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"To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test By PAM BELLUCK Published: January 20, 2011 Taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know, according to new research. It actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques. The research, published online Thursday in the journal Science, found that students who read a passage, then took a test asking them to recall what they had read, retained about 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who used two other methods. One of those methods - repeatedly studying the material - is familiar to legions of students who cram before exams. The other - having students draw detailed diagrams documenting what they are learning - is prized by many teachers because it forces students to make connections among facts. These other methods not only are popular, the researchers reported; they also seem to give students the illusion that they know material better than they do. In the experiments, the students were asked to predict how much they would remember a week after using one of the methods to learn the material. Those who took the test after reading the passage predicted they would remember less than the other students predicted - but the results were just the opposite. "I think that learning is all about retrieving, all about reconstructing our knowledge," said the lead author, Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University. "I think that we're tapping into something fundamental about how the mind works when we talk about retrieval.""

"Biology Professors Use Cloud Computing to Reach Students January 28, 2011, 2:00 pm By Tushar Rae To help reduce the number of dropouts in freshman biology courses, professors at the University at Buffalo have turned to the power of collaboration and cloud computing to build an online teaching tool designed to explain concepts better than a textbook can. The tool, called Pop!World, provides a visual way to map evolution. It's the work of Bina Ramaurthy, a research associate professor in the department of computer science and engineering; Jessica Poulin, a research assistant professor in the department of biological sciences; and Katharina Dittmar, an assistant professor of biological sciences. Cloud computing allows for different levels of network resources to be devoted to Pop!World based on the number of students using it, Ms. Ramaurthy says. The addition of Pop!World, which will serve as a lab component, is part of a redevelopment of the freshman biology curriculum that aims both to address attrition and to add mathematical rigor to the program, Ms. Poulin says. The hope is that it will visually engage students. "Teaching from a text gets boring to them," says Ms. Ramaurthy. Though Pop!World has been used for only one semester on the campus, which is part of the State University of New York, Ms. Poulin says she already sees the effects. On a survey of students who were retaking freshman biology during the fall semester, and thus had experienced the course with and without Pop!World, positive reviews of Pop!World, she says, were "off the charts.""

"January 30, 2011 Scholars Create Influential Journal for About $100 a Year By Jennifer Howard A group of herpetologists-researchers who study reptiles and amphibians-has been quietly demonstrating that it's possible to put together a well-regarded, researcher-run journal with the tiniest of budgets and no help from a publisher. The journal, Herpetological Conservation and Biology, caught my eye as a well-developed example of a movement for grass-roots scholarly publishing that has been rapidly picking up speed. The herpetology publication, founded in 2006, is an online-only, open-access, peer-reviewed journal with a budget of about $100 a year. (That money comes out of the editors' pockets.) Unlike most science journals, it charges no author or download fees. It has a submission-to-publication turnaround time measured in weeks or at most a few months. And it has just hit a milestone: The editors learned in December 2010 that HCB will be included in Journal Citation Reports, a service run by the commercial publisher Thomson Reuters that calculates impact factors for journals-a significant measure of importance for many researchers. HCB will receive its first impact rating in 2012 or 2013, and the editors expect the journal to rate highly. That credential will help reassure potential contributors, especially researchers who don't yet have tenure, that publishing an article in HCB will be good for their careers. Judged by the number of visitors to the site, the journal has caught on. In its first year, 2006, it received just over 6,000 unique visitors. In 2010 it received 42,288, according to the editors. Readers from more than 160 countries came to the site. And the number of submissions that are deemed good enough to be sent out for peer-review stage-more than 100 in 2010-has more than doubled since 2006, according to Malcolm L. McCallum, the managing editor. He says HCB's acceptance rate for submissions that make it to peer review is running about 50

"June 12, 2011 In Follow-Up, 'Academically Adrift' Students Show Worrisome Levels of Debt and Joblessness, Author Says By Scott Carlson Some people have been talking about a bubble in higher education. Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education at New York University, doesn't quite buy it. But he did tell a room of college administrators here that higher education was going through a sea change: Once upon a time, if you took the financial risk of getting a college degree, no matter your major, you would do extremely well in life, compared to someone with only a high-school degree. Times have changed, he said. "It's not that college degrees aren't worthwhile," but the returns are diminished, he said. "After 2008, "you can't be so sure that the college credential, waving that paper in the air, is enough to give you the job that is going to pay enough that it didn't matter how many loans you took out." Mr. Arum appeared here at the Summer Seminar, a conference put on by the Lawlor Group and Hardwick-Day, two higher-education consulting firms based in the Twin Cities, to discuss the book he wrote with Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011). By now, most academics are familiar with the book and its provocative thesis: Students, the authors contend, spend a great deal of time socializing and relatively less time studying effectively. As a result, they don't seem to be learning as much as we might like to think they are, despite the high grades many have. "They might not hand out A's on college campuses like they're candy," he said, "but we hand out B's like they are candy. You've got to really work today to get something below a B." The book represents the work the researchers did in tracking through their first two years of college 2,300 students who entered 24 representative four-year institutions in the fall of 2005. "By the time the book came out, we had data not just on the first tw

