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S Spaeth

Main Page - OpenWetWare - 0 views

openwetware.org/Main_Page

iTeams pbl

shared by S Spaeth on 02 Apr 09 - Cached
  • sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering.
  • S Spaeth on 02 Apr 09
     
    OpenWetWare is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering. Learn more about us. If you would like edit access, would be interested in helping out, or want your lab website hosted on OpenWetWare, please join us.
Joshua Yeidel

Scholar Raises Doubts About the Value of a Test of Student Learning - Research - The Ch... - 3 views

chronicle.com/...65741

assessment accountability

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 02 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Beginning in 2011, the 331 universities that participate in the Voluntary System of Accountability will be expected to publicly report their students' performance on one of three national tests of college-level learning.
  • But at least one of those three tests—the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA—isn't quite ready to be used as a tool of public accountability, a scholar suggested here on Tuesday during the annual meeting of the Association for Institutional Research.
  • Students' performance on the test was strongly correlated with how long they spent taking it.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Besides the CLA, which is sponsored by the Council for Aid to Education, other tests that participants in the voluntary system may use are the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency, from ACT Inc., and the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress, offered by the Educational Testing Service.
  • The test has sometimes been criticized for relying on a cross-sectional system rather than a longitudinal model, in which the same students would be tested in their first and fourth years of college.
  • there have long been concerns about just how motivated students are to perform well on the CLA.
  • Mr. Hosch suggested that small groups of similar colleges should create consortia for measuring student learning. For example, five liberal-arts colleges might create a common pool of faculty members that would evaluate senior theses from all five colleges. "That wouldn't be a national measure," Mr. Hosch said, "but it would be much more authentic."
  • Mr. Shavelson said. "The challenge confronting higher education is for institutions to address the recruitment and motivation issues if they are to get useful data. From my perspective, we need to integrate assessment into teaching and learning as part of students' programs of study, thereby raising the stakes a bit while enhancing motivation of both students and faculty
  • "I do agree with his central point that it would not be prudent to move to an accountability system based on cross-sectional assessments of freshmen and seniors at an institution," said Mr. Arum, who is an author, with Josipa Roksa, of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press
  • Gary Brown on 02 Jun 10
     
    CLA debunking, but the best item may be the forthcoming book on "limited learning on College Campuses."
  • Joshua Yeidel on 25 Jun 10
     
    "Micheal Scriven and I spent more than a few years trying to apply his multiple-ranking item tool (a very robust and creative tool, I recommend it to others when the alternative is multiple-choice items) to the assessment of critical thinking in health care professionals. The result might be deemed partially successful, at best. I eventually abandoned the test after about 10,000 administrations because the scoring was so complex we could not place it in non-technical hands."
  • Joshua Yeidel on 25 Jun 10
     
    In comments on an article about CLA, Scriven's name comes up...
Peggy Collins

Science in the open » Google Wave in Research - the slightly more sober view ... - 4 views

blog.openwetware.org/...-more-sober-view-part-i-papers

wave

shared by Peggy Collins on 01 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Peggy Collins on 01 Oct 09
     
    an interesting post about Google Wave and academic document collaboration
Gary Brown

What's Wrong With the American University System - Culture - The Atlantic - 3 views

