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Gary Brown

News: Turning Surveys Into Reforms - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...nsse

assessment NSSE Closing the loop

shared by Gary Brown on 26 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, warned those gathered here that they would be foolish to think that accountability demands were a thing of the past.
  • She said that while she is “impressed” with the work of NSSE, she thinks higher education is “not moving fast enough” right now to have in place accountability systems that truly answer the questions being asked of higher education. The best bet for higher education, she said, is to more fully embrace various voluntary systems, and show that they are used to promote improvements.
  • One reason NSSE data are not used more, some here said, was the decentralized nature of American higher education. David Paris, executive director of the New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability, said that “every faculty member is king or queen in his or her classroom.” As such, he said, “they can take the lessons of NSSE” about the kinds of activities that engage students, but they don’t have to. “There is no authority or dominant professional culture that could impel any faculty member to apply” what NSSE teaches about engaged learning, he said.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • She stressed that NSSE averages may no longer reflect any single reality of one type of faculty member. She challenged Paris’s description of powerful faculty members by noting that many adjuncts have relatively little control over their pedagogy, and must follow syllabuses and rules set by others. So the power to execute NSSE ideas, she said, may not rest with those doing most of the teaching.
  • Research presented here, however, by the Wabash College National Study of Liberal Arts Education offered concrete evidence of direct correlations between NSSE attributes and specific skills, such as critical thinking skills. The Wabash study, which involves 49 colleges of all types, features cohorts of students being analyzed on various NSSE benchmarks (for academic challenge, for instance, or supportive campus environment or faculty-student interaction) and various measures of learning, such as tests to show critical thinking skills or cognitive skills or the development of leadership skills.
  • The irony of the Wabash work with NSSE data and other data, Blaich said, was that it demonstrates the failure of colleges to act on information they get -- unless someone (in this case Wabash) drives home the ideas.“In every case, after collecting loads of information, we have yet to find a single thing that institutions didn’t already know. Everyone at the institution didn’t know -- it may have been filed away,” he said, but someone had the data. “It just wasn’t followed. There wasn’t sufficient organizational energy to use that data to improve student learning.”
  • “I want to try to make the point that there is a distinction between participating in NSSE and using NSSE," he said. "In the end, what good is it if all you get is a report?"
  • Kimberly Green on 26 Oct 09
     
    An interesting discussion, exploring basic questions CTLT folks are familiar with, grappling with the question of how to use survey data and how to identify and address limitations. 10 years after launch of National Survey of Student Engagement, many worry that colleges have been speedier to embrace giving the questionnaire than using its results. And some experts want changes in what the survey measures. I note these limitations, near the end of the article: Adrianna Kezar, associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern California, noted that NSSE's questions were drafted based on the model of students attending a single residential college. Indeed many of the questions concern out-of-class experiences (both academic and otherwise) that suggest someone is living in a college community. Kezar noted that this is no longer a valid assumption for many undergraduates. Nor is the assumption that they have time to interact with peers and professors out of class when many are holding down jobs. Nor is the assumption -- when students are "swirling" from college to college, or taking courses at multiple colleges at the same time -- that any single institution is responsible for their engagement. Further, Kezar noted that there is an implicit assumption in NSSE of faculty being part of a stable college community. Questions about seeing faculty members outside of class, she said, don't necessarily work when adjunct faculty members may lack offices or the ability to interact with students from one semester to the next. Kezar said that she thinks full-time adjunct faculty members may actually encourage more engagement than tenured professors because the adjuncts are focused on teaching and generally not on research. And she emphasized that concerns about the impact of part-time adjuncts on student engagement arise not out of criticism of those individuals, but of the system that assigns them teaching duties without much support. S
  • Gary Brown on 02 Nov 09
     
    Repeat of highlighted resource, but merits revisiting.
Gary Brown

The Profession: More Pressure on Faculty Members, From Every Direction - Almanac of Higher Education 2010 - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 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

