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Joshua Yeidel

Refining the Recipe for a Degree, Ingredient by Ingredient - Government - The Chronicle... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...125545

assessment accreditation outcomes

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 04 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Supporters of the Lumina project say it holds the promise of turning educational assessment from a process that some academics might view as a threat into one that holds a solution, while also creating more-rigorous expectations for student learning. Mr. Jones, the Utah State history-department chairman, recounted in an essay published in the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History how he once blithely told an accreditation team that "historians do not measure their effectiveness in outcomes." But he has changed his mind. The Lumina project, and others, help define what learning is achieved in the process of earning a degree, he said, moving beyond Americans' heavy reliance on the standardized student credit hour as the measure of an education. "The demand for outcomes assessment should be seized as an opportunity for us to actually talk about the habits of mind our discipline needs to instill in our students," Mr. Jones wrote. "It will do us a world of good, and it will save us from the spreadsheets of bureaucrats."
  • Joshua Yeidel on 04 Jan 11
     
    Lumina Foundation pushes a Eurpopean-style process to define education goals state- and nation-wide, with mixed success. "Chemistry, history, math, and physics have been among the most successful", whileothers have had a hard time beginning. "Supporters of the Lumina project say it holds the promise of turning educational assessment from a process that some academics might view as a threat into one that holds a solution, while also creating more-rigorous expectations for student learning. Mr. Jones, the Utah State history-department chairman, recounted in an essay published in the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History how he once blithely told an accreditation team that "historians do not measure their effectiveness in outcomes." But he has changed his mind. The Lumina project, and others, help define what learning is achieved in the process of earning a degree, he said, moving beyond Americans' heavy reliance on the standardized student credit hour as the measure of an education. "The demand for outcomes assessment should be seized as an opportunity for us to actually talk about the habits of mind our discipline needs to instill in our students," Mr. Jones wrote. "It will do us a world of good, and it will save us from the spreadsheets of bureaucrats."
S Spaeth

MIT Press Journals - International Journal of Learning and Media - Full Text - 0 views

www.mitpressjournals.org/...ijlm.2009.0005

pbj ALT assessment co-development

shared by S Spaeth on 22 May 09 - Cached
  • Howard GardnerHobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education
  • As shown in table 1, we will be cognizant throughout of who the learners are, where they learn, how they learn, what are the principal curricula, and how competences are purveyed via the media of the time. The grid itself contains generalizations about the past and present, and speculation about the future, thus providing a broad portrait of changes over time. While we do not discuss each entry in the grid, we hope that it aids in thinking about learning in formal and informal settings.
  • Uniform schooling reflects both fairness and efficiency. It appears fair to treat all children in the same way; and it is also efficient, given classes of 20, 30, or even 60 charges in one room, sometimes arrayed by age, sometimes decidedly heterogeneous in composition.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • It would be an exaggeration to claim that formal education takes place without attention to what has been learned about the processes of successful learning, such as insights into student motivation, study habits, strategies, metacognition, and other approaches obtained from experience, or, more recently and systematically, from the psychological and cognitive sciences. But it would probably be accurate to say that such accumulated knowledge is used only spottily and sporadically in most parts of the world. Education—teaching and learning—changes very slowly.
  • Yet, nowhere are these ideas dominant. Indeed, until today, one might say that the European classroom models of the 19th century continue to hold sway: Teachers give out information, students are expected to master it with little help, and the awards of the culture during the years of school go to those who can crack the various literate and disciplinary codes.
  • One strategy might involve formal education playing a role in informal learning spaces (perhaps on the analogy of teaching hospitals), and learners' out-of-school passions finding a validating place in formal educational arenas.
  • NDM's vast resources, including the provision of many activities in which the user assumes a formative role, can complement constructivist approaches to education. As noted above, a motivated learner can investigate a wide variety of personal interests on his or her own.
  • At this point in time, deeply constructivist classrooms remain few and far between despite evidence that hands-on, problem-solving approaches in the classroom result in higher levels of student engagement, conceptual thinking, knowledge transfer, and retention (Scardamalia, Bereiter, and Lamon 1994; Bransford et al. 1999; Hmelo-Silver 2004; Meier 1995; Project Zero and Reggio Children 2001; Sizer 1984). But in an environment of “No Child Left Behind” and standardized tests linked to federal funding, the implementation of constructivist principles in the classroom can be considered a risky enterprise for public schools.
  • A web-based project at MIT, for instance, paired French language students with peers in France learning to speak English, and provided students an authentic opportunity to practice their language skills, learn online communication skills, and negotiate the implicit guidelines of a different culture (Cultura 2007).
  • S Spaeth on 22 May 09
     
