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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.
Discussed below are seven classroom strategies that are frequently encouraged by teacher trainers and/or administrators and are assumed to be useful. However, when examined more closely what one sees is that they are actually highly ineffective and tend to encourage negative effects on the classroom climate, students’ psychology and level of function and order in the class. We need to therefore stop suggesting teachers use them, and if they have been suggested to you, you might politely decline and instead consider implementing better alternative practices that will get you long-term positive results such as those described below.
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.
he elevated attention paid to sexual and interpersonal violence, coupled with new legislative requirements, is eading colleges and universities to improve the ways that victims and survivors can report incidents of such iolence. Providing additional resources and educating students about reporting options can lead to a significant ncrease in those reports. That is a positive step forward. However, surges in reporting can, in turn, stress nstitutional resources and delay or stop colleges and universities from shifting their focus to actually preventing sexual violence and bringing reporting numbers back down.
In any Ph.D. job search, if there is an application process, you should read the instructions before you do anything,writes Natalie Lundsteen. You should take your time, be thoughtful and follow directions.
Accelerated courses continue to be part of the changing academic landscape at Canadian universities. However, there is limited evidence to support their efficacy in relation to knowledge retention. A greater understanding of knowledge retention associated with accelerated courses (i.e., intensive full-day course for a one- or two-week duration) as compared to traditional courses (i.e., one three-hour lecture once a week for 12 weeks) will provide university stakeholders and administrators with evidence to determine whether quicker courses should be pursued in the postsecondary education environment.
Let us begin by being clear about what a start-up is.A start-up is generally a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. It may be a service company for seniors, a technology company or a company selling
a particular product. As a start- up, it does all the work needed to get to and stay in a market and learn what it will take to go from a small business to a medium-sized, fast growing business and then to a large business. A start-up is a temporary since the way it works will not be the way the medium and larger scale versions of the business work. Think of Apple, which began with two
young men building interesting machines and selling them via friends and their social networks, and look at Apple now! Think of Costco / Price Club, which began in 1976 with a single warehouse, and look it at now – a very different kind of global business.
A start-up of this kind is not the same as a small business offering a product in a single market – a one-off business. The strategic intention of a start-up of the kind we are describing here is to move from small to large, from local to national and then global, and from a single product to a range of related products.
On university campuses across Ontario, students who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, trans, two-spirit, non-binary, questioning, or who otherwise identify as Queer (LGBTQ+) face varying levels of discrimination, harassment, and exclusion. Without pathologizing being LGBTQ+, it is important to recognize the increased mental and physical health concerns associated with the marginalization these students routinely face.
As a minority group on university campuses, the unique needs of mature students can be easily overlooked. It is important that the term “mature students” does not disguise the heterogeneity of this group: “…it is erroneous to speak of ‘the adult learner’ as if there is a generic adult that can represent all adults.”1 However, amongst this varied group of students, there are common
concerns that they share. This policy sets out students’ priorities in increasing the visibility of mature students on campus as well as optimizing their educational experience.
Mature students need more recognition of the different hurdles they face in achieving success. These can include situational barriers like a lack of time, lack of money, health issues, or dependant care,2 as well as attitudinal or dispositional barriers, including the fear of failure or alienation. Lastly, they also face systemic barriers such as restrictive course offerings and
availability of instructors or support services outside of regular business hours.3
As a minority group on university campuses, the unique needs of mature students can be easily overlooked. It is important that the term “mature students” does not disguise the heterogeneity of this group: “…it is erroneous to speak of ‘the adult learner’ as if there is a generic adult that can represent all adults.” 1 However, amongst this varied group of students, there are common concerns that they share. Mature students need more recognition of the different hurdles they face in achieving success. These can include situational barriers like a lack of time, lack of money, health issues, or dependant care,2 as well as attitudinal or dispositional barriers, including the fear of failure or alienation. Lastly, they also face systemic barriers such as restrictive course offerings and availability of instructors or support services outside of regular business hours. 3 Our Mature Student Policy sets out students’ priorities in increasing the visibility of mature students on campus as well as optimizing their educational experience.
The question of how to hold Ontario’s universities accountable to the needs of students is a relatively complex one. One must be careful to balance the need for academic freedom with the public’s (and especially students’) right to be assured that its considerable investments into postsecondary institutions are being used effectively and appropriately. OUSA’s Accountability paper offers recommendations to improve quality assurance and strategic goal-setting in Ontario’s universities. In essence, it describes students’ vision of to whom, for what, and how universities should be held accountable.
Aboriginal peoples in Canada face multiple and systemic barriers to attaining and succeeding in post-secondary education. A long history of discrimination, including the legacy of residential schools, and chronic government underfunding of Aboriginal education has contributed to low high school completion rates, a widening gap in post- secondary attainment, and the lowest labour market
outcomes of any group in Canada.
