Many years ago, educational anthropologists George and Louise Spindler (1982) urged us to "make the familiar strange and the strange familiar" (p. 15) to understand the commonplace in our culture. The lives of 21st century students are strange in many ways; they face much of the traditional angst associated with social acceptance, prospects for academic achievement, and economic success. However, the lives of today’s youth are also defined by a burgeoning number of technological innovations that shape every aspect of behavior, relationships, and communication. As such, attempts to make this world more familiar are important to adults seeking to understand and perhaps create spaces where there are opportunities to bridge the gap between a rapidly changing and complex contemporary world and a future where the only certainty is that our notions of community, work, and family are likely to be even more sharply defined by technological innovations.
This study analyzes the three different types of institutions—public schools, independent schools, and home schooling—that provided education to stu-dents in Canada over the 2000/01 to 2012/13 period. Specifically, this study quantifies enrolment numbers by type of education institution in order to better understand how Canadian students are being educated.
It is important to understand enrolment numbers within the context of a declining school-aged population. The number of Canadians aged 5 to 17 declined by 6.4 percent between 2000 and 2013. Every province except Alberta recorded a decline in their school-aged population over this period, affecting enrolment rates.
In Ontario, every winter, students in grade 8 must choose between taking applied or academic courses in their core subjects for grade 9. The decisions they make will have a long-term impact.
The choice will affect their options during the rest of their years in high school, and after they graduate. It may also
have an impact on their chances for success.
It is not clear that grade 8 students and their families have all the information they need to make these important decisions.
Perhaps even more important, international evidence suggests that the fact they have to choose at such an early age may contribute to greater achievement gaps, and greater inequality.
It's one of the commonly held beliefs about First Nations people in this country: they all get free post-secondary education.
Problem is, it's not true. And the reality is much more complicated.
To help make sense of it, here's a little of what Canadians should know about First Nations people and funding for
post-secondary education.
Learning Study is a collaborative, action-research approach to improve the effectiveness of student learning by enhancing the professional competence of teachers. This is achieved through the collaborative construction of the pedagogical content knowledge enabling them better to teach specific objects of learning. Through inquiry and authentic learning by the teachers, it takes account of students’ prior knowledge in the lesson planning and so creates an authentic learning environment for the students. This paper explains how the Learning Study approach relates to the set of approaches known as “Lesson Study” and how it incorporates the principles for high quality learning proposed by the OECD project on Innovative Learning Environments (ILE) in its design and implementation. It examines how Learning Study helps to integrate the factors comprising innovative learning environments. It analyses the critical conditions that support its development and practice in schools and in professional learning networks and education systems in general.
Based on recent public opinion polling commissioned by the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA), an
overwhelming majority of Ontarians (79 per cent) agreed that students and their families have to borrow too much money
to pay for their education. When asked to rank (on a scale of to 5) how important a university degree was to finding a good
job, 53 per cent of those surveyed selected 4 or 5, indicating that a degree was ‘important’ or ‘very important’. Only 11 per
cent of the respondents ranked a degree as ‘unimportant’ or ‘very unimportant’ to securing a good job. Finally, nearly half
of Ontarians indicated that they would be willing to pay more taxes to decrease student costs and increase student financial
assistance.
Postsecondary education in Ontario has seen a number of labour strikes over the past few decades, including some protracted, high‐profile work stoppages. These labour disputes can impact students negatively in a number of ways, yet there has been limited research exploring the psychosocial and academic impact of work stoppages on university students and possible strategies to minimize these effects. This report outlines the findings of a three‐study project designed to expand on the limited, existing research in two ways. The first study analyzed data from a rare longitudinal survey, assessing changes in student responses to the 2008–2009 York University strike by teaching assistants and contract faculty over the course of the work stoppage. The second and third studies adopted a mixed‐methods approach, using focus group interviews and a retrospective online survey to understand students’ experiences of the 2015 labour strikes at the University of Toronto and York University.
Americans reaching traditional retirement ages during the past two decades and today face a different retirement environment than did prior cohorts. Mandatory retirement has been eliminated for the vast majority of American workers, and important work disincentives (or retirement incentives) in Social Security and in employer pension plans have been eliminated or reduced. Americans are living longer and healthier lives, fewer have physically arduous jobs, and technology has increased the options about where and when people work. In addition, the age of eligibility for ‘full’ Social Security retirement benefits has been increased from 65 to 66 (and will soon increase to 67), which is equivalent to an across-the-board benefit cut, and fewer firms are offering employer-sponsored post-retirement health insurance. There are concerns about the future of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Some of these changes are good news for older workers and some bad, but they all have altered the relative attractiveness of work and leisure late in life in favor of work.
