Technology is gradually replacing cursive instruction—but have we taken stock of what we’re losing?
Should cursive writing still be taught in our schools? The old debate is back with a vengeance as schools shift resources from the intricate, painstakingly rendered script to keyboard skills.
This article brings together empirical academic research on public sector innovation. Via a systematic literature review we investigate 181 articles and books on public sector innovation, published between 1990 and 2014. These studies are analysed based on the following themes: (1) the definitions of innovation, (2) innovation types, (3) goals of innovation, (4) antecedents of innovation and (5) outcomes of innovation. Based upon this analysis, we develop an empirically-based framework of potentially important antecedents and effects of public sector innovation. We propose three future research suggestions: (1) more variety in methods: moving from a qualitative dominance to using other methods, such as surveys, experiments and multi-method approaches; (2) emphasize theory development and testing as studies are often theory-poor; and (3) conduct more cross-national and cross-sectoral studies, linking for instance different governance and state traditions to the development and effects of public sector innovation.
OISE/UT Guidelines for Theses and Orals
Background/Context: In contrast to cultural constructs that equate education with cognitive development and formal schooling, the Latin American cultural model of educación encompasses academic knowledge and social competence. Prior scholarship has mainly investigated parental notions of educación vis-à-vis childrearing and schooling, primarily among Mexican Americans and
Puerto Ricans. Analysis of educación should include other nationalities and elucidate how adults believe educación is acquired and linked both to schooling and nonformal adult education and literacy.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The purpose of this article is to explicate how former adult literacy participants in rural El Salvador perceived the meanings of educación, how one becomes an educated person, and how educación relates to schooling and literacy.
The development of outcomes-based educational (OBE) practices represents one important way in which a
learning outcomes approach to teaching and learning can be applied in the postsecondary sector.
This study adopts a multiple case study design and profiles seven OBE initiatives being implemented in Ontario’s colleges and universities to better understand the scope of outcomes-based educational practices in the province’s postsecondary sector. ‘OBE initiatives’ are defined as purposeful actions undertaken by postsecondary providers directed at defining, teaching toward and assessing learning outcomes in their educational practice (modified from Jones, Voorhees & Paulson, 2002).
For more than six years, HEQCO has conducted research on the differentiation of Ontario’s public postsecondary system, where institutions build on and are accountable for their specific strengths, mandates and missions. This report identifies clear distinctions between universities in terms of their research and teaching missions. The data point to critical pathways to achieve the benefits of greater differentiation. The goal is a system that is more cohesive, more sustainable and of higher quality.
Ontario’s colleges share the provincial government’s belief that apprenticeship must play a greater role in addressing skills shortages and contributing to innovative, high-performance workplaces that enhance Ontario’s competitiveness.
In recent years, college attendance for first-gen-eration students has had a high profile in Texas. First-generation students—students whose parents did not attend college—have increasingly been the target of ef-forts to increase college-going and completion rates in the state. Such efforts demonstrate a growing recogni-tion by state policymakers and educators that expand-ing postsecondary opportunity to students who have previously lacked college access—namely the state’s large and increasing low-income, minority, and first-generation populations—is critical to the future social and economic well-being of Texas.
Student ratings of teaching have been used, studied, and debated for almost a century. This article examines student ratings of teaching from a statistical perspective. The common practice of relying on averages of student teaching evaluation scores as the primary measure of teaching effectiveness for promotion and tenure decisions should be abandoned for substantive and statistical reasons: There is strong evidence that student responses to questions of “effectiveness” do not measure teaching effectiveness. Response rates and response variability matter. And comparing averages of categorical responses, even if the categories are represented by numbers, makes little sense. Student ratings of teaching are valuable when they ask the right questions, report response rates and score distributions, and are balanced by a variety of other sources and methods to evaluate teaching.
In this working paper, Earl and Timperley argue that evaluative thinking is a necessary component of successful innovation and involves more than measurement and quantification. Combining evaluation with innovation requires discipline in the innovation and flexibility in the evaluation. The knowledge bases for both innovation and evaluation have advanced dramatically in recent years in ways that have allowed synergies to develop between them; the different stakeholders can bring
evaluative thinking into innovation in ways that capitalise on these synergies. Evaluative thinking contributes to new learning by providing evidence to chronicle, map and monitor the progress, successes, failures and roadblocks in the innovation as it unfolds. It involves thinking about what evidence will be useful during the course of the innovation activities, establishing the range of objectives and targets that make sense to determine their progress, and building knowledge and developing practical uses for the new information, throughout the trajectory of the innovation. Having a continuous cycle of generating hypotheses, collecting evidence, and reflecting on progress, allows the stakeholders (e.g., innovation leaders, policymakers, funders, participants in innovation) an opportunity to try things, experiment, make mistakes and consider where they are, what went right and what went wrong, through a fresh and independent review of the course and the effects of the innovation. This paper describes issues and approaches to each phase of the cycle. It concludes by outlining the synergies to be made, building capacity for evaluative thinking, as well as possible tensions to be addressed.
