Billboards and yard signs throughout Grand Rapids, Mich., tell students to “Strive for Less Than Five Days Absent.” Leader boards inside school buildings display attendance by grade level. Students who miss too many days are contacted by school personnel and offered support. Since the district began a focused campaign three years ago, chronic absenteeism has dropped from 36 percent to 23 percent. “It is something every community looking at their data can dig into. It’s very actionable,” says Mel Atkins II, the executive director of community and student affairs for the Grand Rapids public school system.
It’s exam time. Research suggests that while some students will be pleasantly surprised by how they did on exams, a larger group will falsely believe they did much better on their exams than they did.
At this time of year, university students across the country are preparing for exams. Some will happily get higher-than-expected marks. But a larger group instead will be surprised by lower scores.
Negative surprises are common partly because we humans tend to be overly optimistic. Look at how people buy lottery tickets, borrow money or invest in stocks.
Students also tend to be unduly optimistic about their learning and forthcoming grades. Less skilled students are especially likely to over-estimate. This may lead them to make poor choices. If they mistakenly believe they’re already doing well, they may not study enough.
I often see this problem among my undergraduate students. So, I’ve experimented by giving them extra feedback about their grades and then surveying their reactions. A Chancellor’s Chair for Teaching Excellence award from Brock University funded this research.
This summer’s college president departure season is off to a swift start that has largely been marked by little
forewarning from colleges before exits are announced.
Many boards of trustees would consider it best practice to have a quick parting of ways with little surrounding
drama. But it doesn’t always go so smoothly in higher education -- it didn’t last summer -- making the pace and tone
of presidential partings so far this year stand out. Also noteworthy is that many recently announced transitions have
involved leaders who are relatively young or who are early in their tenures.
The president of Washington College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore resigned just a week after word leaked that all
was not well between her and the institution’s board. That president, former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
chair Sheila Bair, was two years into a five-year contract. She cited her family when she departed, but the college
did not go into depth on reasons for her resignation.
When I think about my highest goal as a teacher, it is to help create responsible citizens who take care of each other and their world.
And the best way that I can help form human beings who do good is to teach them empathy. I’d like to think that the ability to
understand and share the feelings of others is something that everyone is born with, but I also think that it is important enough to
be explicitly taught just in case.
Art is one of the most underutilized resources in today’s ELA classroom. The Roman poet Horace claimed, “A picture is a poem
without words” meaning art and written word are different mediums of expression. Art offers students a break from written words while continuing to develop the same skill set needed to be successful readers through challenging students to think both critically and analytically.
Political pollsters like to talk about the distinction between "hard support" and "soft support." Hard supporters will vote for a candidate no matter what. Soft supporters are known by another name: swing voters. They are the people who say they’ll vote for a certain candidate but often change their minds.
The idea of training Ph.D.s for diverse career tracks has hard and soft supporters, too, but some professors may not realize which group they’re in. They may believe they’re behind graduates who search for jobs beyond the professoriate. But the actions of these faculty members — or their inaction — can suggest otherwise.
When I was an advanced graduate student preparing to take my chances on the academic job market, I approached the head of the freshman-writing program for a recommendation. "What do you want me to say about you?" he asked.
The question caught me off guard. No professor had ever asked me that before. Without thinking, I told him to describe me as a "teacher-scholar." It made sense at the time, and decades later, I still see myself as some combination of teacher and scholar. So do most of us in academe, I believe — although scientists might prefer a term like "teacher-investigator." ("Investigation" was the all-purpose word used in 1891 by William Rainey Harper, the president of the newly established University of Chicago, to describe what professors would do there once the place opened.)
This month, we’ll focus on how to prepare for existing state and national tests. I’ll focus on three things that can help your students improve their chances to score up to their potential. By the way, kids never score above their potential; they’re just not going to randomly make enough lucky right answers time after time after time (in statistics, it’s called regression to the mean).
But, they often underperform for a host of reasons, even when they should perform much better. While we could focus on dozens of variables that influence standardized testing, we’ll focus on these three: 1) brain chemistry, 2) priming, and 3) episodic memory triggers. Some of these suggestions got so many rave reviews that they are reproduced from an earlier bulletin!
Research shows that women perform better than men on four out of five traits of effective leaders, says Øyvind Martinsen
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to offer junior scholars a front-to-back guide to writing an academic, theoretically positioned, qualitative research article in the social sciences.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on formal (published) advice from books and articles as well as informal (word-of-mouth) advice from senior scholars.
Findings – Most qualitative research articles can be divided into four major parts: the frontend,
the methods, the findings, and the backend. This paper offers step-by-step instructions for writing each of these four parts.
Originality/value – Much of the advice in this paper is taken-for-granted wisdom among senior scholars. This paper makes such wisdom available to junior scholars in a concise guide.
Keywords Qualitative research, Theoretical contribution, Writing an article
Paper type Technical paper
When I visit with teachers employed in public schools, I often hear, “You are already where I want to be. College. That’s where we all want to be.”
Many public school teachers consider pursuing master’s degrees with the goal of someday teaching college. Unfortunately, many of them are under misconceptions. More than once, someone has applied for a position at Howard College who was not aware of certain realities. For those who have considered teaching at a community college, here are a few things of which to be aware.
Public perception has become reality -- reputations are made and destroyed overnight thanks to the power of social and online media and an emboldened public who has seen Twitter bring down corporate titans and foment socio-political unrest around the world.
