Some scholars have questioned academe’s reliance on letters of recommendation, saying they’re onerous for the professors writing them or speak more about connections to “big-name” scholars than substance, or both.
A recent study explores another concern about letters of recommendation: whether they’re biased against the women they’re supposed to help. The short answer is yes.
Dominique Oliver-Dares remembers being a first-year undergraduate student at Dalhousie University, looking around at the other students in her “humongous” introductory classes and seeing only a handful of Black students like her spread out around the room. “It was very isolating,” she recalls. “Sometimes your fellow students either know each other from somewhere else, or they might just feel more comfortable to make friends with the other students that look like them. I couldn’t engage in conversations as easily.”
Of all students who started college in fall 2016, 73.9 percent persisted at any U.S. institution in fall 2017, while 61.6 percent were retained at their starting institution. The persistence rate is the percentage of students who return to college at any institution for their second year, while the retention rate is the percentage of students who return
to the same institution.
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.
This article documents the design, delivery, and evaluation of a first-year experience (FYE) course in media and communication studies. It was decided that CMNS 110: Introduction to Communication Studies would start to include elements to address a perceived and documented sense of disconnectedness among first-year students in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. These elements included coping, learning, and writing workshops facilitated by various services units across campus. We present results from surveys and focus groups conducted with students at the end of the course
and discuss the predicaments that the new realities of an accreditation and audit paradigm—under the cloak of the neoliberal university—produce. On one hand the FYE course may help students transition into a post-secondary institution; on the other hand, too much emphasis on the FYE can result in an instrumental approach to education, jeopardizing the integrity of the course.
We offer some insights into the challenges and opportunities of implementing
FYE curricula within a large classroom setting.
The changing nature of work is a hot topic these days and policy makers across the globe must grapple with the challenges it presents. In our search for solutions, we need to remember that the future of work is inextricably linked to the future of education.
It is this linkage that makes Joseph Aoun’s new book, Robot-Proof, a must-read for anyone who is thinking about workforce development or education policy – though, of course, if you’re thinking about one, you should be thinking about the other.
Looking to incorporate some learner-centered teaching principles into your courses but aren’t sure where to begin? Here are 10 activities for building student engagement and getting students more actively involved in their learning.
I was the invited outside speaker at a professional development event for schoolteachers. The day’s lunch was preceded by a public prayer that inspired me to consider parallels in “callings to serve” that can be found in both education and religion. Sometime later, I happened to read a poem in a Jewish prayer book that expressed noble intentions for a worship space. The
poem didn’t reference a particular faith—it was really just a set of intentions. Immediately, I thought of what professors hope for in their classroom spaces.
Without reopening any debate on prayer in public school, I’ll say that I don’t think any of us would object to a list of intentions that call forth a mindfulness that echoes the values embedded in our institution’s statements of mission, vision, and code of conduct. Nor should there be anything wrong with reminding ourselves and our students that a course is about so much more than students getting grades and teachers getting paychecks.
Let’s start by acknowledging the truth: Course evaluations are incredibly biased, and aren’t an accurate measure of an instructor’s
effectiveness in the classroom. Too often, students’ perceptions of your appearance, demeanor, or pedigree prevent them from writing a fair and relevant review of your actual teaching. Yet despite dozens of studies demonstrating their unreliability, course evaluations continue to be used in hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions by most colleges and universities.
Scholarly reading is a craft — one that academics are expected to figure out on our own. After all, it’s just reading. We all know how to do that, right?
Yes and no. Scholarly reading remains an obscure, self-taught process of assembling, absorbing, and strategically deploying the writing of others.
Digital technology has transformed the research process, making it faster and easier to find sources and to record and retrieve information. Like it or not, we’ve moved beyond card catalogs, stacks of annotated books and articles, and piles of 3x5 cards. What hasn’t changed, however, is the basic way we go about reading scholarly work.
Understanding personal factors that contribute to university student satisfaction with life is important in order to determine how we can better prepare students for the transition to post-secondary education and support them during this transition. This study examined predictors of university student satisfaction with life, academic self-efficacy, and self-reported academic achievement
in their first year of university. First-year students (n = 66) completed selfreport measures of academic achievement, university well-being, satisfaction with life, personality, and mental health. A linear regression analysis approach was applied to the data. Results indicated that academic satisfaction and school connectedness predicted satisfaction with life but that academic
self-efficacy and college gratitude did not, conscientiousness predicted academic self-efficacy, college well-being predicted self-reported achievement, and anxiety predicted achievement but depression did not. This study highlights the importance of understanding the personal factors that influence well-being and achievement during the transition to university.
