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.
Since its launch in 1983, the U.S. News and World Report’s annual college rankings have sought to compare institutions using a series of quantifiable metrics, including acceptance rates and alumni donations, that have increasingly come under scrutiny. In 2013, President Obama argued that the rankings actually incentivize colleges to “game the numbers and in some cases, [get rewarded] for raising costs,” encouraging schools to invest extra money in activities such as alumni outreach and in turn theoretically raise tuition. Yet, according to Obama, colleges motivated by these grading systems, largely continued to neglect one key measure: student outcomes. Since then, he’s pledged to change the way colleges are ranked by shifting the focus from institutional prestige to students’ actual academic experience.
Internationalization processes are at the fore of university strategic plans on a global scale. However, the work of internationalization is being performed through the connections between many actors at different policy levels. Our purpose here is to ask, what is happening with internationalization of higher education at the Canadian national policy level? To do so, we suggest that we must look at policies at the national level not as individual entities but rather as these policies exist in relation to each other. We examine three recent policy statements from different organizations at the national level in Canada: a federal governmental agency, a pan-Canadian provincial organization and a national educational association. Our approach involved mapping the actors, knowledges and spaces that are discursively produced through these texts and engaging a relational approach to policy analysis that questions what comes to be assembled as these policies co-exist in the national landscape.
If we see a colleague with a fever, we say “go home and rest.” Why can’t we treat mental illness with the same understanding?
Today, I want to revisit the story David told in his last post. Someone he knew collapsed, became addicted to crystal meth and ended up homeless. We all wonder after such a story – could this have been prevented? Overall, it is difficult to provide a single answer and there is no one person to blame but I hope that after reading the list below, you will feel like you can help (even if it is only in a small way).
Last semester I reinvented English composition as a community-service learning course. My students did the usual work of any composition course — developing basic writing skills, crafting narrative essays and arguments, conducting research — but it was in the service of creating print and web content for a local homeless shelter.
In their end-of-semester evaluations, students praised the experiment, and I will probably repeat it. But I don’t want to make too much of that particular reinvention, because I have reinvented first-year composition at least a half-dozen times in my 20 years of teaching it, and will no doubt do so again. The same goes for most people I know who teach composition.
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.
It’s now simply a given among student affairs professionals that parents will be involved in their children’s lives at
university.
John Hannah notes, with a laugh, that his kids are “nauseatingly close to postsecondary age.” The father of two will soon watch as his teenagers begin the exciting but often bureaucratic and stressful journey of applying to university. Mr. Hannah must make a tough call: how much, exactly, should he hand-hold, guide and support them during this pivotal step towards adulthood?
Baylor University’s newly named president, Linda A. Livingstone, has had a long career in higher education. But there’s one position that’s not on her résumé: provost.
Increasingly, that’s not an unusual step to skip, according to a report, released on Wednesday, that analyzed 840 college presidents’ CVs. While serving as provost was once a clear steppingstone on the way to the president’s office, many deans are now moving straight into the top job, according to the report, which was issued by Deloitte’s Center for Higher Education Excellence and the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Center for 21st Century Universities.
Abstract
This study aimed to better understand campus mental health culture and student mental health coping strategies, and to identify the mental health needs of students as well as gaps in mental health services within postsecondary education. A videovoice method was used to identify and document health-related issues and advocate for change. Forty-one interviews were conducted with campus stakeholders at five universities. Five themes involving mental health emerged from the campus interviews: the stigma of mental illness; campus culture related to mental health; mental health services available and barriers to mental health services on campus; accommodations for students’ mental health needs; and student mental health coping strategies. A documentary was developed to advocate for better mental health. We conclude that although Canadian campuses are raising awareness about mental health issues, there is not enough mental health infrastructure support on campuses; in particular, accessibility to campus mental health resources needs improvement.
Résumé
Cette étude vise à mieux comprendre la culture de la santé mentale au sein de différents campus ainsi que les stratégies d’adaptation adoptées par les étudiants, puis à relever les besoins des étudiants et les lacunes quant à l’offre de services en santé mentale des institutions postsecondaires. Nous avons eu recours à la méthode « videovoice » dans le but d’identifier et de documenter les problèmes de santé mentale, puis de plaider en faveur d’un changement. Quarante-etune entrevues ont été réalisées auprès d’intervenants sur les campus de cinq
différentes universités. De ces entrevues, cinq thèmes liés à la santé mentale ont émergé, soit la stigmatisation liée à la santé mentale, la culture des campus, la disponibilité des services en santé mentale et les obstacles de l’offre de tels services, les accommodements offerts par les campus, et les stratégies d’adaptation des étudiants. Nous avons élaboré un documentaire qui plaide en faveur de la santé mentale. Nous concluons que, bien que les campus canadiens sensibilisent leurs étudiants à ce sujet, il y a absence de soutien en termes d’infrastructure pour la
santé mentale sur les campus. En effet, l’accès des ressources en santé mentale doit particulièrement être amélioré sur les campus.
No matter how much we debate the issue, end-of-course evaluations count. How much they count is a matter of perspective. They matter if you care about teaching. They frustrate you when you try to figure out what they mean. They haven’t changed; they are regularly administered at odds with research-recommended practices. And faculty aren’t happy with the feedback they provide. A survey (Brickman et al., 2016) of biology faculty members found that 41% of them (from a wide range of institutions) were not satisfied with the current official end-of-course student evaluations at their institutions, and another 46% were only satisfied “in some ways.”
Attrition from Canadian graduate programs is a point of concern on a societal, institutional, and individual level. To improve retention in graduate school, a better understanding of what leads to withdrawal needs to be reached. This paper uses logistic regression and discrete-time survival analysis with time-varying covariates to analyze data from the Youth in Transition Survey. The pre-entry attributes identified in Tinto’s (1993) model of attrition are exam-ined to help uncover who is most likely to withdraw from graduate school. A good academic background is shown to be the strongest predictor of entering graduate school. Upon entry, demographic and background characteristics, such as being married and having children, are associated with a reduced likelihood of completing. Policy recommendations at the department and in-stitution level are provided as well as directions for future research.
“Ideological diversity” and “intellectual diversity” are the buzzwords on everyone’s lips these days. Recently, when a student at a town hall asked Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg how he makes his company a “free and safe environment” for self-expression, he said, “We have a board member who is an adviser to the Trump administration, Peter Thiel. I personally believe that if you want to have a company that is committed to diversity, you need to be committed to all kinds of diversity, including ideological diversity,” an article on The Ringer reports. Meanwhile, since students shouted down the controversial sociologist Charles A. Murray at Middlebury College this month, many conservatives and some liberals have been quick to chide liberal students and academics for their intolerance and push for ideological and intellectual diversity on campuses, notes Kate Knibbs, a staff writer for the sports and popculture website.
A number of studies suggest that student evaluations of teaching are unreliable due to various kinds of biases against instructors. (Here’s one addressing gender.) Yet conventional wisdom remains that students learn best from highly rated instructors; tenure cases have even hinged on it.
What if the data backing up conventional wisdom were off? A new study suggests that past analyses linking student achievement to high student teaching evaluation ratings are flawed, a mere “artifact of small sample sized studies and publication bias.”
Studying for a doctoral degree can be a lonely, dispiriting experience. You huddle in the library during yet another weekend away from loved ones, frantically searching the basement for an ancient tome that you desperately need to finish your literature
review. Life appears to devolve into a numbing monotony punctuated by paralyzing moments of stress and the occasional minor success. When you reach the all but dissertation (ABD) stage, your waking hours seem to endlessly revolve around a few mundane tasksread, write, edituntil you have successfully completed your oral defense. During the bleakest hours, well before the end is in sight, when your money, health, and resolve are at a collective nadir, it can feel like your path is too long and you are making no progress. Suffering through these moments of tremendous self-doubt, it can feel like there are too many obstacles and not enough support to finish this long, solitary, tortuous journey.