    In this article we argue that, after millennia of considering education (learning and teaching) chiefly in one way, we may well have reached a set of tipping points: Going forward, learning may be far more individualized, far more in the hands (and the minds) of the learner, and far more interactive than ever before. This constitutes a paradox: As the digital era progresses, learning may be at once more individual (contoured to a person's own style, proclivities, and interests) yet more social (involving networking, group work, the wisdom of crowds, etc.). How these seemingly contradictory directions are addressed impacts the future complexion of learning.
Joshua Yeidel

Can Gates Foundation's Millions Remake Higher Education? - Students - The Chronicle of ... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...123824

higher_education

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 25 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Another Gates grantee, Highline Community College, in Washington, created different tracks for students planning to major in math-heavy fields and for all the others. Highline is one of 29 colleges in Washington that got Gates money as part of a $5.3-million grant given to the Washington State Board for Technical and Community Colleges.
  • Joshua Yeidel on 25 Aug 10
     
    "All are focusing, to varying degrees, on learning communities as a way to improve remedial education. The idea is that the linked courses create peer-support networks, build greater cohesion in the curriculum, and enable students to earn some college credits along with precollege work."
  • Joshua Yeidel on 25 Aug 10
     
    One aspect of the Gates Foundation's massive move into higher education. The remedial aspect quoted may raise memories for some of us...
Gary Brown

Lawmakers Focus Ire on Accreditors for Abuses at For-Profit Colleges - Government - The... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...123771

accountability accreditation

shared by Gary Brown on 05 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Six weeks after vowing to cull the bad apples from the for-profit higher-education sector, some Senate Democrats are asking whether the whole barrel is spoiled, and largely blaming accreditors for the rot.
  • Pressed by lawmakers, Mr. Kutz faulted the Education Department, saying it has failed in its oversight of the sector.
  • "Consistent oversight is going to be necessary," he said.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Senate Democrats focused most of their ire on accreditors, grilling the head of one national agency about the standards it uses to judge institutions.
  • "Do you think maybe your rigorous standards aren't rigorous enough?" asked Senator Franken, of Minnesota.
  • it was "apparent to me that we need a hearing on accreditation."
  • "But your on-site evaluations didn't detect it," Senator Harkin said. "It seems like you accept the schools' word on what they're doing."
  • Mr. Harkin said he planned to "look into" the financing structure of the accrediting system, saying it "seems to be a situation that is rife with conflict."
  • That should please committee Republicans, who called for a broader investigation into higher education. Sen. Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, the top Republican on the education panel, said he would ask the GAO to expand its investigation to nonprofit colleges as well.
  • Gary Brown on 05 Aug 10
     
    Though the focus is on recruiting and finance of the for-profits, it is hard not to see more emphasis on verification coming down the pike....
Joshua Yeidel

Strategic Directives for Learning Management System Planning | EDUCAUSE - 1 views

www.educause.edu/...213945

coursemanagement lms

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 21 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 21 Sep 10
     
    A largely sensible strategic look at LMS in general. "The LMS, because of its integration with other major institutional technology systems, has itself become an enterprise-wide system. As such, higher education leaders must closely 7 monitor the possible tendency for LMSs to contribute only to maintaining the educational status quo.40 The most radical suggestion for future LMS use would dissolve the commercially enforced "course-based" model of LMS use entirely, allowing for the creation of either larger (departmental) or smaller (study groups) units of LMS access, as the case may require. This ability to cater to context awareness is perhaps the feature most lacking in most LMS products. As noted in a study in which mobile or handheld devices were used to assemble ad hoc study groups,41 this sort of implementation is entirely possible in ways that don't necessarily require interaction through an LMS interface." Requires EDUCAUSE login (free to WSU)
  • Joshua Yeidel on 23 Sep 10
     
