The Winter/Spring 2016 issue of Peer Review highlights the powerful impact ‘transparency’ can have on learning for all students. One aspect of transparency is making obvious the intellectual practices involved in completing and evaluating a learning task. But making these processes visible for students is more easily said than done; we are experts in our fields for
the very reasons that our thinking and evaluating are automatic and subconscious. It’s hard to describe exactly what we do intellectually when we synthesize or integrate, critique, or create. Similarly, it’s difficult to articulate the differences between an assignment we score as an A and one to which we give a B. Thus, a challenge in achieving transparency is developing a
deep awareness of our own processes. Only then can we explicitly teach those thinking processes.
The prevailing statistics on cheating are disheartening. Some put the rate at 75%. That means three out of every four students admit to some kind of academic dishonesty at some point during their higher education.
We all know that this is not a new phenomenon. Cheating is as old as higher education itself. Older, really, if you look outside the classroom. Classicists tell us that cheating scandals occurred even during the ancient Olympic Games.
So is there really a way to solve a problem with such ancient roots?
This article is concerned with the differences in REB policy and application processes across Canada as they impact multi-jurisdictional, higher education research projects that collect data at universities themselves. Despite the guiding principles
of the Tri-Council Policy Statement 2 (TCPS2) there is significant variation among the practices of Research Ethics Boards
(REBs) at Canada’s universities, particularly when they respond to requests from researchers outside their own institution.
The data for this paper were gathered through a review of research ethics applications at 69 universities across Canada. The
findings suggest REBs use a range of different application systems and require different revisions and types of oversight for
researchers who are not employed at their institution. This paper recommends further harmonization between REBs across
the country and national-level dialogue on TCPS2 interpretations.
Keywords: research ethics, university ethics, higher education, social science research, harmonization
Last week, a student named Mary visited me during my office hours and presented me with an interesting dilemma. In one of her classes, a professor had distributed a study guide with a series of questions to help the students prepare for an upcoming exam. Mary, being the millennial student that she is, decided to upload the study guide into Google Docs and invite the rest of the class to contribute to the document. Students answered the study guide questions from each of their individual notes and then refined the answers from their peers.
Teacher education evaluation is a major policy initiative intended to improve the quality of classroom instruction. This study docyments a fundamental challenge to using teacher evaluation to improve teaching and learning.
Across academe, the conversation about career diversity for Ph.D.s has cracked wide open up in just a few years.
That’s equivalent to the blink of an eye in academic (read: glacial) time. The proposition that graduate programs
should prepare students for the actual jobs that they’ll get — not just for professorships — no longer receives the
fierce pushback that it did even five years ago. We’ve gone from "Why should we?" to "How should we?" in a
remarkably short time.
The question has two sides: how to prepare students for diverse career paths and how to prepare employers. Most
of the attention up to now has gone to the former — debating and adopting reforms to train graduate students (and
their teachers) for what amounts to a new reality. We’ve got to change graduate school so that doctoral education
can support students who pursue a range of careers. That’s a big job, and it’s still under way.
Stupid.
This word was spoken triumphantly and repeatedly as self-speak by a talented pre-service, k-12 special education teacher during my course Library Resources for Children. Until I heard her say it several times through the semester, I hadn’t seen how one word can hold an entire teaching philosophy. I hadn’t considered how the power of that word multiplies when it takes
the form of self-speak. I hadn’t realized how much it scared me to think that that word might follow her into a k-12 classroom.
When I learned that my own teaching philosophy existed on the pinhead of a single word whenever I’ve thought it at myself, I needed to send this email to that amazing up-and-coming teacher:
When it comes to skills development, sometimes you have to make advantage before you can take advantage.
I’m sitting at my desk in the Research Institute at SickKids, putting the finishing touches on our skills and career development curriculum for the upcoming academic year. Our office has an open-door policy, so one of the institute’s PhD students pops in to talk about internships. They’re interested in participating in our administrative internship program, which places grad students and postdocs in departments like grant development, knowledge translation and tech transfer. What they really want though is to work in the project management unit. They’re seriously interested in moving into a project management role after they graduate, but they want to get some practical experience first to find out if they really enjoy the work and to build their network.
One of the biggest differences between the experience I had as a student and the experience students have in my classroom has to do with assignments. When I was a student, assignments often had no discernible relationship to what we were doing in class. Oh, we would have to write about a text we read for class. But once the assignment was given out, we were generally on our own — there were no opportunities to work on it in class, to reflect on the skills the assignment asked us to practice, to share and workshop our ideas with our classmates.
The courses I teach are different. A sequence of major assignments form the backbone of the semester. Almost everything we do in class is explicitly linked to one or more of those assignments. We break them down into stages, work on them collaboratively, and discuss the challenges students might face along the way. Like many teachers, I design assignments not just to assess performance, but also to give students opportunities to practice and develop important skills.
