The Skills College Graduates Need

This is hardly surprising news, but at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities today, AAC&U's president released a report detailing the findings of a survey of employers.  What did the employers say about college graduates?  That they need more rounded skills, such as communication, and the need higher levels of knwlede.  The Inside HigherEd article states: "But, most surveyed said, colleges and universities have room for improvement in preparing students to be workers."

This is certainly impoertant information for those of us who are out there teaching. All classes need to teach what employers say they want most.  Again from the article; this is what the employers say:

Employers said colleges should place more emphasis on preparing students "to effectively communicate orally and in writing" (89 percent), to use "critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills" (81 percent) and to have "the ability to apply knowledge and skills to real-world settings through internships or other hands on-experiences" (79 percent).

Hospital Care--Does Nursing Education Make a Difference!

How do we raise the standards of nursing education in the United States and at the same time increase the number of qualified and competent nursing practitioners? Does nursing education make a difference? Beverly Malone, CEO of the National League for Nursing, explores these questions in an article Choosing Sides in the January 14, 2010, version of Inside Higher Ed. She quotes recommendations from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in the book Educating Nurses: A Call for Radical Transformation where Carnegie recommends a requirement that nurses have a bachelor’s degree before entering into practice. While Malone largely agrees with much of the Carnegie recommendations, she disagrees with the requirement that nurses have a bachelor’s degree before being able to practice. A major factor for this disagreement is due to the fact that “. . . more than half of all registered nurses are ADN-credentialed only.” With such a huge percentage of registered nurses to work with, how could this radical recommendation be implemented in a timely fashion without affecting the care of patients? All in all, however, there are some very intriguing key findings and observations in this book; and I highly recommend reading the book highlights; just click on the above link.

Whether or not practicing nurses should have more education than an Associate Degree of Nursing has been an issue of debate for several decades, but not much progress has been made in moving the ADN practitioners into higher degrees such as Bachelors of Science in Nursing or Masters of Science in Nursing. After all, it’s a big job—there are almost 3 million nurses today. But let’s try to remember—it’s our health care we’re talking about, and more opportunities for health professionals can lead to better health care for us. Watch for results from President O’Bama’s 2010 Budget Proposal for $125 Million for Title VIII Nursing Education Loan Repayment Program. And let us know what’s happening on your campus in the field of educating nurses.

Does Service Learning Really Help?

Writing in today's Chronicle of Higher Education, Stan Katz blogs about the issues surrounding service learning.  Are students really doing the "learning" part of the experience, or is it just more like plain old community service? He makes some good points, especially that the service-learning experience shouild be closely managed by the institution (so as to not unduly burden the organization where students are doing the service) and should be tightly connected to the students' curriculum. He writes, "I suppose there may be a context in which a committed instructor could turn 'painting park benches' into a teachable moment, but I have long thought that the community-service component of service learning ought to be tightly integrated into the subject-matter content of the service learning course."

I'm a big fan of service learning and have used it extensively in my classes in years past.  Now might be a good time for all other faculty members to seriously consider incorporating service-learning experiences into their classes, and take the points in Katz's article as tips.

Oh -- and don't forget that CTL is sponsoring two Webinars about service-learning presented by Minnesota Campus Compact.  Get more information here and here.

Yet Another Good STEM Idea: Integrated Curriculum

Higher ed reporting suffers from the same weaknesses as does higher education itself: too little understanding of and attention paid to the scholarship of higher education. As a result, the latest idea is too often promoted as a new or first idea, and there's little sense of history or connection. Example? We're in trouble in STEM education. Do we take a scholarly approach to the analysis and solution of the trouble? Not often. And especially when it comes to teaching problems and solutions, we are susceptible (or resistant) to the latest decent-sounding idea as an idea--not as evidence. This morning's "latest idea" for improving STEM education comes from Princeton president Shirley Tilghman's speech yesterday to the Council of Independent Colleges. Tilghman, a molecular biologist, recommends more interdisciplinarity in introductory science courses, and cites positive results from experiments at Princeton involving seminars and a two-year Integrated Science Curriculum, as developed by David Botstein and colleagues. Sounds good. Now how do those ideas, how do the Princeton results, fit in the body of research on effective science instruction, and how can we encourage more of it, more carefully planned and applied? For instance, how can we predict whether ideas that work at private liberal arts colleges will be a good fit for students, classrooms and departments at our two-year colleges and comprehensive universities?
scienceed / 06 - Inside Higher Ed

More on Men: What's the Mystery?