Professors Who Focus on Honing Their Teaching Are a Distinct Breed - Research - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

chronicle.com/...65262

teaching

shared by Gary Brown on 27 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Professors who are heavily focused on learning how to improve their teaching stand apart as a very distinct subset of college faculties, according to a new study examining how members of the professoriate spend their time.
  • those who are focused on tackling societal problems stand apart as their own breed. Other faculty members, it suggests, are pretty much mutts, according to its classification scheme.
  • 1,000 full-time faculty members at four-year colleges and universities gathered as part of the faculty Professional Performance Survey administered by Mr. Braxton and two Vanderbilt doctoral students in 1999. That survey had asked the faculty members how often they engaged in each of nearly 70 distinct scholarly activities, such as experimenting with a new teaching method, publishing a critical book review in a journal, or being interviewed on a local television station. All of the faculty members examined in the new analysis were either tenured or tenure-track and fell into one of four academic disciplines: biology, chemistry, history, or sociology.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • cluster analysis,
  • nearly two-thirds of those surveyed were involved in the full range of scholarly activity they examined
  • Just over a third, however, stood out as focused almost solely on one of two types of scholarship: on teaching practices, or on using knowledge from their discipline to identify or solve societal problems.
  • pedagogy-focused scholars were found mainly at liberal-arts colleges and, compared with the general population surveyed, tended to be younger, heavily represented in history departments, and more likely to be female and untenured
  • Those focused on problem-solving were located mainly at research and doctoral institutions, and were evenly dispersed across disciplines and more likely than others surveyed to be male and tenured.
  • how faculty members rate those priorities are fairly consistent across academic disciplines,
  • The study was conducted by B. Jan Middendorf, acting director of Kansas State University's office of educational innovation and evaluation; Russell J. Webster, a doctoral student in psychology at Kansas State; and Steve Benton, a senior research officer at the IDEA Center
  • Gary Brown on 27 Apr 10
     
    Another study that documents the challenge and suggests confirmation of the 50% figure of faculty who are not focused on either research or teaching.
Gary Brown

On Hiring - Redefining Faculty Roles - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...8016

faculty roles assessment change

shared by Gary Brown on 15 Sep 09 - Cached
  • aculty duties and expectations have diversified and become more complex, but there clearly has not been a concomitant change in the traditional expectations for faculty performance.To take one example: at many institutions, assessment programs have added substantial burdens to faculty members, who must both plan and execute them. I suspect, though I do not know, that such additional burdens are heavier at teaching-oriented colleges and universities that also have higher standard teaching loads than more research-oriented institutions. There's also increased pressure on faculty members to involve undergraduate students in research, an initiative that takes various forms at various institutions but that is prevalent across institutional types.
  • Gary Brown on 15 Sep 09
     
    lamenting the increased burden involved in changing faculty roles, but misses the implications of SoTL and synergies. It is not more work but different, but communicating that vantage is our challenge.
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. "
Nils Peterson

