Thursday, April 21, 2011

On remediation and writing in higher ed

This thoughtful piece by Mike Rose (UCLA) discusses why it is so important to continue providing access to education for all and suggests we need to break out of disciplinary and methodological silos to do it effectively. As you may or may not have noticed, I frequently include posts about reading and writing in this ostensibly education oriented blog, precisely because I see being able to read and write as so essential to success in higher (or K-12 or continuing) education. My friend and writing instructor extraordinaire, Sara Jameson, wrote her thesis on Mike Rose so I always pay particular attention to what he has to say. Here are a couple of excerpts from this piece:
"...some of the problems with college remediation as it is typically executed. It is built on a set of assumptions about language and cognition that have long ago been proven inadequate, like the belief that focusing on isolated grammar exercises will help students write better prose. The work students are doing isn’t connected to the writing they are required to do in their other courses, academic or vocational.... Most of us are trained and live our professional lives in disciplinary silos. Let me give you one example of how mind-boggling, and I think harmful, this intellectual isolation can become. In all the articles I’ve read on remediation in higher education journals, not one cites the 40 years’ worth of work on basic writing produced by teachers and researchers of writing. There is even a Journal of Basic Writing that emerged out of the experiments with open admission at CUNY in the 1970s. Not a mention of any of it. Zip."

To be or not to be? Librarians as faculty?

Here at UNLV, Librarians are indeed tenure-track, with similar [albeit discipline-specific] expectations for performance and evaluation in job, service, and scholarship. This isn't true everywhere and this article, "Faculty No Longer," from today's (4/21/11) edition of Inside Higher Ed describes the recent decision by a community college system to change the status of librarians to professional staff in order to save money. This is followed by discussion about why academic librarians are generally considered to be faculty.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Tips for improving student presentations

ProfHacker offers a simple set of guidelines in today's (4/20/11) post for avoiding DBP (death by powerpoint):
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/challenging-the-presentation-paradigm-with-the-115-rule/32691?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Start with the Pecha Kucha formula: maximum 20 slides at 20 seconds per slide
Spur creativity and mastery of the material by superimposing the 1:1:5 rule...

"In addition to the time constraint of the Pecha Kucha, your presentation must also follow the 1/1/5 rule. That is, you must have at least one image per slide, you can use each exact image only once, and you should add no more than five words per slide. "

Professor Sample says these guidelines have improved student presentations overall, although nothing is foolproof :-).

New enrollment figures for elementary/secondary schools

Some highlights from the new NCES report on the  2009-2010 year.


• About 49 million students attended 98,817 operating public elementary/secondary schools in the 2009–10 school year.

• Almost 1.6 million students were enrolled in 4,952 charter schools in 2009-10.

• Across all active regular public schools with students, the pupil/teacher ratio in 2009-10 was 16.1. Pupil/teacher ratio ranged from 10.9 in Vermont to 23.4 in Utah. [ Nevada's overall ratio was 19.4]

Full report is available here: http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2011345

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

WWC comparison of elementary math programs

Illustration Friday - Resolutionphoto © 2011 Caroline (via: Wylio)
"The study examined the relative effectiveness of four early elementary school math curricula: Investigations in Number, Data, and Space; Math Expressions; Saxon Math; and Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley Mathematics.
The study analyzed data on more than 8,000 first- and second-grade students in 110 schools in 12 districts in 10 states....

more info
For first graders, the authors found no statistically significant differences in student math achievement among the curricula after adjusting results for multiple curricula comparisons within the same analysis.

For second graders, one difference was statistically significant after taking multiple curricula comparisons into account. Second-grade students attending Saxon Math schools scored 0.17 standard deviations higher than students attending Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley Mathematics schools, roughly equivalent to moving a student from the 50th to the 57th percentile in math achievement."
Additional information about the programs studied is here:
http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/publications/quickreviews/QRReport.aspx?QRId=170






Monday, April 11, 2011

Helping students learn to read journal articles

This article from Inside Higher Ed offers some excellent guidance is offered for how we can help students learn to read good sources...
http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/instant_mentor/essay_on_teaching_students_to_read_journal_articles

Students are writing but don't have anything to say...?

Two researchers reporting at the annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication said that students “...are not selecting authoritative, meaningful sources and not reading them carefully. They are not, in a word, engaging.” 164 student research papers (with 1,832 research citations) produced in first-year composition classes were analyzed. Institutions in 12 states from diverse regions of the country, including community colleges and four-year public universities, private colleges and universities, and religiously affiliated and Ivy league institutions were represented.
"Only 9 percent of the citations were categorized as summary [ as opposed to quotes, paraphrasing or patchwriting]. 'That's the stunning part, I think: 91 percent are citations to material that isn't composing,' said Jamieson. 'They don't digest the ideas in the material cited and put it in their own words.' "
Read a fuller report of their findings in today's (April 11) Inside Higher Ed.















REL Study Examines Student Bullying and Victimization in Grades 3–8

Bully Free Zonephoto © 2008 Eddie~S | more info (via: Wylio)
The study examined aggression, victimization, and approval of aggression among elementary and middle grades students in two Oregon counties. Data for the study were collected in 2005 through surveys; participation was voluntary. Students reported on beliefs about aggression, how frequently they were the victims or the perpetrators of either overt aggression (verbal and physically aggressive behavior intended to threaten or physically harm another student) or relational aggression (behaviors intended to harm another student’s relationships with others). Iincludes detailed summaries of students’ responses to specific questions about victimization and bullying.

Click here http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/projects/project.asp?projectID=248 to view this new release by the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance.