The reading and math skills of 15-year-old immigrant students, as measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) between 2000 and 2012, vary across regions of Canada.
Regional variations were also observed in the high school and university completion rates of youth who immigrated in Canada before the age of 15, as measured in 2011.
As a faculty member for almost 30 years, I have been inspired and motivated by all of the online chatter. It’s made me think about the great teachers I’ve known — and I’ve known many, from kindergarten through graduate school and beyond. Several taught in my department when I served as chair, and I had the pleasure of observing them at work.
Ken Coates is a Munk Senior Fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and co-author of What to Consider If
You’re Considering University. Douglas Auld is a professor of economics at the University of Guelph.
As students at colleges and universities across the country head back to class, the nation’s media have been filled with familiar debates about tuition fees, student debt, careers and government funding. As the debate goes on, universities, colleges and polytechnical institutes will defend their work, governments will laud the contributions of postsecondary institutes to Canada’s so-called innovation agenda, and student organizations will demand lower fees. This is all predictable, producing more heat than light in the process.
The College Standards and Accreditation Council is presenting Ontario’s Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology with an important challenge. CAATs must comply with CSAC requirements, among which is an overall commitment to general education. CSAC has voiced the employers’ need for graduates who combine vocational skills with demonstrable communicative competence, social awareness, and critical thinking. It has recognized that vocational training alone cannot foster personal growth and enrichment.
In 2004, the Lumina Foundation for Education approved a generous grant to support validation research to explore and document the validity of the Community College Student Report (CCSR), add to the higher education field’s understanding of student engagement, and help to identify research or institutional practices that require further attention. The study was conducted in three strands that linked Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) respondents with external data sources: (1) data from the Florida Department of Education; (2) data from the Achieving the Dream project; and (3) student record databases maintained at community colleges that have participated in the CCSSE survey and are either Hispanic-Serving Institutions or members of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU). All participating students had participated in the 2002, 2003, or 2004 administrations of the Community College Student Report, CCSSE’s survey instrument.
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.
Hosting international students has long been admired as one of the hallmarks of internationalization. The two major formative strands of internationalization in Canadian universities are development cooperation and international students. With reduced public funding for higher education, institutions are aggressively recruiting international students to generate additional revenue. Canada is equally interested in offering incentives for international students to stay in the country as immigrants after completing their studies. In its 2011 budget, the Canadian federal government earmarked funding for an international
education strategy and, in 2010, funded Edu-Canada—the marketing unit within the Department of Education and Foreign Affairs (DFAIT)—to develop an official Canadian brand to boost educational marketing, IMAGINE: Education in/au Canada. This model emulates the Australian one, which rapidly capitalized on the recruitment of international students and became an
international success story. Given current Canadian higher education policy trends, this paper will address the cautionary lessons that can be drawn from the Australian case.
Are your students stressed out, tired, and unable to focus? They’re not alone. The average eighth-grade student now spends over 25 hours a year taking standardized tests, while the average high school student reports feeling stressed 80 percent of the time.
Even kindergartners are feeling more academic pressure, spending less time on art and music and more on math, reading, and assessment compared with the late 1990s. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, childhood stress can lead to permanent changes in brain structure and function, increasing the likelihood of learning difficulties, memory problems, and chronic diseases in adult life. Meanwhile, a 2013 report by the American
Psychological Association (APA) found that the negative effects of stress persist into the high school years: 35 percent of teens lie awake at night because of stress, cutting into critical sleep time and increasing the likelihood that they’ll have concentration problems or experience feelings of sadness and depression.
More than six months after the Harvey Weinstein scandal catapulted sexual harassment to the top of the cultural agenda, academia is among the industries still grappling with the extent of the problem that it faces, and what to do about it.
Most of them won’t be celebrating.
Confederation has been described as a turning point for the worse in the lives of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples in Canada. Britain’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 recognized certain Indigenous rights. In 1982, Canada’s repatriated constitution “recognized and affirmed” the “aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada.” However the extent and content of those rights and what they mean to Canada continue to be disputed. Even rights recognized under treaty have not been respected in the post-Confederation era, it’s been well-argued.* There was a steep decline in the vitality of Indigenous cultures and languages, and in people’s well-being, particularly after the Indian Act of 1876. The country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, looking into the legacy and abuses of the residential school system for Indigenous children, wrote in its 2015 report that “national reconciliation is the most suitable framework to guide commemoration” of Canada’s 150th anniversary, calling it “an opportunity for Canadians to take stock of the past, celebrating the country’s accomplishments without shirking responsibility for its failures.” The following are reflections from six Indigenous scholars at Canadian universities on their vision for a “reconciled Canada.”
It sometimes seems like there are two tribes in undergraduate teaching: STEM and the humanities. Despite the growing appeal of interdisciplinarity, and the budding campaign to turn STEM into STEAM, courses in the two realms remain very different.
