Recruitment of participants is a challenging and very important aspect of research on postsecondary education. Many studies founder when students are not interested in participating, when students drop out before finishing a study, or when the students who respond do not represent the diversity of the student population. Recruitment is complex: students must know about the
study, want to participate, be able to participate and, finally, log in or show up.Researchers can improve recruitment by being flexible, explaining how the research is relevant to a diverse student body, devoting extra resources to recruiting students who are less likely to participate, and practicing patience and persistence.
. Unique value-added in the research “market-placeâ€;
. Experience in applying new knowledge to solve industry problems and achieve industry goals;
. Personnel with expertise and experience across key sectors of the economy;
. The ability to rapidly move innovative ideas through the early stages of development and commercialization;
. State-of-the-art facilities, equipment and space to support the development of new products and applications; and
. A sustained commitment to a culture of innovation.
Systemic barriers that currently limit the degree to which colleges can contribute to the future achievement of Ontario’s productivity and prosperity goals include:
. A permissive but not enabling provincial policy framework for college applied R&D and innovation;
. No operating funding for Ontario colleges supporting applied research activities, resulting in:
. A shortage of funds to strengthen colleges’ institutional capacity to initiate, undertake and manage applied R&D and innovation projects that respond to industry and community needs in a timely way;
. A shortage of funds to support college personnel conducting applied R&D and innovation projects; and
. A shortage of funds to enable college applied R&D personnel to rapidly establish partnerships to address applied R&D challenges and to sustain and foster long-term relationships with key personnel from business, industry and community organizations. To strengthen provincial economic competitiveness and prosperity, Ontario colleges are calling on the government of Ontario to:
. Move beyond merely ermissive policies in relation to applied R&D and innovation activities at Ontario colleges and develop a formal provincial policy and investment framework that recognizes and enables the unique roles colleges can play in support of applied R&D and business and industry innovation activities;
. Explicitly develop Ontario colleges’ applied research, innovation and commercialization
capacity; and
. Enable colleges to increase their capacity for applied R&D and innovation partnerships
with business, industry, federal and provincial governments, and com-
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
In the knowledge-based economy (KBE), a strong education system should produce a citizenry that is equipped with the tools for success: skills, competencies, and knowledge. The role of higher education in the development of the KBE is crucial because institutions are the "creators of, and venues for, cultural and social activity” (OECD, 2007: 39). Around the world, governments are aiming to provide higher education equitably and en masse while ensuring it is both of high quality and of relevance to the labour market. This is a challenge that Ontario, too, faces as it prepares its strategies to enhance the knowledge and skills of its citizens.
As they begin taking classes, most incoming adult learners express a strong desire to complete a degree, but many also harbor concerns and attitudes that reduce their motivation and put them at risk for attrition. This report explores a wide range of these noncognitive, motivational attributes that influence completion. The study is based on a national sample of 5,000 first-year adult learners who filled out a 74-item, college completion risk survey in 2014 or 2015 at 50 colleges and universities across the United States.
The Canadian Trans Youth Health Survey was a national on-line survey conducted by researchers from several Canadian universities and community organizations. The survey had 923 trans youth participants from all 10 provinces and one of the territories. The survey included somewhat differ- ent questions for younger (14-18 years) and older (19-25 years) trans youth about a wide range of life experiences and behaviours that influence young people’s health. This national report is a first snapshot of survey results.
Skills shortages1 have regularly been identified as one of the top 10 barriers to competitiveness in Canada by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, costing the Canadian economy billions in lost GDP annually.2 There is now a rare consensus about skills
needs and challenges in this country, across the demand and supply perspectives.3 An aging population will only
exacerbate the problem in the coming years, especially for the most in-demand professions in the
skilled trades and STEM-based occupations (where STEM refers to science, technology, engineering
and math).
With this report the Canadian Chamber of Commerce focuses on the role of the education-to-employment transition in mitigating or aggravating the skills gaps. Specifically, this report addresses the ways in which all stakeholders, including government, employers, workers, education providers and students, will need to adapt and collaborate to improve the efficiency of
the labour market.
How do changing economic conditions and uncertain market opportunities affect young adults’ transition from their undergraduate college years to adult roles and responsibilities? The Arizona Pathways to Life Success (APLUS) project is uniquely positioned
to answer this question. Launched in 2007, APLUS examines what factors shape and guide individual life trajectories — the pathways that young adults tread on their way to independence and self-sufficiency.
