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Nils Peterson

2009 Annual Meeting | Conference Program - 0 views

www.aacu.org/...program.cfm

shared by Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09 - Cached
  • This session explores the notion that assessment for transformational learning is best utilized as a learning tool. By providing timely, transparent, and appropriate feedback, both to students and to the institution itself, learning is enhanced – a far different motive for assessment than is external accountability.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      need to get to these guys with our harvesting gradebook ideas...
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      decided to attend another session. Hersh was OK before lunch, but the talk by Pan looks more promising
  • Academic and corporate communities agree on the urgent need for contemporary, research-based pedagogies of engagement in STEM fields. Participants will learn how leaders from academic departments and institutions have collaborated with leaders from the corporate and business community in regional networks to ensure that graduates meet the expectations of prospective employers and the public.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      here is another session with links to CTLT work, both harvesting gradebook and the ABET work
  • Professor Pan will discuss the reflective teaching methods used to prepare students to recognize and mobilize community assets as they design, implement, and evaluate projects to improve public health.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      Students tasked to learn about a community, ride the bus, make a Doc appt. Then tasked to do a non-clinical health project in that community (they do plenty of clinical stuff elsewhere in the program). Project must build capacity in the community to survive after the student leaves. Example. Work with hispanic parents in Sacramento about parenting issue, ex getting kids to sleep on time. Student had identified problem in the community, but first project idea was show a video, which was not capacity building. Rather than showing the video, used the video as a template and made a new video. Families were actors. Result was spanish DVD that the community could own. Pan thinks this is increased capacity in the community.
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  • Freshman Survey annually examines the academic habits of mind of entering first-year students.  Along with academic involvement, the survey examines diversity, civic engagement, college admissions and expectations of college. 
  • The project aims to promote faculty and student assessment of undergraduate research products in relation to outcomes associated with basic research skills and general undergraduate learning principles (communication and quantitative reasoning, critical thinking, and integration and application of knowledge).
  • They focus educators on the magnitude of the challenge to prepare an ever-increasingly diverse, globally-connected student body with the knowledge, ability, processes, and confidence to adapt to diverse environments and respond creatively to the enormous issues facing humankind.
  • One challenge of civic engagement in the co-curriculum is the merging of cost and outcome: creating meaningful experiences for students and the community with small staffs, on small budgets, while still having significant, purposeful impact. 
  • a)claims that faculty are the sole arbiters of what constitutes a liberal education and b) counter claims that student life professionals also possess the knowledge and expertise critical to defining students’ total learning experiences.  
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      also, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
  • This session introduces a three-year national effort to document how colleges and universities are using assessment data to improve teaching and learning and to facilitate the dissemination and adoption of best practices in the assessment of college learning outcomes.
  • Exciting pedagogies of engagement abound, including undergraduate research, community-engaged learning, interdisciplinary exploration, and international study.  However, such experiences are typically optional and non-credit-bearing for students, and/or “on top of” the workload for faculty. This session explores strategies for integrating engaged learning into the institutional fabric (curriculum, student role, faculty role) and increasing access to these transformative experiences.
  • hands-on experiential learning, especially in collaboration with other students, is a superior pedagogy but how can this be provided in increasingly larger introductory classes? 
  • As educators seek innovative ways to manage knowledge and expand interdisciplinary attention to pressing global issues, as students and parents look for assurances that their tuition investment will pay professional dividends, and as alumni look for meaningful ways to give back to the institutions that nurtured and prepared them, colleges and universities can integrate these disparate goals through the Guilds, intergenerational membership networks that draw strength from the contributions of all of their members.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      see Theron's ideas for COMM.
  • Civic engagement learning derives its power from the engagement of students with real communities—local, national, and global. This panel explores the relationship between student learning and the contexts in which that learning unfolds by examining programs that place students in diverse contexts close to campus and far afield.
  • For institutional assessment to make a difference for student learning its results must result in changes in classroom practice. This session explores ways in which the institutional assessment of student learning, such as the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education and the Collegiate Learning Assessment, can be connected to our classrooms.
  • Interdisciplinary Teaching and Object-Based Learning in Campus Museums
  • To address pressing needs of their communities, government and non-profit agencies are requesting higher education to provide education in an array of human and social services. To serve these needs effectively, higher educationneeds to broaden and deepen its consultation with practitioners in designing new curricula. Colleges and universities would do well to consider a curriculum development model that requires consultation not only with potential employers, but also with practitioners and supervisors of practitioners.
  • Should Academics be Active? Campuses and Cutting Edge Civic Engagement
  • If transformational liberal education requires engaging the whole student across the educational experience, how can colleges and universities renew strategy and allocate resources effectively to support it?  How can assessment be used to improve student learning and strengthen a transformational learning environment? 
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      Purpose of university is not to grant degrees, it has something to do with learning. Keeling's perspective is that the learning should be transformative; changing perspective. Liberating and emancipatory Learning is a complex interaction among student and others, new knowledge and experience, event, own aspirations. learners construct meaning from these elements. "we change our minds" altering the brain at the micro-level Brain imaging research demonstrates that analogical learning (abstract) demands more from more areas of the brain than semantic (concrete) learning. Mind is not an abstraction, it is based in the brain, a working physical organ .Learner and the environment matter to the learning. Seeds magazine, current issue on brain imaging and learning. Segway from brain research to need for university to educate the whole student. Uses the term 'transformative learning' meaning to transform the learning (re-wire the brain) but does not use transformative assessment (see wikipedia).
  • But as public debates roil, higher education has been more reactive than proactive on the question of how best to ensure that today’s students are fully prepared for a fast-paced future.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Jan 09
       