    The EDUCAUSE paper suggests "dissolv[ing] the commercially enforced 'course-based' model of LMS". How about dissolving the "course-based" model of higher education on which the commercial LMS is based?
Gary Brown

The Future of Wannabe U. - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 2 views

chronicle.com/...124917

outcomes numbers

shared by Gary Brown on 18 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Alice didn't tell me about the topics of her research; instead she listed the number of articles she had written, where they had been submitted and accepted, the reputation of the journals, the data sets she was constructing, and how many articles she could milk from each data set.
  • colleges and universities have transformed themselves from participants in an audit culture to accomplices in an accountability regime.
  • higher education has inaugurated an accountability regime—a politics of surveillance, control, and market management that disguises itself as value-neutral and scientific administration.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • annabe administrator noted that the recipient had published well more than 100 articles. He never said why those articles mattered.
  • And all we have are numbers about teaching. And we don't know what the difference is between a [summary measure of] 7.3 and a 7.7 or an 8.2 and an 8.5."
  • The problem is that such numbers have no meaning. They cannot indicate the quality of a student's education.
  • or can the many metrics that commonly appear in academic (strategic) plans, like student credit hours per full-time-equivalent faculty member, or the percentage of classes with more than 50 students. Those productivity measures (for they are indeed productivity measures) might as well apply to the assembly-line workers who fabricate the proverbial widget, for one cannot tell what the metrics have to do with the supposed purpose of institutions of higher education—to create and transmit knowledge. That includes leading students to the possibility of a fuller life and an appreciation of the world around them and expanding their horizons.
  • But, like the fitness club's expensive cardio machines, a significant increase in faculty research, in the quality of student experiences (including learning), in the institution's service to its state, or in its standing among its peers may cost more than a university can afford to invest or would even dream of paying.
  • Such metrics are a speedup of the academic assembly line, not an intensification or improvement of student learning. Indeed, sometimes a boost in some measures, like an increase in the number of first-year students participating in "living and learning communities," may even detract from what students learn. (Wan U.'s pre-pharmacy living-and-learning community is so competitive that students keep track of one another's grades more than they help one another study. Last year one student turned off her roommate's alarm clock so that she would miss an exam and thus no longer compete for admission to the School of Pharmacy.)
  • Even metrics intended to indicate what students may have learned seem to have more to do with controlling faculty members than with gauging education. Take student-outcomes assessments, meant to be evaluations of whether courses have achieved their goals. They search for fault where earlier researchers would not have dreamed to look. When parents in the 1950s asked why Johnny couldn't read, teachers may have responded that it was Johnny's fault; they had prepared detailed lesson plans. Today student-outcomes assessment does not even try to discover whether Johnny attended class; instead it produces metrics about outcomes without considering Johnny's input.
  • Gary Brown on 18 Oct 10
     
    A good one to wrestle with.  It may be worth formulating distinctions we hold, and steering accordingly.
Kimberly Green

Everyone Else is Keynsian Now (from Inside Higher Ed) - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...global

higher_education

shared by Kimberly Green on 24 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Kimberly Green on 24 Feb 10
     
    The United States is hardly the only country facing tough economic times right now. But a survey of the worldwide response to the recession suggests that American higher education may be uniquely disadvantaged by the way state and federal governments are responding in the U.S., compared to how the rest of the world is dealing with the crisis. Most governments elsewhere have avoided the "uncoordinated cutting of funding for higher education that we generally see in U.S. state systems," says a report being released today by the Center for Studies in Higher Education, at the University of California at Berkeley.
Gary Brown