This research study is a phenomenological exploration of academics from one Canadian university who either are participating in a phased retirement pro- gram or have delayed their retirement beyond the normal retirement age of 65. It is based on face-to-face interviews with 24 professors, male and female, between the ages of 55 and 69, from an array of disciplines. The results indcate that teaching may be a primary reason why academics choose to retire, that female academics seem to align their retirement plans with those of their partners, and that academics who postpone their retirement feel as though they
possess a significant amount of respect within their fields. Since this re- search is based upon a small sample, it provides a starting point for future research studies, particularly concerning how gender affects the issue of academic retirement.
Drawing from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH; N 611,880), a nationally representative survey of U.S. adolescents and adults, we assess age, period, and cohort trends in mood disorders and suicide-related outcomes since the mid-2000s. Rates of major depressive episode in the last year increased 52% 2005–2017 (from 8.7% to 13.2%) among adolescents aged 12 to 17 and 63% 2009–2017 (from 8.1% to 13.2%) among young adults 18–25. Serious psychological distress in the last month and suicide-related outcomes (suicidal ideation, plans, attempts, and deaths by suicide) in the last year also increased among young adults 18–25 from 2008–2017 (with a 71% increase in serious psychological distress), with less consistent and weaker increases among adults ages 26 and over. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses separating the effects of age, period, and birth cohort suggest the trends among adults are primarily due to cohort, with a steady rise in mood disorder and suicide-related outcomes between cohorts born from the early 1980s (Millennials) to the late 1990s (iGen). Cultural
trends contributing to an increase in mood disorders and suicidal thoughts and behaviors since the mid-2000s, including the rise of electronic communication and digital media and declines in sleep duration, may have had a larger impact on younger people, creating a cohort effect.
Do your school reform efforts frequently sputter or stall? In this indispensable sequel to the
bestseller Motion Leadership, Michael Fullan shares the real-life strategies and results of educators who have
used motion leadership to propel entire organizations and systems forward. Success stories from the
US and around the world illustrate how educators can use a small number of specific actions to
generate momentum for lasting change. Motion Leadership in Action addresses:
• Creating and leading movement in the right direction and at the right time
• Implementing a "ready-fire-aim" mindset
• Emphasizing the importance of collaboration
• Forging relationships while handling resistance
• Establishing your change stance in order to get better results
Two of five Canadians would have difficulty reading this sentence, following the instructions on a prescription bottle, finding out information about how to vote, or filling out a permission form for their child’s upcoming school trip. Although for nine of the past 14 years, Canada has ranked first on the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI), a measure of a country’s relative wellbeing, complacency would be a serious mistake. Low levels of literacy – especially among adults and vulnerable groups – remain a significant challenge to Canada’s continued well- being. As our performance on the HDI and other international rankings
confirms, we have a solid foundation on which to build; but we must not underestimate the significance of literacy problems in this country. The groups most vulnerable to low literacy are the poor; persons of Aboriginal ancestry; persons whose native language is neither English nor French; persons in rural and isolated communities; and persons with certain disabling conditions. Given the rise in skill levels demanded throughout the labour market, the ubiquity of new technologies in daily and work life, and the desire of people to engage with pub- lic issues, those with poor literacy will become even further
marginalized.
Educational Assessment: Designing a System for More
Meaningful Results
The past few years have ushered in more strident calls for accountability across institutions of higher learning. Various internal and external stakeholders are asking questions like "Are students learning what we want them to learn?" and "How do the students' scores from one institution compare to its peers?" As a result, more institutions are looking for new, more far-reaching ways to assess student learning and then use assessment findings to improve students' educational experiences.
However, as Trudy Banta notes in her article An Accountability Program Primer for Administrators, “just as simply weighing a pig will not make it fatter, spending millions simply to test college students is not likely to help them learn more.” (p. 6)
While assessing institutional effectiveness is a noble pursuit, measuring student learning is not always easy, and like so many things we try to quantify, there’s much more to learning than a number in a datasheet. As Roxanne Cullen and Michael Harris note in their article The Dash to Dashboards, “The difficulty we have in higher education in defining and measuring our outcomes lies in the complexity of our business: the business of learning. A widget company or a fast-food chain has clearly defined goals and can usually pinpoint with fine accuracy where and how to
address loss in sales or glitches in production or service. Higher education is being called on to be able to perform similar feats, but creating a graduate for the 21st century workforce is a very different kind of operation.” (p. 10)
This special report Educational Assessment: Designing a System for More Meaningful Results features articles from Academic Leader, and looks at the assessment issue from a variety of different angles. Articles in the result include:
• The Faculty and Program-Wide Learning Outcome Assessment
• Assessing the Degree of Learner-Centeredness in a Department or Unit
• Keys to Effective Program-Level Assessment
• Counting Something Leads to Change in an Office or in a Classroom
• An Accountability Program Primer for Administrators
Whether you’re looking to completely change your approach to assessment, or simply improve the efficacy of your current assessment processes, we hope this report will help guide your discussions and eventual decisions.
