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Gary Brown

Online Evaluations Show Same Results, Lower Response Rate - Wired Campus - The Chronicl... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...23772

student evaluations online learning

shared by Gary Brown on 06 May 10 - Cached
  • Students give the same responses on paper as on online course evaluations but are less likely to respond to online surveys, according to a recent study.
  • The only meaningful difference between student ratings completed online and on paper was that students who took online surveys gave their professors higher ratings for using educational technology to promote learning.
  • Seventy-eight percent of students enrolled in classes with paper surveys responded to them, but  only 53 percent of students enrolled in classes with online surveys responded.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • "If you have lower response rates, you're less inclined to make summative decisions about a faculty member's performance,"
  • While the majority of instructors still administer paper surveys, the number using online surveys increased from 1.08 percent in 2002 to 23.23 percent in 2008.
  • Gary Brown on 06 May 10
     
    replication of our own studies
Judy Rumph

High Response Rates Don't Ensure Survey Accuracy - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle... - 6 views

chronicle.com/...48642

shared by Judy Rumph on 05 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Emerging research shows that despite all the hand-wringing about survey nonresponse, the actual effect of response rate on survey accuracy is generally small and inconsistent, and in any case it is less consequential than many other serious but often ignored sources of bias. Ironically, by drawing time and attention away from the prevention and correction of those other forms of bias, efforts to minimize nonresponse bias may actually decrease the accuracy of higher-education surveys
  • Gary Brown on 05 Oct 09
     
    Key link for much of our work as we prepare for another round of concern about response rates.
  • Judy Rumph on 05 Oct 09
     
    I like this summary of issues with surveys, you can't just throw some questions in a survey and expect meaningful results.
  • Peggy Collins on 11 Oct 09
     
    hi I cant see more than the first paragraph as this says this is locked content for subscribers. Is there a CTLT subscription?
Nils Peterson

Goal 2025 - Lumina Foundation: Helping People Achieve Their Potential - 0 views

www.luminafoundation.org/...goal3.html

attainment lumina assessment higher_education

shared by Nils Peterson on 16 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Nils Peterson on 16 Oct 09
     
    "Based on current estimates, to reach the 60 percent level by 2025, the U.S. higher education system must produce 23 million more college graduates than are expected at present rates of production. The actual size of the gap will shift annually, as we make progress and new data become available. Obviously, we can't close this gap overnight. But, for example, if we can start to increase the rate of attainment each year and produce 150,000 more graduates than the year before - an annual increase of about 5 percent - we will reach the big goal by 2025."
  • Nils Peterson on 16 Oct 09
     
    adding 150,000 more college graduates/year each year from now to 2025 is a significant scaling up. Spread over 5000 institutions its only 30/institution on average, which many could manage. Or perhaps Western Governors could absorb many of them.
Joshua Yeidel

Doonesbury@Slate - Daily Briefing - 1 views

www.doonesbury.com/...index.html

web_2.0

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 22 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 22 Oct 09
     
    "Here are top rated news and opinions reviewed by NewsTrust.net, a social news network devoted to good journalism. We rate the news based on quality, not just popularity."
  • Joshua Yeidel on 22 Oct 09
     
    A social model of news and opinion aggregation
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.
Gary Brown

Texas A&M System Will Rate Professors Based on Their Bottom-Line Value - Faculty - The ... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...124280

accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 03 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Under the proposal, officials will add the money generated by each professor and subtract that amount from his or her salary to get a bottom-line value for each, according to the article.
  • the public wanted accountability. "It's something that we're really not used to in higher education: for someone questioning whether we're working hard, whether our students are learning. That accountability is going to be with us from now on."
  • American Association of University Professors, blamed a conservative think tank with ties to Gov. Rick Perry for coming up with an idea that he said is simplistic and relies on "a silly measure" of accountability.
  • Gary Brown on 03 Sep 10
     
