Instruction of team skills is quickly emerging as an important and missing dimension of engineering education. This project evaluated a new framework for guiding students in providing self- and peer assessments of their effectiveness in teamwork. This framework is the foundation for a new web-based tool that offers students structured feedback from teammates, along with personalized exercises and actionable strategies that guide targeted learning in the areas thereby identified. Specifically, the study documented in this report investigated whether the feedback framework, when used for intra-team self and peer feedback, increased students’ abilities to learn about and improve their team-effectiveness in executing design projects.
Background/Context: In many countries, there are multiple studies intended to improve initial teacher education. These have generally focused on pieces of teacher education rather than wholes, and have used an underlying linear logic. It may be, however, that what is needed are new research questions and theoretical frameworks that account for wholes, not just parts, and take complex, rather than reductionist perspectives.
Background/Context: In many countries, there are multiple studies intended to improve initial
teacher education. These have generally focused on pieces of teacher education rather than wholes,
and have used an underlying linear logic. It may be, however, that what is needed are new research
questions and theoretical frameworks that account for wholes, not just parts, and take complex,
rather than reductionist perspectives.
Purpose: This article examines the challenges and the promises of complexity theory as a framework for teacher education research. One purpose is to elaborate the basic es. A second purpose is to propose a new research platform that combines complexity alism (CT-CR) and prompts a new set of empirical questions and research methods. es. A second purpose i alism (CT-CR) and prompts a new set of empirical questions and research methods.
What will you be expected to publish from your dissertation?
Canada’s universities are critical to Canada’s
international assistance and to mobilizing people and ideas for an innovative, inclusive and
prosperous world. Through leveraging research expertise and networks, engaging researchers and
students, working with communities,
and supporting the provision of quality higher education in partner countries, universities play an
active role in reducing poverty, creating
new opportunities for the world’s poorest and most marginalized, and building more inclusive societies. Canada’s universities are a key, and often underleveraged, asset in shaping an effective and innovative approach for the delivery of Canadian development assistance for the benefit of all citizens in partner countries.
As the voice of Canada’s universities at home and abroad, representing the interests of 97 Canadian public and private not-for-profit universities, Universities Canada is grateful for the opportunity to provide input into this important process of re-examining and re-think-ing Canada’s international assistance policy.
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.
In 2005, a study found that 10 percent of graduate and professional students at the University of California at Berkeley had contemplated suicide. More than half reported feeling depressed a lot of the time. While concerns about undergraduates' mental health were already growing then and have only increased since, the finding about graduate students surprised and alarmed many experts. And because of Berkeley's prominence in educating future Ph.D.s and professors, the study was widely circulated.
Ten years later, the graduate student government at Berkeley is releasing a new study. It too finds a high percentage of graduate students showing signs of depression.
The ability to reach a variety of audiences in diverse environments has made distance learning a major form of education
and training in the 21st century. Though traditionally encountered in the educational and business communities, distance learning has proven an important resource for a variety of other constituencies. Terrorist groups have exploited the digital domain as a means of recruitment, propaganda and training, and other related activities, including the use of distance learning as a strategic resource and force multiplier. The distance learning strategies and tactics of jihadists are reviewed as we explore the dark side of distance learning.
“Do you know how much this exam is worth?”
“I can’t find any office hours listed for one of my classes—are there any?.”
“What if I get sick and miss a few classes—will my grade be hurt?”
My answer was the same for all three questions—“I don’t know.” Even though these were my first-year seminar students asking these questions, they were looking at syllabi from their other courses, part of a syllabus review exercise I do each fall with first-time students.
Future teachers are likely to teach as they were taught—which can be problematic, researchers wrote in a recent
study, "because most teachers experienced school mathematics as a set of disconnected facts and skills, not a
system of interrelated concepts."
But even when prospective teachers are taught to teach math conceptually, a good content knowledge base is still
important, the study found.
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.
One of the core principles of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) is that all willing and qualified students should be able to attend post-secondary regardless of their ability to pay. However, students in Ontario face the highest tuition fees in the country and the cost and perceived costs of post-secondary education are consistently identified as barriers to post-secondary education. These barriers are contributing factors to the persistently high attainment gaps for various vulnerable groups
in pursuing an undergraduate degree.
