The new Summer 2009 issue of the AAC&U publication, Peer Review, is now available. Some full-length articles from this issue are available online. Please take a look.
This issue makes the case for a bridge between the undergraduate and public health communities, illustrates the potential for public health education as a vehicle for liberal learning, and provides concrete examples and approaches to the development of high quality undergraduate courses and curricula.
When rewards or prizes are made available in return for doing something, we’ll do whatever is easiest in order to get the reward. If the reward for a high school student is acceptance to their first-choice college, they’ll take the path of least resistance, doing what’s needed to gain that acceptance, but no more. As this article points out, what’s needed usually does not include acquiring more lasting learning or genuinely increasing and enhancing the competencies that colleges and universities hope their new students will bring. If selective institutions want to do a better job of admitting students who possess the qualities and competencies they want to see in their freshmen, they first need to do a better job of specifying those qualities and competencies and (especially) a better job of assessing whether or not applicants possess them.
From the institutional perspective, various rewards have been made available for graduating a large percentage of their students. So institutions engage in all sorts of practices that they hope will result in more students staying in school and eventually graduating. But practices that result in more retention and a larger percentage of students graduating too often don’t have much to do with improving students’ learning. As a result, college graduates do not possess the competencies, skills, knowledge, values, or qualities that they need to lead productive and satisfying lives and that our nation and our world need to prosper or even to survive.
How is this different from the much-despised Wall Street moguls whose exclusive focus on short-term profits led us to the brink of economic and social catastrophe?
The 2010 conference will be at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro on February 5-7. The theme is Evidence-based learning and teaching..
From today's Chronicle of Higher Education. A couple of quotes:
In the ongoing conversation about institutional quality, I continuously see references to retention and graduation rates as “the” -- or at least "a” -- key indicator of institutional quality. But what if we have it all wrong? What if measuring graduation and retention rates as evidence of institutional quality is like taking a person’s temperature to evaluate the efficacy or effectiveness (these are experimentally different measures) of his blood pressure medication?And now, for the rest of the story...
Schools that serve a large number of wealthy students can win the numbers game when graduation and retention rates are reported as averages among the entire student body. Conversely, schools that serve large numbers of disadvantaged students have nowhere to hide.
Perhaps the real reason that retention and graduation rates are so low among disadvantaged students is that the Federal financial-aid system is based on the principle of giving a little bit of money to a lot of students rather than giving enough money to any students.
More good stuff from the POD listserv...
Teaching, Learning + Technology (TLT) at Stony Brook University has launched a new Internet TV show called "Innovations in Education." It features Stony Brook faculty and staff using innovative approaches and best practices in teaching, and applications of educational technology that have had a positive effect on student learning. Interviews are 15-30 minutes long and focus primarily on faculty members. Video and pictures of the application of the innovation or best practice are included in each show where possible. The interviews are intended to provide a balanced look at both the benefits and challenges of adopting a particular approach to teaching and learning and should be useful to faculty and faculty developers at any campus. Please visit the show's web site at https://tlt.stonybrook.edu/FacultyServices/FacDev/TVShow/ for more information and to view the show.
More from the ongoing discussion on the POD listserv (about which, info on the left side of this page)...
1. The paragraphs Ed Neal cites below actually cause me to heighten my celebration. Far from a general "online education is better" conclusion, they give me hope that, in many places, we may be seeing a waning of the "no significant difference" phenomenon that characterized past distance vs. in-person research, and an improvement in the design and facilitation of hybrid and distance education.
As others have noted, online learning environments offer some unique affordances for learning (as do face-to-face). That well-designed and facilitated distance courses offer advantages over "traditional face-to-face instruction" does not seem surprising to me. At SDSU, faculty who choose to offer distance courses (and there aren't a lot) are highly motivated to be excellent teachers and invest a great deal of time in course design, supported by peers and staff. In contrast, the average in-person course (especially among the large lecture general ed courses which SDSU is now also offering online) is, unfortunately, a passive, lecture-and-test, cover-the-content experience.
Again, as others have noted, the question with these kind of "horse race" studies is always what is being compared. The conclusion that a blended approach is superior provides hope to me that many faculty are learning what works very well in online learning, what is best done in person, and are beginning to better take advantage of the affordances of both environments.
2. I am not a meta-analysis expert, but in a fairly quick review of the methodology used in this report, it seemed to me a sound and rigorous approach to a very challenging task. If there are specific criticisms regarding the methodology employed I would very much like to hear and consider them.
- Jim
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Dr. Jim Julius, Associate Director
Instructional Technology Services, AH-1144
San Diego State University
Available as a free download from Faculty Focus, a set of articles about effective group work strategies for the college classroom. You'll need to register on their web site, but doing that is quick and easy.
Innovative Educators does a pretty good job of providing useful materials, often at a good price or no price at all. This fall they're offering three free webinars focusing on student retention at three different kinds of institutions. About the one addressed to four-year publics they say:
The webinar will feature data on the coordination of retention services, retention and degree completion rates, student and institutional factors contributing to attrition, and perceived effectiveness of more that 90 retention interventions. Data will be cross-walked into retention and degree completion rates to ascertain practices that differentiate institutions with high retention and persistence to degree rates from those with low rates. Finally, results of the survey will be compared with those of the 2004 survey to determine if any changes have taken place in the last five years.Links to info about the three free webinars:
What works in student retention at community colleges
What works in student retention at four-year public colleges
What works in student retention at four-year private colleges
Another listserv that should be of interest to AT! readers is POD, which stands for "Professional & Organization Development Network in Higher Education." There's a link to their archives on the left side of this page. I suggest going there, navigating to the "August" posts, and reading entries in the thread called "Praxis: What are your favorite game-changing practices?" Here's an example (actually, the entry that started the thread):
Dear POD Friends,
I'm about to resume teaching after finishing my Ph.D. in philosophy and am looking for some fresh inspiration. I've been hunting through the POD archives seeking discussions of concrete practices, but have (so far) been encountering mainly discussions of abstract concepts (e.g., intrinsic motivation, sharing power, student centered classrooms, utilizing the affective domain, metacognitive exercises, etc.) -- but less discussion of concrete practices. I'd really like to hear about concrete teaching practices that make a big difference for you and your students. Hence my question:
What are your favorite game-changing practices?