Adoption of the learning management system can affect areas of higher education such as student engagement, classroom anagement, and online courses. Likewise, lack of adoption can impede the success of using the tools available to higher education. This whitepaper will explore Roger’s Theory of Diffusion use with adoption among faculty.
D2L believes when one faculty adopts the technology, another faculty member who might resist will soon follow. Students, in turn, will use the platform for classes and are usually not the issue when adopting technology.
Why does the federal government subsidize postsecondary education?
There are numerous positive externalities associated with high-quality postsecondary education. As a result, markets will likely produce less than is socially optimal. Consider that an important goal of postsecondary institutions is to train students and thus create a high-quality workforce. Much of the benefit of this training will be captured by the students themselves through higher earnings over their lifetime. Some of this benefit, however, will spill over to the larger society through improved long-term economic growth, lower unemployment and increased productivity, as well as greater equity and economic mobility.
The purpose of this study was to document the implementation of an intergenerational literacy program that incorporated authentic literacy activity with the goal of raising low-English literacy levels of the parent and the English emergent literacy levels of their non-English speaking young children.
The higher education world is getting smaller as more and more students are choosing to study abroad. Students are looking to universities to provide an international experience, the opportunity to study alongside students from all over the world, and to give them a truly global higher education community in which to study.
As part of the data collected for the World University Rankings, Times Higher Education asks all institutions to provide figures on the percentage of international students they have. THE has extracted these data and compiled a list of the top 200 universities.
Three of the universities featured in the top five were founded in the past 30 years – perhaps suggesting that younger universities are more appealing to international students.
Sixteen universities from London feature in the top 200, making it one of the most represented cities in the ranking. In fact, the UK as a whole was the most represented country with 72 universities present in the top 200 in total,
compared with 27 from the US and 22 in Australia.
Many colleges speak of the importance of increasing student retention. Many even invest substantial resources in programs to achieve that end. Witness, for instance, the growth of the freshman seminar. Some institutions even go so far as to hire retention consultants who promise significant gains in retention if only you use their programs. But while many colleges have adopted a variety of programs to enhance retention, most programs are add-ons that are marginal to the academic life of the institution. Too many colleges have adopted what Parker Palmer calls the “add a course” strategy. Need to address the issue of diversity? Add a course in diversity studies. Need to address the success of new students? Add a freshman seminar. Need to address student retention? Bring in a consultant and establish a committee or office charged with that responsibility. The result is a growing segmentation of services for students into increasingly autonomous fiefdoms whose functional responsibilities are reinforced by separate budget and promotion systems. Therefore, while it is true that retention programs abound on our campuses, most institutions, in my view, have not taken student retention seriously. They have done little to change the way they organize their activities, done little to alter student experience, and therefore done little to address the deeper roots of student attrition. As a result, most efforts at enhancing student retention, though successful to some
degree, have had more limited impact than they should or could.
This report examines skill trends in 24 OECD countries over the past several decades. The skill measures used include broad occupation groups, country-specific direct measures of skill requirements from international surveys, and direct skill measures from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) database applied to both United States and European labour force surveys. Each kind of data has its own strengths and limitations but they tell a consistent story.
Responsible ethics evaluation is the heart of Canada’s research community, but some believe that the evaluation process could be better tailored for the college sector.
The use of non-tenure-track and part-time faculty in U.S. colleges and universities is on the rise, altering the composition
of the academic workforce in fundamental ways. Who, then, are contemporary faculty? In what ways do they differ from their predecessors? In which institutions and sectors are the trends most pronounced?
This project investigated the “contingency movement” using a variety of analytic approaches, including extensive literature review, quantitative analysis of over two decades of national institutional data, and onsite interviews with contingent and non-contingent faculty at a research university, a private liberal arts college, and a public masters-level institution.
New research at the University of Warwick demonstrates two shortcomings with the current benchmarking of internationalisation: they are based purely on structural measures and they use a simple bi-polar distinction between home and international students.
Almost 40 per cent of the most highly rated private career colleges in Ontario appear to be failing to prepare students for the labour market, with a third of graduates at 58 out of 159 campuses unable to find any work six months after graduation.
The numbers, released by the provincial government this spring and analyzed by The Globe and Mail, raise renewed questions about whether public money should be used to help students attend the private institutions. Data were made public only for the schools the province has approved as eligible for financial aid.