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 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).
Over the past 30 years, more and more faculty members and institutions have embraced undergraduate research
as a way to further faculty research and to enhance student learning. It has been used to attract and retain talented
students, to improve the educational experience of minorities, and to prepare more students for graduate school.
Engaging students in original scholarship is a time-intensive and expensive activity, but the outcomes are almost
always powerful and positive. Perhaps most important, research keeps students and the faculty connected and
engaged in high-level intellectual collaborations. Studies have shown that student learning depends strongly on
faculty involvement, and that when faculty members who have a strong research focus don’t include students in that
research, it has a negative impact.
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.
Almost fifteen ago, I received a “the job is yours” call and the chance to serve one of Canada’s most important and
enduring legacies, Joseph E. Atkinson’s crusades for social and economic justice.
As I prepare to pass the torch as Executive Director of the Atkinson Foundation, the advantage of 20/20 hindsight has led me to reflect on lessons learned about how to change the world, particularly through strategic philanthropy.
I joined the Foundation at the beginning of 1996, when the board was seeking a new approach to social change.
The goal was to move from receiving proposals for “good works” to becoming a proactive organization, working with
partners to advance evidence and ideas about how the future could be more just.
The findings from 20 years of research on undergraduate education have been unequivocal: The more actively engaged students are — with college faculty and staff, with other students, and with the subject matter they study — the more likely they are to learn, to stick with their studies, and to attain their academic goals.
The existing literature, however, focuses almost exclusively on students in four-year colleges and universities. This special report provides summary highlights from a large-scale research project that examined, for the first time, relationships between student engagement and a variety of student outcomes — including academic performance, persistence and attainment — in community colleges. The bottom line for community colleges: Student engagement matters.
Students cheat. Educators struggle to respond, sometimes blaming themselves for not making courses sufficiently interesting or relevant and sometimes engaging in a battle of wits or technologies with their students to prevent cheating. Sometimes we in higher education try to address cheating as a moral problem and sometimes as a pedagogical one. Another way to understand cheating, however, is to borrow an insight from Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, namely, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
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.
This morning, I had the opportunity to talk with CBC radio morning shows about academic freedom: what is it and
why is it important to professors. And most importantly, why is it so important that it’s at the centre of a 4-week strike
that has no end in sight?
Academic Freedom has been contorted by many forces: in popular terms, by sensationalist reporting that focuses
on individual instances of a professor doing something bad but being protected from reprisal. But it’s not really that.
Joe Biden has a secret weapon in his bid for the presidency: He is the first Democratic nominee in 36 years without a degree from an Ivy League university.
This is a potential strength. One of the sources of Donald Trump’s political appeal has been his ability to tap into resentment against meritocratic elites. By the time of Mr. Trump’s election, the Democratic Party had become a party of technocratic liberalism more congenial to the professional classes than to the blue-collar and middle-class voters who once constituted its base. In 2016, two-thirds of whites without a college degree voted for Mr. Trump, while Hillary Clinton won more than 70 percent of voters with advanced degrees.
Across the country, many students still lack access to a college option that fits their needs.
It’s a problem that two very different states are looking to solve.
Despite having 114 campuses in California, Governor Jerry Brown wants the state’s community college system to explore expanding its programs through a new online-only college. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania’s education department has given its approval for the creation of a new alternative type of community college to serve the northwestern part of the state.
“Community colleges across the country are suffering from decreasing enrollments, so they’re out there trying to figure out what are the options to reach students who they haven’t reached in the past and retain the ones they have,” said Elisabeth Barnett, senior research scientist at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University.
One of the most frequent questions faculty ask about the flipped classroom model is: “How do you encourage students to actually do the pre-class work and come to class prepared?”
This is not really a new question for educators. We’ve always assigned some type of homework, and there have always been students who do not come to class ready to learn. However, the flipped classroom conversation has launched this question straight to the top of the list of challenges faculty face when implementing this model in their classrooms. By design, the flipped model places more emphasis on the importance of homework or pre-class work to ensure that in-person class time is effective, allowing the instructor and the students to explore higher levels of application and analysis together. If students are unprepared, it leads to frustration, stress, and anxiety for everyone.