I'll start. A number of years ago, after a difficult first year of teaching as a grad student with no pedagogy training whatsoever, I tracked down and attended Boot Camp for Profs. A simple practice that made a big difference in my classroom was a variation on Think-Pair-Share. If I wanted to inspire students to engage in collaborative inquiry and discussion, instead of asking, "So what do you think about X?" (and being met with silence), I would ask students to get out a piece of paper and write a paragraph on what they thought about X; then to pair and discuss X; then follow up with a class discussion of X. Rudimentary, perhaps -- but it made a terrific difference in terms of engagement, quality of discussion, and -- dare I say -- learning! This has become a favorite of mine.
I'd love to hear some of your favorite ways of creating a course structure & classroom environment in which students are more likely to engage, learn, and enjoy the process. I am imagining that such a discussion might also provide fresh inspiration to others in the group. I look forward to hearing from anyone who would be open to sharing such practices!
Many Thanks,
-Hans
The listserv conversation that I mentioned in the previous entry continues at high speed after several days. So I wanted to point you in its direction again because some very useful things are being said there. So even if you followed the trail when I first posted the previous entry, I urge you to go back and see what's new.
I encourage everyone to subscribe to, or at least pay frequent attention to, the ASSESS listserv (subscription info on left side of this page). You'll find a recent discussion very interesting. ASSESS subscribers discuss quite a number of angles relative to the relationship between grades and genuine assessment. Here's a link to August's threads on the listserv. Look for the thread called "Assessments replacing grades."
Jonathan Kaplan is president of Walden University. Recently he wrote about a Department of Education study, based on 12 years worth of evidence, which concluded that "online learning has clear advantages over face-to-face instruction" and that “students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.”
Some of the reasons cited included:
In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, former Florida senator, Bob Graham, says...
Colleges are failing to produce competent public citizens, and accreditors should pay more attention to their performance in that area.The article goes on to say that, according to Mr. Graham,
...too many Americans have no idea how to organize their neighbors to affect public policy. Even the students he encountered a few years ago during a visiting position at Harvard University, he says, lacked basic knowledge about how to leverage public power.And now, for the rest of the story...
All institutions of higher education (and institutions of lower education too, for that matter) should be employing those pedagogical techniques that George Kuh and others have labeled "high-impact educational practices." One of them is service learning (which also goes by other labels). But one of the things that drives me nuts is when we promote those approaches without also giving equal emphasis to the notion that we have to implement them well. High-impact educational practices are worthless unless they're done well. Here's an article from Inside Higher Ed about an investigation of service learning programs. A couple of excerpts...
Every semester, "service learning" programs send students out to local community organizations to get their hands dirty, putting to use the concepts they learn in the classroom. The intended outcome is a symbiotic relationship between the college and the community. In The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning(Temple University Press), Randy Stoecker, professor of community and environmental sociology at the University of Wisconsin, and Elizabeth Tryon, community partner specialist for the Human Issues Studies Program at Edgewood College’s School of Integrative Studies, explore the relationship between college and community, asking whether the latter benefits as much as service-learning proponents say.And now, for the rest of the story...
With the help of Amy Hilgendorf, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin in human development and family studies, Stoecker and Tryon tapped into community organization staff members' empirical knowledge by publishing interviews that were conducted and analyzed by service-learning students. Issues ranging from supervision to training to poor student performance are addressed, with concluding recommendations for ways for colleges and community organizations to make better use of each other.
When you ask community workers if they are satisfied with students, they almost always say yes. But when you ask them what those students accomplished, too frequently the answer is "not much."
According to an Aug. 4 story in Inside Higher Ed,...
It's hardly a coincidence that the push for colleges to measure and report how successfully their students achieve certain learning outcomes has been least embraced by elite, traditional institutions already perceived to be atop the higher education pyramid, and championed most by colleges with less name recognition or nontraditional approaches. The former would arguably have the most to lose, and the latter the most to gain, if evidence about student learning were to upend longstanding perceptions about which colleges did the best job.The article offers some comparisons between TBD and a couple of other highly-touted accountability initiatives, such as the Voluntary System of Accountability. In this matchup, what I like about TBD is their apparent agreement that, rather than focusing on requiring all member institutions to use the same standardized instruments, they're exploring ways in which each institution can put forth the continuous improvement results that make the most sense for them.
So it's also not surprising that of all the accountability systems that have emerged from within higher education in the last few years, perhaps the most aggressive and expansive, a project known as Transparency by Design, has come from a group of primarily online institutions that serve adult students.
The August edition of the AAC&U News is now available online. It contains some full-length articles, news briefs, meeting notices, and updates on LEAP and other initiatives and projects.
Assess this! is a gathering place for information and resources about new and better ways to promote learning in higher education, with a special focus on high-impact educational practices, student engagement, general or liberal education, and assessment of learning. The blog's name comes from one of the major activities in the ongoing cycle that starts with establishing student learning outcomes and proceeds through designing learning opportunities, assessing their effectiveness, and using assessment results to make improvements in educational practices.
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