    Nothing more to say about this....
  • Joshua Yeidel on 03 Sep 10
     
    I would simply like to note the thoughtless slide from a desire to know "whether we're working hard, whether our students are learning" to revenue measures.
  • Gary Brown on 04 Sep 10
     
    Our colleagues in science disciplines, who had seen this, pointed out that unlike other institutions where this kind of system goes largely unspoken, at least at Texas AM there is some value included in the metric for those who teach undergraduates.
Gary Brown

Some say bypassing a higher education is smarter than paying for a degree - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2010090903350_2.html

shared by Gary Brown on 14 Sep 10 - No Cached
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 14 Sep 10
       
      Of course many faculty have been calling for this for a long time, wanting to teach students who elect to be here for reasons other than presumably maximizing their learning potential.
  • "If you major in accounting or engineering, you're pretty likely to get a return on your investment," Vedder says. "If you're majoring in anthropology or social work or education, the rate on return is going to be a good deal lower, on average.
  • The unemployment rate among those with bachelor's degrees is at an all-time high
Gary Brown

Texas A&M's Faculty Ratings: Right and Wrong - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Edu... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...124330

accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 08 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • "Academia is highly specialized. We don't mean to be exclusive. We are a public-serving group of people. But at the same time, that public isn't well-enough aware of what we do and who we are to evaluate us."
  • But the think tank is correct that taxpayers deserve to know how their money is being spent. Public-university operating costs in Texas have gone up more than 60 percent in the last two decades, even after adjusting for inflation, and professors are among the state's highest-paid public employees. The state needs accountability measures, and they must be enforced by a party other than the faculty, who, it could easily be charged, have a conflict of interest. That's what Texas A&M got right.
  • Moosally is right about one thing: The public isn't well aware of what she and many of her colleagues do. But they should be. That is not to say that the public will be able to understand what goes on in all of the chemistry laboratories in Texas. But Moosally teaches English at a college that is not exactly tasked with performing cutting-edge research. Houston-Downtown's mission is to provide "educational opportunities and access to students from a variety of backgrounds including many first-generation college students."
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • No doubt there is useful research coming out of the university system. But plenty could be omitted without a great deal of detriment to students' education. For instance, Hugill's most recent contributions have included a chapter on "Transitions in Hegemony: A Theory Based on State Type and Technology" and the article "German Great-Power Relations in the Pages of Simplicissimus, 1896-1914." Moosally's master's thesis was titled "Resumptive Pronouns in Modern Standard Arabic: A Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar Account," and her current research interests include "interactions between grammar knowledge and writing abilities/interest [and] cross-linguistic patterns of agreement."
  • Only 35 percent of respondents felt it was very important for colleges to "provide useful information to the public on issues affecting their daily lives."
  • According to a 2004 survey by The Chronicle, 71 percent of Americans thought it was very important for colleges to prepare undergraduates for careers, while only 56 percent thought it was very important for colleges to "discover more about the world through research."
  • What Texas A&M officials have also missed is that faculty members must be held accountable for what they teach.
  • Professors receive more credit for teaching higher-level students. But again, that is backward. The idea should be to give senior faculty members more credit for teaching introductory classes.
  • Moreover, the metric entirely ignores teaching quality. Who cares how many "student hours" professors put in if they are not particularly good teachers anyway?
  • Ultimately there needs to be a systemic solution to the problem of teacher quality. Someone—a grown-up, preferably—needs to get into the classroom and watch what is being done there.
  • Gary Brown on 08 Sep 10
     
    Another one in which the comments say more than I might--but the range of these accountability pieces underscore the work to do....
Gary Brown

Critical friend - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 2 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Critical_friend

feedback

shared by Gary Brown on 22 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • The Critical Friend is a powerful idea, perhaps because it contains an inherent tension. Friends bring a high degree of unconditional positive regard. Critics are, at first sight at least, conditional, negative and intolerant of failure. Perhaps the critical friend comes closest to what might be regarded as 'true friendship' - a successful marrying of unconditional support and unconditional critique. [
  • Gary Brown on 22 Sep 10
     
