Interleaving is not a well-known term among those who teach, and it’s not a moniker whose meaning can be surmised, but it’s a well-researched study strategy with positive effects on learning. Interleaving involves incorporating material from multiple class
presentations, assigned readings, or problems in a single study session. It’s related to distributed practice—studying more often for shorter intervals (i.e., not cramming). But it is not the same thing. Typically, when students study and when teachers review, they go over what was most recently covered, or they deal with one kind of problem at a time.
Every morning, before the coffee kicks in, I unload the dishwasher. This is more or less mindless work, but there often comes a moment when I'm forced to pause. I take out the silverware basket, put it on the counter, and look at the disorganized jumble: forks and spoons and knives sticking out every which way. For a split second, I am overwhelmed with a kind of paralysis — I don’t know where to begin. Of course, I soon snap out of it and start putting everything away.
That strikes me as similar to what instructors — particularly novice ones — face at the beginning of the fall semester.
It can be overwhelming to think of all of the objectives you have for your students. In my own writing courses, I want my students to learn how to construct an argument and how to write good sentences. I want them to understand the place of research, and how to integrate outside sources into their writing. Of course to become good writers, they need to be good readers, understanding how other writers create. And what about learning how to draft and revise? Trying to balance that glut of important skills, my head can become very muddled, very quickly.
This paper exploits data from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to shed light on the link between measured cognitive skills (proficiency), (formal) educational attainment and labour market outcomes. After presenting descriptive statistics on the degree of dispersion in the distributions of proficiency and wages, the paper shows that the cross-country correlation between these two dimensions of inequality is very low and, if anything, negative. As a next step, the paper provides estimates of the impact of both proficiency and formal education at different parts of the distribution of earnings. Formal education is found to have a larger impact on inequality, given that returns to education are in general much higher at the top than at the bottom of the distribution. The profile of returns to proficiency, by contrary, is much flatter. This is consistent with the idea that PIAAC measures rather general skills, while at the top end of the distribution the labour market rewards specialised knowledge that is necessarily acquired through tertiary and graduate education. Finally, a decomposition exercise shows that composition effects are able to explain a very limited amount of the observed cross-country differences in wage inequality. This suggests that economic institutions, by shaping the way personal characteristics are rewarded in the labour market, are the main
determinants of wage inequality.
I have been teaching for 20 years, and after a range of adjunct and visiting gigs and two tenure-track jobs (one of which ended because the institution was on the verge of financially collapsing after the economic crash in 2008), I am up for tenure and promotion this year. As virtually every tenure-track professor experiences, I, too, have had to make choices about when, where, how and why to speak out and about what, and have had to weigh issues of silence and voice against the hope and need for job security, health insurance, retirement benefits and the like.
I have had to decide what is worth it and what is not when I have been on the brink of making my viewpoints clear to the campus community and the larger community.
Being untenured is the ultimate manifestation of “You just have to know how and when to pick your battles.” If President Trump could have been an adjunct or tenure-track professor first, perhaps he would be less impulsive and reactive, thinking before tweeting, speaking, banning and dictating.
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.
The first initiative of its kind in an Ontario University
The Nipissing University Promise Program will support you through all aspects of the University journey. Newly admitted and transfer students with less than 30 transfer credits enrolled in the Promise Program will have an advisor to help navigate each step of your academic and co-curricular involvement at Nipissing — the transition into academic studies, life on campus as a Laker, and career development.
What is the NU Promise?
Nipissing invites you to return, tuition free, for up to 30 additional credits* if 6 months after completing your 4-year undergraduate degree program with a 70% GPA and all required elements of the program, you have not secured career-related employment.
The University of Ottawa will put in new training programs for administration, students and full-time coaches, launch a bystander intervention program and fund new courses on rape culture after the release today of a task force report into sexual violence.
The task force on respect and equality’s report, which school president Allan Rock said he received Thursday morning, gives 11 recommendations after nine months of work.