Emotional blackmail is not a pleasant thing to encounter, and many of us succumb to it without even realizing it at various stages in our lives. The truth is that there are many manipulative people out there, who seem to thrive on getting a one-up over someone they deem to be vulnerable and/or they feel they can take something from. As a result, emotional blackmail is something you should do your utmost to avoid. If you think you’re already in such a situation, you need to be able to recognize the signs to identify
emotional blackmail and put an end to it. Here is our guide to dealing with emotional blackmail:
Teaching first-semester freshmen presents some unique challenges. You are teaching them not only your subject, but also how to be college students. One of the best strategies I have found is to begin with a collaborative project that asks them to research their new home: the campus.
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.
The transition from high school to post-secondary education presents challenges for students. Many variables have been identified as significant predictors of student achievement. Resiliency, defined as the ability to overcome challenges and adversity, may be particularly relevant during the adjustment to post-secondary education. This study assesses whether resiliency incrementally predicts student success after controlling for additional predictors. Participants were 277 undergraduate students who completed self-reports of academic skills, resiliency, personality variables, emotional intelligence (EI), and perfectionism. Students’ year-end GPA was collected from the university registrar. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that resiliency, measured by sense of mastery, negatively predicted GPA after controlling for other predictors. The sense of mastery facet of self-efficacy positively predicted GPA; however, the adaptability facet was a significant negative predictor of GPA.
Findings suggest that self-efficacy is a salient predictor of academic success, and that strong academic skills may serve as a protective factor for poor adaptability.
Your students have questions, but they rarely ask them—especially at the beginning of the semester. They feel awkward or embarrassed, or maybe it’s just inertia. Whatever the cause, the vast majority of student questions go unasked. For teachers, this is wildly frustrating because we can’t answer the questions they don’t ask (though some questions can be anticipated). In many cases, the unasked questions represent anxieties and uncertainties that negatively affect students’ performance in class and inhibits their learning. This is a particular problem in the sophomore composition class I teach. It has a reputation as a difficult class, so many students arrive intimidated and nervous.
This article measures gender pay gaps in Ontario’s public post-secondary education sector from 1996 to 2016 using the Public Sector Salary Disclosure Data. We find gaps widening among all faculty ranks. Men were paid on average 2.06%, 2.14%, and 5.26% more than their women colleagues for all employees, university teaching staff, and deans, respectively. We also conduct a Blinder- Oaxaca decomposition to measure the source of gendered salary differentials. Pay gaps persist during this time period despite controlling for the literature’s most common explanations, including the “pipeline effect.” Our results additionally
imply that women’s years of experience in academia do not mitigate the observed pay gaps. Suggestions for future research include increasing the scope of our study to factor in finer details such as labour productivity.
About two years ago at my university, I designed a minor in the medical humanities. At its core was a class that introduced students to medical topics from the perspectives of the humanities and social sciences. When it came to designing assignments that would show how well they understood such varied concepts, I decided to go out on a pedagogical limb.
If they preferred, students could write a traditional research paper for their final project. Or they could "write" about their topic in a different way — via a 45-minute podcast, a 10-to-15-minute video, a website, or an interactive, digital essay (on a blog or a Word document) that used embedded videos, photos, and audio to help the reader understand their topics.
Asked to offer advice to new hires in his department, a senior professor replied, "There is no way not to have a first year." Her remark seemed odd, and a bit ominous, but it turned out to be an accurate indicator of the harried life of a first-year faculty member.
The mental health of Canadian university students is fairly well researched, but there is relatively little evidence concerning the mental health of Canadian university student-athletes. Recent research in the United States and Canada has suggested that mental health (e.g., anxiety and depression) differs between student-athletes and student non-athletes. However, the results are
ambivalent as to whether student-athletes experience more or less psychological distress than their non-athlete peers. To address this gap, the purpose of the current study was to measure the levels of psychological distress in a national sample of 284 university student-athletes. Each athlete completed the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K6; Kessler et al., 2002) via a secure online platform. The average score on the K6 for student-athletes was 8.2 out of 24; 19.8% of the sample surpassed the cut-off for assessing the prevalence of severe mental illness. A regression analysis found that gender, starting status,
and scholarship status significantly predicted levels of psychological distress. Females, non-starters, and student-athletes without a scholarship were associated with increases in K6 scores.