News: Scrutiny for an Accreditor - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...hlc

accreditation

shared by Gary Brown on 26 Dec 09 - Cached
  • The inspector general essentially accused the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools of shirking its federal gate keeping duties because it granted accreditation to a for-profit university despite a single flaw that the inspector general deemed to be serious.
  • The agency's action stunned many higher education leaders, who characterized it as a misstep of dramatic proportions. "We believe that the OIG's recommendation is an unwarranted overreaction," Sylvia Manning, president of the Higher Learning Commission, said in a news release. "To make a sweeping indictment of the HLC's capacity to judge quality based on a single case or even a small group of cases is wrongheaded and overreaching."
  • Added Belle S. Wheelan, president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and head of the Council of Regional Accreditation Commissions: "This is certainly of concern, because they appear to have put themselves in the place of the evaluators, and made a recommendation that's fairly radical based on one instance at one institution."
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  • the Obama administration, in the presence of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, has shown no signs of backing off. While last winter's negotiations over new rules governing accreditation ended in far more accord than did the 2007 discussion that blew up in conflict, the end result left some accreditation experts believing that the federal government was continuing to expand its reach and authority into accreditation matters.
  • Such action, if taken, could impair the ability of the many hundreds of colleges that the commission accredits to award federal financial aid.
  • Gary Brown on 26 Dec 09
     
    The Department of Education and Middle States at odds, and the new scrutiny is revealed.
Gary Brown

Teacher-Education Programs Are Unaccountable and Undemanding, Report Says - Government ... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...123712

education accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 29 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Most states are doing little or nothing to hold teacher-education programs accountable for the quality of their graduates, according to a new report that also criticizes colleges for setting low standards for education majors.
  • Colleges, by contrast, are largely not selective enough in accepting students for education programs, lack a rigorous curriculum, and don't give teaching candidates enough classroom training.
  • the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, said that the report was timely and that her association was working to unify its members on the theme of accountability.
  • Gary Brown on 29 Jul 10
     
    Apparently NCATE is not sufficient according to some.
Gary Brown

Educators Mull How to Motivate Professors to Improve Teaching - Curriculum - The Chroni... - 4 views

chronicle.com/...63718

assessment

shared by Gary Brown on 25 Jan 10 - Cached
  • "Without an unrelenting focus on quality—on defining and measuring and ensuring the learning outcomes of students—any effort to increase college-completion rates would be a hollow effort indeed."
  • If colleges are going to provide high-quality educations to millions of additional students, they said, the institutions will need to develop measures of student learning than can assure parents, employers, and taxpayers that no one's time and money are being wasted.
  • "Effective assessment is critical to ensure that our colleges and universities are delivering the kinds of educational experiences that we believe we actually provide for students," said Ronald A. Crutcher, president of Wheaton College, in Massachusetts, during the opening plenary. "That data is also vital to addressing the skepticism that society has about the value of a liberal education."
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  • But many speakers insisted that colleges should go ahead and take drastic steps to improve the quality of their instruction, without using rigid faculty-incentive structures or the fiscal crisis as excuses for inaction.
  • Handing out "teacher of the year" awards may not do much for a college
  • W.E. Deming argued, quality has to be designed into the entire system and supported by top management (that is, every decision made by CEOs and Presidents, and support systems as well as operations) rather than being made the responsibility solely of those delivering 'at the coal face'.
  • I see as a certain cluelessness among those who think one can create substantial change based on volunteerism
  • Current approaches to broaden the instructional repertoires of faculty members include faculty workshops, summer leave, and individual consultations, but these approaches work only for those relatively few faculty members who seek out opportunities to broaden their instructional methods.
  • The approach that makes sense to me is to engage faculty members at the departmental level in a discussion of the future and the implications of the future for their field, their college, their students, and themselves. You are invited to join an ongoing discussion of this issue at http://innovate-ideagora.ning.com/forum/topics/addressing-the-problem-of
  • Putting pressure on professors to improve teaching will not result in better education. The primary reason is that they do not know how to make real improvements. The problem is that in many fields of education there is either not enough research, or they do not have good ways of evaluationg the results of their teaching.
  • Then there needs to be a research based assessment that can be used by individual professors, NOT by the administration.
  • Humanities educatiors either have to learn enough statistics and cognitive science so they can make valid scientific comparisons of different strategies, or they have to work with cognitive scientists and statisticians
  • good teaching takes time
  • On the measurement side, about half of the assessments constructed by faculty fail to meet reasonable minimum standards for validity. (Interestingly, these failures leave the door open to a class action lawsuit. Physicians are successfully sued for failing to apply scientific findings correctly; commerce is replete with lawsuits based on measurement errors.)
  • The elephant in the corner of the room --still-- is that we refuse to measure learning outcomes and impact, especially proficiencies generalized to one's life outside the classroom.
  • until universities stop playing games to make themselves look better because they want to maintain their comfortable positions and actually look at what they can do to improve nothing is going to change.
  • Gary Brown on 25 Jan 10
     
    our work, our friends (Ken and Jim), and more context that shapes our strategy.
  • Matthew Tedder on 26 Jan 10
     
