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.

Online Education: The Elements for Better Learning

Some news (probably not enough) is being made of the recent U.S. Department of Education study, "Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies." It's a meta-analysis of 99 studies in the research literature from 1996 to 2008, with an emphasis on 2004-2008 (46 studies from that time period were of sufficient scope to permit the calculation of effect sizes).

The report finds that online courses can have outcomes that are superior to those of classroom-based learning. However, the real news is in the final pages of the study, in Discussions and Implications (p. 51):

"Clark (1983) has cautioned against interpreting studies of instruction in different media as demonstrating an effect for a given medium inasmuch as conditions may vary with respect to a whole set of instructor and content variables. That caution applies well to the findings of this meta-analysis, which should not be construed as demonstrating that online learning is superior as a medium. Rather, it is the combination of elements in the treatment conditions, which are likely to include additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration, that has proven effective. The meta-analysis findings do not support simply putting an existing course online, but they do support redesigning instruction to incorporate additional learning opportunities online."

In other words, interventions that can increase time on task and engagement with learning materials and other students, are likely to improve student learning. This is not news, but an important confirmation. Online tools give us more options for achieving increased engagement, but online does not--and these authors say it emphatically--magically, or in itself, produce better teaching and learning.

Wary of Budget Knife, Teaching Centers Seek to Sharpen Their Role

• Wary of Budget Knife, Teaching Centers Seek to Sharpen Their Role

  I'd have called it, "Wary of Budget Knife, Teaching Centers More Vitally Necessary Than Ever." This Chronicle piece suggests repeatedly that teaching centers ought to be anxious, and quotes a few anxious folks. I couldn't agree more, though, with Connie Cook, who speaks to the contrary.
  
  Not everyone is so gloomy. Constance E. Cook, who directs Michigan's teaching center, says that despite the high-profile closures, she believes more centers have opened than have been shuttered during the last two years. (No hard numbers exist, but most people interviewed for this story shared Ms. Cook's instinct.) "In this era in which people care so much about student learning, faculty teaching centers are generally thriving," Ms. Cook says. But she says that some of the recent closures, especially at an institution as large as Missouri, have made her colleagues anxious. As budgets tighten, she says, teaching centers need to strengthen their ties with other university offices and make sure that administrators see that the various offices are working in harmony.

• tags: facultydevelopment, teaching, centers, economy

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

Men Men Men Men

The day's news brings two items concerned with improving educational outcomes for boys and men.

In one, Grand Meadow (Albert Lea, MN) Superintendent, Joe Brown, announces that in his district, beginning this fall, four 7th- and 8th-grade classes (art, vocal music, industrial technology and physical education) will offer gender-segregated instruction. Brown cites Leonard Sax and others in support of this decision to give young men specific attention that may improve their education. Grand Meadow has a disproportionate number of boys with discipline problems, in special education, and underperforming academically. The Austin Daily Herald article reports that "Brown and his wife, Minnesota Rep. Robin Brown (DFL-Moscow Township), and possibly other staff are attending a National Association for Single Sex Public Education conference in Atlanta in October. Robin Brown, an art teacher in Albert Lea, sits on the Higher Education committee at the capitol and is also a proponent of the gender education." Brown was not specific as to the specific teaching approaches or learning experiences that might improve these students' outcomes.

In the other, the San Francisco Bay View publishes an article on the University of Pennsylvania's Grad Prep Academy, seeking 10 young Black males who will enroll as juniors in fall, 2009, as potential Ph.D. scholars. The 10 men selected will receive mentoring and specific preparation to prepare them to apply for graduate school. They will also be eligible for a full scholarship in the university's Graduate School of Education. The program is intended to address the disparity in doctoral awards by gender and race: only 2.1 percent of all Ph.D.s degrees awarded at American universities in 2008.

Both are interesting responses to particular gaps in K-12 and higher education outcomes.

Change: Now's our chance?

In a time such as this, when it's truly clear for once that things must change, you can't turn around without hearing loud calls for change and loud change-rakers.

