The Georgia Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, and Arizona State University last year provided students with Echo Dots, puck-shaped, voice-activated devices programmed to answer campus-specific questions about meal plans and business hours for campus buildings.
Some of these Echo Dots, programmed by n-Powered, a Boston-based start-up, can relay individual students’ data, including financial aid and grades. The company’s founders installed 60 of the virtual-assistant devices at Northeastern this past spring.
1. Public support to families with pre-school children can be in the form of cash benefits (e.g. child allowances) or of “in-kind” support (e.g. care services such as kindergartens). The mix of these support measures varies greatly across OECD countries, from a cash / in-kind composition of 10%/90% to 80%/20%. This paper imputes the value of services into an “extended” household income and compares the resulting distributive patterns and the redistributive effect of these two strands of family policies. On average, cash and in-kind transfers each constitute 7 – 8% of the incomes of families with young children. Both instruments are redistributive. Cash transfers reduce child poverty by one third, with the estimated impacts in Austria, Ireland, Sweden, Hungary and Finland performing above average. When services are accounted for, child poverty falls by one quarter and poverty among children enrolled in childcare is more than halved. This reduction is highest in Belgium, France, Hungary, Iceland and Sweden.
Don’t overlook the benefits of working in a non-faculty role at a university.
It was a chilly December morning at work. I was sipping on my first coffee of the day, reading my emails and making my plans for the day, when an email notified me that one of my publications had been referenced. No way! It had been almost eight years to the day since I defended my PhD thesis and I had long stopped adding research publications to my resumé.
Still, it was exciting to find out someone referenced my research.
A seasoned educator shares four ideas for supporting students who have suffered emotional trauma.
Abstract
This survey study measured the association between risk and protective factors of anxiety and its implications on the
academic performance of 1,053 students at a four-year, public post-secondary institution in southwestern Ontario. Logistic
regression analyses revealed 13 significant variables at the univariable level, while the multivariable model yielded seven
significant factors. Students who felt hopeless significantly increased their odds of reporting anxiety adversely affecting
their academic performance, while being able to manage daily responsibilities was the only protective factor against anxiety
impacting students’ educational attainment. By planning, designing, and implementing proactive programs focusing on these
predictor variables, such interventions can equip students against the debilitative influence of anxiety on their academic
success.
Keywords: anxiety, academic performance, post-secondary students, student wellness, risk factors, protective factors
When colleges talk about diverse hiring, much of the focus — and the funding — goes to recruiting and retaining faculty members from underrepresented minority groups. But a program in the works at the University of California at Berkeley is looking at new ways to elevate an overlooked cohort: minority staff in nonacademic areas, like student-affairs administrators and office managers.
Training sessions will be tailored to the experiences of midcareer staff members from minorities. The sessions are aimed at helping participants understand topics like strategic networking, how the university works, and how to negotiate.
Have your students ever told you that your tests are too hard? Tricky? Unfair? Many of us have heard these or similar comments. The conundrum is that, in some circumstances, those students may be right.
Assessing student learning is a big responsibility. The reason we report scores and assign grades is to communicate information about the extent of student learning. We use these indicators to judge whether students are prepared for more difficult work or ready to matriculate into majors or sit for certification exams. Ideally, scores and grades reflect a student’s learning of a particular body of content, content we intended them to learn. Assessments (e.g., tests, quizzes, projects, and presentations) that are haphazardly constructed, even if unintentionally, can result in scores and grades that misrepresent the true extent of students’ knowledge and leave students confused about what they should have been learning. Fortunately, in three easy steps, test
blueprinting can better ensure that we are testing what we’re teaching.
It is all too common to see PhD students work themselves to the point of physical and mental illness in order to complete their studies. It is less common to see PhD students who feel that they are under such pressure that the only option is suicide. But it does happen. There is a culture of acceptance around mental health issues in academia – and this needs to change.
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.
Why we need to promote socioeconomic diversity.
Sarah Green Carmichael, an editor at the Harvard Business Review, recently talked with Joan C. Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law, about her new book, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, which examines how class divisions affected the recent election. Ms. Williams contends that liberals have long been hung up on identity and cultural issues at the expense of socioeconomic ones. While she believes that eliminating racial and gender inequality is a good thing — she’s a progressive and a feminist, after all — she suggests that there’s been a blindness to class inequality, which is alive and growing in America. As one example, she points to a recent study of fictitious résumés, which found that male law students from privileged backgrounds were far more likely to get callbacks for coveted internships at top law firms than their working-class counterparts were. Socioeconomic bias is all too real, she argues, yet many corporate and college diversity efforts tend to overlook it. It’s time to expand diversity programs to include class, she tells Ms. Carmichael.
Colleges are feeling heat to prove that their students are learning. As a result, a growing number of colleges are
measuring intended “learning outcomes” as well as issuing grades. But fewer are using standardized tests than was the case a few years ago.
Those are findings of a new survey from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). The liberal education organization received responses from chief academic officers at 325 of its member institutions, including community colleges and four-year institutions (public and private as well as a couple of for-profits).
