The Survey on College Student Health Literacy was a pilot study conducted during the spring 2013 semester at the Ohio State University Columbus campus. The survey was developed from the results of a 2012 qualitative study regarding college student health literacy related to prescription medications, which was conducted in collaboration with the Wilce Student Health Center Pharmacy. The survey expanded upon the qualitative study to include health literacy and numeracy skills such as the ability to interpret tables, nutrition labels, and prescription label instructions. The survey was piloted with a stratified random sample of Ohio State students on the Columbus campus to ensure the inclusion of international students within the sample. A total of 2,000 students were invited to participate, of which 277 students responded, yielding a 14% response rate.
• Fewer than one in five PhD graduates are employed as full-time university professors. The majority of PhDs are employed outside academia in a wide range of rewarding careers—such as in industry, government, and not-for- profit organizations.
• Many PhD graduates face challenging initial transitions to careers outside academia due to underdeveloped professional skills and networks, difficulty articulating the value of the skills gained through PhD studies to non-academic employers, and limited employer awareness or misperceptions about the potential value of PhD hires.
Although historical thinking has been the subject of a substantial body of recent research, few attempts explicitly apply the results on a large scale in North America. This article, a narrative inquiry, examines the first stages of a multi-year, Canadawide
project to reform history education through the development of classroombased assessments. The study is based on participant-observations, documents generated by the project, and interviews, questionnaires, and correspondence with participants.
The authors find impediments – apparently surmountable – in teachers’ application of potentially difficult concepts, and in their organizational resistance.
The Strategic Mandate Agreement (SMA) exercise was intended to address at least three desired
outcomes:
1. To promote the government’s stated goal1 of increasing the differentiation of the Ontario postsecondary system by asking each Ontario postsecondary institution to articulate an institutional mandate statement identifying its distinctive strengths or aspirations and to identify key objectives aligned with that aspiration.
2. To advance and inform the discussion about how the Ontario system could increase its productivity to deliver a quality education to more students within the financial constraints expected in the public sector.
3. To elicit the best thinking from institutions about innovations and reforms that would support higher quality learning and, in its most ambitious form, transform Ontario’s public postsecondary system.
To assist with the evaluation of the SMAs, the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities (MTCU) “…instructed the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) to establish a peer review panel to evaluate…mandate submissions … for their ability to achieve significant improvements in productivity, quality and affordability through both innovation and differentiation.” The members of the Expert Panel are listed in Appendix 1.
Vision
Rooted in our communities, we will be a globally recognized college delivering innovative learning opportunities and preparing career-ready graduates to be leaders in their fields.
Mission/Mandate
• We are dedicated to student success, academic excellence, and leadership in our communities.
• We meet the learning needs of postsecondary students in Eastern Ontario and support, through
education and training, the economic, social, and cultural needs of the communities we serve. As the primary provider of quality and accessible education in our region, we are our communities’ pathway to educational opportunities. We are committed to our strategic directions:
- Student Experience – Provide outstanding campus communities, support services, and engagement opportunities that enhance the success of our students.
- Contemporary Learners – Foster digital and foundational literacies in our students through academic grounding and real world experience.
- Sustainability – Be accountable for our decisions and actions to ensure our long- term viability, reduce our environmental impact, and foster a healthy and dynamic college.
Ontario faces significant challenges to its global competitiveness. At the same time, demographic trends point to growing skills shortages and to increased competition worldwide for skilled labour. In the face of these challenges, there is an urgent need to ensure the economy has the skills it needs and individuals have access to recognized, credentialed education and training that meets their individual aspirations and supports their transition to long-term employment.
The proposals contained in this document also address a key priority of the McGuinty government: addressing poverty. For example, with youth unemployment at nearly 14 per cent, Ontario must ensure that at-risk youth, who have even higher unemployment rates, participate in education and training programs such as the Ontario Youth Apprenticeship Program, Job Connect and Learning to 18.
The number of international students attending Ontario colleges and universities has increased every year since 2009, testament to the quality of Ontario’s institutions and the province’s well-earned reputation as a study destination of choice.
Today, international students account for over 15 per cent of all students enrolled in public postsecondary institutions in the province. 1 With this vibrant international student body comes the need for a renewed international postsecondary education strategy for Ontario: one mindful of the vital linkages between education, innovation and the economy, and puts students at the centre.