This paper seeks to address the challenges faced by international students pursuing a post-secondary education in Ontario, and to consider more broadly the growing internationalization agenda within education. OUSA recognizes the benefits both of international students coming to Ontario, both in economic and socio-cultural terms, and for Canadian students undertaking a period of study abroad. However, it is evident that increasing internationalization requires institutions, governments and students to address various concerns that impact the ability of international students to succeed, and to ensure we are building strong intercultural university communities. To this end, we offer recommendations in the following areas, aimed at improving the international student experience:
International students are valuable members of a university community, and bring a range of benefits to Ontario. These include economic impacts - contributing $2.9 billion to the provincial economy and creating just under 30,000 jobs1 – as well as contribu
ing to diverse and vibrant classrooms and communities.
Rates of depression and anxiety among young people in America have been increasing steadily for the past 50 to 70 years. Today, by at least some estimates, five to eight times as many high school and college students meet the criteria for diagnosis of major depression and/or anxiety disorder as was true half a century or more ago. This increased psychopathology is not the result of changed diagnostic criteria; it holds even when the measures and criteria are constant.
Effort and habit are instrumental to learning and writing, but they are often dimly lit in our grading systems. That light needs to brighten with the help of new research and popular literature that highlight how essential habit, effort, and perseverance are to learning. I’ve used an effort-aware grading system in my teaching for some time now, a B- grading contract that locks hardworking students into a minimum final grade of B. For grades rising above B, the quality of the writing is the focus (the product), but only for students who fulfill the contract (the process).
The leadership of Higher Education institutions has been placed under increasing scrutiny since the 1980s with the expansion of student numbers, changes in funding for student places, increased marketization and student choice, and continuing globalisation of the sector. In this climate of change Higher Education institutions have been required to consider how to develop their leaders and what might be appropriate leadership behaviour to enable adaptation to these new circumstances. When the various paradigms of leadership encountered in the Higher Education sector are compared with established leadership theory and practice it is possible to identify further intricacies in the development of Higher Education leaders. Further consideration of practicalities within Higher Education identifies whether competence frameworks might assist in leadership development. An examination of a recently-developed comprehensive framework of leadership capabilities applied in an alternative sector leads to an evaluation as to whether the same constructs apply to the demands placed upon leaders in Higher Education. Analysis demonstrates that, with minor changes in terminology, the constructs remain appropriate and valid. The definitions Higher Education leaders could be developed and therefore form a potential framework of leadership capabilities for Higher Education.
In Canada, the term “visible minority” is used to define one of four designated groups under the Employment Equity Act. The purpose of the act is to achieve workplace equality and to correct employment disadvantages affecting women, Aboriginal peoples, people with disabilities, and visible minorities. Within this context, visible minorities are defined as “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour.”
omen and African Americans—groups targeted by negative stereotypes about their intellectual abilities—may be
nderrepresented in careers that prize brilliance and genius. A recent nationwide survey of academics provided nitial support for this possibility. Fields whose practitioners believed that natural talent is crucial for success had ewer female and African American PhDs. The present study seeks to replicate this initial finding with a different, and rguably more naturalistic, measure of the extent to which brilliance and genius are prized within a field. Specifically, e measured field-by-field variability in the
emphasis on these intellectual qualities by tallying—with the use of a ecently released online tool—the frequency of the words “brilliant” and “genius” in over 14 million reviews on ateMyProfessors.com, a popular website where students can write anonymous evaluations of their instructors. his simple word count predicted both women’s and African Americans’ representation across the academic pectrum. That is, we found that fields in which the words “brilliant” and “genius” were
used more frequently on ateMyProfessors.com also had fewer female and African American PhDs. Looking at an earlier stage in students’ ducational careers, we found that brilliance-focused fields also had fewer women and African Americans obtaining achelor’s degrees. These relationships held even when accounting for field-specific averages on standardized athematics assessments, as well as several competing hypotheses concerning group differences in epresentation. The fact that this naturalistic measure of a field’s focus on brilliance predicted the magnitude of its gender and race gaps speaks to the tight link between ability beliefs and diversity.
Women who start college in one of the natural or physical sciences leave in greater proportions than their male peers. The reasons for this difference are complex, and one possible contributing factor is the social environment women experience in the classroom. Using social network analysis, we explore how gender influences the confidence that college-level biology students have in each other’s mastery of biology. Results reveal that males are more likely than females to be named by peers as being
knowledgeable about the course content. This effect increases as the term progresses, and persists even after controlling for class performance and outspokenness. The bias in nominations is specifically due to males over-nominating their male peers relative to their performance. The over-nomination of male peers is commensurate with an overestimation of male grades by 0.57 points on a 4 point grade scale, indicating a strong male bias among males when assessing their classmates. Females, in contrast, nominated equitably based on student performance rather than gender, suggesting they lacked gender biases in filling out these surveys. These trends persist across eleven surveys taken in three different iterations of the same Biology course. In
every class, the most renowned students are always male. This favoring of males by peers could influence student self-confidence, and thus persistence in this STEM discipline.