Sara Goldrick-Rab, in a commentary piece in the Chronicle, cites research offering a number of alternative explanations for the increasing gap between men's and women's success in college. The clearest evidence, she says, points to female successful performance in college and academic preparation for college. Her argument sounds tautological--but maybe it's just me.

• The So-Called Boy Mystery (Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education)

  "According to many, sources for the gender differential in higher education are a complete "mystery," a puzzle, a whodunit that we may be intentionally ignoring. Yes, there are numerous potential explanations for the underrepresentation of men in higher education -- and in particular the growing female advantage in terms of bachelor's degree completion. "

  tags: gender, gap, highered

The comments posted in response to the article included one from Dan Dutton providing a link to a speech given by Roy Baumeister at the 2007 American Psychological Association conference in San Francisco. Makes for provocative related reading.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Math Redesign Means More Student Success

An article in this month's "The Learning MarketSpace," a publication of the National Center for Academic Transformation, offers a fascinating review of a math success story. The article is written by Carol Twigg, who founded the center.

At Jackson State Community College in Tennessee faculty members were fretting about the high failure rates in their remedial and developmental math courses, so the decided to try an experimental redesign of the course.  They really threw out all the rules by consolidating three courses into 12 "modules." Creatively, the faculty members were able to do this without upending the traditional register-for-a-course, take-the-course, get-a-grade-for-the-course administrative structure of college registrars. Students were required to only pass the number of modules deemed necessary for their desired course of study, and could self-pace their work in a math center staffed most of each day.

Success rates are amazing!  You can see the results clearly in the article.Here is an intriguing thought that Twigg writes in the article: "JSCC has decided that it is more important to prepare students to succeed in the future than to remediate the past. That is a decision that every institution struggling with low student success rates in developmental math will need to make." Fasscinating stuff.

Zemsky's Big 3: Learning, Attainment, Money

Robert Zemsky has written two commentary pieces recently in Inside Higher Ed. In the first, on September 4, he discussed topics that higher ed reformers are distracted by and, in his view, should leave alone. In the second, on September 14, he discussed about as clearly as has anyone, the three topics that should demand the academy's attention, action and reform: learning, attainment, and money. I couldn't agree more with his selection, and think that these would make a great core for the Board of Trustees' next revision of the strategic plan.

While I applaud Zemsky's summary, I do think that his discussion of the specific challenges in our assessment of learning is a bit shallow, and leads him only in the end to suggest that brain research will in coming decades help us better know whether and what students have learned. He describes the current state of affairs as argument between those in "two linguistic cul de sacs"--champions (or at least testers) of rote learning, and a supposedly opposite camp that teaches for creativity and critical thinking. It's a false dichotomy. "Experts in the process of learning," know that learning involves a great deal of memorization, rehearsal, and automaticity, often as a necessary precursor to or basis for analysis, synthesis and creativity. Experts in their own fields usually have to teach for a long time, and with a good deal of critical attention, before they gain the understanding of student learning that helps them know how to structure learning toward ever more sophisticated ends.

Zemsky still makes a strong case for the need for the investors in higher education to act as though learning is the important goal: important not just to teachers and students, but to society:

In fact, the absence of adequately defined testable learning outcomes reflects the fact that getting a good answer to the question [how and what are students learning?] has to date not proved very important. The United States continues to invest vast sums of money in an enterprise whose most tangible outcomes are only tangentially related to learning. Were this country -- or any country -- to decide it was important to rethink those investments, I think the academy would suddenly get very good at evaluating which teaching and learning modalities were the best. The question then becomes how best to create those conditions.

That's the question all right.