      Bologna process being adopted (slowly) in EU, the idea is to make academic degrees more interchangeable and understandable across the EU three elements * Qualification Frameworks (transnational, national, disciplinary). Frameworks are graduated, with increasing expertise and autonomy required for the upper levels. They sound like broad skills that we might recognize in the WSU CITR. Not clear how they are assessed * Tuning (benchmarking) process * Diploma Supplements (licensure, thesis, other capstone activities) these extend the information in the transcript. US equivalent might be the Kuali Students system for extending the transcript. Emerging dialog on American capability This dialog is coming from 2 directions * on campus * employers Connect to the Greater Exceptions (2000-2005) iniative. Concluded that American HE has islands of innovation. Lead to LEAP (Liberal Education and America's Promise) Initiative (2005-2015). The dialog is converging because of several forces * Changes in the balance of economic and political power. "The rise of the rest (of the world)" * Global economy in which innovation is key to growth and prosperity LEAP attempts to frame the dialog (look for LEAP in AACU website). Miami-Dade CC has announced a LEAP-derived covenant, the goals must span all aspects of their programs. Define liberal education Knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world intellectual and practical skills responsibility integrative skills Marker of success is (here is where the Transformative Gradebook fits in): evidence that students can apply the essential learning outcomes to complex, unscripted problems and real-world settings Current failure -- have not tracked our progress, or have found that we are not doing well. See AACU employer survey 5-10% percent of current graduates taking courses that would meet the global competencies (transcript analysis) See NSSE on Personal and social responsibility gains, less tha
  • Dr. Pan will also talk about strategies for breaking down cultural barriers.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 24 Jan 09
       
      Pan. found a non-profit agency to be a conduit and coordinator to level the power between univ and grass roots orgs. helped with cultural gaps.
Gary Brown

In Hunt for Prestige, Colleges May Undermine Their Public Mission - Government - The Ch... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...65640

research future of educaiton

shared by Gary Brown on 21 May 10 - Cached
  • many large research universities are placing too much priority on activities that raise the profile and prestige of their institutions but do little to improve undergraduate education.
  • "In some of these places, undergraduate education has never been a top priority," says Jane V. Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability.
  • While its grants and gifts have gone up, the percentage of money it spends on core teaching and student services has gone down. Many students, of course, benefit from the private support and research dollars, as the university has built better facilities and attracted world-class faculty members.
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  • But the research aspirations of many large universities are in conflict with their founding principles, Ms. Wellman says, especially as undergraduate admissions has become more selective
  • another result of the chase for research dollars is that measures for faculty assessment and promotion rely too heavily on the research output and publication and too little on the quality of classroom teaching.
  • "I'm not pushing for banning research," he says, but there should be more flexibility and balance in the criteria."
  • Gary Brown on 21 May 10
     