I’ve been following, with something like exasperation, the discussion over Harvard University’s new study on teaching. Not
surprisingly, the study found that physics students performed better on multiple-choice tests if they were taught via active learning
strategies than by lecture alone. Yet it also found that students tended to feel they learned more from listening to a
polished lecture.
Are you on a first-name basis with your university president, provost, and deans?
Do they know your name?
This question may seem odd to those college and university employees who already enjoy a high degree of status
and security. Norms of faculty culture and shared governance have, in my understanding, have usually encouraged
a first-name familiarity among (tenure-track) faculty and institutional academic leaders. Faculty culture is one of flat
hierarchies. (Please share if you have experienced something different ).
Among staff, however (and maybe contingent faculty), being on a first-name basis with the president or provost is
not a given. (How students refer to campus leaders - and their professors - is a whole different question).
I work at a small and intimate liberal arts college where staff are on a first-name basis with all of the academic
leaders.
The “talent economy,” consisting of highly skilled personnel from the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, is the linchpin of a productive society and economy. Maintaining knowledge-sharing in these fields relies on training, retaining and attracting global talent. It also requires encouraging international and inter-sectorial experiences (i.e., within academia, governments, industry and NGOs) for domestic and foreign researchers –otherwise known as “brain circulation” [PDF]. Indeed, international and intersectorial mobility should be a part of career development for scientists to become leaders in
increasingly multi- and interdisciplinary professional environments.
UBC’s “Moments that Matter” course mines departmental expertise to transform a second-year history course into a team performance.
The dull roar of plastic computer keys clicking in the lecture hall at the University of British Columbia stills for a moment as Canadian history professor Bradley Miller flashes a picture onto the screen behind him.
It’s former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, flamboyantly decked out in a cape, white jacket with a rose pinned to the lapel and a 19th-century dandy’s hat – an incongruous sight at that most high-testosterone of events, the Canadian Football League’s Grey Cup championship of 1970.
“Watching a (nearly) finished student receive that coveted job offer, whether it’s a faculty position she’s worked so hard for, a position at that top research lab, or a lucrative offer from that hot startup everyone wants to join.”
“Watching one of you students deliver a fantastic talk at a premier conference in front of a packed room of attendees from all over the world.”
“Getting an unexpected thank you note in the mail or an email from a former student, thanking you for that class you taught her six years ago and detailing how it’s changed the trajectory of her life and career.”
“Meeting up with a former student at an academic conference and being introduced to his or her current students getting ready to present their work.”
Regardless of our subject area, we’ve all had moments where some students appear to hang on every word,
gobbling up our messages, images, graphs, and visuals with robust engagement. Within those very same classes,
however, there will be a degree of confusion, perplexed looks, or at worst, the blank stare! In my field of anatomical
education, like many other STEMM* disciplines, the almost ubiquitous use of multimedia and other increasingly
complex computer visualizations is an important piece of our pedagogic tool kit for the classroom, small group, or
even the one-on-one graduate-level chalk talk. Although a picture indeed does say a thousand words, the words that
each person hears, or more importantly, comprehends, will vary widely.
Considerable research attention has been devoted to understanding the importance of knowledge creation in organisations over the last decade. Research suggests that leadership plays an important role in knowledge creation processes. Nonetheless, there is an important omission in knowledge creation research; namely, what are the underlying processes that underpin the implications of leadership for knowledge creation? This article aims to develop a theoretical model of leadership and knowledge creation by drawing on two contrasting leadership perspectives; that is transformational leadership and leader-member exchange (LMX), and the research on open-mindedness norms. Specifically, we argue why transformational leadership is related to knowledge creation, and also theorise how openmindedness norms and LMX quality serve as underlying mechanisms to underpin the effect of transformational leadership on knowledge creation. We conclude with a discussion of implications of the model for theory and practice, and also suggest potential avenues for future research.
Educators view critical thinking as an essential skill, yet it remains unclear how effectively it is being taught in college. This meta-analysis synthesizes research on gains in critical thinking skills and attitudinal dispositions over various time frames in college. The results suggest that both critical thinking skills and dispositions improve substantially over a normal college experi-ence. Furthermore, analysis of curriculum-wide efforts to improve critical thinking indicates that they do not necessarily produce incremental long-term gains. We discuss implications for the future of critical thinking in edu-cation.
KEYWORDS: critical thinking, college students, changes in critical thinking
Of all the mysteries in graduate school, the greatest may be the dissertation committee.
When it works well, it offers academics an opportunity to shape both burgeoning scholars and future research in the field. Unfortunately, for many academics, the allure of serving on a doctoral committee — also called a thesis committee — fades quickly.
Any committee assignment comes with its share of challenges, of course, but the dynamic of a dissertation committee accentuates some of the more subtle and nuanced ways in which faculty members exercise privilege, not only over students but over other committee members.
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.
Information for international students interested in attending college or university in Ontario.