Offering an array of support services to meet the diverse needs of post-secondary learners assumes that these services improve success by providing students with compensatory resources and opportunities for engagement (Purnell & Blank,
2004). Little Canadian research, however, has examined students’ use of support services. This study describes how campus support services are used by Ontario college students and factors that influence the uptake of those services. Results show that despite relatively high student-reported need, the majority of Ontario college students did not utilize most campus services.
Age, gender and ethnicity, receptivity to support, negative college experiences, faculty referral, studying with peers, and poor grades were associated with increased use of some services. The findings argue for a proactive service delivery
model using web-based resources to minimize location-based barriers and to more effectively promote services dedicated to student success.
New analysis offers more evidence against the reliability of student evaluations of teaching, at least for
their use in personnel decisions.
Student requests for academic accommodations are increasing across university campuses, and Bruce Pardy, Professor of Law at Queen’s University, believes students are taking advantage of available accommodations, such as extra time on exams, to get ahead of their peers.
Pardy argues against providing accommodation with this analogy: that if Andre De Grasse asked for a 20-metre head start in the recent World Track and Field Championships to accommodate for his injury, no one would take him seriously. This comparison assumes that academic accommodations give disabled students an advantage over others. The difference, however, between De Grasse and students with a mental illness, is that students are not asking for a 20-metre head start; mental illness and other disabilities are setbacks which have students starting the race from 20-meteres behind the starting blocks. The purpose of accommodation is not to give them an edge over other students, but to bring them forward to the starting line with everyone else.
As a minority group on university campuses, the unique needs of mature students can be easily overlooked. It is important that the term “mature students” does not disguise the heterogeneity of this group: “…it is erroneous to speak of ‘the adult learner’ as if there is a generic adult that can represent all adults.”1 However, amongst this varied group of students, there are common
concerns that they share. This policy sets out students’ priorities in increasing the visibility of mature students on campus as well as optimizing their educational experience.
Mature students need more recognition of the different hurdles they face in achieving success. These can include situational barriers like a lack of time, lack of money, health issues, or dependant care,2 as well as attitudinal or dispositional barriers, including the fear of failure or alienation. Lastly, they also face systemic barriers such as restrictive course offerings and
availability of instructors or support services outside of regular business hours.3
OUSA’s policy on system growth is a broad based look at the future structure and function of Ontario’s post-secondary system. Throughout the past decade, Ontario has seen unprecedented growth in undergraduate enrolment across universities and colleges, successfully achieving the highest provincial post-secondary attainment in Canada. OUSA is supportive of the
Ontario government’s work towards the goal of a more prosperous society and workforce.
However, these commitments have come at a price to students within the postsecondary system. While per-student operating grants have kept pace with increasing enrolment, provincial funding into postsecondary still falls dramatically behind all other provinces, both in terms of real dollars and percentage of GDP. Meanwhile, universities are experiencing unsustainable rising costs, particularly salaries and pensions, which threaten universities’ and students’ collective futures.
A university education can provide an individual with greater employment options, higher income potential, and improved health and quality of life, yet young persons from rural areas remain less likely to attend university than their urban counterparts. This study explores the perceived personal, social, and cultural factors that might create barriers for young persons from rural areas. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 individuals living in rural areas in Alberta, aged 18 to 23 years, who had not attended univer-sity. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis, we identified 11 major themes, which were then organized into a conceptual model to illustrate the interacting nature of these factors and their influence on a person’s decision to pursue a university education. An examination of this model and its associ-ated themes may help reveal the possible barriers young persons from rural areas experience when deciding whether or not to attend university.