There is nothing new in the role popular culture plays in issues of young people and identity. Few people reading this chapter did not, at some point, present their identities or claim their affiliations through displays of popular culture content or preferences. Beatles or Rolling Stones? Tupac or Biggie? Star Wars or Star Trek? Halo or World of Warcraft? Sex in the City or Grey’s Anatomy? We have all argued, shared, reminisced, disdained, or delighted in performing our identities through popular culture and using it to gauge potential friends or possible adversaries.
Traditional pedagogy is premised on a belief that older generations teach younger generations how to learn. At this point in history, however, through their ubiquitous exposure to media, technology, and communication, younger generations understand contemporary forms of communication better and more tacitly than older generations. Yet schooling lags behind advances in communication and technologies, clinging to a concept that older generations still impart knowledge to prepare younger generations for the future. Jake Telluci (2007), a participant in our research study on marketplace production, articulated this discrepancy well, when he said, “It’s about when technology is in the hands of people, they will often just do things with it.” In this chapter, I argue that unveiling new media and digital technologies production practices exposes a logic and language that better serve as a contemporary model of learning. The process of adopting new media is iterative and cyclical in that meaning-makers pick up new media production practices, remix them, and make them their own. Forging a twenty-first century identity entails reappropriating practices and texts consumed on a daily basis.
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.
The purpose of this qualitative case study was to gain insights into how aca-demics understand undergraduate graduand attributes. The findings reveal some alignment in views about student attributes, including that they are engaged citizens, are self-directed, have imagination, are questioning, are flexible, display leadership, are problem solvers, and possess character. This consistency, however, does not include the spectrum of views on how these attributes are conceived and developed. The findings reveal a range of inter-pretations regarding the kinds and levels of understandings of how graduand student attributes are developed throughout an undergraduate program of study. The findings indicate that (i) a shared understanding does not exist on how academics construe student attributes, (ii) academics do not share com-mon meanings about the core achievements of a higher education, or how these are developed through students’ undergraduate programs, and (iii) stu-dent attributes tend not to be perceived as developing from the usual process of an undergraduate education.
Question (from "Luanne"): I’m in a bullpen office with half a dozen adjuncts, some of us sharing desks, all of us crowded, overworked, and demoralized. But that’s not what I’m writing about.
"Dana" manages to make it so much worse with his chronic complaining. Every day there’s a new crisis — noisy plumbing, bad drivers, barking dogs. He hates the weather in our part of the country, and despises the local politics. His students, he rails, are all morons. And we, his colleagues, will never measure up to the world-class professors he knew at his Ivy League grad school.
He’s known as "Dana the Complainer" and making fun of him behind his back is a common pastime. I’m not happy with that. (I’m probably called "Luanne the Pollyanna.") I can’t get any work done, with his fuming and stomping around.
Holidays are the worst, when he scolds the staff members about Christmas stuff on their desks. (They’re mostly single moms from the small Appalachian towns near us, and they have to be polite, no matter the provocation). I agree that religion doesn’t belong in the university. But I also believe in tact, which is a foreign concept to Dana. He loathes "mindless politeness" and values "people who speak their mind, no matter what."
How can I deal with him? Our college pays so little that I can’t even hope he’ll be fired. There’s no line of people wanting his job.
The wave of upcoming retirements is a myth and PhD numbers have little to do with the academic job
market anyway.
In my last post I took a look at some of the history and context of Canadian universities’ hiring of contract faculty. While I was digging around for information, I couldn’t help noticing the relevance of some of the material to another ongoing debate in higher education: that of the “overproduction” of PhDs. Since “too many PhDs” is a recurring theme in media commentary about
graduate education (e.g. Nature, The Economist), I thought I’d explore the issue in more depth and connect it to some of the research I found. Are we really “producing” too many PhDs, and if so, is this a recent problem?
At a conference in Ottawa, academics, policymakers, students and community leaders addressed the role universities can play in reconciling Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.
What role can and should universities play in reconciliation efforts between Canadian institutions and Indigenous communities? What’s working well and what needs to change? These questions were central to a two-day symposium of university administrators, students, policymakers and community organizers called Converge 2017, hosted by Universities Canada in Ottawa last week.
The Education For Practice Institute led thedevelopment of the professional and practice-based education (P&PBE) standards for Charles Sturt University undergraduate and graduate entry courses in 2010. This exercise was conducted with
extensive consultation with the CSU community and led to the development of 70 standards based on the four aspects identified as influencing the quality of learning and teaching at course level: learning outcomes, teaching and learning activities, course infrastructure at a local level, and infrastructure at the university level.
MONTREAL -- It’s not whether to talk to students about sensitive current events like the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Va., but how. That was the upshot of a panel called “Teaching in Our Contemporary Moment” here Monday at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.
“You have to talk about those things in your class,” said Tanya Golash-Boza, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Merced, who specializes in race and immigration. “Whatever you think of sociologists, they’re more socially aware than the biologists and the computer scientists … You have to remember that sociology is a place where students come to talk about what happened yesterday, what happened last week.”