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Jim Aird

How to Improve Public Online Education: Report Offers a Model - Government - The Chroni... - 18 views

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  • patchwork collection of online courses that's difficult for students to navigate.
  • they can improve their online-education efforts to help students find streamlined, affordable pathways to a degree.
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  • "Taken together, these steps result in something that looks less like an unorganized collection of Internet-based classes, and more like a true public university."
  • I am always miffed at the people within Higher Ed who recognize that nothing about pedagogy has changed in 50 years except computers and PowerPoint but they still rationalize that nothing needs changed or fixed.
Tracy Tuten

The Irascible Professor on "The SAT that isn't (the death of aptitude.)" - 2 views

  • It used to be that the SAT was distinguished from its competitor the ACT by the fact that the former was seen as measuring aptitude and being effectively un-coachable, while the latter was a gauge of achievement in learning.
  • At the risk of sounding pejorative, I'd say that I was expecting the test to be a measure of who I was, while some of my fellow students and their parents treated it more as a test of how they could present themselves to admissions officers.&nbsp; And while I wouldn't suggest that people tend to think of it in these terms, I believe that the latter perception relies on the academically damaging belief that an individual student's capabilities need not matter to what goals he sets for himself.&nbsp; That perception leads people to believe that there is something inherently unfair about a test that you can't study for.
  • And if after four years of high school they haven't developed much skill for reasoning, that's okay – they can take preparatory courses to learn how to fake it for an exam, and let that be their stepping stone toward academic accomplishment.&nbsp; As a society that values the promise of formal education more than the satisfaction of actual learning, we have precipitated the death of aptitude.&nbsp; We are afraid to acknowledge that it exists, because aptitude, whether the product of inborn talent or effective rearing, makes some people better suited than others for certain goals.
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  • Lori Gottlieb, writing in The Atlantic last year, claimed that child-rearing in the current generation has been excessively focused on preserving self-esteem.&nbsp; As an illustration of one symptom of this, Gottlieb quoted clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel as saying that parents are actually relieved to be told that their struggling children are learning disabled, so that today "every child is either learning disabled, gifted, or both – there's no curve left, no average."&nbsp; To claim a learning disability is the only way to set legitimate lower benchmarks for performance.&nbsp; Kids are never just bad at anything anymore, because that's seen as being more harmful to self-esteem.
  • But my worries about the individual effects of the death of aptitude are dwarfed by my concern for its effect on the institutions of higher learning that those individuals are entering.&nbsp; College is not a one-directional relationship of dispensing knowledge to young people.&nbsp; The entire institution gains or loses value on the basis of what its students put into it.&nbsp; By telling students with low aptitude and low interest that they can, should, and must strive to accomplish the same things as their higher-achieving peers, I fear that we're saturating higher education with people who subtract value from their institutions by committing minimum effort and lowering whatever curve still exists for the measurement of performance.
  • We all seem to agree that standards for college readiness need to improve, but you'll hear virtually no one asserting that when those standards are not met, the student ought to leave off college altogether, or to defer it until they have acquired, by sheer will or by natural intellectual growth, the aptitude to be successful at the proper level.&nbsp; Indeed, just as common in criticism of education is the sentiment that we must see to it that more children enter and complete college.&nbsp; But if those children don't have the aptitude to do so, the goal of improving college curriculum contradicts the goal of college-for-all.
  • We can't keep pretending that there is no such thing as aptitude and that every child has equal cause to vie for the topmost positions of intellectual esteem.&nbsp; It does a disservice to the student and the school in kind.
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    An essay on what the SAT says about society's view of education, accomplishments, aptitude, and self-esteem. 
Don Doehla

AVID | Decades of College Dreams - 31 views

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    AVID, Advancement Via Individual Determination, is a college readiness system for elementary through higher education that is designed to increase schoolwide learning and performance. The AVID College Readiness System (ACRS) accelerates student learning, uses research based methods of effective instruction, provides meaningful and motivational professional learning, and acts as a catalyst for systemic reform and change.
Randolph Hollingsworth

2011 College Completion Data | Complete College America - 4 views

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    Includes state profiles from 33 states - includes a 20 page summary, tables, separate profiles for each state and full report; uses the following metrics: total degrees and certificates, graduation rates for certificate/assoc/bacc, time to degree, credits to degree, remediation enrollment, remediation graduation, transfers
Randolph Hollingsworth

National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation's Report Card: Writing 2011 - 2 views

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    Asa Spencer of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute writes in the Education Gadfly Weekly: "Traditionalists cringe, tech buffs rejoice: This latest NAEP writing assessment for grades eight and twelve marks the first computer-based appraisal (by the "nation's report card") of student proficiency in this subject. It evaluates students' writing skills (what NAEP calls both academic and workplace writing) based on three criteria: idea development, organization, and language facility and conventions. Results were predictably bad: Just twenty-four percent of eighth graders and 27 percent of twelfth graders scored proficient or above. Boys performed particularly poorly; half as many eighth-grade males reached proficiency as their female counterparts. The use of computers adds a level of complexity to these analyses: The software allows those being tested to use a thesaurus (which 29 percent of eighth graders exploited), text-to-speech software (71 percent of eighth graders used), spell check (three-quarters of twelfth graders), and kindred functions. It is unclear whether use of these crutches affected a student's "language facility" scores, though it sure seems likely. While this new mechanism for assessing kids' writing prowess makes it impossible to track trend data, one can make (disheartening) comparisons across subjects. About a third of eighth graders hit the NAEP proficiency benchmark in the latest science, math, and reading assessments, compared to a quarter for writing. So where to go from here? The report also notes that twelfth-grade students who write four to five pages a week score ten points higher than those who write just one page a week. Encouraging students to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) is a start."
Randolph Hollingsworth

New study challenges popular perceptions of AP | Inside Higher Ed - 38 views

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    Denise Pope, senior lecturer at Stanford's Graduate School of Education and co-founder of the advocacy group Challenge Success, questions the assertions by the College Board about AP exams
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