CTLT and Friends

He emphasized, however, that "rankings are only useful if the indicators they use don't just measure things that are easy to measure, but the things that need to be measured."

"In Malaysia we do not call it a ranking exercise," she said firmly, saying that the effort was instead a benchmarking exercise that attempts to rate institutions against an objective standard.

Not exactly, but faculty members and students at Rutgers University are embarking this week on a two-year effort  to "cultivate small acts of courtesy and compassion" on the New Brunswick campus.

being civil is more than just demonstrating good manners.

"Living together more civilly means living together more peacefully, more kindly, and more justly," she says. Rutgers, Ms. Hull hopes, will become a "warmer, closer community" as a result of Project Civility

According to the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), the goal “is to ensure that academic expectations for students are of high quality and consistent across all states and territories.” To educators across the nation, this means they now have to sync up all curriculum in math and language arts for the benefit of the students.

They are evidence based, aligned with college and work expectations, include rigorous content and skills, and are informed by other top performing countries.”

“Educational standards help teachers ensure their students have the skills and knowledge they need to be successful by providing clear goals for student learning.” They are really just guidelines for students, making sure they are on the right track with their learning.

But state officials said they are still concerned that self-imposed standards are not good enough and that online programs are not consistent in providing students with high-quality education.

“We’re very interested in making sure that as many good opportunities are available to students as possible,” added David Longanecker, president of the Western Interstate Commission.

he group called for a more uniform accreditation standard across state lines as well as a formal framework for getting a conversation on regulation started. Even with the framework in place, however, the state representatives said it will be difficult to get state-education agencies and state legislatures to agree. “Trying to bring 50 different people together is really tough,” Mr. Longanecker said.

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.

why peer review processes often avoid, rather than facilitate, sound judgment

humans do not differentiate between computers and people in their social interactions.

no matter what "everyone knows," people act as if the computer secretly cares

Measuring student engagement is important for WSU

The Critical Friend is a powerful idea, perhaps because it contains an inherent tension. Friends bring a high degree of unconditional positive regard. Critics are, at first sight at least, conditional, negative and intolerant of failure. Perhaps the critical friend comes closest to what might be regarded as 'true friendship' - a successful marrying of unconditional support and unconditional critique. [

The issue that needs to be addressed and spectacularly has been avoided is whether controlled studies (one group does the articulation of and then measurement of outcomes, and a control group does what we have been doing before this mania took hold) can demonstrate or falsify the claim that outcomes assessment results in better-educated students. So far as I can tell, we instead gather data on whether we have in fact been doing outcomes assessment. Not the issue, people. jwp

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

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

Alice didn't tell me about the topics of her research; instead she listed the number of articles she had written, where they had been submitted and accepted, the reputation of the journals, the data sets she was constructing, and how many articles she could milk from each data set.

colleges and universities have transformed themselves from participants in an audit culture to accomplices in an accountability regime.

higher education has inaugurated an accountability regime—a politics of surveillance, control, and market management that disguises itself as value-neutral and scientific administration.