AAC&U News | April 2010 | Feature - 1 views

www.aacu.org/...feature.cfm

shared by Nils Peterson on 01 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Comparing Rubric Assessments to Standardized Tests
  • First, the university, a public institution of about 40,000 students in Ohio, needed to comply with the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA), which requires that state institutions provide data about graduation rates, tuition, student characteristics, and student learning outcomes, among other measures, in the consistent format developed by its two sponsoring organizations, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and the Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU).
  • And finally, UC was accepted in 2008 as a member of the fifth cohort of the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, a collaborative body with the goal of advancing knowledge about the effect of electronic portfolio use on student learning outcomes.  
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  • outcomes required of all UC students—including critical thinking, knowledge integration, social responsibility, and effective communication
  • “The wonderful thing about this approach is that full-time faculty across the university  are gathering data about how their  students are doing, and since they’ll be teaching their courses in the future, they’re really invested in rubric assessment—they really care,” Escoe says. In one case, the capstone survey data revealed that students weren’t doing as well as expected in writing, and faculty from that program adjusted their pedagogy to include more writing assignments and writing assessments throughout the program, not just at the capstone level. As the university prepares to switch from a quarter system to semester system in two years, faculty members are using the capstone survey data to assist their course redesigns, Escoe says.
  • the university planned a “dual pilot” study examining the applicability of electronic portfolio assessment of writing and critical thinking alongside the Collegiate Learning Assessment,
  • The rubrics the UC team used were slightly modified versions of those developed by AAC&U’s Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) project. 
  • In the critical thinking rubric assessment, for example, faculty evaluated student proposals for experiential honors projects that they could potentially complete in upcoming years.  The faculty assessors were trained and their rubric assessments “normed” to ensure that interrater reliability was suitably high.
  • “It’s not some nitpicky, onerous administrative add-on. It’s what we do as we teach our courses, and it really helps close that assessment loop.”
  • There were many factors that may have contributed to the lack of correlation, she says, including the fact that the CLA is timed, while the rubric assignments are not; and that the rubric scores were diagnostic and included specific feedback, while the CLA awarded points “in a black box”:
  • faculty members may have had exceptionally high expectations of their honors students and assessed the e-portfolios with those high expectations in mind—leading to results that would not correlate to a computer-scored test. 
  • “The CLA provides scores at the institutional level. It doesn’t give me a picture of how I can affect those specific students’ learning. So that’s where rubric assessment comes in—you can use it to look at data that’s compiled over time.”
  • Their portfolios are now more like real learning portfolios, not just a few artifacts, and we want to look at them as they go into their third and fourth years to see what they can tell us about students’ whole program of study.”  Hall and Robles are also looking into the possibility of forming relationships with other schools from NCEPR to exchange student e-portfolios and do a larger study on the value of rubric assessment of student learning.
  • “We’re really trying to stress that assessment is pedagogy,”
  • “We found no statistically significant correlation between the CLA scores and the portfolio scores,”
  • In the end, Escoe says, the two assessments are both useful, but for different things. The CLA can provide broad institutional data that satisfies VSA requirements, while rubric-based assessment provides better information to facilitate continuous program improvement.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 01 Apr 10
       
      CLA did not provide information for continuous program improvement -- we've heard this argument before
  • Gary Brown on 01 Apr 10
     
    The lack of correlation might be rephrased--there appears to be no corrlation between what is useful for faculty who teach and what is useful for the VSA. A corollary question: Of what use is the VSA?
Gary Brown

Learning Assessments: Let the Faculty Lead the Way - Measuring Stick - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...26779

assessment

shared by Gary Brown on 08 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • The barriers to faculty involvement in assessment have been extensively catalogued over the years. Promotion and tenure systems do not reward such work. Time is short and other agendas loom larger. Most faculty members have no formal training in assessment—or, for that matter, in teaching and course design. Given developments in K-12, there are concerns, too, about the misuse of data, and skepticism about whether assessment brings real benefits to learners.
  • Moreover, as Robin Wilson points out, some campuses have found ways to open up the assessment conversation, shifting the focus away from external reporting, and inviting faculty members to examine their own students’ learning in ways that lead to improvement.
  • Does engagement with assessment’s questions change the way a faculty member thinks about her students and their learning? How and under what conditions does it change what he does in his classroom—and are those changes improvements for learners? How does evidence—which can be messy, ambiguous, discouraging, or just plain wrong—actually get translated into pedagogical action? What effects—good, bad, or uncertain—might engagement in assessment have on a faculty member’s scholarship, career trajectory, or sense of professional identity?
  • Gary Brown on 08 Sep 10
     
    Hutchings is a critical leader in our work--good links to have available, too.
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."
Gary Brown

Educators Mull How to Motivate Professors to Improve Teaching - Curriculum - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 4 views

chronicle.com/...63718

assessment

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

Change Magazine - The New Guys in Assessment Town - 0 views

www.changemag.org/...full-assessment-town.html

shared by Nils Peterson on 05 May 09 - Cached
  • if one of the institution’s general education goals is critical thinking, the system makes it possible to call up all the courses and programs that assess student performance on that outcome.
  • bringing together student learning outcomes data at the level of the institution, program, course, and throughout student support services so that “the data flows between and among these levels”
  • Like its competitors, eLumen maps outcomes vertically across courses and programs, but its distinctiveness lies in its capacity to capture what goes on in the classroom. Student names are entered into the system, and faculty use a rubric-like template to record assessment results for every student on every goal. The result is a running record for each student available only to the course instructor (and in a some cases to the students themselves, who can go to the system to  get feedback on recent assessments).
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      sounds like harvesting gradebook. assess student work and roll up
    • Joshua Yeidel
      Joshua Yeidel on 05 May 09
       
      This system has some potential for formative use at the per-student leve.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “I’m a little wary.  It seems as if, in addition to the assessment feedback we are already giving to students, we might soon be asked to add a data-entry step of filling in boxes in a centralized database for all the student learning outcomes. This is worrisome to those of us already struggling under the weight of all that commenting and essay grading.”
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      its either double work, or not being understood that the grading and the assessment can be the same activity. i suspect the former -- grading is being done with different metrics
    • Joshua Yeidel
      Joshua Yeidel on 05 May 09
       
      I am in the unusual position of seeing many papers _after_ they have been graded by a wide variety of teachers. Many of these contain little "assessment feedback" -- many teachers focus on "correcting" the papers and finding some letter or number to assign as a value.
  • “This is where we see many institutions struggling,” Galvin says. “Faculty simply don’t have the time for a deeper involvement in the mechanics of assessment.” Many have never seen a rubric or worked with one, “so generating accurate, objective data for analysis is a challenge.”  
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      Rather than faculty using the community to help with assessment, they are outsourcing to a paid assessor -- this is the result of undertaking this thinking while also remaining in the institution-centric end of the spectrum we developed
  • I asked about faculty pushback. “Not so much,” Galvin says, “not after faculty understand that the process is not intended to evaluate their work.”
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      red flag
  • the annual reports required by this process were producing “heaps of paper” while failing to track trends and developments over time. “It’s like our departments were starting anew every year,” Chaplot says. “We wanted to find a way to house the data that gave us access to what was done in the past,” which meant moving from discrete paper reports to an electronic database.
    • Joshua Yeidel
      Joshua Yeidel on 05 May 09
       
      It's not clear whether the "database" is housing measurements, narratives and reflections, or all of the above.
  • Can eLumen represent student learning in language? No, but it can quantify the number of boxes checked against number of boxes not checked.”
  • developing a national repository of resources, rubrics, outcomes statements, and the like that can be reviewed and downloaded by users
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 05 May 09
       
      in building our repository we could well open-source these tools, no need to lock them up
  • “These solutions cement the idea that assessment is an administrative rather than an educational enterprise, focused largely on accountability. They increasingly remove assessment decision making from the everyday rhythm of teaching and learning and the realm of the faculty.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 06 May 09
       
      Over the wall assessment, see Transformative Assessment rubric for more detail
Joshua Yeidel

Faculty Development on Campuses - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 2 views

chronicle.com/...26232

faculty higher_education

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 19 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 19 Aug 10
     
    Treading lightly, ProfHacker looks at Faculty Development offices (also called centers for teaching and learning).
Gary Brown

Texas A&M's Faculty Ratings: Right and Wrong - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 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

Book review: Taking Stock: Research on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education « Tony Bates - 2 views

