CTLT and Friends

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

Read methods online

Book of the month What Counts as Credible Evidence in Applied Research and Evaluation Practice?

Arne Duncan, said state and local governments should rethink their policies of giving pay raises to teachers who have master’s degrees because evidence suggests that the degree alone does not improve student achievement.

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."

Senators want to know why accreditors haven’t protected the public interest.

Congress shouldn’t blame accreditors: it should blame itself. The existing accreditation system has neither ensured quality nor ferreted out fraud. Why? Because Congress didn’t want it to. If Congress truly wants to protect the public interest, it needs to create a system that ensures real accountability.

But turning accreditors into gatekeepers changed the picture. In effect, accreditors now held a gun to the heads of colleges and universities since federal financial aid wouldn’t flow unless the institution received “accredited” status.

During the early modern period, and especially during the years 1550-1750, Europe experienced a kind of "information explosion." I emphasize the word "experience" as this is an essential element to the arguments presented here. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that during this period, the production, circulation, and dissemination of scientific and scholarly texts accelerated tremendously. In her essay, Ann Blair notes that over the course of this period, a typical scholarly library might have grown by a factor of fifty, while Brian Ogilvie demonstrates an equivalent acceleration in the production and consumption of texts in the domain of natural history; and there is a large literature to back both of these arguments up. But the fact of accelerated textual production and consumption is not what is principally at issue here. What is essential is the sense that such a phenomenon was taking place and the variety of responses to it.

She examines the varieties of textual practices "deployed by early modern scholars" in response to a perceived "overabundance of books" during the period between 1550 and 1700, and she argues that historians have paid disproportionate attention to what she calls "literary reading" and not enough to other modes of encountering and engaging textual materials ranging from browsing and skimming to buying and collecting to annotating, cutting and pasting, and dog-earing. For Blair these other modes of acting upon texts are important in all historical moments, but in situations where readers feel themselves overwhelmed by information, they become all that much more crucial and telling.

"By the 1580s," Ogilvie writes, "the botanical tyro had to master a tremendous number of words, things, and authorities." And during this period botanical literature increasingly sought to address precisely this concern. Already in the 1550s, with the work of Conrad Gesner and Remert Dodoens, Ogilvie observes a shift from an older form of botanical treatise, descended from the alphabetical materia medica, to a new form organized around "tacit notions of similarity" among different natural types. Not that all of these developments were useful. As Ogilvie notes, the move toward similarity was not a direct move toward scientific taxonomy, and in different works vastly different categorical schemes applied, so that the same plant might be grouped with "shrubs" in one and, in another, with "plants whose flowers please." Eventually, with Caspar Bauhin at the end of the sixteenth century and John Ray at the end of the seventeenth, Ogilvie notes the rise of a new class of scientific literature aimed not only at describing and organizing natural facts but at doing the same work for scientific texts themselves.

Does testing for statistical significance encourage or discourage thoughtful data analysis? Posted by Patricia Rogers on October 20th, 2010

Epidemiology, 9(3):333–337). which argues not only for thoughtful interpretation of findings, but for not reporting statistical significance at all.

We also would like to see the interpretation of a study based not on statistical significance, or lack of it, for one or more study variables, but rather on careful quantitative consideration of the data in light of competing explanations for the findings.

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. 

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.