    Nothing new, but affirmation of our perceptons.
Gary Brown

Education ambivalence : Nature : Nature Publishing Group - 1 views

www.nature.com/...465525b.html

science undergraduate teaching

shared by Gary Brown on 02 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Academic scientists value teaching as much as research — but universities apparently don't
  • Nature Education, last year conducted a survey of 450 university-level science faculty members from more than 30 countries. The first report from that survey, freely available at http://go.nature.com/5wEKij, focuses on 'postsecondary' university- and college-level education. It finds that more than half of the respondents in Europe, Asia and North America feel that the quality of undergraduate science education in their country is mediocre, poor or very poor.
  • 77% of respondents indicated that they considered their teaching responsibilities to be just as important as their research — and 16% said teaching was more important.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • But the biggest barrier to improvement is the pervasive perception that academic institutions — and the prevailing rewards structure of science — value research far more than teaching
  • despite their beliefs that teaching was at least as important as research, many respondents said that they would choose to appoint a researcher rather than a teacher to an open tenured position.
  • To correct this misalignment of values, two things are required. The first is to establish a standardized system of teaching evaluation. This would give universities and professors alike the feedback they need to improve.
  • The second requirement is to improve the support and rewards for university-level teaching.
  • systematic training in how to teach well
  • But by showering so many rewards on research instead of on teaching, universities and funding agencies risk undermining the educational quality that is required for research to flourish in the long term.
  • Gary Brown on 02 Jun 10
     
    Attention to this issue from this resource--Nature--is a breakthrough in its own right. Note the focus on "flourish in the long term...".
Peggy Collins

Clemson University e-portfolio winners - 3 views

www.clemson.edu/...news.html

shared by Peggy Collins on 28 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Peggy Collins on 28 Jul 10
     
    Students used different technologies, not one set mandated system for the e-portfolios. In 2006, Clemson University implemented the ePortfolio Program that requires all undergraduates to create and submit a digital portfolio as evidence of academic and experiential mastery of Clemson's core competencies. Students collect work from their classes and elsewhere, connecting (tagging) it to the competencies (Written and Oral Communication; Reasoning, Critical Thinking and Problem Solving; Mathematical, Scientific and Technological Literacy; Social Science and Cross-Cultural Awareness; Arts and Humanities; and Ethical Judgment) throughout their undergraduate experience.
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."
Nils Peterson

Tech's 29 Most Powerful Colleges - Page 1 - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...echs-29-most-powerful-colleges

shared by Nils Peterson on 05 May 10 - Cached
  • which schools really represent a pipeline to the top jobs? To find out, The Daily Beast scoured the biographies of hundreds of key technology executives from the nation’s biggest companies and some of its hottest startups, too. Our goal was to identify which colleges, compared student-for-student (undergraduate enrollment data courtesy of the National Center for Education Statistics), have turned out the most undergraduates destined for high-tech greatness.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 10
       
      Post-hoc analysis. Who holds the job, where did they graduate?
  • some schools excel at inculcating a crucial skill for techland: dealing with uncertainty and making the right decision without taking too long to size up a situation quickly.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 10
       
      Rubric dimensions.
  • I want someone who’s quick and decisive and a good leader, like a graduate of' and then they'll name certain schools.” Champion says part of that stems from the competitive environment of the top schools, which vet their admittees so heavily. "Is the competition the only the reason they’re successful? No,” Champion says. “But is it the beginning of training in a process that helps them be successful? Yes.”
Theron DesRosier

Come for the Content, Stay for the Community | Academic Commons - 0 views

www.academiccommons.org/...come-content-stay-community

inorganic_chemistry repository community 2.0 learning

shared by Theron DesRosier on 15 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 15 Sep 09
     
    The Evolution of a Digital Repository and Social Networking Tool for Inorganic Chemistry From Post: "It is said that teaching is a lonely profession. In higher education, a sense of isolation can permeate both teaching and research, especially for academics at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs). In these times of doing more with less, new digital communication tools may greatly attenuate this problem--for free. Our group of inorganic chemists from PUIs, together with technologist partners, have built the Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource Web site (VIPEr, http://www.ionicviper.org) to share teaching materials and ideas and build a sense of community among inorganic chemistry educators. As members of the leadership council of VIPEr, we develop and administer the Web site and reach out to potential users. "
Theron DesRosier

www.courseportflio.org - an international repository for documenting student learning - 0 views

www.courseportfolio.org/...index.jsp

shared by Theron DesRosier on 21 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 21 Sep 09
     