Human capital is key for economic growth. Not only is it linked to aggregate economic performance but also to each individual’s labour market outcomes. However, a skilled population is not enough to achieve high and inclusive growth, as skills need to be put into productive use at work. Thanks to the availability of measures of both the proficiency and the use of numerous types of skills, the Survey of Adult Skills offers a unique opportunity to advance knowledge in this area and this paper presents and discusses evidence on both these dimensions with a particular focus on their implications for labour market policy. This paper explores the role played in the labour market by skill proficiency in the areas of literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environments. It also shows how skills use, not only proficiency, affects a number
of key labour market phenomena, such as the gender wage gap. Finally, the paper combines information on skill proficiency, educational attainment, skill use and qualification requirements to construct indicators of qualification and skills mismatch and to explore their causes and consequences.
This paper presents the findings based on case studies of the educational systems of England and of the Canadian province of Ontario, as part of a research project funded by the Thomas J. Alexander Fellowship Programme.1 This research project aims to provide inputs to policymakers and school leaders, especially in Latin America, to support teachers and schools with student behaviour issues and improve classroom and school climate. The purpose of these case studies is to investigate how
system-level policies in four main areas (initial teacher education, professional development, professional collaboration and participation among stakeholders) and other types of system-level initiatives (such as student behaviour policies) have been implemented in order to improve disciplinary climate and help teachers to deal with student behaviour issues. It also aims to
identify the conditions in which teaching and classroom practices take place, in order to understand the context of student behaviour and disciplinary climate in these educational systems.
In a traditional face-to-face class, students have many opportunities to interact with their instructor and fellow students. Whether it’s an informal chat before or after class, or participating in the classroom discussion, interaction can be an important factor in student success.
Creating similar opportunities for participation and collaboration in an online course is one of the biggest challenges of teaching online. Yet, opportunities for meaningful interaction online are plentiful, provided you design and facilitate your course in the correct manner and with the proper tools.
The Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW) is an internationally recognized, peer-based, educational development program involving 24 hours of structured intensive instruction designed to strengthen instructors’ skills in planning, teaching, feedback and critical reflection through a student-focussed process. For over 30 years, the ISW has been offered at more than 100 institutions worldwide as a method of facilitating the development of student-centred, reflective instructors (Day, 2004). Although based on best pedagogical principles for teaching adult learners (Day, 2005), little empirical research has been performed to assess the impact on faculty of participating in the ISW (Macpherson, 2011). Research performed to date has typically shown that individuals who participate in this workshop report that it is transformative to their teaching in the classroom (Macpherson, 2011). The present study sought to extend these findings by conducting a pre-post analysis of ISW and non-ISW participants. The goal of this research was to investigate the influence of the ISW on developing a student-centred approach to teaching in university and college faculty.
This paper introduces two new concepts to the debate on job quality: the low-wage gap and low-wage intensity. These two measures provide information on the depth and severity of low wages. Using Labour Force Survey microdata, we discuss trends in these two measures, along with trends in the incidence of low wages over the 1997-2014 period. For example, in 2014, 27.6 per cent of all employees aged 20 to 64 years earned less than two-thirds of median hourly wages for full-time workers aged 20 to 64 years (or $16.01 per hour), our low-wage cutoff. In this same year, the low-wage gap was 21.0 per cent, which means that the average low-wage employee earned approximately 79.0 per cent of the low-wage cutoff (or $12.66 per hour). Consequently, low-wage intensity, defined as the product of the incidence and the gap (scaled by 100) was 5.8. This is down from an intensity of 6.3 in 1997, which was the result of a slightly higher incidence (27.9 per cent) and a higher gap (22.7 per cent). This paper also provides these results by gender, age, educational attainment, industry, occupation, employment status and province. These detailed results help identify which groups face the highest rates, greatest depths, and largest intensities of low-wage employment in Canada. Furthermore, this paper explores the implications of a $15 minimum wage on the low-wage gap in 2014. Finally, to provide a brief sensitivity analysis, we discuss (1) the results for low-wage employment in Canada using a different cutoff (two-thirds mean hourly wages for full-time employees aged 25 to 54 years) and (2) comparisons of our results to those of CIBC’s Employment Quality Index and the OECD’s low-pay data.
SUMMARY
This paper presents an overview of gender differences in education outcomes in OECD countries. A rich set of indicators describes the improvement of educational attainment among women over the past decades, and various dimensions of male under-performance in education. Possible explanatory factors include incentives provided by changing employment opportunities for women, demographic trends, as well as the higher sensitivity of boys to disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. Gender differences in field of study and in performance by subject are found to be related to attitudes and self-perceptions towards academic subjects, which are in turn influenced by social norms. A number of policy options to address gender gaps are presented in the final section of the paper.