Powerful things happen when leaders from diverse backgrounds gather and commit time to dialogue on a single issue. The results of the dialogue are even more powerful when those leaders are well informed and committed to action. When the issue at hand is central to a whole country’s future, the results of this dialogue must be shared so that others can join in.
The National Working Summit on Aboriginal Postsecondary Education produced important commitments for action from its participants and substantive policy recommendations for the federal government. The summit was held at Six Nations Polytechnic on October 5, 2010. Over 50 participants from universities, colleges, Aboriginal institutes, charities, Aboriginal organizations and the private sector took part.
In 2004, former Ontario Premier Bob Rae was invited to lead the Postsecondary Education
Review to provide advice on the seemingly intractable job of reconciling the province’ aspirations for a high quality, highly accessible and affordable postsecondary education system with the level of financial support that governments have felt able to provide for this endeavor. The report was
considered extremely successful in providing 28 recommendations that were “sensitive to long
standing patterns of public opinion, articulated new public goals, [and] recognized the important
role to be played by each major stakeholder.”(Clark and Trick, 2006, p. 180).
As
literacy. This commentary asks the question: What changes can the states and federal government make to education policy that will boost adolescent reading achievement?
Recently, American College Testing (ACT) issued a report about the problems with adolescent literacy (ACT, 2006). ACT thinks
America’s teens should be able to read well enough to get into college and to complete freshman year successfully (attaining at
least Cs in their basic subjects). Their analysis of middle and high school reading achievement over the past several years suggests this isn’t the case for a growing percentage of students. In fact, ACT reported that while many eighth graders are not on track for this kind of triumph, the numbers of students who are not ready actually increases as students move through high school; progressively fewer 10th and 12th graders are on track to do well.
It has become a cliché to note the constancy of change in the environments in which we lead, but it is anything but a cliché to experience as a leader the unpredictability, contingency, and constant sense that something for which you could not have been prepared is about to blindside you. I have been in senior level leadership in higher education for 35 years, 24 as a president, and can assure you that this experience is real. Year to year shifts in funding priorities, unstable governance and rogue board members, intrusive state mandates, bizarre and embarrassing personnel issues, litigious students and employees, instant infamy on the internet, refractory organizations with deep fault lines between different constituents, unintended consequences of policy decisions made far from the college experience, and all manner of human foolishness threatens the capacity of the leader to guide the ship without foundering
In this paper, four qualitative case studies capture the complex interplay be- tween the social and structural relations that shape community - academic partnerships. Collaborations begin as relationships among people. They are sustained by institutional structures that recognize and support these relationships. Productive collaborations centralize reciprocity, flexibility, and
relationship building between individuals and institutions. Our findings also indicate a synergistic interaction between collaborative processes and out- comes: an equitable process supports the development of mutually beneficial outcomes, and the ability to sustain a collaborative process requires substantive progress towards shared change goals.
The search for effective public policy approaches for relating higher education to the needs of the labour market was a subject of much attention in the 1960s and early 19 70s, and the verdict was largely against centralized comprehensive manpower planning. This paper re-examines the role of manpower planning in the university sector, in light of new economic imperatives and new data production initiatives by Employment and Immigration Canada. It concludes by rejecting what is conventionally referred to as manpower planning, and offering, instead, a set of guidelines for improving the linkage between universities and the labour market within the framework of existing institutional and policy structures.
On s 'est beau coup preoccupe pendant les annees 60 et au debut des annees 70 de trouver des politiques efficaces pour mieux adapter le monde de !'education superieure aux besoins du marche du travail; d cette epoque on s 'est prononce en grande partie contre une planification centralisee et globale de l'emploi. Cet article reexamine le role de la planification de l'emploi dans le secteur universitaire d la lumiere des nouveaux imperatifs economiques et des nouvelles initiatives de production de donnees de la part d 'Emploi et Immigration Canada. L 'auteur en arrive a la conclusion qu 'il faut rejeter ce que l'on appelle communement la planification de l'emploi pour offrir a la place un ensemble de directives pour ameliorer les liens entre les universites et le marche du travail dans le cadre des structures politiques et institutionnelles existantes.
On behalf of Universities Canada, Abacis cpmdicted amd extensive online nationwide study of Canadian's views of Universities.
