Study explores faculty members' views on scholarly communication, the use of information and the state of academic libraries and their concerns about students' research skills.
With a mandate to prepare students for the labour market, ‘communication’ figures prominently among the essential employability skills that Ontario’s colleges are expected to develop in students prior to graduation. As a result, many colleges have instituted measures to help shore up the skills of students who are admitted to college yet who do not possess the expected ‘college-level English’ proficiency. Several have addressed this challenge by admitting these students into developmental communication classes, which are designed to build their skills to the expected college level.
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.
Awareness contexts are useful concepts in symbolic interactionist research, which focusses on how everyday realities are constructed. To provide a fresh perspective on governance in Canada’s colleges, I sorted vignettes in interview data collected from administrators and faculty into four types of contexts originally derived from observation of interaction between physicians and patients around bad news. These theoretical categories were introduced by Glaser and Strauss in their 1965 book Awareness of Dying. Applying this lens revealed a “closed awareness” context around college fund-raising and a “mutual suspicion” context in administrator-faculty interaction around student success policy. Examples of “mutual pretense” included feigned administrator-faculty cooperation around changing college missions and faculty workload formulas. “Open awareness” or dialogue, however, occurred where professional bodies or unions intervened. Sorting by awareness contexts reveals similarities between doctor-patient and administrator-faculty interactions. For example, just as doctors feared that delivering bad news to patients might precipitate “mayhem” in the hospital, college administrators may fear that openness around divisive topics might precipitate “mayhem” in college management.
Abstract
First-year seminars (FYS) have become increasingly prevalent in North American postsecondary institutions. The popularity of such initiatives owes much to the belief that providing unprepared students general life and academic skills can bolster engagement and thereby improve retention. In this paper we argue that, despite their good intentions, many FYS actually perpetuate the kind of disengagement they were designed to alleviate due to their reliance on a narrow, instrumental view of education. To demonstrate, we briefly outline the history and curricula of the FYS movement to draw attention to its dependence on marketplace ideals, rationales, and strategies. We demonstrate some of the ways this vision of education impoverishes the university experience and suggest that, in order to be robust, FYS must focus first and foremost on cultivating rich understandings of the broader purposes of higher education and its relation to the good life, both for and beyond one’s own fulfillment.
Résumé
Les séminaires de première année sont devenus de plus en plus répandus dans les énstitutions d post-secondaires en Amérique du Nord. La popularité de telles initiatives doit beaucoup à l’idée que le fait de fournir des aptitudes
générales et académiques aux étudiants non préparés peut renforcer leur engagement et ainsi améliorer leur taux de rétention. Dans cet article, nous soutenons que, malgré leurs bonnes intentions, beaucoup de sention. Dans cet aère année perpétuent le même genre de désengagement qu’ils essaient d’atténuer en raison de leur dépendance envers une vision instrumentale
mais étroite de l’éducation. Pour le démontrer, nous décrivons brièvement l’histoire et les programmes de ce mouvement qui vise à attirer l’attention sur sa dépendance à l’égard des idéaux de marché, des justifications et des stratégies. Nous démontrons quelques-unes des façons par lesquelles cette vision de l’éducation appauvrit l’expérience universitaire et nous suggérons que pour être robustes, les séminaires de première année doivent d’abord se concentrer à cultiver la richesse de compréhension des objectifs plus larges de l’enseignement supérieur et de sa relation au bien-vivre, pour la r ur n-viv
personnelle des étudiants et au-delà.
The research PhD was created to support the development of individuals able to use the power of rigorous scholarly inquiry to advance society. If the academy is committed to ensuring the relevance of the degree for the 21st century, we need to understand how our graduates are, or could be, contributing to the world today. This information will help tremendously in raising awareness of, and increasing the transparency about, potential careers, and in informing our educational endeavours.
Background/Context: Since the 1970s, researchers have attempted to link observational measures of instructional process to
student achievement (and occasionally to other outcomes of schooling). This paper reviews extensively both historical and
contemporary research to identify what is known about effective teaching.
Every day, students consume hundreds of words on their iPads, mobile phones, Chromebooks, and Kindles. Increasingly, educational publishers are delivering curriculum on these devices, including several start-ups focused on getting informational texts and news stories into students' hands. But fundamentally, is reading online different from using the old class copies of Ethan Frome or The Federalist Papers?
As it turns out, what we don't know outweighs what we do know about how people comprehend texts on a digital
screen rather than on the printed page, a new research review concludes.
TORONTO -- It is "unacceptable" for publicly funded Ontario colleges to operate campuses outside Canada that exclude women, the premier of Ontario said Friday when asked about two men-only schools in Saudi Arabia.