www.tonybates.ca/...d-learning-in-higher-education

teaching

shared by Gary Brown on 09 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Christensen Hughes, J. and Mighty, J. (eds.) (2010) Taking Stock: Research on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Montreal QC and Kingston ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 350 pp, C$/US$39.95
  • ‘The impetus for this event was the recognition that researchers have discovered much about teaching and learning in higher education, but that dissemination and uptake of this information have been limited. As such, the impact of educational research on faculty-teaching practice and student-learning experience has been negligible.’
  • Julia Christensen Hughes
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Chapter 7: Faculty research and teaching approaches Michael Prosser
  • What faculty know about student learning Maryellen Weimer
  • ractices of Convenience: Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
  • Chapter 8: Student engagement and learning: Jillian Kinzie
  • (p. 4)
  • ‘much of our current approach to teaching in higher education might best be described as practices of convenience, to the extent that traditional pedagogical approaches continue to predominate. Such practices are convenient insofar as large numbers of students can be efficiently processed through the system. As far as learning effectiveness is concerned, however, such practices are decidedly inconvenient, as they fall far short of what is needed in terms of fostering self-directed learning, transformative learning, or learning that lasts.’
  • p. 10:
  • …research suggests that there is an association between how faculty teach and how students learn, and how students learn and the learning outcomes achieved. Further, research suggests that many faculty members teach in ways that are not particularly helpful to deep learning. Much of this research has been known for decades, yet we continue to teach in ways that are contrary to these findings.’
  • ‘There is increasing empirical evidence from a variety of international settings that prevailing teaching practices in higher education do not encourage the sort of learning that contemporary society demands….Teaching remains largely didactic, assessment of student work is often trivial, and curricula are more likely to emphasize content coverage than acquisition of lifelong and life-wide skills.’
  • What other profession would go about its business in such an amateurish and unprofessional way as university teaching? Despite the excellent suggestions in this book from those ‘within the tent’, I don’t see change coming from within. We have government and self-imposed industry regulation to prevent financial advisers, medical practitioners, real estate agents, engineers, construction workers and many other professions from operating without proper training. How long are we prepared to put up with this unregulated situation in university and college teaching?
Gary Brown

News: Different Paths to Full Professor - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...osu

SoTL research Tenure and Promotion

shared by Gary Brown on 11 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Ohio State is embarking on discussions on how to change the way professors are evaluated for promotion to full professor. University officials argue that, as in tenure reviews, research appears to be the dominant factor at that stage, despite official policies to weigh teaching and service as well.
  • The concept in play would end the myth that candidates for full professor (and maybe, someday, candidates for tenure) should be great in everything. Why? Because most professors aren't great at everything.
  • Once research eminence is verified, teaching and service must be found only to be "adequate."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This approach is insidiously harmful," Alutto said. "First, it generates cynicism among productive faculty, as they realize the 'game' being played. Second, it frustrates productive faculty who contribute to their disciplines and the university in unique and powerful ways other than -- or in addition to -- traditional research. Third, it flies in the face of everything we know about the need for a balanced portfolio of skills to achieve institutional success."
  • Measuring impact is always difficult, particularly when it comes to teaching and service," he said. "But it can be done if we focus on the significance of these activities as it extends beyond our own institution -- just as we expect such broad effects with traditional scholarship. Thus, indicators of impact on other institutions, recognition by professional associations, broad adoption of teaching materials (textbooks, software, etc.) by other institutions, evidence of effects on policy formulation and so on -- all these are appropriate independent indicators of effectiveness."
  • Gerber said, the idea of "counting" such contributions in faculty evaluations is an embrace of Ernest Boyer's ideas about "the scholarship of teaching," ideas that have had much more influence outside research universities than within them.
  • Gary Brown on 11 Mar 10
     
    Reconsidering SoTL at Ohio State
  • Kimberly Green on 29 Mar 10
     
    Responding to this portion: This approach is insidiously harmful," Alutto said. "First, it generates cynicism among productive faculty, as they realize the 'game' being played. Second, it frustrates productive faculty who contribute to their disciplines and the university in unique and powerful ways other than -- or in addition to -- traditional research. Third, it flies in the face of everything we know about the need for a balanced portfolio of skills to achieve institutional success." How does OAI navigate these real concerns / hurdles with our program assessment efforts? If we convince/force leadership to "value" teaching and SoTL but it carries little or no weight in terms of promotion and tenure (I give you Carol Anelli, for example), then don't we become part of that "game"?
Nils Peterson

Views: Changing the Equation - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...bassis

shared by Nils Peterson on 25 Mar 10 - Cached
  • But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resources
  • But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resource
  • But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resources
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • year we strug
  • year we strug
  • those who control influential rating systems of the sort published by U.S. News & World Report -- define academic quality as small classes taught by distinguished faculty, grand campuses with impressive libraries and laboratories, and bright students heavily recruited. Since all of these indicators of quality are costly, my college’s pursuit of quality, like that of so many others, led us to seek more revenue to spend on quality improvements. And the strategy worked.
  • Based on those concerns, and informed by the literature on the “teaching to learning” paradigm shift, we began to change our focus from what we were teaching to what and how our students were learning.
  • No one wants to cut costs if their reputation for quality will suffer, yet no one wants to fall off the cliff.
  • When quality is defined by those things that require substantial resources, efforts to reduce costs are doomed to failure
  • some of the best thinkers in higher education have urged us to define the quality in terms of student outcomes.
  • Faculty said they wanted to move away from giving lectures and then having students parrot the information back to them on tests. They said they were tired of complaining that students couldn’t write well or think critically, but not having the time to address those problems because there was so much material to cover. And they were concerned when they read that employers had reported in national surveys that, while graduates knew a lot about the subjects they studied, they didn’t know how to apply what they had learned to practical problems or work in teams or with people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
  • Our applications have doubled over the last decade and now, for the first time in our 134-year history, we receive the majority of our applications from out-of-state students.
  • We established what we call college-wide learning goals that focus on "essential" skills and attributes that are critical for success in our increasingly complex world. These include critical and analytical thinking, creativity, writing and other communication skills, leadership, collaboration and teamwork, and global consciousness, social responsibility and ethical awareness.
  • despite claims to the contrary, many of the factors that drive up costs add little value. Research conducted by Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman found that “there is no consistent relationship between spending and performance, whether that is measured by spending against degree production, measures of student engagement, evidence of high impact practices, students’ satisfaction with their education, or future earnings.” Indeed, they concluded that “the absolute level of resources is less important than the way those resources are used.”
  • After more than a year, the group had developed what we now describe as a low-residency, project- and competency-based program. Here students don’t take courses or earn grades. The requirements for the degree are for students to complete a series of projects, captured in an electronic portfolio,
  • students must acquire and apply specific competencies
  • Faculty spend their time coaching students, providing them with feedback on their projects and running two-day residencies that bring students to campus periodically to learn through intensive face-to-face interaction
  • At the very least, finding innovative ways to lower costs without compromising student learning is wise competitive positioning for an uncertain future
  • As the campus learns more about the demonstration project, other faculty are expressing interest in applying its design principles to courses and degree programs in their fields. They created a Learning Coalition as a forum to explore different ways to capitalize on the potential of the learning paradigm.
  • a problem-based general education curriculum
  • After a year and a half, the evidence suggests that students are learning as much as, if not more than, those enrolled in our traditional business program
  • the focus of student evaluations has changed noticeably. Instead of focusing almost 100% on the instructor and whether he/she was good, bad, or indifferent, our students' evaluations are now focusing on the students themselves - as to what they learned, how much they have learned, and how much fun they had learning.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 25 Mar 10
       
      gary diigoed this article. this comment shines another light -- the focus of the course eval shifted from faculty member to course & student learning when the focus shifted from teaching to learning
  • Gary Brown on 25 Mar 10
     
    A must read spotted by Jane Sherman--I've highlighed, as usual, much of it.
Theron DesRosier

Assessing Learning Outcomes at the University of Cincinnati: Comparing Rubric Assessments to Standardized Tests - 2 views

www.aacu.org/...feature.cfm

CLA assessment accountability

shared by Theron DesRosier on 15 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 15 Oct 10
     