Schools can no longer be certain they’ll avoid the media spotlight or trust that their hard-earned reputations will protect them. In 2015, the University of Missouri faced a maelstrom of hunger strikes by the football team, racial incidents and massive protests. “Official inaction” from the administration catalyzed the initial protests, and subsequent attempts at reconciliation, including the resignation of the chancellor and president and appointment of a chief diversity officer, came too late to appease discontented students, alumni and community members. Two years
later, as recently reported by the New York Times, the university’s enrollment is down more than 35 percent and
budget cuts have forced the temporary closure of seven dormitories and elimination of 400 staff positions.
It is a standard question that my fellow consultants and I hear at the outset of any search, especially at the presidential level: Should we have a student on the committee?
The issue has always been somewhat fraught, but it has become more and more important as undergraduates around the country assert themselves on any number of topics facing their colleges — tuition costs, loan debt, racial inequities, gender identity, sexual misconduct, bullying and violence on campus, to name but a few. In many ways, the campus environment today is reminiscent of an earlier age, one in which campus unrest ultimately led to real change — the end of in loco parentis policies, inclusion of students in shared governance, and, oh yeah, stopping a war.
Mindfulness has received significant attention in the empirical literature during the past decade, but few studies have focused on mindfulness in university students and how it may influence problematic behaviours. This study examined the relationships among mindfulness, coping, and physiological reactivity in a sample of university students. Participants completed questionnaires, and skin conductance measurements were collected during an interview where they recalled a personally stressful event. Correlation analyses tested relationships among these variables. There was a negative correlation between substance use and mindfulness. Specifically, those using substances as a coping mechanism were less likely to be mindful and displayed higher physiological reactivity. More mindful individuals were less likely to report misusing substances and were able to calm themselves more quickly than their counterparts following a stressful event. Thus, poor outcomes for distressed students may be reduced with mindfulness-based interventions
Résumé
Au cours des dernières décennies, la pleine conscience a été l’objet d’une attention importante dans la documentation empirique, mais peu d’études ont ciblé la pleine conscience chez les étudiants et sa façon d’influencer les comportements problématiques. Cette étude a étudié l’association entre la pleine conscience, les mécanismes d’adaptation et la réactivité physiologique chez un échantillon d’étudiants. En plus de répondre à des questionnaires, les participants ont dû passer une entrevue où il leur fallait raconter un souvenir personnel particulièrement stressant pendant qu’on mesurait leur conductance cutanée. Des analyses de corrélation ont évalué les liens entre ces variables. Ainsi, on a dénoté une corrélation négative entre l’utilisation de substances nocives et la pleine conscience. Plus précisément, les participants qui avaient consommé des substances nocives comme mécanisme d’adaptation avaient moins tendance à posséder des traits conscients, et ont démontré une réactivité physiologique plus élevée que les autres étudiants. Les gens plus pleinement conscients avaient moins tendance à utiliser des substances nocives, et étaient capables de se calmer plus rapidement que leurs pairs après un événement stressant. Par conséquent, des interventions basées sur la pleine conscience pourraient aider les étudiants stressés à ne pas adopter de comportements problématiques.
What do my living room, the Ronald McDonald House in New Haven and the New York City subway have in common? They are all places where I have conducted professional development on a tight schedule. Professional development is the process of developing skills and gaining experience that will help advance your career. Sometimes professional development involves developing skills that are not immediately relevant to your research. My hope for this article is that you will also find professional development opportunities that do not interfere with your academic priorities.
"Plan for the students you actually have, not those you wish you had, or think you used to have, or think you used to be like."
So John N. Gardner, the creator of the term "first-year experience," advised college officials charged with making sure that the experience is a good one. In other words, be realistic; don’t expect too much of students.
That mind-set contrasts with the one evoked by the New Yorker writer David Denby in his new book, Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-Four Books That Can Change Lives. The New York Times last week noted, "Lit Up is a refreshing lesson in what motivates students and why not to dumb down reading lists." Denby opens a window into the classrooms of several gifted high-school English teachers who assign Faulkner, Orwell, Frankl, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Shakespeare, Poe, and Twain — and whose love of reading is contagious to their teen students.
Engaging with students – both inside and outside the classroom – who are continually linked in to social media and online devices presents a range of opportunities, challenges and pitfalls.
To some of my students’ displeasure, I have my office hours on Friday afternoons. I prepare for this ancient tradition of face-to-face, pen-and-paper pedagogy by tidying my office, purging unwanted scraps of paper, removing half empty coffee cups, and sometimes even plugging in an air freshener. Then I sit in my swivel chair, arms crossed, and wait for the barrage of undergraduate students to arrive with their genetics questions.
In the early 1970s, Rosalind Driver, then a graduate student in education at the University of Illinois, had a peculiar notion. To understand how children learn important scientific concepts,she argued, we first need to grasp how they see the world before they start school. Children do not come into their first science classrooms as blank slates, with no sense of the natural world or of the way objects move in space. Talking with children, Driver showed, often revealed that they had quite fully developed (if incorrect) ideas about scientific phenomena.
Her crucial — and radical — insight was that learning is dependent on preconceptions. We learn by revising our understanding of things.
We live in a world filled with physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual violence. This violence has, unfortunately, toxic consequences for us. It is definitely not a question of what doesn’t kill you makes you strong; it is a question of what doesn’t kill you leaves you scarred. This short article, directed at parents and teachers, highlights the emotional and psychological violence children experience at school. As the article suggests, this violence is ubiquitous and damaging.
Professor Arthur Gill Green traces his conversion to using open educational resources, or OER, back to a specific day in his introductory geography class in 2010. That day, after the lecture, he noticed students taking photos at the back of the classroom and wondered why.
It turns out they were photographing the textbook. “Two of us every week get digital pictures of the textbook pages, and one of us gets to take it home,” a nervous student confessed upon Dr. Green’s approach. He reassured the students he wasn’t upset, but the professor now sees the incident as a disruptive moment.