"If Engineers Were to Rethink Higher Ed's Future September 27, 2011, 10:27 pm By Jeffrey Selingo Atlanta - Walk into a college president's office these days, and you'll probably find a degree hanging on the wall from one of three academic disciplines: education, social sciences, or the humanities and fine arts. Some 70 percent of college leaders completed their studies in one of those fields, according to the American Council on Education. You're unlikely to discover many engineering degrees. Just 2 percent of college presidents are engineers. Yet, when we think of solving complex problems, we normally turn to engineers to help us figure out solutions. And higher education right now is facing some tough issues: rising costs; low completion rates; and delivery systems, curricula, and teaching methods that show their age. So what if engineers tackled those problems using their reasoning skills and tested various solutions through simulations? Perhaps then we would truly design a university of the future. That's the basic idea behind Georgia Tech's new Center for 21st Century Universities. The center is officially described as a "living laboratory for fundamental change in higher education," but its director, Rich DeMillo, describes it in terms we can all understand: higher education's version of the Silicon Valley "garage." DeMillo knows that concept well, having come from Hewlett-Packard, where he was chief technology officer (he's also a former Georgia Tech dean). Applying the garage mentality to innovation in higher ed is an intriguing concept, and as DeMillo described it to me over breakfast on Georgia Tech's Atlanta campus on Tuesday, I realized how few college leaders adopt its principles. Take, for example, a university's strategic plan. Such documents come and go with presidents, and the proposals in every new one are rarely tested in small ways before leaders try to scale them across the campus. After all, presidents have l

"May 2, 2011 Balance Your Budget by Cleaning House By Michael J. Bugeja As we approach the end of another academic term, some institutions are still living off of stimulus money that did little to inspire solutions to mammoth budget cuts looming for the 2012 academic year, which promises to be one of the most difficult in memory for higher education. I direct the journalism school at Iowa State University, a land-grant institution that strives to make education affordable in good or bad economic times. We've experienced layoffs, firings, and furloughs, and are still in the process of reorganizing within my college of liberal arts and sciences. My school is the largest academic program in the largest college at ISU, and our budget has been slashed by more than 20 percent in the past four years. Nevertheless, in the next academic year, we'll balance our budget without increasing workload for most professors, while graduating students sooner-thanks to streamlined curricula, enhanced by advising. To accomplish those goals, the journalism school and other units at the university have adopted or are in the process of adopting several of the methods below: 1. Curtail curricular expansion. Nothing is more responsible for the increasing cost of higher education than ever-expanding pedagogies. Too many professors want their course loads to harmonize with their research interests, and many create courses based on the latest technology. Others are unwilling to teach basic introductory courses, preferring to farm those out to underpaid adjuncts. Worse yet, administrators typically reward professors for new course creation. Expanding pedagogies are a part of our academic culture, but they must be curtailed. Early adopters should introduce new technology into existing classes, and hires should be made not on the promise of creating new curricula but on teaching within the existing ones. Promotion-and-tenure documents should be revised to reward innovation within the present c

"Wikipedia Aims Higher July 11, 2011 BOSTON - The United States' foremost custodian of public records had advice for professors whose colleagues still turn up their noses at Wikipedia. "If all else fails, you can tell them, 'If it's good enough for the archivist of the United States,' " said David Ferriero, who was appointed to the post in 2009, " 'we should at least take a look at it on campus.' " Five years ago, many professors had pegged Wikipedia as a pariah. Now, four years into its first coordinated effort to recruit professors and students to its cause, Wikipedia's overseers believe they have successfully recast the free, publicly edited encyclopedia as an ally of respectable scholarship. Two dozen universities now have courses where students are working on Wikipedia as part of their formal coursework. Many of those campuses have "Wikipedia ambassadors" tasked with helping professors weave writing and editing Wikipedia entries into the syllabus. Even Ferriero's office at the National Archives and Records Administration now employs a "Wikipedian in residence" in charge of fostering relationships with galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Late last week, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the encyclopedia, took another step toward assuming the mantle of an accessory of higher education: it held an academic conference. The first-ever Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit convened professors who had incorporated Wikipedia into their teaching, as well as others who were considering doing so, to talk about pros and cons of assigning students to improve the publicly edited online encyclopedia. The foundation also made it clear that Wikipedia plans to expand its relationship with academe. When the foundation started recruiting professors several years ago for its Public Policy Initiative - an effort to improve articles relating to U.S. public policy - it already had its eye set on developing "mechanisms and systems that would enabl