    Home page: "The Peer Review of Teaching Project (PRTP) provides faculty with a structured and practical model that combines inquiry into the intellectual work of a course, careful investigation of student understanding and performance, and faculty reflection on teaching effectiveness. Begun in 1994, the PRTP has engaged hundreds of faculty members from numerous universities. In 2005, the project was awarded a TIAA-CREF Theodore M. Hesburgh Award Certificate of Excellence in recognition of it being an exceptional faculty development program designed to enhance undergraduate student achievement. "
Gary Brown

Views: The White Noise of Accountability - Inside Higher Ed - 2 views

www.insidehighered.com/...adelman

accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 06 Aug 10 - Cached
  • We don’t really know what we are saying
  • “In education, accountability usually means holding colleges accountable for the learning outcomes produced.” One hopes Burck Smith, whose paper containing this sentence was delivered at an American Enterprise Institute conference last November, held a firm tongue-in-cheek with the core phrase.
  • Our adventure through these questions is designed as a prodding to all who use the term to tell us what they are talking about before they otherwise simply echo the white noise.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • when our students attend three or four schools, the subject of these sentences is considerably weakened in terms of what happens to those students.
  • Who or what is one accountable to?
  • For what?
  • Why that particular “what” -- and not another “what”?
  • To what extent is the relationship reciprocal? Are there rewards and/or sanctions inherent in the relationship? How continuous is the relationship?
  • In the Socratic moral universe, one is simultaneously witness and judge. The Greek syneidesis (“conscience” and “consciousness”) means to know something with, so to know oneself with oneself becomes an obligation of institutions and systems -- to themselves.
  • Obligation becomes self-reflexive.
  • There are no external authorities here. We offer, we accept, we provide evidence, we judge. There is nothing wrong with this: it is indispensable, reflective self-knowledge. And provided we judge without excuses, we hold to this Socratic moral framework. As Peter Ewell has noted, the information produced under this rubric, particularly in the matter of student learning, is “part of our accountability to ourselves.”
  • But is this “accountability” as the rhetoric of higher education uses the white noise -- or something else?
  • in response to shrill calls for “accountability,” U.S. higher education has placed all its eggs in the Socratic basket, but in a way that leaves the basket half-empty. It functions as the witness, providing enormous amounts of information, but does not judge that information.
  • Every single “best practice” cited by Aldeman and Carey is subject to measurement: labor market histories of graduates, ratios of resource commitment to various student outcomes, proportion of students in learning communities or taking capstone courses, publicly-posted NSSE results, undergraduate research participation, space utilization rates, licensing income, faculty patents, volume of non-institutional visitors to art exhibits, etc. etc. There’s nothing wrong with any of these, but they all wind up as measurements, each at a different concentric circle of putatively engaged acceptees of a unilateral contract to provide evidence. By the time one plows through Aldeman and Carey’s banquet, one is measuring everything that moves -- and even some things that don’t.
  • Sorry, but basic capacity facts mean that consumers cannot vote with their feet in higher education.
  • If we glossed the Socratic notion on provision-of-information, the purpose is self-improvement, not comparison. The market approach to accountability implicitly seeks to beat Socrates by holding that I cannot serve as both witness and judge of my own actions unless the behavior of others is also on the table. The self shrinks: others define the reference points. “Accountability” is about comparison and competition, and an institution’s obligations are only to collect and make public those metrics that allow comparison and competition. As for who judges the competition, we have a range of amorphous publics and imagined authorities.
  • There are no formal agreements here: this is not a contract, it is not a warranty, it is not a regulatory relationship. It isn’t even an issue of becoming a Socratic self-witness and judge. It is, instead, a case in which one set of parties, concentrated in places of power, asks another set of parties, diffuse and diverse, “to disclose more and more about academic results,” with the second set of parties responding in their own terms and formulations. The environment itself determines behavior.
  • Ewell is right about the rules of the information game in this environment: when the provider is the institution, it will shape information “to look as good as possible, regardless of the underlying performance.”
  • U.S. News & World Report’s rankings
  • The messengers become self-appointed arbiters of performance, establishing themselves as the second party to which institutions and aggregates of institutions become “accountable.” Can we honestly say that the implicit obligation of feeding these arbiters constitutes “accountability”?
  • But if the issue is student learning, there is nothing wrong with -- and a good deal to be said for -- posting public examples of comprehensive examinations, summative projects, capstone course papers, etc. within the information environment, and doing so irrespective of anyone requesting such evidence of the distribution of knowledge and skills. Yes, institutions will pick what makes them look good, but if the public products resemble AAC&U’s “Our Students’ Best Work” project, they set off peer pressure for self-improvement and very concrete disclosure. The other prominent media messengers simply don’t engage in constructive communication of this type.
  • Ironically, a “market” in the loudest voices, the flashiest media productions, and the weightiest panels of glitterati has emerged to declare judgment on institutional performance in an age when student behavior has diluted the very notion of an “institution” of higher education. The best we can say is that this environment casts nothing but fog over the specific relationships, responsibilities, and obligations that should be inherent in something we call “accountability.” Perhaps it is about time that we defined these components and their interactions with persuasive clarity. I hope that this essay will invite readers to do so.
  • Clifford Adelman is senior associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. The analysis and opinions expressed in this essay are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the positions or opinions of the institute, nor should any such representation be inferred.
  • Gary Brown on 06 Aug 10
     