Une formation universitaire peut permettre aux individus d’avoir un plus grand nombre d’options d’emploi et de meilleurs salaires, en plus d’améliorer leur santé et leur qualité de vie. Malheureusement, les jeunes des milieux ruraux demeurent moins enclins à fréquenter l’université que leurs homologues citadins. Cette étude se penche sur les facteurs personnels et socioculturels perçus qui pourraient ériger des barrières limitant l’accès universitaire aux jeunes adultes des milieux ruraux. Une étude basée sur des entrevues semi-structurées a été réalisée auprès de 17 individus âgés de 18 à 23 ans habitant en milieu rural albertain et n’ayant pas fréquenté l’université. Avec l’analyse interprétative de phénomène, nous avons répertorié 11 thèmes majeurs, que nous avons regroupés en un modèle conceptuel afin d’illustrer la nature des interactions entre ces facteurs et leur influence sur la décision des personnes d’entamer des études universitaires. L’examen du modèle et des thèmes associés pourrait révéler les barrières possibles auxquelles font face les jeunes adultes issus de milieux ruraux lorsque vient le temps de choisir d’étudier ou non à l’université.
When you think of Canada, you probably think of its picture postcard beauty – wide-open spaces, dramatic mountains, pristine forests and majestic lakes. What might not come to mind, however, is that Canada is a modern, progressive, open and tolerant multi-cultural society with 2 official languages – English and French.
Living in Canada is similar in many respects to living in other Western countries, however there are some aspects of daily life that are unique to our nation. This section of the website will give you a high level overview of our country as well as some helpful tips to know before you arrive to study in Canada.
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.
The recontextualizing of the campus chaplaincy – both as a non-denominational spirituality and as a form of mental health care – can be a problem even as it has helped to renew attention to the office.
In the Fall of 1999, after serving 14 years as a United Church minister, Reverend Tom Sherwood figured it was time for a change. He left his suburban Ottawa congregation for Carleton University to become campus chaplain. “At the time, I was the school’s only full-time religious professional working with 20,000 students,” he says. “But I was prepared for it.”
While the ethos of providing counselling and spiritual guidance proved to be similar to his work in his previous congregation, a number of things were specific to the student population. “Everything’s hard to do the first time, and lot of those firsts happen in university. Your first grandparent dies, your first friend dies, you attend your first funeral. People very successful in high school may for the first time experience failure or perhaps not being the smartest in the class.” Drawing on his experiences as a pastor and a former graduate school residential fellow, Dr. Sherwood settled into campus life.
Background/Context: The literature on emotional and social intelligence, based on the the-oretical constructs of several authors, identifies self-awareness as a core skill for leadership development. However, there is very little research or theory on how one might develop a ped-agogy of self-awareness for leaders.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This study describes an innovative leadership development program in self-awareness in the Summer Principals Academy at Teachers College. It describes both the theoretical and practical pedagogy of self-awareness training. What follows is a description of that pedagogy and some preliminary research results based on the journals and feedback of 45 students who completed the program in 2006.
Is a valid strategy to improve a college's retention rate to encourage students at risk of dropping out to do so in the first few weeks, so they won't be counted in the total numbers reported to the U.S. Education Department and others?
That is a question raised by emails leaked to the student newspaper at Mount St. Mary's University, in Maryland. The emails suggest that the president had such a plan in motion -- despite opposition from some faculty members and other administrators. The board chair at Mount St. Mary's released an open letter in which he did not dispute the emails, but said they were taken out of context. The board chair's letter did not detail what was allegedly out of context. Primarily, his statement blasted the student journalists for publishing the contents of confidential emails.
Think back to your time as a student. How did you experience feedback from your own instructors? Did reading their comments on your work bring moments of elation? Pride? Disappointment? Bewilderment? Do you still have a visceral reaction to a lot of red ink?
Feedback can be a powerful force in college classrooms, and there are ways to make the experience of providing and receiving it even stronger. That’s especially important as students continue to report dissatisfaction with the feedback they get on assignments and tests — calling it vague, discouraging, and/or late.
When I recently returned to my department after a decade in administration, I looked forward to reconnecting with former colleagues, getting to know the grad students, going to lectures and colloquia, teaching undergrads, and yes, even serving on departmental committees. But when I moved into my faculty office and began my work schedule, I had only one question as I looked around my department: Where did everybody go?