    "When the CLA results arrived eight months later, the UC team compared the outcomes of the two assessments. "We found no statistically significant correlation between the CLA scores and the portfolio scores," Escoe says. "In some ways, it's a disappointing finding. If we'd found a correlation, we could tell faculty that the CLA, as an instrument, is measuring the same things that we value and that the CLA can be embedded in a course. But that didn't happen." There were many factors that may have contributed to the lack of correlation, she says, including the fact that the CLA is timed, while the rubric assignments are not; and that the rubric scores were diagnostic and included specific feedback, while the CLA awarded points "in a black box": if a student referred to a specific piece of evidence in a critical-thinking question, he or she simply received one point. In addition, she says, faculty members may have had exceptionally high expectations of their honors students and assessed the e-portfolios with those high expectations in mind-leading to results that would not correlate to a computer-scored test. In the end, Escoe says, the two assessments are both useful, but for different things. The CLA can provide broad institutional data that satisfies VSA requirements, while rubric-based assessment provides better information to facilitate continuous program improvement. "
  • Theron DesRosier on 15 Oct 10
     
    Another institution trying to make sense of the CLA. This study compared student's CLA scores with criteria-based scores of their eportfolios. The study used a modified version of the VALUE rubrics developed by the AACU. Our own Gary Brown was on the team that developed the critical thinking rubric for the VALUE project.
  • Joshua Yeidel on 19 Oct 10
     
    "The CLA can provide broad institutional data that satisfies VSA requirements, while rubric-based assessment provides better information to facilitate continuous program improvement. " This begs some questions: what meaning can we attach to these two non-correlated measures? What VSA requirements can rubric-based assessment NOT satisfy? Are those "requirements" really useful?
Gary Brown

71 Presidents Pledge to Improve Their Colleges' Teaching and Learning - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...125285

accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 05 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • In a venture known as the Presidents' Alliance for Excellence in Student Learning and Accountability, they have promised to take specific steps to gather more evidence about student learning, to use that evidence to improve instruction, and to give the public more information about the quality of learning on their campuses.
  • The 71 pledges, officially announced on Friday, are essentially a dare to accreditors, parents, and the news media: Come visit in two years, and if we haven't done these things, you can zing us.
  • deepen an ethic of professional stewardship and self-regulation among college leaders
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Beginning in 2011, all first-year students at Westminster will be required to create electronic portfolios that reflect their progress in terms of five campuswide learning goals. And the college will expand the number of seniors who take the Collegiate Learning Assessment, so that the test can be used to help measure the strength of each academic major.
  • "The crucial thing is that all of our learning assessments have been designed and driven by the faculty," says Pamela G. Menke, Miami Dade's associate provost for academic affairs. "The way transformation of learning truly occurs is when faculty members ask the questions, and when they're willing to use what they've found out to make change.
  • Other assessment models might point some things out, but they won't be useful if faculty members don't believe in them."
  • "In the long term, as more people join, I hope that the Web site will provide a resource for the kinds of innovations that seem to be successful," he says. "That process might be difficult. Teaching is an art, not a science. But there is still probably a lot that we can learn from each other."
Nils Peterson

It's Time to Improve Academic, Not Just Administrative, Productivity - Chronicle.com - 0 views

chronicle.com/...18a02601.htm

active learning chronicle

shared by Nils Peterson on 03 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Nils Peterson on 03 Feb 09
     
    Kimberly said of this: The focus on activity deals directly with the learning process - one that pushes students to take a more active role - while assessment supplies faculty members with the feedback necessary to diagnose and correct learning problems. Technology allows such active learning processes to be expanded to large courses and, as learning software and databases become better, to use faculty time more effectively. Relates to clickers and skylight learning activities/assessments, in the large class context, as well as the elusive LMS.
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.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • 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.
Joshua Yeidel

TLChallenges09 | EDUCAUSE CONNECT - 0 views

connect.educause.edu/...TLChallenges09

web_2.0 educause higher education

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 09 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 09 Jan 09
     
    After four months of spirited discussion, the EDUCAUSE teaching and learning community has voted on the, "Top Teaching and Learning Challenges, 2009." The final list for 2009, ranked by popularity, includes (click on individual Challenges to visit their wiki page): 1. Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation. 2. Developing 21st-century literacies among students and faculty (information, digital, and visual). 3. Reaching and engaging today's learner. 4. Encouraging faculty adoption and innovation in teaching and learning with IT. 5. Advancing innovation in teaching and learning (with technology) in an era of budget cuts.
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