    How about using examples of highly motivational lecture and teaching techniques like the Richard Dawkins video I presented on this forum, recently. Even if teacher's do not consciously try to adopt good working techniques, there is at least a strong subconscious human tendency to mimic behaviors. I think that if teachers see more effective techniques, they will automatically begin to adopt adopt them.
Gary Brown

A Measure of Learning Is Put to the Test - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

chronicle.com/...124519

assessment accountability CLA

shared by Gary Brown on 20 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Others say those who take the test have little motivation to do well, which makes it tough to draw conclusions from their performance.
  • "Everything that No Child Left Behind signified during the Bush administration—we operate 180 degrees away from that," says Roger Benjamin, president of the Council for Aid to Education, which developed and promotes the CLA. "We don't want this to be a high-stakes test. We're putting a stake in the ground on classic liberal-arts issues. I'm willing to rest my oar there. These core abilities, these higher-order skills, are very important, and they're even more important in a knowledge economy where everyone needs to deal with a surplus of information." Only an essay test, like the CLA, he says, can really get at those skills.
  • "The CLA is really an authentic assessment process," says Pedro Reyes, associate vice chancellor for academic planning and assessment at the University of Texas system.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • "The Board of Regents here saw that it would be an important test because it measures analytical ability, problem-solving ability, critical thinking, and communication. Those are the skills that you want every undergraduate to walk away with." (Other large systems that have embraced the CLA include California State University and the West Virginia system.)
  • value added
  • We began by administering a retired CLA question, a task that had to do with analyzing crime-reduction strategies,
  • performance task that mirrors the CLA
  • Mr. Ernsting and Ms. McConnell are perfectly sincere about using CLA-style tasks to improve instruction on their campuses. But at the same time, colleges have a less high-minded motive for familiarizing students with the CLA style: It just might improve their scores when it comes time to take the actual test.
  • by 2012, the CLA scores of more than 100 colleges will be posted, for all the world to see, on the "College Portrait" Web site of the Voluntary System of Accountability, an effort by more than 300 public colleges and universities to provide information about life and learning on their campuses.
  • If familiarizing students with CLA-style tasks does raise their scores, then the CLA might not be a pure, unmediated reflection of the full range of liberal-arts skills. How exactly should the public interpret the scores of colleges that do not use such training exercises?
  • Trudy W. Banta, a professor of higher education and senior adviser to the chancellor for academic planning and evaluation at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, believes it is a serious mistake to publicly release and compare scores on the test. There is too much risk, she says, that policy makers and the public will misinterpret the numbers.
  • most colleges do not use a true longitudinal model: That is, the students who take the CLA in their first year do not take it again in their senior year. The test's value-added model is therefore based on a potentially apples-and-oranges comparison.
  • freshman test-takers' scores are assessed relative to their SAT and ACT scores, and so are senior test-takers' scores. For that reason, colleges cannot game the test by recruiting an academically weak pool of freshmen and a strong pool of seniors.
  • students do not always have much motivation to take the test seriously
  • seniors, who are typically recruited to take the CLA toward the end of their final semester, when they can already taste the graduation champagne.
  • Of the few dozen universities that had already chosen to publish CLA data on that site, roughly a quarter of the reports appeared to include erroneous descriptions of the year-to-year value-added scores.
  • It is clear that CLA scores do reflect some broad properties of a college education.
  • Students' CLA scores improved if they took courses that required a substantial amount of reading and writing. Many students didn't take such courses, and their CLA scores tended to stay flat.
  • Colleges that make demands on students can actually develop their skills on the kinds of things measured by the CLA.
  • Mr. Shavelson believes the CLA's essays and "performance tasks" offer an unusually sophisticated way of measuring what colleges do, without relying too heavily on factual knowledge from any one academic field.
  • Politicians and consumers want easily interpretable scores, while colleges need subtler and more detailed data to make internal improvements.
  • The CLA is used at more than 400 colleges
  • Since its debut a decade ago, it has been widely praised as a sophisticated alternative to multiple-choice tests
Gary Brown