Here are a couple thought-provoking "change we must" pieces from the week's higher ed news.

End the University as We Know It
Mark C. Taylor, chair of the department of religion at Columbia
April 27 New York Times

(and a reasonable response from Dean Dad at Inside Higher Ed)

In a Time of Crisis, Colleges Ought to Be Making History
Goldie Blumenstyk
May 1 Chronicle of Higher Education

New Book on Student Plagiarism: Blum

Inside Higher Ed today posted an article, "It's Culture, Not Morality," about Susan D. Blum's new book on student plagiarism (My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture)"The book, about to appear from Cornell University Press, is sure to be controversial because it challenges the strategies used by colleges and professors nationwide. In many ways, Blum is arguing that the current approach of higher education to plagiarism is a shock and awe strategy — dazzle students with technology and make them afraid, very afraid, of what could happen to them."

As usual with Inside Higher Ed articles, the comments are as good as the piece itself. I side with those who say no matter what theoretical frame you bring to it, practically speaking, the only way around plagiarism is to create assignments that make it very, very difficult.

Teachers: Can't predict 'em, can't live without 'em

Malcolm Gladwell (Mr. Tipping Point) in the December 15, 2008 New Yorker, says, "Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession has to be more rigorous in how it evaluates young teachers…"

Gladwell draws comparisons to the recruitment and training of pro quarterbacks and financial advisers, and points to this kind of research about teachers: "A group of researchers—Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard’s school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress—have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom."

Compelling challenge. Of course, it's an idea that would only apply to K-12 teachers. Right?

Blogged with the Flock Browser

AAC&U Meeting in Minneapolis October, 2009

How's this for exciting? The Association of American Colleges and Universities is holding a national meeting on ethics and civic engagement here in town next fall. Call for proposals open through January 30, 2009. Let's make sure our public colleges and universities are well represented!

Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility: Deepening Student and Campus Commitments

Network for Academic Renewal Conference

October 1-3, 2009

Minneapolis, Minnesota

About the Conference

Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility: Deepening Student and Campus Commitments will bring together faculty, student affairs personnel, academic administrators, students, and others to explore how to move education for personal and social responsibility to the center
of institutional culture and academic practice. The program will feature promising practices that develop students’ civic engagement and social responsibility in both a local and global context; personal and academic integrity; ability to examine and understand differing (and often competing) perspectives; and ethical and moral reasoning.

The central premise of the conference is that personal integrity and ethics cannot be developed in isolation from a commitment to and engagement with others, and that students’ ethical, civic, and moral development must be addressed as part of their basic responsibilities as learners.

Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility | Conference Overview

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Face to Face with History

On a day that brings news from our neighboring state of new public swastikas at the University of North Dakota, here's also news of real possibility, of teaching for peace, not hate.

Bernard Reuter, director of St. Cloud State University's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Education, is leading a tour of 200+ students from the St. Cloud area to Germany and France, where they will study directly the effects of the Nazi holocaust on the area of Alsace-Lorraine. They will also take part in performing a choral work (by Stephen Paulus and commissioned by Fr. Michael O'Connell when he was pastor at Minneapolis's Basilica of St. Mary), "To Be Certain of the Dawn."

One of the things that makes this trip so resonant, and so hopeful, is that St. Cloud State University is the institution most known in the news of the last few years for swastika graffiti and other evidence of anti-Semitic hate. I look forward to learning about the impact of this visit on these students and the faculty who accompany them. And I wish them all a wonderful trip, full of learning and deeply human interaction.

January Thaw

We're warming up here at CTL. Hope you are, too.

Science Teaching Matters

An article in today's New York Times compares the sense of science education crisis in the post-Sputnik era and now.

It's a good general-interest update piece that pulls together a lot of the key current issues:

• We need more and better science teachers in high-school classrooms (coincidentally, that's a current MnSCU initiative: More and Better STEM Teachers).
• Teaching methods in science need broadscale improvement: too many memorization-based approaches, not enough conceptual and hands-on work.
• The sequence of science education: it presents the arguments of the "physics first" scientists, who say that what made sense in the 19th century (biology, chemistry, then physics) is upside down, and based on the idea that biology is a "descriptive" science. (The American Association of Physics Teachers articulates this approach at http://www.aapt.org/Policy/physicsfirst.cfm).
  