www.theatlantic.com/...60458

higher education

shared by Gary Brown on 31 Jul 10 - Cached
  • But when the young superstar sat down with the department chair, he seemed to have only one goal: to land a tenure-track position that involved as many sabbaticals and as little teaching as possible
  • Hacker and his coauthor, New York Times writer Claudia Dreifus, use this cautionary tale to launch their new book, a fierce critique of modern academia called Higher Education? "The question mark in our title," they write, "is the key to this book." To their minds, little of what takes place on college campuses today can be considered either "higher" or "education."
  • They blame a system that favors research over teaching and vocational training over liberal arts.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Tenure, they argue, does anything but protect intellectual freedom
  • Schools get status by bringing on professors who are star researchers, star scholars. That's all we really know about Caltech or MIT or Stanford. We don't really know about the quality of undergraduate teaching at any of these places. And it's the students who suffer.
  • Claudia and I were up at Harvard talking to students, and they said they get nothing from their classes, but that doesn't matter. They're smart already—they can breeze through college. The point is that they're going to be Harvard people when they come out.
  • So tenure is, in fact, the enemy of spontaneity, the enemy of intellectual freedom.
  • Good teaching can't be quantified at the college level.
  • or instance, Evergreen College, a sweet little state school in Olympia, Washington. We spent three days there and it was fantastic. They don't give grades, and they don't have academic departments. There are no faculty rankings. Almost all the classes we saw were taught by two professors—say, one from philosophy and one from psychology, teaching jointly on Henry and William James. Even though they don't give grades, the professors write out long evaluations for students. And the students have no problem getting into graduate schools.
  • I like Missouri Western State. It's a third-tier university, but the faculty realize they're going to stay there, they're not going to get hired away by other colleges, so they pitch in and take teaching seriously. At a school like that, you have a decent chance of finding a mentor who will write you a strong recommendation, better than you would at Harvard.
  • We believe the current criteria for admissions—particularly the SAT—are just so out of whack. It's like No Child Left Behind. It really is. It's one of the biggest crimes that's ever been perpetrated.
  • Professor X. He argued that some students just aren't ready for college. What's your view on that? Our view is that the primary obligation belongs to the teacher. Good teaching is not just imparting knowledge, like pouring milk into a jug. It's the job of the teacher to get students interested and turned on no matter what the subject is. Every student can be turned on if teachers really engage in this way. We saw it at Evergreen and other places that have this emphasis.
  • This is the hand I was dealt this semester. This is my job." Some people say to me, "Your students at Queens, are they any good?" I say, "I make them good." Every student is capable of college. I know some people have had difficult high school educations. But if you have good teachers who really care, it's remarkable how you can make up the difference.
  • Matthew Tedder on 31 Jul 10
     
    In case you haven't already seen this.  While don't deny higher education needs attention, I personal wish there'd be far more attention paid to lower education and regressive education (my own term for, redressing and improving the education of all U.S. citizens).  We are in the process of destroying our country and our world.  Education as at the very heart of any solution.
  • Gary Brown on 11 Aug 10
     
    More of the discussion in the news--the Atlantic
Gary Brown

The Profession: More Pressure on Faculty Members, From Every Direction - Almanac of Hig... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...123918

change

shared by Gary Brown on 25 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Changes in the American professoriate’s employment patterns and types, demographics, and work life are the greatest we have seen in over half a century.
  • But averages obscure the widening salary ranges on campuses, particularly between presidents and faculty members
  • The drive toward institutional prestige that most professors consider a high priority at their four-year institutions has intensified the focus on research there.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Some faculty members, permanent and contingent, are expected to cover their full salaries with grants. With the tenure bottleneck narrowing, junior faculty members are often advised to focus on research, do a reasonable job of teaching, and avoid service.
  • Faculty members report spending more than half of their time on teaching and classroom-related activities. Professors are increasingly expected to use new technologies in both distance education and on-campus courses, and to be more systematic about assessing student learning at both course and program levels.
  • The scholarship of teaching and learning, in which faculty members examine the effects of their teaching strategies, is spreading; the advent of conferences and publications marks its increasing acceptance as serious scholarship.
  • The “corporatization” of institutional administrations in the face of fiscal distress and severe budget cuts imperils faculty governance, which falls increasingly to the shrinking number of permanent tenured faculty members.
  • Gary Brown on 25 Aug 10
     
    New realities rendered starkly.
  • Joshua Yeidel on 26 Aug 10
     
    Note: A "premium content" article -- you must be a paid subscriber to see it, not just a registered site user.
Gary Brown

Colleges May Be Missing a Chance for Change - International - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...124417

employers accountability future of education

shared by Gary Brown on 14 Sep 10 - No Cached
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 14 Sep 10
       
      And what are people for, after all?
  • Peter P. Smith, senior vice president for academic strategies and development at Kaplan Higher Education, said that if traditional universities did not adjust, new institutions would evolve to meet student needs. Those new institutions, said Mr. Smith, whose company is a for-profit education provider, would be more student-centric, would deliver instruction with greater flexibility, and would offer educational services at a lower cost.
  • Speakers at an international conference here delivered a scathing assessment of higher education: Universities, they said, are slow to change, uncomfortable in dealing with real-world problems, and culturally resistant to substantive internationalization.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The gathering drew about 500 government officials, institutional leaders, and researchers
  • both education and research must become more relevant and responsive to society.
  • many faculty members may be "uncomfortable" with having deeper links to industry because they don't understand that world. Students, however, are highly practical, Mr. Fadel said, and are specifically seeking education that will get them a job or give them an advantage in the workplace.
  • "I'm sorry, as a student, you do not go to university to learn. You go to get a credential," he said.
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 14 Sep 10
       