The Ticker - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

chronicle.com/...9217

accreditation department of education

shared by Gary Brown on 15 Dec 09 - Cached
  • The U.S. Education Department today released a report critical of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, saying the regional accrediting organization did not set minimum standards for its member institutions on program length or credit hours.
  • The accreditor responded that "the fundamental concern of higher education's constituencies is whether students graduate with appropriate knowledge, skills, and competencies, not how many hours they spend in a classroom."
  • Gary Brown on 15 Dec 09
     
    A critical indicator of why I see our work as work with accreditors rather than for accreditors.
Joshua Yeidel

Views: Reconsider the Credit Hour - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...crow

assessment

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 27 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 27 Jan 10
     
    "The Office of the Inspector General (of the Department of Education) prefers auditable measures for performance. It reads the Higher Education Act with its multiple references to credit hours to demand such measures."
  • Joshua Yeidel on 27 Jan 10
     
    How far is accountability from accounting...
Gary Brown

Can We Afford Our State Colleges? - Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...22268

accountability reform

shared by Gary Brown on 05 Apr 10 - Cached
  • xperts do not agree on the precise numbers, but over the past generation we have moved from an environment in which states paid for 70 percent of cost and students paid 30 percent, to a situation in which those numbers have exactly reversed. Increasingly, tuition accounts for the lion’s share of institutional budgets, with state appropriations playing a minority role.
  • The sense I got Friday was that higher-education professionals do not expect the ”good old days” to return
  • the apparent consensus that public education needs to be more productive, because there was no discussion of the definition of productivity. 
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • But even when instruction was (implicitly) assumed to be the measure of productivity, there was no discussion of measurable learning outcomes.
  • 5. It is true that public colleges do not measure learning outcomes. Neither does anyone else. U.S. universities resist this kind of accountability in every way they can think of. Since 1985, when the modern assessment movement gained traction, higher education can only be said to have been temporizing, getting ready to get ready through endless committees that go nowhere.
  • Most institutions continue to invoke apodictic notions of quality and refuse to define quality in modern terms (suitability to purpose; quality for whom and for what purpose) or to address the issue of value added, where career schools and community colleges will generally lead. At this time, there is virtually no institution-wide assessment system in place that would pass muster in a 501 measurement science course.
  • 6. Yes, public institutions need restructuring to make them more accountable and productive. Our independent colleges and universities need the same kind of restructuring and the agenda is rightfully one of public interest. The common perception that taxpayers do not support our private institutions is false.----------------------Robert W TuckerPresidentInterEd, Inc.www.InterEd.com
  • Gary Brown on 05 Apr 10
     
    Tucker's note in the comments again suggests the challenge and opportunity of the WSU model.
Gary Brown

Evaluations That Make the Grade: 4 Ways to Improve Rating the Faculty - Teaching - The ... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...65226