The University community has an interest in improving the happiness and well-being of graduate students for a straightforward reason: to enable graduate students to do their best work. Balanced, happy people are more productive, more creative, more collaborative, better at pursuing long-term goals, more likely to find employment, and more physically and psychologically resilient, among other things. Positive emotion is associated with curiosity, interest and synthetic thinking. In contrast, depression is associated with loss of interest, helplessness, difficulty concentrating and remembering details, and worse. For more on this, see Part VI, “The Objective Benefits of Subjective Well-Being,” from the World Happiness Report.
What is on the five-year horizon for higher education institutions? Which trends and technologies will drive educational change? What are the challenges that we consider as solvable or difficult to overcome, and how can we strategize effective solutions? These questions and similar inquiries regarding technology adoption and educational change steered the collaborative research and discussions of a body of 56 experts to produce the NMC Horizon Report: 2015 Higher Education Edition, in partnership with the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). The NMC Horizon Report series charts the five-year horizon for the impact of emerging technologies in learning communities across the globe. With more than 13 years of research and publications, it can be regarded as the world’s longest-running exploration of emerging technology trends and uptake in education.
While the benefits of strong literacy skills are well established, there is growing concern that Canadians’ literacy skills, including those of students attending postsecondary institutions in Ontario, are not meeting expectations. The timing is especially problematic given that strong literacy skills are critical to students as they graduate into a highly competitive and increasingly globalized labour market.
A review of literacy data from Statistics Canada and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), including results from the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (ALL) and the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), point to some troubling trends in literacy achievement and a lack of consistency in expectations for high school students who go on to postsecondary education.
Audience response systems (ARS) are electronic applications in which a receiver captures information entered by students via keypads or hand-held devices. Students’ responses can be displayed instantly, usually in the form of a histogram. Professors typically use ARS to increase student interaction and for formative assessment (to measure students’ understanding of material during a lecture; Micheletto, 2011). In some cases, audience response systems have also been used to pose real research questions and follow an interactive sampling approach (not to be confused with experiment data collection). For example, imagine that a research study concluded that females respond more quickly to red stimuli than do males. An interactive sampling session in the classroom would present students with coloured stimuli, and the instructor would ask students to respond, as quickly as possible and using the ARS, when they see the red stimuli. The instructor would then display the students’ responses and compare the students’ data to results from the published research study. Barnett & Kriesel (2003) propose three criteria that classroom interactive sampling should meet if it is to stimulate discussion among students:
Universities play an increasingly prominent role in shaping regional, social, and economic development. In Canada, however, spatial, economic, and so- cial differences between universities and their host communities continue to challenge positive town–gown relationships and undermine the benefits associated with high concentrations of prospective young, “creative” graduates. The purpose of this article is to identify the factors that lead to positive town– gown relations and,
subsequently, encourage graduate retention. Through this research, university and town administrators were found to play a key role in establishing a positive relationship between students and community members. Local employment opportunities were also found to help students build an experiential relationship with their localities and make them more
likely to settle there after graduation.
While discussions on the value of education often focus on economic gains, the social returns to education are vast and can be reaped at both the individual level (e.g., better health) and societal level (e.g., lower crime rates).
Based on a combination of new and existing analyses, this paper explores the individual benefits and disadvantages associated with education, focusing on civic engagement; health/happiness; crime; and welfare/unemployment. The findings clearly suggest that investing in education has both individual and social benefits. While no causal link can be made between level of education and the returns examined, it is evident that those with some form of postsecondary education (PSE) often fare better than those with no more than a high school education.
You heard about it happening to others. Perhaps the victim was a graduate student in a seminar, or an administrator at a high-stakes meeting. Maybe it was a young scholar at an academic conference where passions for a subject tend to run high and unbridled egos may roam. But you never really thought it would happen to you — until it does. Blindsided. Maybe the full impact didn't sink in until after the fact: You’d been smacked by an academic sneer.
Because innovation is an inherently social process – requiring people to make connections, develop ideas, and orchestrate implementation – colleges have built relationships to help their clients increase their scope of innovative practices. Each college is directly involved with many local economic development and innovation networks.