    Perhaps the most important piece I've read recently. Yes must be our answer to Adelman's last challenge: It is time for us to disseminate what and why we do what we do.
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.
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  • 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

Op-Ed: 'Higher Education' Is A Waste Of Money : NPR - 4 views

www.npr.org/...story.php

shared by Gary Brown on 02 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Professor Andrew Hacker says that higher education in the U.S. is broken. He argues that too many undergraduate courses are taught by graduate assistants or professors who have no interest in teaching.
  • Gary Brown on 02 Aug 10
     
    Forwarded from a colleague.
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

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."
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  • 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

Opinion | Legislature's waning support for higher education creates chasm for middle cl... - 1 views

seattletimes.nwsource.com/...2012959173_guest22smith.html

future of education

shared by Gary Brown on 22 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Today in Washington, the traditional on-campus experience is increasingly enjoyed primarily by children of the wealthy or the very poor who are very bright.
  • The Washington State Higher Education Coordinating Board reports that based on the number of degrees per 100 residents, our children are not as well-educated as their parents.
  • we rank 48th in undergraduate enrollment and 49th in graduate enrollment. We are losing business to other states and need to realize they probably have better educated work forces.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • If our public universities do not get increased support from the state of Washington, they will decrease in quality and need to become increasingly private.
  • it is time for Washington to return to the concept that all individuals, regardless of their incomes, should have the opportunity to have access to an affordable, high-quality education.
  • Samuel H. Smith is president emeritus of Washington State University, a member of the Washington State Higher Education Coordinating Board, and a founding board member of the College Success Foundation and the Western Governors University. He is also a member of The Seattle Times board of directors.
  • Gary Brown on 22 Sep 10
     
    An old friend...
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 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
Gary Brown

Making College Degrees Easier to Interpret - Measuring Stick - The Chronicle of Higher ... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...27045

employers

shared by Gary Brown on 21 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Over the past few decades, the central purpose of undergraduate education in the United States has steadily evolved away from elite studies in the liberal arts and toward course work that prepares students for successful careers in their chosen fields. 
  • how do employers determine the values of the college degrees held by young job applicants? 
  • There is essentially no method to determine which of the three graduates have the knowledge and skills that match the advertised position. Grades and academic standards often vary so much by institution, department, and instructor that transcripts are written off as arbitrary and meaningless by those making hiring decisions. Outside fields with licensure exams like accounting and nursing, employers often hire workers based on connections, intuition, and the sometimes-misleading reputations of applicants’ alma maters. 
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This system doesn’t allow labor markets to function efficiently.
  • To rectify this broken hiring system, academia and industry should form stronger partnerships to better determine which skills and knowledge students in various fields need to master
  • The traditional college transcript is simply too impenetrable for anyone outside—or inside—academia to comprehend.
  • Gary Brown on 21 Sep 10
     
