Group items tagged

"We discuss our implementation of targeted pre-reading assignments with an associated online quiz in two science classes, one physics and one biology. Our goal was to create a pre-class assignment that helped students recognize the benefits of reading before class. Students were asked to take part in a survey about how and why they completed the pre-reading assignments. We found that 80% of students read the textbook on a regular basis, which is much higher than reported in previous studies. Also nearly 3/4 of students reported using productive strategies for completing the reading assignment and cited reading prior to class as being helpful to their learning. Student self-reports were checked against electronic logs and were found to be highly accurate. Moreover, these results were nearly identical between the physics and biology courses."

"report and provide valuable data about learning processes. The main disadvantage is that these measures can often be highly resource- intensive-especially if they require training observers, time to complete extensive observations, and coding videos or field notes."

"EXECUTIVE SUMMARY A new business landscape is emerging wherein a multitude of small entities will bring products and services to market using the infrastructure and platforms of large, concentrated players. The forces driving this are putting new and mounting pressures on organizations and individuals while also opening up new opportunities. But traditional postsecondary educational institutions are not supporting individuals in successfully navigating this not-too-distant future, nor are the educational institutions immune to these forces. Perhaps more than any other sector, postsecondary education is being affected by changing demand as the learning needs and preferences of the individual consumer rapidly evolve. Increasingly, individuals need both lifelong learning and accelerated, on-demand learning, largely as a response to the pressures of the broader evolving economic landscape. Rarely seen amid gross national statistics on the skills gap, employability, completion rates, and tuition hikes is a serious discussion of the unmet, and increasingly disparate, needs and expectations of individual learners. The costs to the individual are increasing, and the payoff is less certain. Students of all ages are more comfortable with technology and are less tied to traditional notions of the academy as fewer American adults between the ages of 18 and 22 achieve a four-year, full-time, campus-based degree.1 At the same time, technological advances reduce the lifespan of specific skills, and an increasingly globalized and automated workforce needs to continuously learn and retrain."

"[Psychological] ... interventions had a large effect on the performance of learners in less-developed countries, doubling their persistence and essentially eliminating the global achievement gap" (Psychological interventions, ¶9).