I was once invited to a costume party by graduate students where the theme was “what you would be doing if you hadn’t gone to grad school”. Although I never attended the party, in hindsight I would probably have dressed as a pharmaceutical sales rep for the mood stabiliser medication that I am currently taking. Something akin to the character Jamie Randall in the film Love & Other Drugs.
Canada's universities make essential contributions to our nationa innovation system, from conducting discover-driven research to partnering with industry on practical solutions to immediate problems. Universiites are key economic drivers of regional and national prosperity. They generate the ideas and solutions used by communities, small and medium enterrises, national and multi-national companies and sectors of the economy across the country
Certaines données utilisées dans ce guide sont tirées du projet de recherche-action Modes de travail et de collaboration
à l’ère d’Internet réalisé sous l’égide du CEFRIO. Ce projet visait essentiellement à étudier la mise en place,
le fonctionnement, l’évolution et les résultats générés par une série de communautés de pratique virtuelles. Rappelons
qu’il poursuivait trois grands objectifs :
Presidential terminations and resignations are nothing new, even in the staid world of academia. Yet, rarely have they played out in so public a manner as the abrupt departure of president Arvind Gupta at the University of British Columbia in the summer of 2015 or the messy dismissal of Ilene Busch-Vishniac as president of the University of Saskatchewan a year earlier. Quebec had its own drama in May 2015, with the resignation of Nadia Ghazzali, rector at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, following a critical report by Quebec’s auditor general. All three leaders left before completing their first mandates.
Amidst the turmoil, Peter Stoicheff was named the 11th president of U of S, a position he took up in late October 2015. A former English professor and a classical guitar composer with two recordings to his name, Dr. Stoicheff had served as dean of the college of arts and science at U of S for four years and knew the internal workings of the institution and its culture well. But there was a lot he didn’t know, he readily admits, and that weighed on him.
It will be some time before we know the full impact of the COVID-19-induced shift to remote learning this spring -- how it altered the arc of students' academic careers, for example, or affected the extent and nature of their learning.
But we now have some early data on how it reshaped instructors' teaching practices.
A survey released today by Bay View Analytics (formerly the Babson Survey Research Group) and its president, the digital learning researcher Jeff Seaman, offers some insights into the transition that virtually all colleges, instructors and students undertook this spring as the novel coronavirus shut down campuses across the country.
Experienced and new teachers shared what they learned in the spring about how to make mentoring work during the pandemic.
Women who start college in one of the natural or physical sciences leave in greater proportions
than their male peers. The reasons for this difference are complex, and one possible contributing factor is the
social environment women experience in the classroom. Using social network analysis, we explore how gender influences the confidence that college-level biology students have in each other’s mastery of biology. Results reveal that males are more likely than females to be named by peers as being knowledgeable about the course content. This effect increases as the term progresses, and persists even after controlling for class performance and outspokenness. The bias in nominations is specifically due to males over-nominating their male peers relative to
their performance. The over-nomination of male peers is commensurate with an overestimation of male grades by 0.57 points on a 4 point grade scale, indicating a strong male bias among males when assessing their classmates. Females, in contrast, nominated equitably based on student performance rather than gender, suggesting they lacked gender biases in filling out these surveys. These trends persist across eleven surveys taken in three different iterations of the same Biology course. In every class, the most renowned students are always male. This favoring of males by peers could influence student self-confidence, and thus persistence in this STEM discipline.
I became a professor because I wanted to teach. I really wanted to be a middle-school English teacher but — even at age 19 — I knew that salary wouldn't allow me to pay off my undergraduate loans, so I decided on a Ph.D. Twelve years later and I'm extremely happy with my decision, particularly because I landed at a small liberal-arts college where I have the freedom to teach whatever I want and the good fortune to have small classes.
But it would be dishonest not to admit that I truly had no idea what it meant to be a teacher. Specifically, I had no idea what it meant to be a professor of color at a predominately white institution.