The Teaching Assistant (TA) job is typically filled by an upper-level university student or graduate student. It’s a job that requires one to play several different roles. First and foremost, the TA is a student and must complete all responsibilities to maintain this status. Second, the TA has a responsibility to the hiring professor. To the professor, the TA is the assistant and must abide
by the requirements set out by the professor. Third, the TA has a responsibility to the students in the class. The role here is that of teacher, tutor, and occasionally advisor.
Women in the sciences who earn PhDs are less likely than their male counterparts to pursue tenure-track positions at research universities. Moreover, among those who become STEM researchers, men have been found to publish more than women. These patterns raise questions about when sex differences in publication begin. Using data from a survey of doctoral students at one large institution, this study finds that men submitted and published more scholarly works than women across many fields, with differences largest in natural/biological sciences and engineering. Potential contributing factors are considered, including sex differences in faculty support, assistantships, family responsibilities, and career goals.
Keywords: career development; doctoral students; equity; faculty development; gender studies; graduate education; higher education; publications; regression analyses; research; secondary data analysis; sex; STEM; survey research; women’s issues
Abstract
This paper explores university corporatization and its impact on university literature, examining the frequency and placement of content in the admissions handbooks (viewbooks) of six Ontario universities from 1980 to 2010, at five-year intervals. Government budget cuts implemented in the mid-1990s served as a point of interest in the timing of corporatization. Content
analysis showed a decreased emphasis on academics and an increased emphasis on the university experience; academics moved toward the back of the viewbooks, and student experience and university-specific advantages moved toward the front. The timing of these changes, however, did not correlate, as expected, with government budget cuts of the mid-1990s.
Résumé
Cet article examine la privatisation des l’universités et ses effets répercussions sur la littérature publication universitaire. Sur des intervalles de 5 ans, les auteurs étudient Six universités de l›Ontario sont étudiées pour examiner la fréquence et le placement la disposition du contenu dans les de manuels d’admission à l›universitéde six universités ontariennes, publiés de 1980 à 2010, utilisant des intervalles de 5 ans. Les compressions budgétaires gouvernementales mises en oeuvre par le gouvernement dans vers la moitié des années 1990 servent de point central pour l’analyse de la privatisation des
universités. L’analyse de contenu est utilisée pour examiner le placement et la fréquence de contenu dans les manuels d›admission. Les résultats indiquent une diminution de d’attention l’attention portée sur le contenu académique
et une augmentation de l’emphase mise l’importance de sur l›expérience universitaire. C’est ainsi que le contenu académique a été déplacé vers la fin des manuels d’admission, tandis que les éléments de la vie étudiante, et une augmentation du contenu associé à l’expérience des étudiants et des avantages spécifiques propres de à chacune des universités étaient mis en évidence, au début de la publication. Toutefois, la période à laquelle Le moment de ces changements ont été apportés, cependant, ne correspond pas avec à celle celui des compressions coupes budgétaires gouvernementales mises en oeuvre par
le gouvernement dans le milieu vers la moitié des années 1990.
If you spend any time listening to other teachers (particularly online, where complaining is almost an art form), you’ll soon hear about an epidemic of grandparents dying in the last two months of the semester , when big assignments are due and final exams start to get closer. Students will do anything to take advantage of us, the chorus sings, and the only defense is a strict adherence to the rules: Sorry, kid, but the syllabus clearly says “no extensions.”
That attitude seems even more desirable when you read some of the criticisms of so-called “permissive-indulgent” instructors. Such teachers “fear doing anything that might create stress for students, stifle their personal growth, or hurt their self-esteem,” writes psychologist Douglas Bernstein. They coddle students, being careful not to be too harsh for fear of discouraging them. Even worse, those faculty “are eager to help students succeed, even if it means lowering standards for success.”
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.
Transnational education is now commonplace. But what is a transnational curriculum and what are its outcomes? Is
it an agenda for a universal consensus above and beyond national politics and the dissonances of race, gender and
ethnicity? Or is it something more uneasy, complex, unruly and creative?
Last month provided an opportunity to test answers to some of these questions. Each January, the Centre for Higher
Education Development at the University of Cape Town hosts an intense 10-day residential as part of the Mellon
Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, or MMUF.
Canadian Students Abroad 2016
Canada’s Performance and Potential in International Education
I was in several meetings last month with groups of higher education Vice-Presidents with oversight for teaching and learning, where the topics of discussion included the increasingly dynamic knowledge environment which our graduates are facing. The capsule summary of the workplace knowledge dynamics from one of these meetings was daunting: “We expect most of our graduates will enter work contexts where they will soon face the following new challenges:
working with knowledge that doesn’t yet exist…
using practices that don’t yet exist…
in jobs that don’t yet exist.”
