Canada has enjoyed exceptional and sustained economic growth for the past 15 years – strong commodity prices have created a currency advantage in export markets, the R&D collaboration between universities and the private sector is strong, post-secondary education attainment is one of the highest amongst OECD countries, the overall unemployment rate has fallen, and the number of small and medium enterprises have risen in the last decade. However, as international competition for talent and capital continue to intensify, now may be the time to review one of the critical elements for any economy – skills and learning.
WHEN a story is passed on from one person to another, each man repeating, as he imagines, what he has heard from the last narrator, it undergoes many successive changes before it at length arrives at that relatively fixed form in which it may become current throughout a whole community. To discover the principles according to which successive versions in such a process of change may be traced, presents problems of considerable interest, both for psychology and for sociology. Moreover, precisely the same type of problems confront investigators who endeavour to study the diffusion of decorative and representative art forms, of music, of social customs, institutions, and beliefs, and in fact, of almost every element which enters into the varied and complex life of man in society.
The 2016 Canadian National Postdoctoral Survey (the 2016 Survey) is an outcome of the collaboration between Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars (CAPS-ACSP) and the Tri-Council granting agencies (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council). The content of the 2016 survey leverages the results from two earlier National Postdoctoral Surveys1 and a CAPS-ACSP 2014 report2 developed in collaboration with Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), which highlighted the professional development needs of postdocs in the Social Sciences and Humanities.
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.
Improving student outcomes is a primary goal of all postsecondary institutions. This report includes the first set of results for a research project that aims to understand the effectiveness of an intervention designed to improve postsecondary student success.
Student orientation and transition programs constitute an important part of Mohawk College’s Student Success Plan. The college endeavours to facilitate the development of an individualized “Future Ready Plan” for students to ensure they are prepared for their college experience by organizing goal-setting workshops during orientation and initial transition activities. Recent evidence suggests that an online, guided, writing-intensive approach to goal setting and self-authorship may have significant effects on student outcomes, such as retention and academic performance (Morisan et al., 2010; Schippers, Scheepers & Peterson, 2015).
My first boss, the chairman of my department when I was a young lecturer, was Wilfrid Harrison. Even though there was approximately 40 years’ difference between our ages, I would have described Wilfrid as a friend.
He was a distinguished and influential figure in many ways: the first person to be appointed a teaching fellow in politics alone at an Oxford college, a former editor of Political Studies and a founding member of the Political Studies Association – which still awards a major prize honouring his name. He was also the founding professor of the department, at the University of Warwick, in which I spent 35 years.
When Wilfrid retired, properly and traditionally at the age of 65, he sold all his books, severed all substantive contact with universities and devoted himself to his wife, his daughters, his dogs and his cooking (my memories of the latter are centred on the observation that whisky and cream seemed to feature in all his dishes).
Like many developed countries around the world, Canada and Australia will face growing labour market pressures as a result of unprecedented demographic trends and increasing competition for skilled workers. As part of their response to current and emerging skill shortages, both countries are committed to improving qualification recognition processes to better facilitate internal mobility and skilled migration. With Canada and Australia functioning as federal systems, qualification recognition tends to involve a number of jurisdictions and a range of practices, creating an often confusing and lengthy process for many foreign trained professionals. While Canada is driving improvements in foreign qualification recognition through
intergovernmental and stakeholder collaboration, Australia is restructuring internal systems to centralize and standardize qualification assessment and professional registration. Since both countries face a number of common issues and share similar policy objectives, there is an opportunity to not only share key lessons and emerging best practices, but also work together to advance further collaboration across a range of professions.
In their aptly named book on organizational management, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton write about Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense. A hard fact is something for which there is solid evidence. A dangerous half-truth is when this fact is superficially applied. And total nonsense is often the outcome of not knowing the difference.
We can gain insight about the current state of school leadership by applying this organizational thinking to two of education’s hard facts: The principal is crucial to school success, and professional learning communities are more effective than individual professionals working in isolation. In doing so, we should remember that the danger in the half-truth is not just that it is incomplete or misleading, but that its proponents are unaware that it is not true.
This morning I will speak to what we must do next to more effectively address the continuing problem of student attrition in higher education. To do so I will briefly look back on what is now a thirty-year history of research & practice on student retention and reflect on the lessons we have learned over that time. I will argue that we have yet to attend to the deeper
educational issues that ultimately shape student success in higher education. Until we do so, our efforts will always be less effective than we desire.
major new development in education like the community college baccalaureate warrants serious examination and reflection. In this connection, I wish to applaud Dr. Kenneth Walker for his vision and initiative in founding the Community College Baccalaureate Association and in taking the lead to organize this First Annual Conference of the Association. I feel honoured to be speaking at what I believe will turn out to have been such an historic event.
There are many interesting and important lines of inquiry which can be pursued in studying the community college baccalaureate movement, such as identifying factors which have led to this development; articulating the arguments for and against it; implementation issues; and case studies of early initiatives, to name just a few. I note that all of these lines of inquiry and others are represented in the program for this conference. What I would like to do in my remarks is to step back from the immediate issues in the implementation of the community college baccalaureate and reflect on the implications of the community college baccalaureate with respect to (1) the organization of ostsec community college and; (3) the Bachelor's
Degree
The use of data has produced a narrowing effect in education. It has caused schools to narrow the content we are teaching, focusing on key learning targets (e.g. Common Core State Standards). At the same time, it has caused us to narrow the students we are teaching. Since schools are evaluated by proficiency percentages, educators are using data to create categories of “green,” “yellow,” and “red” students, and diverting resources disproportionately toward “yellow” students as a means of boosting overall percentages. This commentary discusses the consequences of this phenomenon,
particularly on student
l systems to use data in a way that tracks growth rather than performance, in an effort to mitigate the triaging effect.
