Veteran researchers present five strategies—like maintaining success files and allowing choice—to help struggling students develop a positive attitude needed for success.
This report on international undergraduate students is part of a series commissioned by the UK Higher Education International Unit to systematically examine the UK’s market position with respect to international student recruitment and the international student experience. It complements two companion reports that look at the UK’s competitive advantage concerning international taught postgraduate students and international postgraduate research students.
LEESA WHEELAHAN
This contribution to the symposium on Michael Young’s article ‘Overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory: a knowledge based approach’, supports his contention that curricu- lum theory has lost sight of its object—‘what is taught and learned in schools’, and argues that this has particularly deleterious consequences for vocational education and training (VET). VET is
unproblematically positioned as applied, experiential and work- focused learning, and it is seen as a solution for those who are alienated from or unsuc- cessful in more traditional forms of academic education. This article argues that rather than being a mechanism for social inclusion, VET is instead a key way in which social inequality is mediated and reproduced because it excludes students from accessing the theoretical knowledge they need to participate in debates and controversies in society and in their occupational field of practice. It presents a social realist analysis to argue why VET students need access to theoretical knowledge, how a focus on experiential and applied learning constitutes a mechanism for social exclusion and what a ‘knowledge rich’ VET curriculum would look like.
Keywords: vocational education and training; social realism; applied
disciplinary knowledge; curriculum; knowledge
OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) has worked on Open Educational Resources (OER) in the past, which led to the publication Giving Knowledge for Free – the Emergence of Open Educational Resources (2007). This working paper thus builds on exploratory and forward-looking research in CERI and invites countries to consider the policy implications of the expansion of OER, its benefits and associated challenges.
A small OER expert group was established to discuss the subject, link it to other relevant developments in the field, and develop a draft questionnaire for member countries in order to collect information regarding the policy context related to OER. The expert group met in June 2011 and for a second time in September 2011. The questionnaire was sent to the 34 OECD member countries in August 2011. It outlined a short informative note about the benefits and challenges of OER. The responses to the questionnaire are analysed in this document.
What's the worst college major for your career, according to Forbes? Anthropology and archaeology. Kiplinger's says to stay away from religious studies, music, anthropology and art history.
Such warnings are common these days. And liberal arts professors and admissions deans at liberal arts colleges will tell you that plenty of students (and an even larger share of parents) believe them. Many colleges with liberal arts roots are rushing to add preprofessional programs.
The present study used meta-analytic methodology to synthesize research on the relationship between student ratings of instruction and student achievement. The data for the meta-analysis came from 41 independent validity studies reporting on 68 separate multisection courses relating student ratings to student achievement. The average correlation between an overall instructor rating and student achievement was .43; the average correlation between an overall course rating and student achievement was .47. While large effect sizes were also found for more specific rating dimensions such as Skill and Structure, other dimensions showed more modest relationships with student achievement. A hierarchical multiple regression analysis showed that rating/achievement correlations were larger for full-time faculty when students knew their final grades before rating instructors and when an external evaluator graded students’ achievement tests. The results of the meta-analysis provide strong support for the validity of student ratings as measures of teaching effectiveness.
This note demonstrates how life tables can be adapted from demography to studies of teachers’ careers. We provide an example using data from the Schools and Staffing Survey to compare teachers across rural, urban, and suburban locales. Using life tables, we estimate both retention rates and how long we expect teachers to remain at their school depending on their level of experience and find no difference across locales. This methodology could be applied to predict future school staffing needs.
It happened seemingly overnight, but suddenly the education community is all a-Twitter. Or is it? That’s what Faculty Focus set out to learn when it launched in July 2009 a survey on the role of Twitter in higher education. The survey asked college and university faculty about their familiarity and use of the micro-blogging service, if any, as well as whether they expect their Twitter use to increase or decrease in the future.
Studying and working abroad transforms Canadian students into global citizens, helping them develop inter-cultural awareness, adaptability and problem-solving skills. It also gives them a hiring edge with today’s employers. Leaving one’s home province to study can also be a transformative experience, increasing students’ understanding of the diverse cultures, histories and values that make up our country.
Whether learning abroad or in another province, these experiences deepen students’ awareness of the diversity of Canadian and international communities, while strengthening bonds between campuses across Canada and worldwide.
Too few Canadian students, however, benefit from the mobility experiences that can prepare them to enter a globalized labour market. Improving the international and interprovincial mobility of university students is a crucial step in developing our next generation of leaders and sharpening Canada’s competitive edge.