"The Disruption Is Here September 15, 2011 - 3:00am Michael Staton A recent essay here by Robert Archibald and David Feldman challenged the idea of a "higher education bubble." They argued that a degree, even an expensive degree, is still worth it. They correctly pointed out that a degree is not an asset that responds to supply and demand like other markets. Their point that "on average most of us are average, and the data show that college is a very good investment for the average person," is true enough. But their real message was: there's no need to panic, the status quo is still working. I disagree. Said essay is part of a broader continuing discussion, this round set off by Peter Thiel's statements surrounding his 20 Under 20 Program encouraging students to "stop out" of college - with the idea that they are more likely to achieve entrepreneurial breakthroughs on their own than with more formal education. Thiel is a managing partner at one of the venture investors, Founders Fund, in my company, Inigral. Ironically, Inigral serves educational institutions with our Schools App, and most of our clients are traditional colleges and universities. (Schools App is a community platform inside Facebook and on mobile devices that helps to welcome the incoming class during the admissions, orientation, and first-year experience, making sure students find their "fit" and get off on the right foot.) So my company helps keep students in college while Thiel is going around talking about the potential value of "stopping out." Given this irony, people often ask me what I think about Thiel's comments suggesting that higher education is in a bubble. Here's what I think: He is mostly right, but the future prospects for education are more optimistic than Thiel suggests for two primary reasons: 1) Though it looks like an economic bubble, it's unlikely that there will be a precise moment in which the market crashes. Instead, there will be a slow market shift towards amor

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ended 2011 with a grand announcement: It would broadcast massive, open online courses - equal in rigor to its on-campus offerings - to tens of thousands of non-enrolled, non-paying learners around the world. Eventually, the university would offer these students a pathway to some sort of credential.

Salman Khan, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Harvard Business School, was working as a hedge fund manager when he began posting videos on YouTube six years ago to tutor young family members in math. That led to the 2008 creation of the Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization that has built a free, online collection of thousands of digital lessons (nearly 3,000 of them created by Mr. Khan himself) and exercises in subjects ranging from algebra to microeconomics. Education Week Staff Writer Lesli A. Maxwell recently interviewed Mr. Kahn about the evolution of the academy and its potential for changing K-12 education.

The recent bankruptcy declaration by Kodak, one of the nation's most trusted brands for consumers, which once held a market share in excess of 90 percent, is stunning. Kodak mistook America's century-long love affair with its products as a sign of market permanency, missing the fact that camera phones, flip cameras and online sharing would erode its brand and render it irrelevant.American higher education should take heed because it is facing a similar challenge, with implications far more important than the loss of a major corporation

Every other Monday, right before class ends, Muhammad Zaman, a Boston University biomedical engineering professor, hands out a one-page form asking students to anonymously rate him and the course on a scale of one to five. Enlarge This Image Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times Muhammad Zaman, who teaches biomedical engineering at Boston University, graphs the results of his evaluations and e-mails to explain how he will make changes. News, data and conversation about education in New York. Join us on Facebook » Follow us on Twitter » .It asks more, too: "How can the professor improve your learning of the material?" "Has he improved his teaching since the last evaluation? In particular, has he incorporated your suggestions?" "How can the material be altered to improve your understanding of the material?" "Anything else you would like to convey to the professor?" College learning assessments and professorial ratings come in many forms, with new ones popping up all the time. Ratemyprofessors.com has been going strong for years, and almost everywhere, colleges ask students to fill out end-of-term evaluations - and increasingly, midterm evaluations as well. Many professors with large lecture classes swear by clickers that help them keep tabs on how well their students are following the material. Some online courses include dashboards that let professors see which students are stuck, and where. And thousands of professors use some variation of K. Patricia Cross's "One-Minute Paper" approach, in which, at the end of each class, students write down the most important thing they learned that day - and the biggest question left unanswered. But even in an era when teacher evaluations and learning assessments are a hot topic in education, Dr. Zaman stands out in his constant re-engineering of his teaching: He graphs the results the day he collects them (an upward trend is visible), sends out an e-mail telling the class abo

The per-pupil cost of educating a student through virtual education is significantly less, on average, than the national average for brick-and-mortar schools, a paper from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute says. The report also says that fully virtual programs are less expensive, on average, than blended-learning programs, which combine face-to-face and online learning, but the paper does not address whether student outcomes are equal.