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:
1. Interactive sampling should be conducted to demonstrate class concepts.
2. Students should be providing responses in a controlled setting.
3. Students’ responses should be compared to behavioural hypotheses derived from theory.
Prior work has established robust diversity in the extent to which different moral values are endorsed. Some people focus on values related to caring and fairness, whereas others assign additional moral weight to ingroup loyalty, respect for authority and established hierarchies, and purity concerns. Five studies explore associations between endorsement of distinct moral values and a suite of interpersonal orientations: Machiavellianism, prosocial resource distribution, Social Dominance Orientation, and
reported likelihood of helping and not helping kin and close friends versus acquaintances and neighbors. We found that Machiavellianism (Studies 1, 3, 4, 5) (e.g., amorality, controlling and status-seeking behaviors) and Social Dominance Orientation (Study 4) were negatively associated with caring values, and positively associated with valuation of authority. Those higher in caring values were more likely to choose prosocial resource distributions (Studies 2, 3, 4) and to report reduced likelihood of failing to help kin/close friends or acquaintances (Study 4). Finally, greater likelihood of helping acquaintances was positively associated with all moral values tested except authority values (Study 4). The current work offers a novel approach to characterizing moral values and reveals a striking divergence between two kinds of moral values in particular: caring values and authority values. Caring values were positively linked with prosociality and negatively associated with Machiavellianism, whereas authority values were positively associated with Machiavellianism and Social Dominance Orientation.
The Dual Credit and School Within a College (SWAC) programs are both dual enrolment/dual credit programs that address access by creating new pathways to postsecondary education for non-traditional students. The programs allow students who are still in grade 11 and grade 12 to take one or more courses at a local college and earn both a high school credit toward their high school diploma as well as a college credit from the college offering the course. Though these programs have been offered internationally for over three decades, there is still little research and little conclusive evidence that demonstrate their effectiveness.
Abstract This study investigates the degree to which biodiversity concepts are included within university curricula in Ontario and provides a baseline for tracking this. A keyword search of undergraduate and graduate academic calendars from six Ontario universities was conducted. A list of 28 relevant keywords was developed, and university program descriptors were searched for these keywords, while considering core and elective courses within each program. Almost half (49.5%) of the 386 undergraduate programs, and 29.4% of the 327 graduate programs featured biodiversity keywords. Science programs showed the highest degree of integration (74.5% for undergraduate and 37.4% for graduate programs), followed by business programs (57.6% and 38.4%, respectively). The arts and social sciences showed the least biodiversity integration (25.8% of undergraduate and 21.0% of graduate programs). This research method provides a depth of understanding of biodiversity integration within university curricula, although the analysis is limited to the content provided in academic calendars.
Résumé Cette étude évalue le degré d’intégration des concepts de la biodiversité dans les programmes universitaires en Ontario, et établit des repères pour suivre cette intégration. Une recherche par mots-clés a été réalisée dans les calendriers des cours de premier cycle et de cycles supérieurs de six universités ontariennes. Nous avons dressé une liste de 28 mots-clés pertinents, puis avons effectué une recherche de ces mots-clés parmi les descripteurs de programmes universitaires, en englobant les cours obligatoires et facultatifs de chaque programme. Près de la moitié (49,5 %) des 386 programmes de premier cycle et 29,4 % des 327 programmes de cycles supérieurs étaient assortis de mots-clés liés à la biodiversité. Parmi tous les programmes, les programmes scientifiques ont démontré le degré d’intégration le plus élevé (74,5 % pour le premier cycle et 37,4 % pour les cycles supérieurs), suivis des programmes en commerce (57,6 % pour le premier cycle et 38,4 %, pour les cycles supérieurs). Par ailleurs, les arts et les sciences sociales ont démontré la plus faible intégration de la biodiversité (25,8 % pour le premier cycle et 21,0 % pour les cycles supérieurs). Cette méthode de recherche permet de mieux comprendre l’intégration de la biodiversité dans les programmes universitaires, même si l’analyse se limite au contenu indiqué dans les calendriers des cours.
This report examines students’ use of different technologies. The results are from the 2015 Student Life Survey which was administered to a random sample of 5,000 undergraduate students and 1,000 graduate and professional students. A total of 1,039 undergraduate students (20.8% response rate) and 282 graduate/professional students (28.2% response rate) completed the survey. In this report only responses of undergraduate students are presented so they can be compared to findings from the 2012 and 2013 distributions of the Student Life Survey. Among undergraduates, the 2013 survey had a 38.9% response rate, and the 2012 had a 26.0% response rate.