    I've been wrestling with the tension again between supporting programs to help them improve, but then rating them for the accountability charge we hold.  So I've been looking into the concept and practice of the "Critical Friend."  Some tensions are inherent. This quote helps clarify.
Gary Brown

Recruiters Pick State Schools, Pass on Ivies - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4358904575477643369663352.html

employers

shared by Gary Brown on 13 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Recruiters say graduates of top public universities are often among the most prepared and well-rounded academically, and companies have found they fit well into their corporate cultures and over time have the best track record in their firms.
  • Recruiter salaries, travel expenses, advertising and relocation costs run upwards of $500,000 to recruit 100 college grads, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
  • The Journal asked companies to rank schools that produce the best-qualified graduates—overall and by major. Recru
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Partnerships also play a key role. Universities and companies strike research collaborations that often include student participation. Companies get an early look at promising students, leading to internships and job offers.
  • Partnerships can help boost brand awareness among talented students. The economic climate led Dennis Cornell, head of recruiting for LSI Corp. of Milpitas, Calif., to narrow his on-campus recruiting to three schools where the tech firm wanted to expand its reputation:
  • Gary Brown on 13 Sep 10
     
    Note that WSU is rated in a tie as number 25 (Wall Sreet)
Gary Brown

Why Did 17 Million Students Go to College? - Innovations - The Chronicle of Higher Educ... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...27634

future of education costs

shared by Gary Brown on 21 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants.  All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.
  • I have long been a proponent of Charles Murray’s thesis that an increasing number of persons attending college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attributes usually necessary for success at higher levels of learning. 
  • As more and more try to attend colleges, either college degrees will be watered down (something already happening I suspect) or drop-out rates will rise.  
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The relentless claims of the Obama administration and others that having more college graduates is necessary for continued economic leadership is incompatible with this view
  • Putting issues of student abilities aside, the growing disconnect between labor market realities and the propaganda of higher education apologists is causing more and more persons to graduate and take menial jobs or no job at all. This is even true at the doctoral and professional level –there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.Ds, other doctorates, or professional degrees.
  • “Estimating Marginal Returns in Education,”
  • In other words, even if on average, an investment in higher education yields a good, say 10 percent, rate of return, it does not follow that adding to existing investments will yield that return, partly for reasons outlined above.
  • should we be subsidizing increasingly problematic educational programs for students whose prior academic record would suggest little likelihood of academic much less vocational success?
  • I think the American people understand, albeit dimly, the logic above.
  • Higher education is on the brink of big change, like it or not.
  • Gary Brown on 21 Oct 10
     
    The tone is not the same as Berliner's, but the numbers suggest WSU's and others goals merit a second look.
Theron DesRosier

Our Mission: The Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice - 0 views

www.sljhs.org/mission.php

theme based school

shared by Theron DesRosier on 14 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 14 Nov 08
     
    SLJ offers an engaging, law-themed curriculum, with the goal of providing a high-quality, 9-12 education to under-resourced students. SLJ's focus on the study of law builds upon the success and experiences of The Bronx School for Law, Government, and Justice (BLGJ). BLGJ opened in 1997 in the South Bronx and has maintained 95% graduation rates in the first three graduating classes, with 90% of those graduates going on to college. Over its seven years, BLGJ has developed an array of law-themed courses that range from constitutional law to forensic science, and has established a successful internship model through which seniors spend three afternoons a week in courthouses, law firms, and non-profit organizations. SLJ was developed in conjunction with members of the BLGJ community including teachers, students, parents, and the principal.
Theron DesRosier

BigDialog: Ask the President-Elect - 0 views

www.communitycounts.com/forum

networked governance bigdialog

shared by Theron DesRosier on 14 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 14 Nov 08
     