"A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man 'Academy' on YouTube Are his 10-minute lectures the future? Salman Khan, a former financial analyst, has created 1,400 educational videos and posted them to YouTube. "My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me," he says. By Jeffrey R. Young The most popular educator on YouTube does not have a Ph.D. He has never taught at a college or university. And he delivers all of his lectures from a bedroom closet. This upstart is Salman Khan, a 33-year-old who quit his job as a financial analyst to spend more time making homemade lecture videos in his home studio. His unusual teaching materials started as a way to tutor his faraway cousins, but his lectures have grown into an online phenomenon-and a kind of protest against what he sees as a flawed educational system. "My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me," he told me recently. The resulting videos don't look or feel like typical college lectures or any of the lecture videos that traditional colleges put on their Web sites or YouTube channels. For one thing, these lectures are short-about 10 minutes each. And they're low-tech: Viewers see only the scrawls of equations or bad drawings that Mr. Khan writes on his digital sketchpad software as he narrates."

"Humans: Why They Triumphed How did one ape 45,000 years ago happen to turn into a planet dominator? The answer lies in an epochal collision of creativity. By Matt Ridley By MATT RIDLEY [EVOLUTION] Masterfile Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years-the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies. Once "progress" started to produce new tools, different ways of life and burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world, culminating in agriculture, cities, literacy and all the rest. Yet all the ingredients of human success-tool making, big brains, culture, fire, even language-seem to have been in place half a million years before and nothing happened. Tools were made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands of years and the ecological impact of people was minimal. Then suddenly-bang!-culture exploded, starting in Africa. Why then, why there? The answer lies in a new idea, borrowed from economics, known as collective intelligence: the notion that what determines the inventiveness and rate of cultural change of a population is the amount of interaction between individuals. Even as it explains very old patterns in prehistory, this idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead-because ideas are having sex with each other as never before. The more scientists discover, the bigger the evolution puzzle has become. Tool-making itself

"October 31, 2010 YouTube U. Beats YouSnooze U. By Salman Khan Every day during the academic year, tens of thousands of students across the country sit passively in 300-person lecture halls listening to 90-minute lectures on freshman or sophomore-level calculus, chemistry, or biology (and this isn't even counting the students who have decided to punt the lecture altogether). Some students take notes to keep up. Most are lost or bored or both, trying their best to stay awake. Professors stare at a sea of blank faces while delivering a lecture not much different from the ones they have delivered in each of the past 10 years. Students go back to their dorms to work on problem sets in a vacuum. They fight through 1,000-page, 10-pound tomes to get at the nuggets of information they really need or can comprehend. Many give up and copy from their peers. This cycle continues for several weeks, until just before the midterm or final exam, when students cram everything they should have learned into one or two sleepless nights. Regardless of whether they can prove proficiency in 70, 80, or 90 percent of the material, they are "passed" to the next class, which builds on 100 percent of what they should have learned. Fast-forward six months, and students are lucky to retain even 10 percent of what was "covered.""

"Bridge Programs for Underprepared Adults Could Improve College Completion By Jennifer Gonzalez "Bridge" programs that help adult students acquire the skills necessary to succeed in postsecondary education are gaining momentum and could play a vital role in fulfilling the nation's degree-completion agenda, according to the results of a new study by the Workforce Strategy Center. The study, called BridgeConnect, surveyed 515 programs in 345 communities across the nation that are using the concept as part of job-training efforts. The intent of the survey, which was commissioned by the Joyce Foundation and conducted by the Workforce Strategy Center, was to take a composite look at the nation's bridge programs. There is no clearinghouse that keeps track of such efforts, which have many different sources of funds, standards, target populations, goals, and outcomes. A clearer picture could help policy makers grasp the diverse work that bridge programs accomplish, which could lead to a scaling-up of programs and even the formation of national standards, said the authors of a report on the survey. The report, "Building a Higher Skilled Workforce," will be posted on the Web site of the Workforce Strategy Center"

"As scholars, we are always involved in one project or another. Whether it is a funded grant project, a writing project, development (as in web/game/interactive/software/etc), or even curriculum/teaching work, it often becomes quite a challenge to manage things (especially if many collaborators are involved). In situations such as these, many of us turn to tools that can keep our projects well managed and under control-some tools are online, some desktop, some tools are open source, and some are proprietary. All are different, with strengths and weaknesses which will ultimately determine their value to your particular scholarly project. Among the vast cornucopia of collaboratively inclined options, I would like to suggest that people have a look at Open Atrium. The brainchild of Development Seed, Open Atrium is essentially an intranet in a box. It allows for the creation of group/project spaces in which users can have conversations, preserve knowledge, track progress, and share files."