While much literature has considered feedback and professional growth in formative peer reviews of teaching, there has been little empirical research conducted on these issues in the context of summative peer reviews. This article explores faculty members’ perceptions of feedback practices in the summative peer review of teaching and reports on their understandings of why constructive feedback is typically non-existent or unspecific in summative reviews. Drawing from interview data with 30 tenure-track professors in a research-intensive Canadian university, the findings indicated that reviewers rarely gave feedback to the candidates, and when they did, comments were typically vague and/or focused on the positive. Feedback, therefore, did not contribute to professional growth in teaching. Faculty members suggested that feedback was limited because of the following: the high-stakes nature of tenure, the demands for research productivity, lack of pedagogical expertise
among academics, non-existent criteria for evaluating teaching, and the artificiality of peer reviews. In this article I argue that when it comes to summative reviews, elements of academic culture, especially the value placed on collegiality, shape feedback practices in important ways.
This report examines some of the key issues surrounding the education of First Nations, Métis and Inuit students and proposes a governance framework that school boards can use to improve student results.
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.
This story is featured in our 2016 Canadian Universities Guidebook, available on newsstands now. Pick up a copy of the guidebook for full profiles of 80 universities, insider reports written by current students on where to eat, study, and party, and the latest data including the grades needed to get into the school of your dreams and our definitive university rankings.
Information, it’s often said, is power. Yet when high school students are faced with one of the most important decisions of their lives—whether to attend college or university, and which course of study to take, in a sense they’re flying blind. “They’re going on anecdotal information,” says
Ross Finnie, a professor in the graduate school of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa. That’s because there’s very little good data on how students perform in the labour market once they graduate, making it harder to “shop around” for a diploma or degree that will lead to a great job at the end. With a new initiative, Finnie hopes to change that.
Key stakeholders all across higher education -- including boards, policy makers, administrators at all levels, faculty of all types, disciplinary societies, and unions -- increasingly have one. It's time to make it a reality, argues Adrianna Kezar.
The great impacts of globalization, technology advancements and competitive environment have forces higher learning institutions to adapt to strategic change so that they could remain relevant and competitive advantages. Hence, the need effective leadership behavior has become more critical than ever. Previous studies showed that transformational leaders’ support is seemed to be an essential factor in promoting effective organization. However, to what extend this is true in especially in the local public universities. Therefore, this study was intended to examine the relationship between transformational leadership behavior and its augmentation effects among the
academics in a Malaysian higher educational institution. Using a stage cluster sampling, a total of 169 academic staff from Universiti Teknologi MARA participated in the study. The result revealed the academic staff perceived that their superiors exhibited a transactional leadership style rather than transformational leadership style. There was a positive and moderate relationship between transformational leadership and leadership outcomes. The implications of the study were discussed in this paper.
Jobs paranoia is widespread in Canada. Elementary pupils are coming home after receiving the “job talk” from their teachers, typically emphasizing the importance of getting good grades so they can get into a high-quality university – rarely a college, a polytechnic institute or an apprenticeship program. Parents worry about enrolling their children in the “right” schools and academic programs. There is growing concern about the transition from school to work. News media, television programs and movies offer tales of underemployed university and college graduates, intense competition for decent jobs and chronic youth unemployment.
Altnough competency-based education may seem relative new to postsecondary education, the concept has been widely discussed throughout American education since 1990s.
Recently University Affairs published an interview with Kevin Haggerty and Aaron Doyle, two Canadian professors who have written a book of advice for graduate students. The book’s gimmick, if you want to call it that, is that it’s presented as a guide to failing—an anti-guide, perhaps?
—as evidenced by the title, 57 Ways to Screw up in Grad School: Perverse Professional Lessons for Graduate Students. According to Haggerty and Doyle, “students often make a series of predictable missteps that they could easily avoid if they only knew the informal rules and expectations of graduate school.” If only! And this book, we’re told, is designed to help solve that problem.
For over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as “cultural genocide.” Physical genocide is the mass killing of the members of a targeted group, and biological genocide is the destruction of the group’s reproductive capacity. Cultural genocide is the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group. States that engage in cultural genocide set out to destroy the political and social institutions of the targeted group. Land is seized, and populations are forcibly transferred and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are confiscated and destroyed. And, most significantly to the issue at hand, families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next.
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.