• A lot of disagreement about what the problems are.

The piece got me sifting through the dregs of my own files on STEM. Almost a decade ago, in 1999, Gibbs and Fox wrote an article in Scientific American, "The False Crisis in Science Education," that summed up the then-current sense of angst, and argued that there were really two problems underlying the "crisis:"
1. General science education in elementary and postsecondary schools isn't focused on science that is useful to most people in their adult lives, and
2. There are plenty of college students prepared and willing to take on advanced science education, but they get weeded out in gatekeeper introductory courses. The shortage is thus "controlled by universities, not by secondary schools."

As the NYT article notes, the "current" crisis has been roiling since at least 1983 and "A Nation at Risk." It will probably continue on bubbling until we can agree on what the problems really are.

Moodlin'

One of our summertime CTL colleagues, Yolanda Williams, shared with us today this List of Top 100 Tools for Learning from the UK Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies. It's a pretty good checklist of current instructional technologies. (Yolanda's note, though, pointed up an item in the Chronicle that took issue with the relative absence of library databases.)

In checking out the list, a couple things jumped out for me:

1. Our own (Lake Superior College's) Barry Dahl is one of the contributors to the Top 10/Top 100 list.
2. There's only one course management system on the list, and that's the open source Moodle. When I attended the TAOSE group's discussion on open-source IMS a couple weeks ago, a majority of the colleges and universities represented (outside of our system) were either adopting or experimenting with Moodle. Take a look at it; it's grown into a really flexible IMS.

As an adherent of social- or sociocognitive learning theory and fan of non-commercial, user-modifiable open source software, I'm fascinated by moodle, which was developed to serve both ends. It was initially developed by Martin Dougiamas, who articulates on the Moodle home page his own and Moodle's (imagine!) pedagogical philosophy.

The Minority Experience

This month's issue of About Campus explores a number of issues related to students' racial, social class, and cultural diversity.

It closes with an article by Craig Bennett of the University of Cincinnati. He teaches a course called "Strength Through Cultural Diversity," in which he gives students the assignment to "actively participate in a cultural event in which they can experience minority status." While the assignment requires involvement in just a single event, Bennett recounts the anxiety, panic, and resistance of his students. They are mostly white, and have grown up in white neighborhoods and schools.

They are often creative about finding new experiences: attending a gay nightclub, using a wheelchair at a shopping mall, or attending unfamiliar religious rituals. "However," says Bennett, "the experience that typically generates the most awareness and challenge is white students attending an African American church."

Besides resulting in good discussion and new awareness, the experiences end up with students reporting new more welcoming behavior, improved understandings--and giving highly positive end-of-course evaluations.

So now the question is: in what courses and disciplines--beyond the "diversity course" might this be a useful assignment? And, like Bennett, I'll ask you the starter question: "Who can share an experience in which you were the only person representing your race in a room?"

CTL Tutorials--please comment

We welcome comments about your experience at the CTL TUTORIALS:

• Grading: Making it Fair, Time Efficient, and Conducive to Learning
  
• An e-Handbook for New Faculty
  
• Getting Started Online
  
• Instructional Design for eLearning
  
• Active Learning in an Online Environment
  
• Active Learning in Diverse Classrooms
  
• Learning to Write in All Fields
  
• Civility in the Classroom: Classroom Management Strategies
  
• Effective ESL Peer/Student Tutoring
  
• Are you a Reflective Practitioner?
  
• Program Advisory Committee Handbook
  
• "I Hear You, Do You Hear Me?" Teaching in Racially Diverse Classrooms
  
• My Story, Your Story: Building Respect for Diversity in the Classroom
  
• It's Not What You Tell Them That Counts: Getting Started With Active Teaching
  
• Designing Plagiarism-Proof Assignments: Deterring Scholarly Dishonesty