    BigDialog: Ask the President-Elect Think of questions you'd like to ask the President-Elect. 2. We fly the top questioners to MIT and ask their questions. Link to Terms 3. You rate the President-Elect's answers. More...
Theron DesRosier

techPresident - Looking at Voter-Generated Presence on Candidate Websites - 0 views

www.techpresident.com/...presence_on_candidate_websites

2.0 networked governance identity google juice

shared by Theron DesRosier on 09 Dec 08 - Cached
  • As candidates cede authority over their web presence to supporters, allowing the posting of voter-generated content to campaign sites
  • Theron DesRosier on 09 Dec 08
     
    This article compares the Google index rating of canditates who allowed the posting of voter generated content on their site with those that didn't. In other words: Web 2.0 vs. Web 1 approach relative to the number of pages google had indexed from the site.
Theron DesRosier

Ethics in Assessment. ERIC Digest. - 2 views

www.ericdigests.org/in.htm

assessment validity ethics accountability

shared by Theron DesRosier on 05 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 05 Jan 10
     
    "Those who are involved with assessment are unfortunately not immune to unethical practices. Abuses in preparing students to take tests as well as in the use and interpretation of test results have been widely publicized. Misuses of test data in high-stakes decisions, such as scholarship awards, retention/promotion decisions, and accountability decisions, have been reported all too frequently. Even claims made in advertisements about the success rates of test coaching courses have raised questions about truth in advertising. Given these and other occurrences of unethical behavior associated with assessment, the purpose of this digest is to examine the available standards of ethical practice in assessment and the issues associated with implementation of these standards. "
Jayme Jacobson

Evaluating the effect of peer feedback on the quality of online discourse - 0 views

ritdml.rit.edu/10092

peer feedback embedded assessment micro-feedback

shared by Jayme Jacobson on 09 Mar 10 - No Cached
  • Results indicate that continuous, anonymous, aggregated feedback had no effect on either the students' or the instructors' perception of discussion quality.
  • Jayme Jacobson on 09 Mar 10
     
    Abstract: This study explores the effect on discussion quality of adding a feedback mechanism that presents users with an aggregate peer rating of the usefulness of the participant's contributions in online, asynchronous discussion. Participants in the study groups were able to specify the degree to which they thought any posted comment was useful to the discussion. Individuals were regularly presented with feedback (aggregated and anonymous) summarizing peers' assessment of the usefulness of their contribution, along with a summary of how the individuals rated their peers. Results indicate that continuous, anonymous, aggregated feedback had no effect on either the students' or the instructors' perception of discussion quality. This is kind of a show-stopper. It's just one study but when you look at the results there appears to be no effect whatsoever from peers giving feedback about the usefulness of discussion posts, nor any perceived improvement in the quality of the discussions as evaluated by faculty. It looks like we'll need to begin looking carefully at just what kinds of feedback will really make a difference. Following up on Corinna's earlier post http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/03/twitters_potential_as_microfee.html about the effectiveness of short immediate feedback being more effective than lengthier feedback that actually hinders performance. The trick will be to figure out just what kinds of feedback will actually work in embedded situations. It's interesting that an assessment of utility wasn't useful...?
Corinna Lo

A comparison of consensus, consistency, and measurement approaches to estimating interr... - 2 views

pareonline.net/getvn.asp

reliability assessment

shared by Corinna Lo on 16 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Corinna Lo on 16 Apr 10
     
    "The three general categories for computing interrater reliability introduced and described in this paper are: 1) consensus estimates, 2) consistency estimates, and 3) measurement estimates. The assumptions, interpretation, advantages, and disadvantages of estimates from each of these three categories are discussed, along with several popular methods of computing interrater reliability coefficients that fall under the umbrella of consensus, consistency, and measurement estimates. Researchers and practitioners should be aware that different approaches to estimating interrater reliability carry with them different implications for how ratings across multiple judges should be summarized, which may impact the validity of subsequent study results."
Nils Peterson