    The purposes are problematic, but the solution points to one of our approaches.  Where is John Dewey when we need him?
Gary Brown

Comments on the report - GEVC Report Comments - University College - Washington State U... - 2 views

universitycollege.wsu.edu/...default.aspx

general education

shared by Gary Brown on 23 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • My primary concern rests with the heavy emphasis on "outcomes based" learning. First, I find it difficult to imagine teaching to outcomes as separate from teaching my content -- I do not consider "content" and "outcomes" as discrete entities; rather, they overlap. This overlap may partly be the reason for the thin and somewhat unconvincing literature on "outcomes based learning." I would therefore like to see in this process a thorough and detailed analysis of the literature on "outcomes" vs content-based learning, followed by thoughtful discussion as to whether the need to focus our energies in a different direction is in fact warranted (and for what reasons). Also, perhaps that same literature can provide guidance on how to create an outcomes driven learning environment while maintaining the spirit of the academic (as opposed to technocratically-oriented) enterprise.
  • Outcomes are simply more refined ways of talking about fundamental purposes of education (on the need for positing our purposes in educating undergraduates, see Derek Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges, ch. 3). Without stating our educational purposes clearly, we can't know whether we are achieving them. "
  • I've clicked just about every link on this website. I still have no idea what the empirical basis is for recommending a "learning goals" based approach over other approaches. The references in the GEVC report, which is where I expected to find the relevant studies, were instead all to other reports. So far as I could tell, there were no direct references to peer-reviewed research.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • I do not want to read the "three volumes of Pascaralla and Terenzini." Instead, I would appreciate a concise, but thorough, summary of the empirical findings. This would include the sample of institutions studied and how this sample was chosen, the way that student outcomes were measured, and the results.I now understand that many people believe that a "learning goals" approach is desirable, but I still don't understand the empirical basis for their beliefs.
Gary Brown

Disciplines Follow Their Own Paths to Quality - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Educa... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...125055

assessment accreditation critical thinking

shared by Gary Brown on 29 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • But when it comes to the fundamentals of measuring and improving student learning, engineering professors naturally have more to talk about with their counterparts at, say, Georgia Tech than with the humanities professors at Villanova
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 29 Oct 10
       
      Perhaps this is too bad....
  • But there is no nationally normed way to measure the particular kind of critical thinking that students of classics acquire
  • er colleagues have created discipline-specific critical-reasoning tests for classics and political science
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Political science cultivates skills that are substantially different from those in classics, and in each case those skills can't be measured with a general-education test.
  • he wants to use tests of reasoning that are appropriate for each discipline
  • I believe Richard Paul has spent a lifetime articulating the characteristics of discipline based critical thinking. But anyway, I think it is interesting that an attempt is being made to develop (perhaps) a "national standard" for critical thinking in classics. In order to assess anything effectively we need a standard. Without a standard there are no criteria and therefore no basis from which to assess. But standards do not necessarily have to be established at the national level. This raises the issue of scale. What is the appropriate scale from which to measure the quality and effectiveness of an educational experience? Any valid approach to quality assurance has to be multi-scaled and requires multiple measures over time. But to be honest the issues of standards and scale are really just the tip of the outcomes iceberg.
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 29 Oct 10
       
      Missing the notion that the variance is in the activity more than the criteria.  We hear little of embedding nationally normed and weighted assignments and then assessing the implementation and facilitation variables.... mirror, not lens.
  • the UW Study of Undergraduate Learning (UW SOUL). Results from the UW SOUL show that learning in college is disciplinary; therefore, real assessment of learning must occur (with central support and resources)in the academic departments. Generic approaches to assessing thinking, writing, research, quantitative reasoning, and other areas of learning may be measuring something, but they cannot measure learning in college.
  • It turns out there is a six week, or 210+ hour serious reading exposure to two or more domains outside ones own, that "turns on" cross domain mapping as a robust capability. Some people just happen to have accumulated, usually by unseen and unsensed happenstance involvements (rooming with an engineer, son of a dad changing domains/careers, etc.) this minimum level of basics that allows robust metaphor based mapping.
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.
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