Research shows when people are curious about something, not only do they learn better, they learn more. It should come as no
surprise, then, that inquiry-based learning is proving to be an effective education model. In fact, one research study found inquiry-based learning produces increases in affective and cognitive outcomes.
For nearly two-thirds of my 30-year career in higher education, I have served as a middle manager of one sort or another: department chair, dean, program director. For the other third, I have been middle-managed.
Of course, even as a low-level administrator, I had plenty of people above me telling me what to do. I also had people below me who, given the chance, gladly told me what to do.
The point is: I know what it’s like to be on both sides of that transaction. Specifically, I know firsthand how department chairs can make faculty lives easier, and I also know what they do (all too often) that makes faculty lives more difficult (dare I say "miserable"?). Accordingly, I’d like to identify — for the benefit of new and future department chairs especially — what I consider the five biggest morale killers for college faculty.
Faced with a growing demand for adequate policies and programs that meaningfully address sexual violence on campus, the provinces of British Columbia, Ontario and Manitoba have introduced legislation requiring all post-secondary institutions to institute a sexual assault policy. The remaining provinces and territories do not have similar legislation. In absence of such legislation, using the case study of Alberta, we examined how equipped post-secondary institutions in this province are to assist students in need. Utilizing publicly available data we examined: 1) whether Alberta’s post-secondary institutions
have a sexual violence policy which is readily and easily accessible to the student; and 2) the ease with which students can access university resources and support services for sexual violence. The results indicate that most institutions do not have accessible policy and support services for students in need. We are hopeful that this study can inform those designing and advocating for sexual violence policies on campus to institute measures to clarify institutions’ sexual violence policies, increase accessibility to those policies, create policies where they are missing, and work on clarifying the availability of resources for
students on and off campus.
aculty dread the grade appeal; anxiety prevails until the whole process is complete. Much has been written about ow to avoid such instances, but the potentially subjective assessments of written essays or clinical skills can be specially troublesome. One common cause of grade appeals is grading ambiguity in which the student and faculty ember disagree on the interpretation of required content. Another cause is inequity, whereby the student feels thers may have gotten more credit for very similar work or content (Hummel 2010). In the health-care field specially, these disagreements over clinical-skills assessments can actually result in student dismissal from the program and may lead to lawsuits.
I had just received a private tour of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and seen treasures like B. F. Skinner’s famous Teaching Machine, but as I sat in a curator’s office and looked out over the National Mall, all I could think about was my dissertation.
With a big deadline looming, I was angry at myself for taking a whole three hours away from my writing. I had asked to meet with the curator because I had applied for a postdoctoral fellowship at the museum, but the whole thing felt like an exercise in futility. After all, I hadn’t heard anything back from the 60 other applications I’d sent out. Why would this one
end any differently?
If you’re a faculty member, you’ve spent the last few weeks preparing your syllabus for the spring semester. You’ve updated the document and added a little to it. This latest round of edits may have pushed your syllabus another page longer — most now run about five pages, though nearly every campus has lore of some that exceed 20.
Ten years ago, I taught a literature unit on the Vietnam era. We read T.C. Boyle’s Drop City and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and I invited my colleague Bob to speak to my class. He brought his guitar and sang a song he’d written about serving in the Army. Then he looked at my students and said, "I’ve been asked to talk about my experiences in Vietnam maybe six times in my life. You’re the seventh." And he held us spellbound for an hour.
Faculty members juggle teaching, grading assignments, and conducting research. They write grants, run labs, and serve on the committees that keep their academic departments and institutions going.
One aspect of their jobs that stands out in both its rewards and its challenges is working with students. Here are key findings from a Chronicle survey of nearly 1,000 faculty members: Most faculty members find teaching students to be satisfying work.
Race, abortion, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are among the most uncomfortable topics for college students to discuss, according to a report on a survey of nearly 20,000 full-time undergraduate students at 55 four-year colleges and universities. The report, “2020 College Free Speech Rankings: What’s the Climate for Free Speech on America’s College Campuses?,” released on Tuesday, says that about six out of 10 students said they had censored themselves on these and other thorny issues out of fear of how others would react.
Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET) have been the most consistently administered tool, and they are still extensively used in higher education institutions to assess teaching effectiveness. The purpose of this study was to explore how SET are used by administrators in the teaching evaluation process at a large, research-intensive Canadian university. A basic qualitative
research design was used in this project, and semi-structured interviews were used to obtain administrators’ experiences. The research question that guided this study was: How are SET (and other tools) used in the evaluation of teaching at this university? Findings showed that although participants mostly utilized a couple of SET statements as indicators of effective teaching,
they were certainly aware of the intrinsic issues concerning these tools, and that they are continually seeking to obtain more evidence if SET results are below their benchmarks.
There's a student that's familiar to many teachers: He's the one who stumbles into class with sleep in his eyes after staying up late from writing his paper at the last minute. He probably avoids studying for tests, too. And maybe his backpack is a jumbled mess of crumpled papers and unorganized notes.
And there's also a common explanation for his bad habits: He probably doesn't particularly care how he does in school. But psychologists say that, for some students, that's a totally inaccurate assumption.
Research shows that women perform better than men on four out of five traits of effective leaders, says Øyvind Martinsen
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.
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to reread some of my favorite teaching and learning resources, especially those I haven’t looked at in a while. I’m enjoying these revisits and decided to share some random quotes with timeless insights.
Barriers to permanent residency are formidable, but can be overcome
Students and graduates alike consider creating good jobs for young people a top priority for government. Right after affordability of post-secondary education, it is the top area they’d like government to prioritize.
The most famous dictum of the science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke may be his Third Law: “Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” And for most of us, the efficiency of 21st-century search engines — Google, Bing, Yahoo and others — can be uncannily accurate. But when it comes to learning, instant gratification can be as much a bug as a feature.
Take high school students today. They have grown up using search engines and other web resources; they don’t need to understand how these tools work in order to use them. In fact, thanks to what’s called machine learning, search engines and other software can become more accurate — and even those who write the code for them may not be able to explain why.
A large-scale analysis of gender disparities in research output and impact finds that while the number of women researchers has increased over the past 20 years, women researchers publish fewer papers on average than men and are less likely to collaborate internationally and to undertake research that cuts across the corporate and academic sectors. At the same time, a report on the findings notes there is little difference between papers published by men and women in impact as measured by citations and downloads.
Stemming from a series of discussions at recent women's academic conferences in the U.S. and abroad, Women Interrupting, Disrupting, and Revolutionizing Education Policy and Practice is born of the frustration many scholars have expressed over the stagnation of the study of women in educational leadership. Whitney Sherman Newcomb and Katherine Cumings Mansfield
have brought together the works of a broad range of feminist scholarsseasoned and newer academics and studentsto address the questions: in what ways is feminism in the field of educational leadership stalled? What can we do to move ahead?
Canada ranks first among OECD countries in the proportion of the adult population whose highest level of education is a credential from a community college or similar type of educational institution. Canada’s rate of attainment of this type of educational credential is more than three times the average for OECD member countries, and only three member countries have rates that are more than half Canada’s rate. This paper explores the factors that contribute to Canada’s high rate of short-cycle tertiary education attainment relative to other countries. The factors examined include: the role and prevalence of short-cycle postsecondary institutions in different countries; the proportions of students who begin postsecondary education in a college rather than a university; college graduation and transfer rates; and different approaches to workforce preparation. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of some of the implications of the international differences that were explored.