      And if you graduate more appreciative of the credential than what and how you have learned, then the education.
  • That does not mean colleges simply ought to turn out more graduates for in-demand professions like science and engineering, Mr. Fadel added. Colleges need to infuse other disciplines with science and engineering skills.
Gary Brown

The Public Be Damned - Innovations - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...26673

public perception of higher ed

shared by Gary Brown on 09 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • A new generation comes along, and a new bunch of books critical of academia are starting to appear. Two recently out include Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus' Higher Education? and Mark Taylor's Crisis on Campus. We are told colleges have lost their way, have lost sight of what is important, namely shaping young minds and turning immature adolescents into responsible young adults. The last round of muckraking had a decidedly conservative cast to it, while this one is more conventionally left wing or apolitical.
  • But until there is mass indignation about the behavior of colleges--their obscene costs, their bloated bureaucracies, the scandalously low teaching loads, the tons trivial academic research, the corruption of intercollegiate sports
  • Reform requires threats of reduced funding from the financiers of higher education.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the Academic Class has radically different perceptions that the public that funds higher education.
  • The public believes state universities have as their top mission the intellectual and leadership development of undergraduate students, while the Academic Class believes that research and graduate education is truly more important.
  • Gary Brown on 09 Sep 10
     
    for the collection
Joshua Yeidel

World-Class Greatness at a Land-Grant University Near You? - Commentary - The Chronicle... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...124591

higher_education

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 28 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 28 Sep 10
     
    "So how does the maintenance of high academic ranking as a research institution fit into the land-grant mission? Simply put, it doesn't."
  • Joshua Yeidel on 28 Sep 10
     
    Another for the "HE Identity Crisis" collection...
Gary Brown

Academic Grants Foster Waste and Antagonism - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Educ... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...124920

grants

shared by Gary Brown on 20 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • We think that our work is primarily organized by institutions of higher education, or by departments, or by conferences, but in reality those have become but appendages to a huge system of distributing resources through grants.
  • It's time we looked at this system—and at its costs: unpaid, anxiety-filled hours upon hours for a single successful grant; scholarship shaped, or misshaped, according to the demands of marketlike forces and the interests of nonacademic private foundations. All to uphold a distributive system that fosters antagonistic competition and increasing inequality.
  • Every hour spent working on or worrying about grants is an hour that could be better spent on research (or family life, or civic engagement, or sleep). But every hour not spent on a grant gives a competitive edge to other applicants.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The grant is basically an outsourcing of assessment that could, in most situations, be carried out much better by paid professional staff members.
  • Meanwhile grant-receiving institutions, like universities, become increasingly dependent on grants, to the point that faculty members and other campus voices can scarcely be heard beneath the din of administrators exhorting them to get more and more grants.
  • Colleagues whose research may be equally valuable (based on traditional criteria of academic debate) could be denied resources and livelihoods because, instead of grant writing, they favor publishing, or public engagement, or teaching.
  • Grant applications normalize a mode of scholarly writing and thought that, whatever its merits, has not been chosen collectively by academe in the interests of good scholarship, but has been imposed from without, with the grant as its guide. And as application procedures grow more stringent, the quality of successful projects is likely to sink. Can we honestly expect good scholarship from scholars who must constantly concentrate on something other than their scholarship? Academic life is increasingly made up of a series of applications, while the applied-for work dwindles toward insignificance.
  • It's time, I think, to put an end to our rationalizations. My spine will not be straightened. The agony will not be wiped off my brain. My mind misshapen will not be pounded back, and I have to stop telling myself that everything will be OK. Months and years of my life have been taken away, and nothing short of systemic transformation will redeem them.
Judy Rumph

Views: Why Are We Assessing? - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...suskie