evaluating teaching

shared by Gary Brown on 27 Apr 10 - Cached
  • For students, the act of filling out those forms is sometimes a fleeting, half-conscious moment. But for instructors whose careers can live and die by student evaluations, getting back the forms is an hour of high anxiety
  • "They have destroyed higher education." Mr. Crumbley believes the forms lead inexorably to grade inflation and the dumbing down of the curriculum.
  • Texas enacted a law that will require every public college to post each faculty member's student-evaluation scores on a public Web site.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The IDEA Center, an education research group based at Kansas State University, has been spreading its particular course-evaluation gospel since 1975. The central innovation of the IDEA system is that departments can tailor their evaluation forms to emphasize whichever learning objectives are most important in their discipline.
  • (Roughly 350 colleges use the IDEA Center's system, though in some cases only a single department or academic unit participates.)
  • The new North Texas instrument that came from these efforts tries to correct for biases that are beyond an instructor's control. The questionnaire asks students, for example, whether the classroom had an appropriate size and layout for the course. If students were unhappy with the classroom, and if it appears that their unhappiness inappropriately colored their evaluations of the instructor, the system can adjust the instructor's scores accordingly.
  • The survey instrument, known as SALG, for Student Assessment of their Learning Gains, is now used by instructors across the country. The project's Web site contains more than 900 templates, mostly for courses in the sciences.
  • "So the ability to do some quantitative analysis of these comments really allows you to take a more nuanced and effective look at what these students are really saying."
  • Mr. Frick and his colleagues found that his new course-evaluation form was strongly correlated with both students' and instructors' own measures of how well the students had mastered each course's learning goals.
  • Elaine Seymour, who was then director of ethnography and evaluation research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, was assisting with a National Science Foundation project to improve the quality of science instruction at the college level. She found that many instructors were reluctant to try new teaching techniques because they feared their course-evaluation ratings might decline.
  • "Students are the inventory," Mr. Crumbley says. "The real stakeholders in higher education are employers, society, the people who hire our graduates. But what we do is ask the inventory if a professor is good or bad. At General Motors," he says, "you don't ask the cars which factory workers are good at their jobs. You check the cars for defects, you ask the drivers, and that's how you know how the workers are doing."
  • William H. Pallett, president of the IDEA Center, says that when course rating surveys are well-designed and instructors make clear that they care about them, students will answer honestly and thoughtfully.
  • In Mr. Bain's view, student evaluations should be just one of several tools colleges use to assess teaching. Peers should regularly visit one another's classrooms, he argues. And professors should develop "teaching portfolios" that demonstrate their ability to do the kinds of instruction that are most important in their particular disciplines. "It's kind of ironic that we grab onto something that seems fixed and fast and absolute, rather than something that seems a little bit messy," he says. "Making decisions about the ability of someone to cultivate someone else's learning is inherently a messy process. It can't be reduced to a formula."
  • Gary Brown on 27 Apr 10
     
    Old friends at the Idea Center, and an old but persistent issue.
Matthew Tedder

Small classes have long-term benefit for all students, research says - 2 views

www.physorg.com/news174300427.html

education

shared by Matthew Tedder on 10 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Matthew Tedder on 10 Oct 09
     
    Don't we start higher education with generally larger classes and work toward smaller ones? I am not sure, how much starting with smaller classes applies to higher ed.. but it's something to think differently about.
  • Gary Brown on 10 Oct 09
     
    Lots of research in higher ed tends to debunk the belief that smaller classes without additional kinds of mediation will have little impact. Many have argued turning the curriculum in higher ed upside down. Small classes in first years, then when students have internalized new learning strategies they are more likely to get more out of the large lecture class and have the schema to contextualize and therefore learn more from the bombardment of facts that are most often lectures.
Joshua Yeidel

Brainstorm - The Occupation Will Be Televised - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...8581

higher_education accountability

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 23 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 23 Oct 09
     
    The poster in the accompanying picture says: "Education is not for sale". "In response to the massive re-orientation of education toward job training, privatization and the standardization of curricular outcomes mandated by the Bologna Process, students across Europe have been turning out by the thousands. This past June, as many as 250,000 students, parents, schoolteachers, college faculty and staff coordinated a week-long education strike in 90 cities across Germany."
  • Joshua Yeidel on 23 Oct 09
     
    Apropos of Ashley's comments about European views of accreditation and accountability: apparently standardization of curricular outcomes is facing some opposition.
Gary Brown

Views: Asking Too Much (and Too Little) of Accreditors - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...neal