RÉSUMÉ
Ce document présente un aperçu des différences entre garçons et filles dans les résultats scolaires des pays de l’OCDE. Les indicateurs utilisés décrivent l’amélioration du niveau d’instruction des femmes au cours des dernières décennies et les différents domaines dans lesquels les garçons obtiennent des résultats inférieurs par rapport aux filles. Parmi les explications avancées figurent les politiques encourageant les opportunités d’emploi pour les femmes, les tendances démographiques ainsi que la vulnérabilité accrue des garçons issus de milieux socio-économiques défavorisés. Les différences entre hommes et femmes dans le domaine des études et dans les résultats scolaires par discipline tiennent aux mentalités et à l’autoperception des disciplines, et sont elles-mêmes influencées par les normes sociales. La dernière section du document présente un certain nombre de mesures pouvant combler les disparités entre hommes et femmes.
The growth of competency-based education in an online environment requires the development and measurement of
quality competency-based courses. While quality measures for online courses have been developed and standardized, they do not directly align with emerging best practices and principles in the design of quality competency-based online courses. The purpose of this paper is to provide background and research for a proposed rubric to measure quality in competency-based online courses.
The Critical Thinking Assessment Rubric was developed as a key deliverable of the ‘Building Capacity to Measure Essential Employability Skills’ project funded by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO)1. This handbook serves as a resource to teachers in using the Critical Thinking Assessment Rubric.
Critical thinking is one of the six skill categories within the ‘essential employability skills’ (EES) curriculum requirements for Ontario college programs – specifically, EES numbers 4 and 52. Each of these essential employability skills must be addressed (learned, practiced, evaluated) within a program. How and when these are implemented should be based on decisions regarding the program as a whole and by individual teachers.
In recent years, concepts of shared and distributed leadership that view leadership ‘as a group quality, as a set of functions which must be carried out by the group’3 have emerged as popular alternatives to heroic and individual approaches. A shared leadership perspective shifts the focus on leadership from person and position to process and is now widely advocated across public, private and not-for-profit settings where there is a need to influence and collaborate across organisational and professional boundaries.
In May 2004 the Adult Education Review was launched at the request of the Minister of Education and the Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities. The goal of the review was to propose a policy framework for adult education and recommend
actions that would not only support but also improve adult education in Ontario.
It may be the most easily predictable behavior in the undergraduate repertoire. Toward the end of every semester comes the clarion call: "Is there any extra credit I can do to help my final
grade?"
Sometimes the request has a desperate tone. The student recognizes that failure is looming and hopes to avert a dire outcome. In contrast, a student in good standing may be looking for any extra work that could inch their GPA upward. Minimally, if other instructors in your department offer extra-credit options, your students will expect you to do the same and may judge you
harshly if you don’t.
5 Think nationally, act locally – Paul Cappon
Executive summary
Why should Canadians build a national education strategy? What would it look like? How can we construct it? What role should business play in that strategy?
These questions are central to optimising learning conditions nationwide.
This analysis will begin with a review of the declining performance of Canadian education in contrast to comparator countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Recent results from the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) are particularly alarming. They confirm the mediocre basic skill levels of Canadian adults. Since the competencies of adult Canadians with post-secondary education (PSE) are near the bottom for all three basic
Abstract
Despite growing enrollment of university students with disabilities, they have not achieved academic parity with their non-dis-abled peers. This study matched 71 first-year university students with disabilities and students without disabilities on three variables: high school average when admitted to university, gender, and program of study. Both groups of students were compared on three measures of academic performance: GPA failed courses, and dropped courses after first year of university. The relationship between accommodations and academic performance was also analyzed for students with disabilities. Even when matched on admission average, gender, and program of study, students with disabilities had a significantly lower GPA
and were more likely to fail courses in their first year than their peers without disabilities. While note-taking in the classroom was associated with being less likely to drop a course, it was also associated with poorer academic performance, as was using a calculator or alternate format during exams. The more accommodations students lost in the transition from high school,
the worse they performed academically at university. Students who lost human assistant support in the classroom and the use of a computer or a memory aid during exams had a significantly lower GPA and were more likely to fail courses in their first year of university compared with students who did not lose these accommodations. These findings have implications for accessibility offices and universities in supporting the access needs and academic success of students with disabilities.
Keywords: accommodation, academic performance, transition