Douglas Mulford worried when his lab course moved to remote instruction this past spring. Mulford, a senior lecturer of chemistry at Emory University, had worked out a system for giving in-person exams in large classes. But with his 440 students taking their final online, he feared, it would be much easier for them to cheat.
So Mulford set out to protect his test. He looked into lockdown browsers, which limit what students can do on their computers during a test, but concluded they were pointless: Most of his students had a smartphone, too, he figured, and could simply consult it instead. He thought about using a proctoring service, but wasn’t convinced it could handle this volume
of tests on such short notice. So he settled on what he calls “Zoom proctoring,” having students take their final in a Zoom room, with videos turned on, while a TA watched them and recorded the session.
Good boards ask good questions, and great boards ask great questions. The ability to ask meaningful questions is an important skill in the boardroom and fundamental to effective governance. Said the chairman of Bain & Company, Orit Gadiesh, in a 2009 Harvard Business Review interview, “The most distinguished board is useless and does a real disservice to the organization, in my view, if the people on it don’t ask the right questions. If you’re not asking questions, you’re not doing your job.”
If all required learning materials, including textbooks, were provided to all students on or before the first day of class, the average price per student of learning materials would drop and students would be more successful.
We’re at that time of the academic year when the daily details begin to pile up. Teach a class, grade assignments, schedule advisees, and prep for tomorrow. It may not feel like a grind just yet, but it does require lots of focused energy, which makes this a perfect time for a quick reflection on why we teach. For some, teaching is just a job; it’s a paycheck necessity. But for readers of a blog on teaching and learning, I’m pretty sure we’re in it for something more than the bucks, which tend to be pretty modest anyway.
The current Annual Report uses visualizations developed from years of CCMH data to
explore college student mental health with an emphasis on individual counseling provided
by counseling centers. To start, it is worth briefly reviewing the findings from the last two
Annual Reports:
• 2015 Annual Report: Counseling center utilization increased at 5 to 6 times the rate of institutional enrollment, during the preceding five years. This increase is primarily characterized by students reporting a history of “threat-to-self ” characteristics, and these same students use about 20-30% more services.
• 2016 Annual Report: Counseling center resources devoted to “rapid access” services increased by 28%, over the prior six years, whereas resources devoted to “routine treatment” decreased by 7.6% on average.
Happy Thursday, and welcome to Teaching. This week the newsletter is curated by Beckie. First up, Beth shares a scene that stayed with her from a recent reporting trip — and what it means for colleges’ efforts to innovate. Then I’ll fill you in on an effort to improve introductory math, share a list of new books compiled by two of our colleagues at The Chronicle of Higher Education, and run through the highlights of a report on assessing student learning.
"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.
I’ve been receiving an unprecedented number of calls from presidents across the country asking me to “talk [them] off the ledge.” Most of those conversations have been with presidents whom I judge to be effective and emotionally grounded. Yet each person has been distressed in ways that I didn’t find common during my earlier years in higher education.
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.
In showing respect for their favorite professors, today’s college students have ventured well beyond the proverbial
apple.
An Indiana University at Bloomington instructor was once given chicken livers … five pounds of them, from an adoring student whose father was a butcher. He gladly accepted and enjoyed the tasty treat. One Southern Methodist University instructor was presented with “a limited-edition Snickers bar” that said “goofball” on it. Apparently the student saw it and thought of her. For now, the candy bar remains in her office, she said, at least until she “gets hangry.”
The history of rankings stretches back to the late 19th century, but it is the intensification of globalisation that has been the most powerful force and explanation for their emergence and success since the turn of the millennium.
Today, as the distribution of economic activity and scientific collaboration has become increasingly international, higher education has been transformed from a local institution into a global actor. It sits at the fulcrum of the geopolitical struggle for a greater share of the global market and the new world-order, facilitating increasing concentrations of wealth and resources and greater hierarchical differentiation and social stratification
One thing about student evaluations that troubles me is how they give students the impression that it’s the teacher who makes or breaks the course. A few instruments query students about their own efforts, but I’m not sure those kinds of questions make it clear that what happens in any course is the combined result of teacher and student actions. Early in my teaching career, I heard a wise colleague tell students, “It’s not my class. It’s not your class. It’s our class, and together we will make it a good or not-so-good learning experience.”