accreditation

shared by Gary Brown on 12 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Senators want to know why accreditors haven’t protected the public interest.
  • Congress shouldn’t blame accreditors: it should blame itself. The existing accreditation system has neither ensured quality nor ferreted out fraud. Why? Because Congress didn’t want it to. If Congress truly wants to protect the public interest, it needs to create a system that ensures real accountability.
  • But turning accreditors into gatekeepers changed the picture. In effect, accreditors now held a gun to the heads of colleges and universities since federal financial aid wouldn’t flow unless the institution received “accredited” status.
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  • Congress listened to higher education lobbyists and designated accreditors -- teams made up largely of administrators and faculty -- to be “reliable authorities” on educational quality. Intending to protect institutional autonomy, Congress appropriated the existing voluntary system by which institutions differentiated themselves.
  • A gatekeeping system using peer review is like a penal system that uses inmates to evaluate eligibility for parole. The conflicts of interest are everywhere -- and, surprise, virtually everyone is eligible!
  • accreditation is “premised upon collegiality and assistance; rather than requirements that institutions meet certain standards (with public announcements when they don’t."
  • Meanwhile, there is ample evidence that many accredited colleges are adding little educational value. The 2006 National Assessment of Adult Literacy revealed that nearly a third of college graduates were unable to compare two newspaper editorials or compute the cost of office items, prompting the Spellings Commission and others to raise concerns about accreditors’ attention to productivity and quality.
  • But Congress wouldn’t let them. Rather than welcoming accreditors’ efforts to enhance their public oversight role, Congress told accreditors to back off and let nonprofit colleges and universities set their own standards for educational quality.
  • ccreditation is nothing more than an outdated industrial-era monopoly whose regulations prevent colleges from cultivating the skills, flexibility, and innovation that they need to ensure quality and accountability.
  • there is a much cheaper and better way: a self-certifying regimen of financial accountability, coupled with transparency about graduation rates and student success. (See some alternatives here and here.)
  • Such a system would prioritize student and parent assessment over the judgment of institutional peers or the educational bureaucracy. And it would protect students, parents, and taxpayers from fraud or mismanagement by permitting immediate complaints and investigations, with a notarized certification from the institution to serve as Exhibit A
  • The only way to protect the public interest is to end the current system of peer review patronage, and demand that colleges and universities put their reputation -- and their performance -- on the line.
  • Anne D. Neal is president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. The views stated herein do not represent the views of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, of which she is a member.
  • Gary Brown on 12 Nov 10
     
    The ascending view of accreditation.
Theron DesRosier

The Future of Thinking - The MIT Press - 0 views

mitpress.mit.edu/...default.asp

mit education web2.0

shared by Theron DesRosier on 22 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 22 Apr 10
     
    "Over the past two decades, the way we learn has changed dramatically. We have new sources of information and new ways to exchange and to interact with information. But our schools and the way we teach have remained largely the same for years, even centuries. What happens to traditional educational institutions when learning also takes place on a vast range of Internet sites, from Pokemon Web pages to Wikipedia? This report investigates how traditional learning institutions can become as innovative, flexible, robust, and collaborative as the best social networking sites. The authors propose an alternative definition of "institution" as a "mobilizing network"-emphasizing its flexibility, the permeability of its boundaries, its interactive productivity, and its potential as a catalyst for change-and explore the implications for higher education."
  • Theron DesRosier on 22 Apr 10
     
    A new book by Cathy Davidson.
Gary Brown

Views: Accreditation's Accidental Transformation - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...eaton

accountability accreditation

shared by Gary Brown on 11 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Why the national attention? Why the second-guessing of the accreditation decisions? It is part of the accidental transformation of accreditation.
  • Academic quality assurance and collegiality -- the defining features of traditional accreditation -- are, at least for now, taking a backseat to consumer protection and compliance with law and regulation. Government and the public expect accreditation to essentially provide a guarantee that students are getting what they pay for in terms of the education they seek.
  • Blame the powerful demand that, above all, colleges and universities provide credentials that lead directly to employment or advancement of employment. Driven by public concerns about the difficult job market and the persistent rise in the price of tuition, accrediting organizations are now expected to assure that the colleges, universities and programs they accredit will produce these pragmatic results.
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  • The worth of higher education is determined less and less through the professional judgments made by the academic community. The deference at one time accorded accrediting organizations to decide the worth of colleges and universities is diminished and perhaps disappearing.
  • Do we know the consequences of this accidental transformation? Are we prepared to accept them? These changes may be unintended, but they are dramatic and far-reaching. Is this how we want to proceed? Judith S. Eaton is president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.
  • Gary Brown on 11 Aug 10
     
    It is this discussion that programs that approach accreditation perfunctorily need to attend.
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