All transitions are difficult. But there is no doubt that following a long-serving leader brings particular challenges. We tend to focus on the brief administrations that so many leaders in higher education are serving right now. We’ve all witnessed such short tenures -- leaders moving on to other opportunities or unfortunately encountering difficulties that result in other people making that decision for them. But among the key transition issues discussed less often are the challenges that occur at the retirement of long-serving leaders -- in many cases, the “founding” deans or directors of key organizations or departments.
This study provided a comprehensive examination of the full range of transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership. Results (based on 626 correlations from 87 sources) revealed an overall validity of .44 for transformational leadership, and this validity generalized over longitudinal and multisource designs. Contingent reward (.39) and laissez-faire (-.37) leadership had the next highest overall relations; management by exception (active and passive) was inconsistently related to the criteria. Surprisingly, there were several criteria for which contingent reward leadership had stronger relations than did transformational leadership.
Furthermore, transformational leadership was strongly correlated with contingent reward (.80) and laissez-faire (-.65) leadership. Transformational and contingent reward leadership generally predicted criteria controlling for the other leadership dimensions, although trans-formational leadership failed to predict leader job performance.
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.
School leaders are faced with stress as part of their daily jobs; however, left unaddressed, stress has the potential of becoming mentally and physically exhausting. School leaders need opportunities for stress reduction as well as the means to predict and anticipate stress in an effort to minimize its effects. This commentary discusses leadership-related stress and offers strategies to minimize and cope with stress.
We have an assessment system that is designed for our convenience as instructors and administrators, rather than for the learning needs of our students.
Currently, 41 percent of exam accommodation requests at the University of Alberta involve some form of extra time and are related to mental health. In an opinion piece last August in the National Post, as well as in an academic article in the Education and Law Journal in 2016, Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy argues that extra-time
accommodations are not legitimate and should not be granted because they tilt the playing field against the best students. He compares tests and exams to sprint races, in which it would be absurd to allow extra time or give a head start to some competitors on the basis of disability. He identifies an important problem, but his solution is the wrong one. Extra time is not the only solution to accommodating mental illness in exams, but for reasons that are
very different from those he quotes. In a very effective response published by the Huffington Post, Ontario Human Rights chief commissioner Renu Mandhane covers most of the essentials. Let me add an academic perspective.
For two decades I have taught 150- to 200-student sections of introductory financial management to majors in all business programs, plus business minors from diverse fields. Although the course has its fans—some even change their majors to finance each semester— many students find the material daunting, become distracted, and behave in ways that impede the learning of others along with their own. Distractions always have lurked in college classrooms; texters and Web surfers are merely the note passers and campus newspaper readers of the digital age.
Many universities have implemented campus-based initiatives addressing students’ mental health with the goal of promoting well-being. One such initiative is the newly developed Counsellor-in-Residence (CIR) program at the University of Calgary, which targets students’ mental health by providing residence- based counselling services and mental health programming. In this
process evaluation, students completed three waves of data collection conducted over the academic year. Each wave measured students’ mental health literacy, using the Mental Health Literacy Scale (O’Connor & Casey, 2015), and resiliency, using the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale-25 (Connor & Davidson, 2003). Males reported lower mental health literacy than females (p < .001), and international students reported lower mental health literacy than domestic students (p < .001). No differences in resilience levels were found between groups. These findings suggest that male and international students experience additional barriers to accessing campus-based mental health services. Implications for residence-based mental health programming that target male and international students are discussed.
Why are writing groups so difficult to sustain? How can they be cultivated and nurtured? We would like to share our
experiences of being a productive and successful writing group over the last seven years. We began with seven
non-tenured and/or contractual members who saw academic writing as an important process for developing research ideas and, consequently, for career growth. We also recognized that it was vital to have a circle of friends where everyone can receive supportive critique and informative feedback on their writing. Over the years, the group has grown to include 17 academics at all ranks and stages.