regards the aims of the programs, it becomes obvious that they are increasingly grounded on a more broadly defined understanding of leadership, adjusted to the core purpose of school, and based on educational beliefs integrating the values of a democratic society.
Too many students are dropping out of doctoral programs or taking too long to finish, prompting some universities to question what they can do to help them along.
After completing five years of study towards his PhD in English at Queen’s University, Ian Johnston dropped out. To those who have similarly slogged through a doctoral program without success, his reasons will sound all too familiar: his funding had run out; he hadn’t yet begun to write his dissertation; the isolation had become oppressive; and the prospects for landing a tenure-track faculty job in English studies – were he to forge ahead and finish – were dim.
When Canada was created in 1867, the churches were already operating a small num-ber of boarding schools for Aboriginal people. In the coming years, Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries established missions and small boarding schools throughout the West. The relationship between the government and the churches was formalized in 1883 when the federal government decided to establish three large residential schools in west-ern Canada.
It’s a confusing post-secondary landscape out there, with universities that are home to colleges and colleges becoming universities. Then there are the polytechnics. A true polytechnic offers four-year bachelor’s degrees, but isn’t a university. It offers apprenticeship programs and on-the-job learning, but isn’t a community college. The wrong thing to do would be to go by the name.
The student pulled her test tube out of the ice bucket for the 10th time, and then slumped in despair at the sight of the clear liquid.
She shoved the sample back into the ice and put her head in her hands. Nestled in the ice next to her own, her classmates’ test tubes were full of fluffy white crystals, the result of a four-hour lab on recrystallization. Clearly, at some point in the afternoon, this student had done something different from her peers, and now not a speck was visible in her test tube.
The recrystallization lab is like most of the experiments we do in my "Chemistry 3A" section: There is a single desired outcome, intended to teach a chemical concept or a laboratory technique. But of course experiments can go awry in myriad ways, as anyone who has spent any time in a laboratory knows.
Students are the innovators of the future, and to succeed they need access to modern, high-quality programs at Canadian educational institutions. Universities and colleges are built to educate students, develop global citizens, support research, and foster a sense ofcreativity that will benefit Canadian society both socially and economically.
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.
Over the past two decades, and across the nation, the university has been undergoing profound changes. These
structural changes underpin an emergent philosophy of the new university today -- one that should give pause to anyone concerned about the direction of higher education.
For much of the 20th century, and especially after World War II, the university served as the vehicle of upward mobility, the principal pathway to securing a middle-class and eventually upper-middle-class life. Yet that prevailing 20th-century model of the university began to give way in the late 1980s, slowly at first and then more dramatically and visibly with the onset of the new millennium.
Abstract
Informal mid-term feedback processes create opportunities for students and academics to have a dialogue about their progress and to make any necessary or reasonable mid-stream corrections. This article reports on an action research project designed to see what impact mid-semester feedback might have on the classroom experience. The underlying motive for the study was to generate institution-specific “proof” which might encourage other academic staff to conduct informal mid-semester informal feedback exercises with their students.
End-of-semester data shows that both students and lecturers found the exercise to be a positive
experience. Students appreciated being able to voice their problems and opinions at a time when
mid-course corrections were possible. Lecturers felt there was an improvement in
the lines of communication, resulting in a friendlier teaching and learning environment.
Technology has changed just about every facet of our economy and society — from how we travel to how we bank to how we communicate with each other. But perhaps no part of the economy has been as fundamentally transformed as our nation’s workforce.
TheEffective Classroom Interactions (ECI) online courses were designed to provide an engaging, effective and scalable approach to enhancing early childhood teachers’ use of classroom practices that impact children’s school readiness. The created courses included several versions aimed at testing whether or not certain design aspects could increase participation and subsequent learning outcomes. The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which early childhood teachers accessed the courses and varied in their (a) participation in the core course content and (b) optional discussion board as a result of the course experience they were assigned to as well as individual characteristics that may be associated with participation. As might be expected, findings indicated that early childhood teachers accessed the course often on nights and weekends, even though participating centers allowed their teachers to do coursework during work time. In addition, participants reported high levels of satisfaction with their experience. Both persistence in the ECI courses and overall completion of activities were higher than those reported in other studies of online learning. The participation of early childhood educator teachers was consistently predicted by comfort with technology, credit or non-credit status and assignment to the group that included regular conferences with the instructor. These relationships, however, did not always occur in expected ways. Implications for exploring online learning as a feasible option for early childhood educators are discussed.
As I contemplate my syllabi for a new semester, I possess renewed hope for students eager to discuss anything at 8 a.m., yet I have taught long enough to know that I will simply appreciate clean clothes and brushed teeth. As reality sets in, I add to my grading criteria an element that I hope will encourage engagement from even the most timid learners.
Often labeled “participation points,” this topic has been explored from myriad perspectives in any number of books and articles published in the last 20 years. Some approaches to participation include using discussion to facilitate teaching and learning, implementing standard-based grading to eliminate participation points, or creating rubrics for participation to make standards visible to the students.
This paper explores the concept of accountability as it relates to the University of British Columbia. It examines the discourse surround- ing social accountability laid out in the university’s Trek 2010 vision and then juxtaposes this with the private accountability to commercial and government interests as evidenced in other documents and recent university decisions. The paper, thus, concludes that both private and public attempts at accountability are present yet the call to account to a wider social public gets muffled by the vagueness of the goals and, in particular, the appeals to excellence.
Many colleges speak of the importance of increasing student retention. Indeed, quite a few invest substantial resources in programs designed to achieve that end. Some institutions even hire consultants who promise a proven formula for successful retention. But for all that effort, most institutions do not take student retention seriously. They treat student retention, like so many other issues, as one more item to add to the list of issues to be addressed by the institution. They adopt what Parker calls the "add a course" strategy in addressing the issues that face them. Need to address the issue of diversity? Add a course in diversity studies. Need to address the issue of student retention, in particular that of new students?Add a freshman seminar or perhaps a freshmen mentoring program. The result is that student experiences are increasingly segmented into smaller and smaller pieces; their relationships with faculty, staff, and each other becoming more narrow and specialized; their learning further partitioned into smaller disconnected segments.