People abused by angry discipline as children, may tend to abuse or overly punish other people or themselves for perceived wrongs in their adult lives. Passive and aggressive personality types are often attracted to each other. In some individuals, aggressive or passive personality traits may be genetically inherited. The aggressive personality may feel weakened by having guidelines or boundaries for anger. Anger is a normal human emotion, and these guidelines can help express anger in a healthy way:
Background/Context: The increasing number of districts implementing mentoring and induction programs suggests that policymakers are aware of the need to increase the support available to new teachers. The argument underlying many of these programs is based, at least partly, on assumptions about beginning teachers’ emotional responses to their work. Yet while considerable research has studied the effects of induction programs, few researchers have rigorously collected data on how beginning teachers’ affective experiences seem to impact their career plans.
Mental health is a pressing concern for post-secondary students in Canada. The 2016 National College Health Association survey of Canadian post-secondary students demon-strates that a significant number of students are experiencing mental health problems and illnesses: 44.4% of surveyed students reported that at some point in the previous twelve months they felt “so depressed it was difficult to function”; 13% had seriously considered suicide; 2.1% had attempted suicide, and 18.4% reported being “diagnosed or treated by a professional” for anxiety. 1 The growing prominence of mental health issues among post-secondary students is not limited to Canada – it has been noted by practitioners
When it comes to connecting with students, good relationships and good rapport go hand in hand. The desired rapport develops when faculty are friendly, approachable, respectful, and caring toward students. And how do students respond to professors who’ve established good rapport? They “like” those professors, and that’s the point at which some of us experience a bit of nervous twitching. If students like us, does that mean they learn more? Does education hinge on the popularity of the professor? The ethical ground feels stronger if what students learn and take from their educational experiences results from actions that support learning. And that circles us right back to rapport and the powerful role it plays in determining how students respond to the content in our courses, their daily attendance, and the study time they devote to what we’re teaching. Student commitment to a course increases if rapport with the instructor is good. So, be nice, chat with students, and show that you love teaching.
Background/Context: Based on archival material, the following paper analyzes the political strategies of the early OECD stakeholders in transforming schooling from a cultural to a technological system and how they were in need of standardizing different existing patterns of thoughts or institutional behaviors in the member countries. The European standardization process observable in the early 1960s, triggered by the OECD, affected the organization of the educational policies on a ministerial level designed to influence the national school systems according to a specific ideology.
I don’t want to feel out of place (pauses, searching for the “right” words). I don’t want to have my difference hinder me. But, help me if anything. So, I want to express myself so they can understand me—so, that I can communicate.
But, in Jamaica, when I was a little kid, you always heard crazy little things when you’re a kid (laughs). And, you’re like: “Oh, they act like this, and they do this. They’re so silly: They spell color without the u.” And they didn’t necessarily seem to make it a bad thing to be that way, but it was understood that we were different.
And, I liked being different. I liked being Jamaican.
Partnerships between public and private colleges, which have brought thousands of new international students to Ontario, carried unacceptable risks to the students, the province and the quality of education, says a report for the provincial government that led to a moratorium on the programs.
This document describes the development of analytic rubrics for competency assessment project. The purpose of this report is to describe the process of developing a set of general analytic rubrics to assess competencies in design, communication and teamwork, and a set of outcomes and indicators to assess problem analysis and investigation.
The work to develop the rubrics was structured into three main phases. In the first or planning phase, a review of the literature was carried out to create a comprehensive list of learning outcomes in the five competency areas under investigation. A list of more specific, measureable learning outcomes, called indicators, was also compiled. The resulting comprehensive list of learning outcomes and indicators was distilled by removing redundancy between the systems, filling content gaps, and grouping indicators into common learning outcome categories.
“Efficient and effective learning starts with a proper mindset,” Stephen Chew writes in his short, readable, and very useful chapter, “Helping Students to Get the Most Out of Studying.” Chew continues, pointing out what most of us know firsthand, students harbor some fairly serious misconceptions that undermine their efforts to learn. He identifies four of them.
The subject of Leadership has been studied for hundreds of years and reveals an evolving succession of theories. The earliest theories focus mostly on the character and personality of successful leaders and how they behave. The more recent theories focus on what leaders actually do rather than on them need to have certain innate qualities or traits.
I have grown weary with all the calls for educational success to be defined by how much graduates make.
There are college rankings that claim to be about the value of degrees from various institutions. What this really means is that
it lists colleges by how much their graduates make on average. Now, I suppose some would expect me to like this measurement of colleges since my alma mater does quite well. But I am appalled at the equation of a good education and a high salary.
This measurement degrades students who choose careers that do not pay a lot — teachers, social workers, ministers, etc. But
clearly people who do some of the most important jobs in America are being left behind in an economy that is continuing down the road of greater economic inequality.