Nowhere is the gap more noticeable than in methods of assessment. STEM courses still tend to use testing, while those in the humanities rely on student writing. For whatever reason — a tendency to teach the way we were taught, a lack of time to get creative with course design, a belief that students need to learn “the basics” before moving on to anything else — most of us fall into one of those two camps — testing or writing — when it comes to assessing our students. In all the years that I’ve taught English and rhetoric courses, for example, I only ever gave tests when I was required to do so by college or department policy. I’ve always believed that student writing was the best way to measure learning in my classes.
Intellectual property is important in our universities but it sometimes raises thorny issues. Unlike the United States, which has the Bayh-Dole Act – legislation governing intellectual property generated by federally funded research – Canadian universities are free to have their own individual IP arrangements. The Bayh-Dole act permits 50 percent of the IP to be assigned to the researcher and another 50 percent to the university. This act presumes that the universities will play a role in the protection and commercialization of the IP. Certain institutions, such as MIT, contribute a certain portion of their share back to the researcher.
This semester I’m teaching a comparative-literature class that deals with the connections among empathy, literature, and human rights. As in most of my classes, which all circulate around these difficult topics, I constantly prepare my students for their own navigation into the worlds of trauma and critical understanding. The problem this semester, and most semesters, is not the voyage inside historical traumas. The problem goes much deeper — it is my students’ fragility.
What is “mindful teaching”? It entails, as Elizabeth MacDonald and Dennis Shirley explain, an “openness to new information, a willingness to explore topics that are marginalized in the dominant reform fads of the moment, and a readiness to review one’s previous assumptions as a part of a life-long career marked by critical inquiry, reflection and compassion” (p. 27). That definition seems reminiscent of reflective teaching. It certainly appears related.1 But there seem to be qualitative differences between reflective teaching and mindful teaching. Within the last decade a body of literature has blossomed; it is a literature that borrows from western and eastern contemplative traditions, underscores the role of the self and emotions in teaching, and attempts to consider the conflicts, conundrums, and paradoxes of teaching. Parker Palmer (1998), Irene McHenry and Richard Brady (2009), Rachael Kessler (2000), Linda Lantieri (2001), and Maria Lichtman (2005) are a few of the authors who have ventured into these dimensions of vocational exploration. It is a growing literature and one worth examining. Within this space MacDonald and Shirley, a public school teacher and an academic respectively, offer valuable insights and a description of an unusual program.
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.
On June 7, the Ontario voters elected a Progressive Conservative majority government led by Doug Ford. This election outcome has a number of important implications for professors and academic librarians in the province and will pose several challenges and opportunities for the university sector over the next four years.
This article focuses on teachers’ experiences in implementing peer assessment with first semester students. It explores the relationship between teachers’ conceptions of teaching and their approach to peer assessment, where both conceptions and approaches are described as being either learning focused or content focused. Drawing upon analysis of interviews with eight teachers, the study found that one had a consonant view of the interrelationship be- tween conceptions of teaching and
approaches to peer assessment, while the remaining seven described their conceptions of teaching and their approach- es to peer assessment with a combination of learning-focused and content focused statements. These statements are labelled as dissonant. Discussion focuses on implications of consonant and dissonant relationships between conceptions of teaching and approaches to peer assessment for implementation of peer assessment; it also addresses academic development issues.
The study reveals that when implementing new methods (here, peer assessment), underlying assumptions will impact on the nature of teacher engagement.
Just a tiny minority of Canadian students choose to study abroad, and that’s a problem. Here’s what some
universities are doing to try to reverse the trend.
Caitlyn Ryall had her doubts – and her fears. Then a third-year material art and design student at OCAD University,
Ms. Ryall weighed the pros and cons of heading abroad for a semester at the University of Southampton in Winchester, England. On the one hand, she felt an excitement and fascination due to her upbringing – her father is a travel writer, and she shared his wanderlust and curiosity about the world. On the other hand, she faced serious challenges: the costs were almost unthinkable (upwards of $15,000), the initial administrative processes seemed to be moving as slow as molasses, and the payoff, in terms of transfer credits, was uncertain. And it would be her first time abroad, without her traditional network of friends and family.
E-learning holds the potential to profoundly change the way post-secondary education (PSE) is designed and
delivered.
From a quality perspective, e-learning may be more engaging, less passive, and more customized to different
learning styles than traditional lecture-based learning.
There are about 1.3 million enrolments in fully online university and college courses in Canada. E-learning
accounts for between 10 and 15 per cent of PSE learning.
Greater adoption of e-learning will happen if institutional focus on traditional classroom delivery can be reduced;
faculty are adequately supported when they teach online; and e-learning design, development, and delivery
practices improve.
To do justice to students and as a matter of professional duty, faculty members should be at the center of defining and measuring undergraduate learning outcomes, argue Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum.