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Ruth Howard

Debating the Value of College in America : The New Yorker - 9 views

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    Higher education and the justifications for it or not. The New Yorker a riveting read.
Martin Burrett

Book: Uncharted Territories by @Hywel_Roberts & @DebraKidd - 0 views

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    "In their new book, Debra Kidd and Hywel Roberts firmly place teachers, and ultimately their students, in a range of different locations, where the learning inhabits, offering a fantastically imagined context with prompts, ideas and illustrations helping exploration and discovery. In a fascinating resource book, which can be used in many subject areas, across most stages in schools, the authors break down each chapter destination (including a forest, castle, graveyard, ship, zoo, cave, theme park) into a story starter - introducing the location and providing provocative initial questions; key landmarks (either for primary or secondary aged students), a stopover - providing a more in-depth account of their learning journey; stepping stones - context based tasks provided to also prod your imagination, and; the bedrock - offering a debrief of the processes, helping teachers understand the justification of the processes undertaken."
Ed Webb

Peter Thiel: We're in a Bubble and It's Not the Internet. It's Higher Education. - 4 views

  • Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe. The excesses of both were always excused by a core national belief that no matter what happens in the world, these were the best investments you could make. Housing prices would always go up, and you will always make more money if you are college educated.
  • consumption masquerading as investment
  • The implicit promise is that you work hard to get there, and then you are set for life.  It can lead to an unhealthy sense of entitlement. “It’s what you’ve been told all your life, and it’s how schools rationalize a quarter of a million dollars in debt,”
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  • It’s something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing. Whenever Darwinism is invoked it’s usually a justification for doing something mean. It’s a way to ignore that people are falling through the cracks, because you pretend that if they could just go to Harvard, they’d be fine. Maybe that’s not true.”
  • he’s not advocating that stopping out of school is for everyone any more than he’s arguing everyone should be an entrepreneur
Ed Webb

The Fall, and Rise, of Reading - 1 views

  • During a normal week — whether in two-year or four-year colleges, in the humanities or STEM — about 20 to 40 percent of students do the reading.
  • The average college student in the United States spends six to seven hours a week on assigned reading, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement (which started tracking the statistic in 2013). Other countries report similarly low numbers. But they’re hard to compare with the supposed golden age of the mid-20th century, when students spent some 24 hours a week studying, Baron says. There were far fewer students, they were far less diverse, and their workload was less varied — “studying” meant, essentially, reading books.
  • more students are on track to being ready for college-level reading in eighth and 10th grade” — about 62 percent — “than are actually ready by the time they reach 12th grade.
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  • The scores of fourth- and eighth-graders on reading tests have climbed steadily since the 1990s, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But those of 12th-graders have fallen. Just 37 percent of high-school seniors graduate with “proficiency” in reading, meaning they can read a text for both its literal and its inferential meanings.
  • While those with bachelor’s and graduate degrees maintained the highest levels of literacy overall, those groups also experienced the steepest declines. Just 31 percent of college graduates were considered proficient readers in 2003, by that test’s definition, down from 40 percent in 1992.
  • “We quickly realized that unless you actually assign a grade for the out-of-class component, students just won’t do it,”
  • “Harvard students are really not that different in terms of how they behave. They’re bright, they’re academically more gifted,” she says. But they’re also “incredibly good at figuring out how to do exactly what they need to do to get the grade. They’re incredibly strategic. And I think that’s really true of students everywhere.”
  • turns the classroom into a social-learning environment
  • “We have young people who are coming away from high school with a very sort of test-driven training — I won’t call it education — training in reading.”
  • Teaching students how to read in college feels “remedial” to many professors
  • Faculty members are trained in their disciplines. “They don’t want to be reading teachers. I don’t think it’s a lack of motivation,” says Columbia’s Doris Perin. “They don’t feel they have the training.” Nor do they want to “infantilize” students by teaching basic comprehension skills, she says.
  • Tie reading to a grade: Quizzes and assigned journals, which can determine about 20 percent of the final grade, can double or even triple reading compliance — but rote formats that seem to exist for their own sake can encourage skimming or feel punitive.“Do away with the obvious justifications for not doing the reading,” says Naomi Baron, at American U. “If you summarize everything that’s in the reading, why should students do it?”Ask students to make arguments, compare, and contrast — higher- order skills than factual recall.Using different media is fine, but maintain rigor. “You can do critical reading of anything that has essentially an academic argument in it,” says David Jolliffe, at the U. of Arkansas. Video and audio, in fact, may sometimes be better than textbooks — what he calls “predigested food.”Explicitly tie out-of-class reading to in-class instruction, going over points of confusion and connecting lessons and texts to each other.Teach reading skills. “Hundreds” of strategies exist, all of which make “explicit the processes that proficient readers use without thinking about it,” says Doris Perin, at Columbia.
  • “A lot of faculty members, myself included, are saying, If they’re not doing the reading, we can get unhappy, we can get angry,” she says. “Or we can do something about it.”
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