Many adolescents are experiencing a reduction in sleep as a consequence of variety of behavioral factors, even though scientific evidence suggests taht the biological need for sleep increases during maturation. Consequenlly, the ability to effectively interact with peers while learning and processing novel information may be diminished in may sleep-deprived adolescents.
We need to work more with students on seeing exams as something more than just grade generating experiences. Exams can be powerful encounters through which students learn course content and learn about learning. However, given the importance placed on grades, I’m not terribly optimistic about a lot of students discovering on their own what can be learned from an exam experience. We need to frame exams with a stronger focus on learning, and here’s a great example.
The curriculum should pay particular attention to ethnic, gender, and other forms of social difference and inequality. At the same time, it should stress the importance of studying, ideals and experiences of what it means to be a teacher. Courses should be designed to explore these issues in both historical and contemporary settings. Although the concentration needs to be on the content, a good curriculum needs to be designed to foster a community of learning among people and at the same time to offer considerable flexibility and intellectual diversity (J. Yalden, Long, Micheal H., Richards, Jack C. 2001). In this paper we will analyze key aspects of, and changes in, the curriculum, social and economic development in South Eastern Europe in the last twenty years. Major issues covered in this paper will be: the impact of communism on society; political and education reform; the problems of people with special needs; the changing role and status of minority groups and the introduction of a service learning project in the curriculum.
Keywords: Service-learning; education, curriculum, creativity
Since 1977, we’ve been recommending that graduate departments partake in birth control, but no one has been listening,” said Paula Stephan to more than 200 postdocs and PhD students at a symposium in Boston, Massachusetts, in October this year. Stephan is a renowned labour economist at Georgia State University in Atlanta who has spent much of her career trying to understand the relationships between economics and science, particularly biomedical science. And the symposium, ‘Future of Research’, discussed the issue to which Stephan finds so many people deaf: the academic research system is generating progeny at a startling rate. In biomedicine, said Stephan. “We are definitely producing many more PhDs than there is demand for them in research positions.”
This report maps learning outcomes associated with three Ontario advanced diploma programs in Business (Accounting Administration, Human Resources Administration, and Marketing Administration) in order to determine whether these credentials are equivalent to baccalaureate degrees in an international (European and American) context. In so doing, it draws on recent discussions of learning outcomes in both Ontario and the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), particularly with regard to the Bologna Process. It also provides more information for current Ontario debates about the positioning of the three-year advanced diploma.
A main goal of this themed issue of Teachers College Record (TCR) is to move the conversation about PISA data beyond achievement to also include factors that affect achievement (e.g., SES, home environment, strategy use). Also we asked authors to consider how international assessment data can be used for improving learning and education and what appropriate versus inappropriate inferences can be made from the data.
There is widespread interest among a variety of stakeholders, including parents, teachers, policy makers, and the general public, about what and how well students are learning in educational systems around the world and how well educational systems are preparing students for life outside school (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD, 2009). Student achievement is often monitored at the national level, but nations are increasingly interested in cross-national educational comparisons as well. Perhaps in response to increasing globalization in both social and economic terms, stakeholders want to understand their country’s education system within a broader international context (OECD, 2009; 2010). What are its relative strengths and weaknesses? Is it preparing citizens to participate in a globalized economy? Is it valuing high quality learning opportunities and distributing them equitably among children and youth? Is it sufficiently resourced in terms of personnel and materials? Are teachers prepared and supported to work with diverse and high needs student populations?
“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto”1—a statement Dorothy made to her dog, Toto, in The Wizard of Oz—sums up reasonably well the point I want to make in this article. That is, as literacy educators no longer con-strained (or protected) by older, more familiar 20th-century print-centric modes of communicating, we may at times feel challenged to keep pace with students’ preferences for producing and learning with multimodal texts that combine moving and still images, sounds, performances, icons, symbols, and the like. Often digitally mediated, these texts are familiar and freely available to youth who have access to the Internet. Indeed, a small but growing body of research suggests that young people’s ways of telling, listening, viewing, and thinking in digital environments may fac-tor into their self-identifying as literate beings (e.g., Alvermann, 2010; Livingstone, Bober, & Helsper, 2005; Ito et al., 2008; McClenaghan & Doecke, 2010; Rennie & Patterson, 2010; Skinner & Hagood, 2008; Thomas, 2007; Walsh, 2008). Although this research on young people’s online literate identities has implications for classroom practice, the liter-ature remains largely untapped by teachers, school library media special-ists, and literacy teacher educators. Why is this so? Just as importantly, what does this literature have to offer?
Maybe they didn’t think of this back in 2006 when the province scrapped
mandatory retirement.
Ten years later, baby boomers in big numbers are blowing past the old
retirement age of 65, some working into their 70s.
They can defer pensions for a while, but at 71, they’re forced to collect work
and government pensions along with their paycheques.
Who would want to work that long? You might be surprised.
Canada needs more university, college and trades graduates. In order to compete in the new global knowledge economy, we have to equip all Canadians to achieve their potential and contribute to a prosperous Canada.