Assessment

shared by Judy Rumph on 26 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Amid all this progress, however, we seem to have lost our way. Too many of us have focused on the route we’re traveling: whether assessment should be value-added; the improvement versus accountability debate; entering assessment data into a database; pulling together a report for an accreditor. We’ve been so focused on the details of our route that we’ve lost sight of our destinatio
  • Our destination, which is what we should be focusing on, is the purpose of assessment. Over the last decades, we've consistently talked about two purposes of assessment: improvement and accountability. The thinking has been that improvement means using assessment to identify problems — things that need improvement — while accountability means using assessment to show that we're already doing a great job and need no improvement. A great deal has been written about the need to reconcile these two seemingly disparate purposes.
  • The most important purpose of assessment should be not improvement or accountability but their common aim: everyone wants students to get the best possible education
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Our second common purpose of assessment should be making sure not only that students learn what’s important, but that their learning is of appropriate scope, depth, and rigo
  • Third, we need to accept how good we already are, so we can recognize success when we see i
  • And we haven’t figured out a way to tell the story of our effectiveness in 25 words or less, which is what busy people want and nee
  • Because we're not telling the stories of our successful outcomes in simple, understandable terms, the public continues to define quality using the outdated concept of inputs like faculty credentials, student aptitude, and institutional wealth — things that by themselves don’t say a whole lot about student learning.
  • And people like to invest in success. Because the public doesn't know how good we are at helping students learn, it doesn't yet give us all the support we need in our quest to give our students the best possible education.
  • But while virtually every college and university has had to make draconian budget cuts in the last couple of years, with more to come, I wonder how many are using solid, systematic evidence — including assessment evidence — to inform those decisions.
  • Now is the time to move our focus from the road we are traveling to our destination: a point at which we all are prudent, informed stewards of our resources… a point at which we each have clear, appropriate, justifiable, and externally-informed standards for student learning. Most importantly, now is the time to move our focus from assessment to learning, and to keeping our promises. Only then can we make higher education as great as it needs to be.
  • Kimberly Green on 27 Oct 10
     
    Yes, this article resonnated with me too. Especially connecting assessment to teaching and learning. The most important purpose of assessment should be not improvement or accountability but their common aim: everyone wants students to get the best possible education.... today we seem to be devoting more time, money, thought, and effort to assessment than to helping faculty help students learn as effectively as possible. When our colleagues have disappointing assessment results, and they don't know what to do to improve them, I wonder how many have been made aware that, in some respects, we are living in a golden age of higher education, coming off a quarter-century of solid research on practices that promote deep, lasting learning. I wonder how many are pointed to the many excellent resources we now have on good teaching practices, including books, journals, conferences and, increasingly, teaching-learning centers right on campus. I wonder how many of the graduate programs they attended include the study and practice of contemporary research on effective higher education pedagogies. No wonder so many of us are struggling to make sense of our assessment results! Too many of us are separating work on assessment from work on improving teaching and learning, when they should be two sides of the same coin. We need to bring our work on teaching, learning, and assessment together.
Gary Brown

Researchers Criticize Reliability of National Survey of Student Engagement - Students -... - 3 views

chronicle.com/...125438

NSSE

shared by Gary Brown on 18 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • "If each of the five benchmarks does not measure a distinct dimension of engagement and includes substantial error among its items, it is difficult to inform intervention strategies to improve undergraduates' educational experiences,"
  • nly one benchmark, enriching educational experiences, had a significant effect on the seniors' cumulative GPA.
  • Other critics have asserted that the survey's mountains of data remain largely ignored.
  • Gary Brown on 18 Nov 10
     
    If the results are largely ignored, the psychometric integrity matters little.  There is no indication it is ignored because it lacks psychometric integrity.
Theron DesRosier

The Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center » Blog Archive... - 0 views

life-slc.org/?p=498

Bransford 21st century learning skills

shared by Theron DesRosier on 03 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 03 Mar 09
     
    In 2004, the LIFE Center and the Center for Multicultural Education at the University of Washington established the LIFE Diversity Panel. The Panel's goal was to summarize important principles that educational practitioners, policy makers, and researchers can use to build upon the learning that occurs in the homes and community cultures of students from diverse groups. We are pleased to announce the culmination of this two year consensus process. On May 11th, 2007, the centers released the consensus report produced by the LIFE Diversity Panel called Learning In and Out of School in Diverse Environments: Life-Long, Life-Wide, and Life-Deep. A major assumption of this report is that if educators make use of the informal learning that occurs in the homes and communities of students, the achievement gap between marginalized students and mainstream students can be reduced.
Joshua Yeidel

Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...18college.html

higher education grades student

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 18 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 18 Feb 09
     
    "A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B's just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading. "
Joshua Yeidel

Wired Campus: 'Horizon Report' Names Top Technology Trends to Watch in Educat... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...index.php

higher education trends

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 23 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 23 Jan 09
     
    The "2009 Horizon Report," the latest edition of the annual list of technology trends to watch in education, is compiled based on news reports, research studies, and interviews with experts.
Corinna Lo

