Understanding personal factors that contribute to university student satisfaction with life is important in order to determine how we can better prepare students for the transition to post-secondary education and support them during this transition. This study examined predictors of university student satisfaction with life, academic self-efficacy, and self-reported academic achievement
in their first year of university. First-year students (n = 66) completed selfreport measures of academic achievement, university well-being, satisfaction with life, personality, and mental health. A linear regression analysis approach was applied to the data. Results indicated that academic satisfaction and school connectedness predicted satisfaction with life but that academic
self-efficacy and college gratitude did not, conscientiousness predicted academic self-efficacy, college well-being predicted self-reported achievement, and anxiety predicted achievement but depression did not. This study highlights the importance of understanding the personal factors that influence well-being and achievement during the transition to university.
During the economic doldrums that have followed The Great Recession, employees in the education sector (administrators, staff, and teachers or faculty at both the K-12 level and the post-secondary level) are confident about both their retirement savings behavior and their likely retirement outcomes. African American and white American employees in the education sector are more optimistic about their retirement planning and prospects than are U.S. workers overall. Education sector employees—both African Americans (87%) and white Americans (88%)—are more likely than U.S. workers overall (59%) to currently save for retirement. This fact helps justify their greater confidence that they will have enough money to live comfortably throughout retirement. Seven of every ten black American employees and seven of every ten white American employees are confident (‘very’ or ‘somewhat’) of this, while nearly half of all U.S. workers express this level of confidence.
• To set out a conceptual design for a new accountability framework for Ontario PSE
• Framework intended as ppart of HEQCO’s advice on new multi‐year accountability aggreements
• Complements other HEQCO work on this topic
Being admitted to graduate school can feel like a prize — until you actually get there and have to do the work. I’m a full professor now, yet I still vividly recall those daunting first months. And I’m reminded of them each academic year, as I watch so many excellent students make the same missteps.
That got me thinking about how graduate students can better set themselves up for success.
The result is this list of 10 tips.
On the one hand, a growing amount of research discusses support for improving online collaborative learning quality, and many indicators are focused to assess its success. On the other hand, thinkLets for designing reputable and valuable collaborative processes have been developed for more than ten years. However, few studies try to apply thinkLets to online collaborative learning. This paper introduces thinkLets to online collaborative learning and experimentally tests its ffectiveness with participants' responses on their satisfaction. Yield Shift Theory (YST), a causal theory explaining inner satisfaction, is adopted. In the experiment, 113 students from Universities in Beijing, China are chosen as a sample. They were divided into two groups, collaborating online in a simulated class. Then, YST in student groups under online collaborative learning is validated, a comparison study of online collaborative learning with and without thinkLets is implemented, and the satisfaction response of participants are analyzed. As a result of this comparison, YST is proved applicable in this context, and satisfaction is higher in
online collaborative learning with thinkLets.
Abstract: The unprecedented transformations which took place in the last few decades in contemporary society impose a permanent revision of the training methods of the future teachers. On the European and international level, we notice a change in the perception of the teaching profession. There is a more acute problem of focusing on the qualification at standards of higher quality in their preparation through the assimilation of key skills. From this point of view, the institutions of higher learning have great responsibility in the training of professionals in the didactic field, so that they can accumulate the skills which are sufficient and necessary to continuous training, according to the principle of lifelong learning. The orientations towards the professionalization of the teaching profession impose a training level of the learners which can adapt to social changes, and to the transformations at the level of the profession through permanent accumulation in lifelong learning.
Key words: education, competences, teaching, critical thinking, reforming.
OUSA asked students to answer questions about their experience with high-impact learning, active and participatory learning, work-integrated learning, and online courses. Students were also asked to provide their impressions about what
resources should be prioritized within their university, as well as how they viewed the balance between teaching and learning at their institution.
Educators want nothing more than for our students to feel successful and excited to learn, and to understand the importance of their education. We want our students' attention and respect to match our own. I believe that most if not all of our students desire the same, but walking through our classroom doors are beautifully complex youth who are neurobiologically wired to feel before thinking.
Massive open online courses are often characterized as remedies to education disparities related to social class.
Residents of Eastern Ontario are most likely to identify "balancing the budget" as the most important issue currently facing the Ontario government.
The development of essential employability skills (EES) has become an increasingly critical component of the postsecondary curriculum. Today’s graduates must be able to demonstrate a range of skills such as communication, teamwork and problem solving, and use these skills within diverse employment contexts. Although essential skill learning outcomes have been a part of Ontario’s postsecondary college curriculum for more than two decades, there is a distinct gap in research on the development and assessment of these skills. Reports on skill gaps, employment trends and EES assessment in education have led some educators to speculate whether electronic portfolios (ePortfolios) can be used to address the development and assessment of EES — and help shine a spotlight on EES for postsecondary students.
For many young women and girls in Canada, their opportunity to participate equally in Canadian society and their right to lead successful and fulfilling lives may be disrupted by acts of gender-based violence. Acknowledging the serious impact of such violence on young women and girls, the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women (“the Committee”) agreed on 8 March 2016, to conduct a study on violence against young women and girls in Canada.