Higher Ed/: TLT's Harvesting Feedback Project - 0 views

highered.blogspot.com/...rvesting-feedback-project.html

harvest TLT demo webinar assesssment

shared by Nils Peterson on 31 Jul 09 - Cached
  • It's a fascinating project, and to me the most interesting design element is one not actually highlighted here, viz. that the plan is to be able to rate any kind of work anywhere on the Internet. The era of "enclosed garden" portfolio systems may be drawing (thankfully) to an end.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 31 Jul 09
       
      Interesting that David picked up this implication from the work, its something we didn't say but I think want to believe.
  • crowd-sourcing for assessment (you assess some of my students, I assess some of yours, for example) I wonder if the group has considered using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service as a cost-effective way of getting ratings from "the public."
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 31 Jul 09
       
      This is an interesting idea, i've started to follow up at Mechanical Turk and hope to develop a blog post
Gary Brown

It's the Learning, Stupid - Lumina Foundation: Helping People Achieve Their Potential - 3 views

www.luminafoundation.org/...2009-10-14.html

learning accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 15 Oct 09 - Cached
  • My thesis is this. We live in a world where much is changing, quickly. Economic crises, technology, ideological division, and a host of other factors have all had a profound influence on who we are and what we do in higher education. But when all is said and done, it is imperative that we not lose sight of what matters most. To paraphrase the oft-used maxim of the famous political consultant James Carville, it's the learning, stupid.
  • We believe that, to significantly increase higher education attainment rates, three intermediate outcomes must first occur: Higher education must use proven strategies to move students to completion. Quality data must be used to improve student performance and inform policy and decision-making at all levels. The outcomes of student learning must be defined, measured, and aligned with workforce needs. To achieve these outcomes (and thus improve success rates), Lumina has decided to pursue several specific strategies. I'll cite just a few of these many different strategies: We will advocate for the redesign, rebranding and improvement of developmental education. We will explore the development of alternative pathways to degrees and credentials. We will push for smoother systems of transferring credit so students can move more easily between institutions, including from community colleges to bachelor's degree programs.
  • "Lumina defines high-quality credentials as degrees and certificates that have well-defined and transparent learning outcomes which provide clear pathways to further education and employment."
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • And—as Footnote One softly but incessantly reminds us—quality, at its core, must be a measure of what students actually learn and are able to do with the knowledge and skills they gain.
  • and yet we seem reluctant or unable to discuss higher education's true purpose: equipping students for success in life.
  • Research has already shown that higher education institutions vary significantly in the value they add to students in terms of what those students actually learn. Various tools and instruments tell us that some institutions add much more value than others, even when looking at students with similar backgrounds and abilities.
  • The idea with tuning is to take various programs within a specific discipline—chemistry, history, psychology, whatever—and agree on a set of learning outcomes that a degree in the field represents. The goal is not for the various programs to teach exactly the same thing in the same way or even for all of the programs to offer the same courses. Rather, programs can employ whatever techniques they prefer, so long as their students can demonstrate mastery of an agreed-upon body of knowledge and set of skills. To use the musical terminology, the various programs are not expected to play the same notes, but to be "tuned" to the same key.
Nils Peterson

Will a Culture of Entitlement Bankrupt Higher Education? - Commentary - The Chronicle o... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...48819

shared by Nils Peterson on 20 Oct 09 - Cached
  • No other country has so many fully accredited colleges or has provided such widespread access to student financial aid.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 20 Oct 09
       
      But other countries have better rates of attaining higher education (% population with a degree) than US. See Lumina Foundation goals to increase US rate from 40 to 60%
  • The reality is that higher education is expensive, and students and their families will be asked to pay an ever-larger share of the costs. Although annual increases in tuition have diminished recently, tuition is still rising faster than inflation.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 20 Oct 09
       
      Why is this the reality? There is reason to believe that it is not -- especially if one is able to remove what he calls the "entitlements."
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