Among the keys to success in just about any endeavor, preparation is perhaps the most fundamental. Examples of this are plentiful: Musicians practice, athletes train, and actors rehearse long before the concert hall fills, the starting whistle sounds, or the curtain rises. Preparation is a key to success in higher education as well, and a lack of it can be a serious obstacle for students seeking a college credential. Community colleges have a long tradition of open access, but if students who come through the open door are not adequately prepared for college-level work, they have a fairly low chance of graduating. Given this reality, the current national emphasis on college completion – the Completion Agenda – would seem to necessitate an equally strong emphasis on the first step toward that goal: college readiness
A growing number of education and social science researchers design and conduct online research. In this review, the Internet Research Ethics (IRE) policy gap in Canada is identified along with the range of stakeholders and groups that either have a role or have attempted to play a role in forming bet- ter ethics policy. Ethical issues that current policy and guidelines fail to ad- dress are interrogated and discussed. Complexities around applying the hu- man subject model to internet research are explored, such as issues of privacy, anonymity, and informed consent. The authors call for immediate action on the Canadian ethics policy gap and urge the research community to consider the situational, contextual, and temporal aspects of IRE in the development of flexible and responsive policies that address the complexity and diversity of internet research spaces.
This pilot study examines alternative entrance pathways into York University undergraduate degree programs for students who apply from outside the formal education system. These alternative pathways are designed to facilitate university access for students from under-represented populations (for example, lowincome, first-generation, Aboriginal, racialized minorities, differently abled, newcomers to Canada, solesupport caregivers, students with incomplete high school education, or some combination of the preceding).
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.
Background: Via the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA), stronger accountability proponents are now knocking on the doors of the colleges of education that prepare teachers and, many argue, prepare teachers ineffectively. This is raising questions about how effective and necessary teacher education programs indeed are. While research continues to evidence that teachers have a large impact on student achievement, the examination of teacher education programs is a rational backward mapping of understanding how teachers impact students. Nonetheless, whether and how evaluations of teacher education programs should be conducted isyet another hotly debated issue in the profession.
Attraction and retention of apprentices and completion of apprenticeships are issues of concern to all stakeholders involved in training, economic development and workforce planning. The Canadian Apprenticeship Forum (CAF) has forecast that by 2017 there will be a need to train 316,000 workers to replace the retiring workforce in the construction industry alone (CAF, 2011a). In the automotive sector, shortages are expected to reach between 43,700 and 77,150 by 2021. However, shortages are already widespread across the sector, and CAF survey data show that almost half (48.1%) of employers reported that there was a limited number of qualified staff in 2011 (CAF, 2011a). Given this, retention of qualified individuals in apprenticeship training and supporting them through to completion is a serious issue. There is some indication that registration in apprenticeship programs has been increasing steadily over the past few years, but the number of apprentices completing their program has not kept pace (Kallio, 2013; Laporte & Mueller, 2011). Increasing the number of completions would result in a net benefit to both apprentices and employers, minimizing joblessness and skills shortages.
Medical schools have been engaged in curricular reform for over 20 years, although the 2010 release of the Carnegie Foundation’s Educating Physicians: A Call for Reform of Medical School and Residency1 galvanized the effort across the United States and
Canada. The report’s authors suggested four key elements, which we describe below along with some examples of how they can be implemented.
A confluence of social, technical, economic, and other factors have created the demand for improvement and change in U.S. postsecondary education. Many of the drivers for change are quite prominent, and include access to postsecondary education, cost, and students’ success. At the same time, many innovations are taking place, including numerous new modes of delivery, access, and instruction.
However, education outcomes are influenced at the micro level, where incredible variation among advisors, teachers, students, and methods leads to a process which is systemically difficult to map in detail, and hence to understand and support. In this environment, it is crucial to understand faculty members, both as stakeholders, and as potential creators and drivers of innovation, and as the direct, front-line drivers of student success.
During a speech on Thursday, President Trump revealed a striking ignorance of one of the pillars of his country’s educational system. In the course of promoting his infrastructure plan, he, a bit perplexingly, dismissed the country’s community colleges, suggesting he doesn’t know what purpose they serve. “We do not know what a ‘community college’ means,” he told the crowd in an Ohio training facility for construction apprentices, moments after expressing nostalgia for the vocational schools that flourished when he was growing up—schools that offered hands-on training in fields such as welding and cosmetology.
When a person enrolled in university in 1967 he or she entered a world barely recognizable to most students today. There were tow mean for every woman student. Many university facilities such as Hart House at the University of Toronto, were off limits to women, as wee many prestigious scholarships such as Rhodes.