How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition - 0 views

books.nap.edu/catalog.php

book learning

shared by Corinna Lo on 21 Dec 08 - Cached
  • Corinna Lo on 21 Dec 08
     
    This book offers exciting new research about the mind and the brain that provides answers to a number of compelling questions. When do infants begin to learn? How do experts learn and how is this different from non-experts? What can teachers and schools do-with curricula, classroom settings, and teaching methods--to help children learn most effectively? New evidence from many branches of science has significantly added to our understanding of what it means to know, from the neural processes that occur during learning to the influence of culture on what people see and absorb. You can read the entire book online for free.
Theron DesRosier

Aviation High School - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/dents-take-learning-new-levels

theme based school

shared by Theron DesRosier on 14 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 14 Nov 08
     
    "In addition to core courses in math, science, language arts, and social studies, we offer electives such as art, environmental stewardship, forensics, Japanese, and science olympiad, plus a series of seminars focused on aviation and aerospace, including Aviation and the American Character, History of Aircraft Design, and Robotics. In each course, students complete projects that demonstrate a depth of understanding and skill related to our essential questions and schoolwide learning goals. The more complex projects are developed in collaboration with industry experts, such as a wing-design engineer, a transit planner, an Arctic researcher, and a local river-cleanup coalition. "
Theron DesRosier

IUAV - Istituto Universitario di Architettura - Universities in Venice - 0 views

www.efors.eu/...484

theme based school

shared by Theron DesRosier on 14 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 14 Nov 08
     
    "The University Iuav of Venice is a small university with 3 faculties, 14 undergraduate and graduate degree programmes, 15 master degree programmes, 7 PhD programmes and a limited number of students. Although small in size, the Iuav's specificity, that of being a theme-based university, makes it unique among other Italian universities. At the core of its educational instruction and research lies project design and planning in all its many aspects. The idea behind project design and planning encompasses the crucial themes concerning our daily lives: the system of buildings and objects with which we are in constant contact, the homes in which we live, cities and states of transformation, the landscape and territory with which we interact, and the governing of environmental processes. The programmes of the Faculty of Architecture and the Faculty of Urban & Regional Planning prepare individuals to intelligently and skilfully confront the questions of architecture, construction, and sustainable territory management; individuals capable of developing opportunities and policies which bring to the foreground safeguarding the territory and landscape, city requalification, the conscious use of resources, and the right to fair and suitable housing."
Theron DesRosier

Stanford Study of Writing - Research - Sample Out of Class Texts - 0 views

ssw.stanford.edu/...out_of_class_texts.php

writing out-of-class

shared by Theron DesRosier on 08 Dec 08 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 08 Dec 08
     
    Students consistently told us that "really good" or "the best" writing is writing that is performative, that makes something happen in the world; for more information about this aspect of our findings, please see our article "Performing Writing, Performing Literacy" Throughout the five years, students reported being deeply engaged with writing out of class: for these students, extracurricular writing is very important, often more important than any of the writing they are doing for classes. Of the thousands of out-of-class texts students contributed, here is a representative sample:
Joshua Yeidel

HP Labs : Solutions and Services Research : New Competitive Spaces : BRAIN - 0 views

www.hpl.hp.com/...brain

predictivemarkets socialnetworking

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 23 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 23 Mar 09
     
    Predictive Markets at HP: "we is smarter than all of us". Leslie R/ Fine: "The BRAIN Process is an information aggregation tool that harnesses all of the power and truth-telling properties of market mechanisms and implements it with all of the simplicity and robustness of a simple survey.
Gary Brown

Video Chat with Education Author Alfie Kohn - 1 views

www.convergemag.com/...ucation-Author-Alfie-Kohn.html

motivation homework

shared by Gary Brown on 23 Feb 10 - Cached
  • "The reality is that outcomes in education are determined in large part by the attitudes and goals and perspectives of the real living human beings, the learners in our classrooms,"
  • So if they regard homework as pointless, as frustrating, as unlikely to be beneficial, as something they thoroughly detest, it would be extroardinary to find research that finds an achievement effect despite the way they regard it, and in fact the research provides just what would be predicated from a non-behaviorist point of view, namely that it doesn't tend to be beneficial."
  • Gary Brown on 23 Feb 10
     
    Kohn, as usual, challenges convention, probably intractable assumptions about how people learn. But please don't confuse us with facts.
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