Even as the economy has at last begun to expand at a more rapid pace, growth in wages and benefits for most American workers has continued its decades-long stagnation. Real hourly wages of the median American worker were just 5 percent higher in 2013 than they were
in 1979, while the wages of the bottom decile of earners were 5 percent lower in 2013 than
in 1979.1 Trends since the early 2000s are even more pronounced. Inflation-adjusted wage growth from 2003 to 2013 was either flat or negative for the entire bottom 70 percent of the wage distribution.2 Compounding the problem of stagnating wages is the decline in employer-provided health insurance, with the share of non-elderly Americans receiving insurance from an employer falling from 67 percent in 2003 to 58.4 percent in 2013.
In the span of a week, the future of three Alberta colleges was set. On February 22, Minister of Advanced Education Marlin Schmidt announced that Grande Prairie Regional College (GPRC) had been approved for degree-granting status, with a view to becoming a university. On March
1, Premier Rachel Notley appeared at an event to announce that Red Deer College (RDC)
also had been approved to grant its own degrees. That same day, the education minister again
went before the cameras to confirm that the Alberta College of Art + Design (ACAD) had
achieved university status.
This article examines the career and college advice that high school counselors and vocational teachers give to the “forgotten half,” students who are unlikely to seek a 4-year college degree. Using interview data from 12 Midwestern high schools, we found that most counselors tend to encourage all students to attend college, regardless of the students’ interests or plans. Vocational teachers, on the other hand, showed evidence of a more nuanced view of the need for college. We found that vocational teachers in our sample fit in to four broad categories in terms of their advice and opinions about college: the college-for-all advocates, who push college regardless of circumstances; the diplomats, who try subtly to tell students that their plans are unrealistic; the straightforward, who try to make sure that students have realistic information; and the hands-off, who disavow any role in helping students make future plans. After an examination of these approaches, we conclude with a discus-sion of the implications of the various approaches for guiding students’ choices.
THE POSTSECONDARY REVIEW led by Bob Rae has presented a bracing diagnosis of a system he accurately describes as strong, but in serious jeopardy. OCUFA agrees that Ontario’s community colleges and universities are “on the edge of the choice between steady decline and great improvement” and that making the choice for improvement “will require more resources as well as a will to change.”
In other areas, Mr. Rae’s framing of the questions suggests a direction OCUFA would find troubling. The Discussion Paper’s section on “Accessibility” does not consider at all the financial barriers to participating in higher education. Instead, tuition and student aid are a major focus of the “Funding” section, pointing to an apparent belief that reformed student assistance accompanied by higher tuition fees could be a significant source of increased resources for community colleges and universities. In this submission, OCUFA calls attention to evidence from other jurisdictions that student aid innovations, in
particular the “go now-pay later” example currently being exported from Australia to the United Kingdom, will not deliver the hoped-for salvation. Instead, we set out the case for significantly increased public funding for higher education.We have organized our submission along the five main themes set out in the Discussion Paper: accessibility, quality, system design, funding and accountability.
Le projet Comprendre le concept de force en sciences est né de l’initiative des ministères de l’Éducation de l’Ontario et du Québec dans le cadre d’une entente de collaboration signée par les deux Premiers Ministres de ces provinces concernant le secteur de l’éducation ainsi que d’autres secteurs d’activité.
C’est une étude comparative, de nature collaborative et de type exploratoire, qui s’est déroulée de mai 2007 à mai 2008. Elle pourrait être suivie d’une étude plus approfondie et de plus d’envergure selon l’intérêt des résultats présentés ci-dessous de même que la disponibilité des ressources disponibles.
Academic governance is a fundamental element of a higher education provider’s all-encompassing governance structure. If it’s not effective, it calls into question the whole academic framework for verifying quality and integrity in teaching, learning and scholarship in that institution.
The principal ‘body’ responsible for advising the corporate and management ‘arms’ of a higher education provider on all matters associated with the academic functioning of the institution is the 'academic board'.
The academic board is the peak body responsible for assuring academic quality and ensuring academic integrity and high standards in teaching, learning, scholarship and research. Underpinning these functions is the role the academic board has in academic policy development and review. It carries ou t functions in affiliation with (but independently of) the institution’s executive management.
Each year the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance releases its Habitats project: a series of case studies on municipal-level issues affecingundergraduate students. These case studies are written by OUSA campus researcher from our member institutions.
Non-direct entrants to Ontario’s colleges have not been well understood through research. Shifting demographics and a changing labour market indicate that the colleges need to attract a greater number of individuals from a variety of entry pathways.
The objective of this report is to profile applicants and students coming to Ontario colleges through a non-direct route, relative to those who have come directly from high school, in terms of their demographics, perceptions, influences, finances and use of student services. Creating profiles of non-direct entrants, segmented by various entry pathways, provides valuable insight for recruitment strategies, admissions processes, anticipation of student needs and services, and programming decisions. This report utilizes existing data sources that have been re-configured and analyzed to enable the development of a profile of non-direct entrants.