Yet while the university world of that era was far more sexist, today's students - 60 per cent of whom are women - can gaze back at it with envey.
We use data for a large sample of Ontario students who are observed over the five years from their initial entry to high school to study the impact of course selections and outcomes in high school on the gender gap in postsecondary enrolment. Among students who start high school "solidly" in terms of taking the standard set of grade 9 courses (e.g., math, language, science, etc.) and performing well in these courses, we find a 10 percentage point gap in the fraction of females versus males who register for university or college (69% versus 59%). This gap is seen with respect to university registration (43% for females versus 32% for males) but not in college registration. We then show how the gender gap in university registration is related to the gender gaps at two earlier stages: (1) the first year of high school, where students can select either academic or applied track classes in core subjects including math and languages; (2) the final year(s) of high school, where students who intend to enter university must complete a minimum number of university-level classes.
Career colleges and private training institutions, known in some provinces as private vocational or occupational providers, make a significant contribution to education and learning in Canada, with thousands of Canadians graduating each year from hundres of these institutions.
This three-year study explored the perceptions of pre-service candidates in a five-year concurrent teacher education program who participated in a peer mentorship practicum model. In this practicum model teacher candidates were placed as a dyad, with each novice first-year candidate paired with a second- or third-year candidate who acted as a peer mentor. Ideally, the pair was then placed in the same classroom under the supervision of the same hosting associate teacher. However, each year
constraints presented by candidates requesting different geographic areas for their placements and/or a lack of associate teachers in some locations who were willing to host two candidates (i.e., a novice and a mentor) necessitated placing between 5 and 8% of candidates in another classroom in the same school as their mentorship partner or in another school in close geographic proximity. The objective of the peer mentorship model was to foster collaborative practice between novice and mentor candidates, which was perceived to hold the potential to provide additional support for both candidates.
The following research reports detail the results of programs or inventions designed to increase the retention of post-secondary students. This bibliography is intended as a sample of the recent literature on this topic, rather than an exhaustive list. For inclusion, articles or reports generally described experimental research studies of PSE retention programs. Preference was given to larger scale projects focused on colleges in jurisdictions outside of Ontario (in several cases, progress reports from ongoing, large-scale initiatives were also included). Where possible, links to the original research are provided.
Partnerships between public and private colleges, which have brought thousands of new international students to Ontario, carried unacceptable risks to the students, the province and the quality of education, says a report for the provincial government that led to a moratorium on the programs.
This pilot study examines alternative entrance pathways into York University undergraduate degree programs for students who apply from outside the formal education system. These alternative pathways are designed to facilitate university access for students from under-represented populations (for example, low-income, first-generation, Aboriginal, racialized minorities, differently abled, newcomers to Canada, sole-support caregivers, students with incomplete high school education, or some combination of the preceding).
Last fallDonald Trump theorized that the computer hacker who stole emails from the Democratic National Committee could have been “someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.” But the stereotypical rogue nerd isn’t the threat that most concerns information-security officers on college campuses.
The contemporary university has grown to be a fairly complex institution sustained by many competing interests, not all of which are directly concerned with promoting the work of study, broadly conceived. My concern in the fol- lowing is with the quality of the subjective experience of studying that universities are still meant to provide. By subjective experience I mean the
mindful engagement that is study, and my focus is on such study as it is found in undergraduate programs leading to undergraduate degrees. Given the threat of a growing indifference between professors and students concerning their shared engagement in courses offered at the undergraduate level (offered because of professors’ institutional obligations, taken because of students’ degree requirements), I reconsider the subjective investment of mindful engagement that these courses nevertheless represent.
cientists who attain a PhD are rightly proud — they have gained entry to an academic elite. But it is not as elite as it once was. The number of science doctorates earned each year grew by nearly 40% between 1998 and 2008, to some 34,000, in countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-opera-tion and Development (OECD). The growth shows no sign of slowing: most countries are building up their higher-education systems because they see educated workers as a key to economic growth (see ‘The rise of doctor-ates’). But in much of the world, science PhD graduates may never get a chance to take full advantage of their qualifications.
This article focuses on high school to university transitions for Indigenous youth at universities in British Columbia, Canada. The study is premised on an Indigenous research design, which utilizes the concept of visioning and a storywork methodology (Archibald, 2008). The results challenge existing in-stitutional and psychological approaches to transitions in revealing that they are deeply impacted by a variety of lived experiences and that a visioning process is vital to Indigenous youths’ participation in university. The paper concludes with implications for practitioners working in educational and Ab-original community-based settings.