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Matthew Tedder

Accountable Talk: (Un)intended Consequences - 2 views

www.accountabletalk.com/...uninteded-consequences.html

education

shared by Matthew Tedder on 25 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Matthew Tedder on 25 Oct 10
     
    Nutty method of teacher evaluation
Corinna Lo

Why Did 17 Million Students Go to College? - Innovations - The Chronicle of Higher Educ... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...27634

education

shared by Corinna Lo on 23 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Corinna Lo on 23 Oct 10
     
    "Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor's degree."
Gary Brown

Home | AALHE - 2 views

www.aalhe.org

assessment

shared by Gary Brown on 22 Oct 10 - Cached
  • The Association for Assessment of Learning in Higher Education, Inc. (AALHE) is an organization of practitioners interested in using effective assessment practice to document and improve student learning.
  • it is designed to be a resource by all who are interested in the improvement of learning,
  • Gary Brown on 22 Oct 10
     
    Our membership begins November 1
Joshua Yeidel

News: Measuring 2-Year Students' Success - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...data

assessment accountability

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 21 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 21 Oct 10
     
    Measuring student success for federal purposes in community colleges -- and only one passing mention of learning. The factory model prevails -- stamp that widget (student) and send it out the door (they sell themselves!)
Gary Brown

Why Did 17 Million Students Go to College? - Innovations - The Chronicle of Higher Educ... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...27634

future of education costs

shared by Gary Brown on 21 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants.  All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.
  • I have long been a proponent of Charles Murray’s thesis that an increasing number of persons attending college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attributes usually necessary for success at higher levels of learning. 
  • As more and more try to attend colleges, either college degrees will be watered down (something already happening I suspect) or drop-out rates will rise.  
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The relentless claims of the Obama administration and others that having more college graduates is necessary for continued economic leadership is incompatible with this view
  • Putting issues of student abilities aside, the growing disconnect between labor market realities and the propaganda of higher education apologists is causing more and more persons to graduate and take menial jobs or no job at all. This is even true at the doctoral and professional level –there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.Ds, other doctorates, or professional degrees.
  • “Estimating Marginal Returns in Education,”
  • In other words, even if on average, an investment in higher education yields a good, say 10 percent, rate of return, it does not follow that adding to existing investments will yield that return, partly for reasons outlined above.
  • should we be subsidizing increasingly problematic educational programs for students whose prior academic record would suggest little likelihood of academic much less vocational success?
  • I think the American people understand, albeit dimly, the logic above.
  • Higher education is on the brink of big change, like it or not.
  • Gary Brown on 21 Oct 10
     
    The tone is not the same as Berliner's, but the numbers suggest WSU's and others goals merit a second look.
Gary Brown

Empowerment Evaluation - 1 views

eevaluation.blogspot.com

evaluation

shared by Gary Brown on 20 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Empowerment Evaluation in Stanford University's School of Medicine
  • Empowerment evaluation provides a method for gathering, analyzing, and sharing data about a program and its outcomes and encourages faculty, students, and support personnel to actively participate in system changes.
  • It assumes that the more closely stakeholders are involved in reflecting on evaluation findings, the more likely they are to take ownership of the results and to guide curricular decision making and reform.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The steps of empowerment evaluation
  • designating a “critical friend” to communicate areas of potential improvement,
  • collecting evaluation data,
  • encouraging a cycle of reflection and action
  • establishing a culture of evidence
  • developing reflective educational practitioners.
  • cultivating a community of learners
  • yearly cycles of improvement at the Stanford University School of Medicine
  • Gary Brown on 20 Oct 10
     
    The findings were presented in Academic Medicine, a medical education journal, earlier this year
Gary Brown

Graphic Display of Student Learning Objectives - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...27863

outcomes graphics

shared by Gary Brown on 20 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Creating SLOs or goals for a course is simple to us, usually.  We want students to learn certain skills, we create assignments that will help students reach those goals, and we’ll judge how well they have learned those skills. 
  • This graphic displays the three learning objectives for the course, and it connects the course assignment to the learning objectives.  Students can see—at a glance—that work none of course assignments are random or arbitrary (an occasional student complaint), but that each assignment links directly to a course learning objective.
  • The syllabus graphic is quite simple and it’s one that students easily understand.  Additionally, I use an expanded graphic (below) when thinking about small goals within the larger learning objectives.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • In fact, The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map: Communicating Your Course (Linda Nilson) is an interesting way to organize graphically an entire course.
  • An example of a graphic syllabus can be found in Dr. W. Mark Smillie’s displays of his philosophy courses [.pdf file].
  • Some students won’t care.  Moreover, they rarely remember the connection between course content and assignments.  The course and the assignments can all seem random and arbitrary.  Nevertheless, some students will care, and some will appreciate the connections.
  • Gary Brown on 20 Oct 10
     
    Perhaps useful resource
Gary Brown

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

chronicle.com/...124920

grants

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

Assessing Learning Outcomes at the University of Cincinnati: Comparing Rubric Assessmen... - 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?
Joshua Yeidel

Systems Week: Glenda Eoyang on Complexity Demands Simplicity | AEA365 - 2 views

aea365.org/blog

Assessment

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 18 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 18 Oct 10
     
    "Complex systems tend to exist in one of three states. Each state needs a different evaluation design."
Joshua Yeidel

Higher Education: Assessment & Process Improvement Group News | LinkedIn - 2 views

www.linkedin.com/news?viewArticle=&articleID=228514267&gid=1171287&type=news&item=228514267&articleURL=http%3A%2F%2Fnews%2Egoogle%2Ecom%2Fnews%2Furl%3Fsa%3Dt%26fd%3DR%26usg%3DAFQjCNFtGpxVvvSMHWFLYe7182CFKjFmIQ%26url%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fchronicle%2Ecom%2

Assessment accountability

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 18 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 18 Oct 10
     
    "Colleges and universities have transformed themselves from participants in an audit culture to accomplices in an accountability regime."
  • Joshua Yeidel on 18 Oct 10
     
    A philosophical critique of a rapidly-approaching "metric future", with "comensuration" (assigning meaning to measurements) run amok. While the application of student learning outcomes given in the article is not ours, the critique of continuous quality improvement challenges some of our assumptions.
Gary Brown

The Future of Wannabe U. - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 2 views

chronicle.com/...124917

outcomes numbers

shared by Gary Brown on 18 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • annabe administrator noted that the recipient had published well more than 100 articles. He never said why those articles mattered.
  • And all we have are numbers about teaching. And we don't know what the difference is between a [summary measure of] 7.3 and a 7.7 or an 8.2 and an 8.5."
  • The problem is that such numbers have no meaning. They cannot indicate the quality of a student's education.
  • or can the many metrics that commonly appear in academic (strategic) plans, like student credit hours per full-time-equivalent faculty member, or the percentage of classes with more than 50 students. Those productivity measures (for they are indeed productivity measures) might as well apply to the assembly-line workers who fabricate the proverbial widget, for one cannot tell what the metrics have to do with the supposed purpose of institutions of higher education—to create and transmit knowledge. That includes leading students to the possibility of a fuller life and an appreciation of the world around them and expanding their horizons.
  • But, like the fitness club's expensive cardio machines, a significant increase in faculty research, in the quality of student experiences (including learning), in the institution's service to its state, or in its standing among its peers may cost more than a university can afford to invest or would even dream of paying.
  • Such metrics are a speedup of the academic assembly line, not an intensification or improvement of student learning. Indeed, sometimes a boost in some measures, like an increase in the number of first-year students participating in "living and learning communities," may even detract from what students learn. (Wan U.'s pre-pharmacy living-and-learning community is so competitive that students keep track of one another's grades more than they help one another study. Last year one student turned off her roommate's alarm clock so that she would miss an exam and thus no longer compete for admission to the School of Pharmacy.)
  • Even metrics intended to indicate what students may have learned seem to have more to do with controlling faculty members than with gauging education. Take student-outcomes assessments, meant to be evaluations of whether courses have achieved their goals. They search for fault where earlier researchers would not have dreamed to look. When parents in the 1950s asked why Johnny couldn't read, teachers may have responded that it was Johnny's fault; they had prepared detailed lesson plans. Today student-outcomes assessment does not even try to discover whether Johnny attended class; instead it produces metrics about outcomes without considering Johnny's input.
  • Gary Brown on 18 Oct 10
     
    A good one to wrestle with.  It may be worth formulating distinctions we hold, and steering accordingly.
Gary Brown

Online Colleges and States Are at Odds Over Quality Standards - Wired Campus - The Chro... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...27586

quality

shared by Gary Brown on 14 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Like state regulators, colleges are also facing hard decisions on quality standards. With such a diversity in online institutions, Ms. Eaton said it will be difficult to impose a uniform set of standards. “If we were in agreement about quality,” she said, “somebody’s freedom would be compromised.”
  • Gary Brown on 14 Oct 10
     
    I am dismayed to see Longanecker's position on this.
Gary Brown

Grazing: Criteria for great assessment tools - 1 views

sehrmann.blogspot.com/...or-great-assessment-tools.html

assessment

shared by Gary Brown on 13 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Gary Brown on 13 Oct 10
     
    perhaps these sum to utility, but number 5---generativity- would benefit from some unpacking.-
Gary Brown

Online Colleges and States Are at Odds Over Quality Standards - Wired Campus - The Chro... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...27586

quality accreditation

shared by Gary Brown on 13 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • the group called for a more uniform accreditation standard across state lines as well as a formal framework for getting a conversation on regulation started.
  • College officials claim that what states really mean when they discuss quality in online education is the credibility of online education in general. John F. Ebersole, president of Excelsior College, said “there is a bit of a double standard” when it comes to regulating online institutions; states, he feels, apply stricter standards to the online world.
  • Gary Brown on 13 Oct 10
     
    I note the underlying issue of "credibility" as the core of accreditation. It raises the question, again:  Why would standardized tests be presumed, as Excelsior does, to be a better indicator than a model of stakeholder endorsement?
Theron DesRosier

the creative internet (106 things) - 1 views

docs.google.com/...view

shared by Theron DesRosier on 12 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 12 Oct 10
     
    The world is full of interesting things. Use google chrome for this if possible. It will take a little time to download but it has a lot of creative material worth viewing.
Theron DesRosier

Disaggregate power not people - Part two: now with more manifesto @ Dave's Educational ... - 2 views

davecormier.com/...rt-two-now-with-more-manifesto

cormier Personal learning environments social networking

shared by Theron DesRosier on 12 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 12 Oct 10
     
    "Definition 2 - disaggregating power There is a very different power relationship between being given a space which 'enables contexts' and 'allows supports' for a user and a space that you build and support for yourself. It dodges those institutionally created problems of student mobility, of losing the connections formed in your learning and gives you a professional 'place' from which you can start to make long term knowledge network connections that form the higher end of the productive learning/knowing that is possible on the web. The power is disaggregated in the sense that while attending an institution of learning you are still under the dominance of the instructor or the regulations surrounding accreditation, but coming to your learning space is not about that dominance. The power held (and, i should probably add, that you've given to that institution in applying for accreditation/learning it's not (necessarily) a power of tyranny) by the institution only touches some of your work, and it need not impede any work you choose to do. Here's where I get to the part about the 'personal' that's been bothering me The danger in taking definition two as our definition for PLE is that we lose sight of the subtle, complex dance of person and ecology so eloquently described by Keith Hamon in his response to my post. Maybe more dangerously, we might get taken up as thinking that learning is something that happens to the person, and not as part of a complex rhizome of connections that form the basis of the human experience. Learning (and I don't mean definitions or background) and the making of connections of knowledge is something that is steeped in complexity. At each point we are structured in the work (written in a book, sung in a song, spoken in a web session) of others that constantly tests our own connections and further complexifies our understanding. This is the pattern of knowledge as i understand it. It is organic, and messy, and su
Joshua Yeidel

GOVT Week: David Bernstein on Top 10 Indicators of Performance Measurement Quality | AE... - 2 views

aea365.org/blog

Assessment accountability

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 11 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 11 Oct 10
     
    Not surprisingly, the #1 indicator of performance measurement quality is "usefulness".
Gary Brown

International Group Announces Audit of University Rankings - International - The Chroni... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...124882

ranking colleges

shared by Gary Brown on 11 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • the organizer unveiled a project that would effectively rank the rankers.
  • As rankings proliferate around the world, they are increasingly having a direct impact on the decisions of students, academic staff, institutions, and policy makers, but each of those groups differs in its use of rankings and the sophistication it brings to evaluating them.
  • IREG's principles, which emphasize clarity and openness in the purposes and goals of rankings, the design and weighting of indicators, the collection and processing of data, and the presentation of results.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Whether the audit will actually work remains to be seen. Many of the people who attended the meeting expressed deep skepticism and unease about how effectively a rigorous and independent audit procedure could be applied.
  • rankings have become an intensely competitive business, and that any audit procedures would need to be clear and open enough to ensure that competitors were not pronouncing on one another's work.
  • Gary Brown on 11 Oct 10
     
    Sheesh
Gary Brown

Book review: Taking Stock: Research on Teaching and Learning in Higher Educat... - 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?
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