In this paper we utilize interview data to explore the workings of a college–community partnership program that delivers tuition-free, for-credit courses to low-income adult students in neighbourhood-based settings. Addressing the interplay of individual and structural barriers on the educational readiness of students, our findings explore how the program builds participants’
confidence and self-belief, and how the neighbourhood-based delivery model encourages their engagement with post-secondary education (PSE). We find that the value of embedding PSE capacity and resources in low-income communities lies not only in its potential to engage adult learners, but also in how it nurtures a greater sense of community integration and social inclusion. We
conclude by suggesting that our study provides a useful foundation for institutions elsewhere aiming to recalibrate and extend their community outreach strategies when seeking to promote post-secondary access and engagement for low-income populations.
Context: The past decade has witnessed a sustained emphasis on information and communication technologies (ICT) in education, coupled with the rise of online social media and increasing pervasiveness of personal media devices.
Research Question: Our research question asked: How has this changing context affected the educational experiences of American high school students?
Setting: The exploratory, qualitative study took place at two high schools in a large metropolitan district in the southeastern United States. One high school was in a downtown area, and the other was in a suburban setting.
Research Design: The researchers used various qualitative research approaches, including interviews, on-site observations, and document analysis. Our interview participants included classroom teachers and support staff as well as students drawn from across each school’s grade levels. We also shadowed 10 of the student interview participants through their entire school days.
As Canadian universities seek to attract more international students, there is a need to recognize and respond to the diversity within this group and to question the binary categories of domestic students and international stu- dents. Relying primarily on 116 qualitative interviews with international undergraduates at the University of British Columbia, we utilize American students as a case study from which to explore the complex and blurred boundaries between these two categories. Americans resemble domestic stu- dents in some respects and international students in others, yet they are often less prepared to meet adaptational challenges because they have low expecta- tions of cultural and institutional differences. We compare the experiences of
Americans and international students from other countries, as well as other groups of students who fall between the cracks of the domestic and inter- national student classifications. We argue that, by targeting services on the basis of these broad administrative categories, categories that were created for financial purposes, the university reduces the take-up of the very services students need.
Trusting people is not easy for any of us, but it may be particularly difficult for administrators.
It entails a degree of letting go that may feel uncomfortable for people used to being in charge. It also requires a fair
amount of courage, since you never really know what other people are going to do — and in this case, what they do
might very well reflect negatively on you.
I intend to never grade another paper.
At the height of my adjunct "career" teaching writing, world religions, and general humanities courses, I taught up to 12 courses a year at three different institutions in the Houston area. I juggled about 400 students a year in my courses, and each student wrote three to five papers. Do the math — that’s a lot of grading.
I worked that oxymoronic full-time adjunct load for a decade — in addition to teaching a few continuing-ed courses just for kicks and extra income. In short, I taught more students and graded more papers in a decade than most of my full-time colleagues at the same university would teach in their entire careers.
For a while, I was sort of an adjunct guru. I self-published a book called How to Survive as an Adjunct Lecturer: An ntrepreneurial Strategy Manual and ended up writing a monthly advice column on The Adjunct Track for The Chronicle. I also provided coaching to other non-tenure-track instructors to help them figure out ways to work the system and squeeze as much money out of it as possible. The idea was to come as close as they could to an income that honored their knowledge and credentials — or to at least not have to wait tables on nonteaching days to make ends meet.
I did well financially. I made my mortgage every month and managed to save a little. But I shoveled my share of hate mail from people who said I was justifying an exploitative system when, really, all I was trying to do was find a way to survive (maybe even thrive for a few moments) within it.
Background/Context: The assessment of students, along with teachers and school systems, has largely taken place within a context of positivist science. An enormous range of scholarship now challenges the positivist paradigm, offering a social espistemological alternative. This alternative invites a re-examination of assessment processes and their policy implications.