New data on Latino/a college completion

From this morning's (4/11/12) Inside Higher Ed...
Excelencia in Education on Tuesday released data showing Latino college completion rates, by state. "The state-level data on Latino college completion show that today’s investment, or lack thereof, in Latino academic preparation and degree attainment can have a compounding effect on state populations, economies, and communities in the near future,” said Deborah Santiago, the organization's co-founder and vice president for policy and research.

State level and summary reports are available for download here: http://www.edexcelencia.org/eaf/50states

Peer instruction works!

An article in today's (April 11, 2012) Chronicle reports on a study testing whether or not peer instruction is actually helping students learn vs. just pressuring those less sure of themselves into conforming. An excerpt:
"The questions were given in pairs of “isomorphic” questions, having different contexts and “cover stories” but assessing the same core concepts. First, a question was asked using the usual vote-discuss-revote model. Then the second, isomorphic question was asked with only individual voting taking place.
If the peer discussion was merely creating an environment of peer pressure to vote the same as the knowledgeable students, then what you’d expect is that the percentage of students answering correctly would be relatively low on the first vote on Question 1, then high on the revote, then back to low again on Question 2. But that’s not what the study found! On the first vote, an average of about 50% of students were voting correctly. On the revote of the first question, that average went up to just shy of 70%. On the first vote of the second question — testing the same concept but in a new context — the percent voting correctly was above 70%."
The study cited is: M. K. Smith, W. B. Wood, W. K. Adams, C. Wieman, J. K. Knight, N. Guild, and T. T. Su. Why Peer Discussion Improves Student Performance on In-Class Concept Questions.
Science 2 January 2009: 323 (5910), 122-124. [DOI:10.1126/science.1165919]

Oldest EdD program in the country to close

As reported in today's (Mar. 29) Inside Higher Ed, the Harvard Graduate School of Education will be "eliminating the Ed.D. and replacing it with a Ph.D. program. The university's decision will close the first American Ed.D., a program Harvard has offered for 90 years..." GSE Dean Yoshikawa offers this rationale, "This will produce what we think is the first truly universitywide Ph.D. in education, with the primary purpose being to better link the intellectual resources in the university to produce leaders in the field of education."

Jill Perry, co-director of the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate, comments that, "Harvard’s move was a validation of the need to differentiate between the two kinds of doctoral degrees and re-emphasize the role and purpose of each. She said the Carnegie project was doing just that, and had worked with more than 50 schools of education to create frameworks for Ed.D. programs, or professional practice doctorates. The goal, she said, was to equate such a degree with other professional degree programs rather than with a Ph.D."

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/03/29/country%E2%80%99s-oldest-edd-program-will-close-down#.T3SD443fFY8.email#ixzz1qWTMDvmj

New IPEDS data available

Data on --financial aid, retention and graduation rates, etc. for higher ed. "...findings include:

• In fall 2010, Title IV institutions enrolled 19 million undergraduate and 3 million graduate students. Of the 19 million undergraduates, 56 percent were enrolled in 4-year institutions, 42 percent in 2-year institutions, and 2 percent in less-than-2-year institutions.
• Approximately 58 percent of full-time, first-time students attending 4-year institutions in 2004 who were seeking a bachelor’s or equivalent degree completed a bachelor’s or equivalent degree within 6 years at the institution where they began their studies.
• Overall, first-time undergraduate student 1-year retention rates were higher for full-time students (72 percent) than for part-time students (44 percent)."

To view the full report please visit
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2012280

NCES post-secondary education data available

To improve postsecondary education data users’ access to data, NCES has released the College and Career Tables Library as part of DataLab – NCES’s postsecondary education data tool suite, which includes PowerStats and QuickStats.

The Tables Library lets you
• Browse 5,000+ tables from NCES’s postsecondary publications
• Search for tables by keywords; narrow search results by data source and publication year; and browse for tables by topic using explore topics

The tables also include link back to the original publications and you can download the files used to create the tables within PowerStats (for those based on datasets that are within PowerStats).

To access the Tables Library, please visit http://nces.ed.gov/datalab.

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.

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

Projections of Education Statistics to 2019

New report out from NCES that covers "statistics on enrollment, graduates, teachers, and expenditures in elementary and secondary schools, and enrollment and earned degrees conferred expenditures of degree-granting institutions. For the Nation, the tables, figures, and text contain data on enrollment, teachers, graduates, and expenditures for the past 14 years and projections to the year 2019. For the 50 States and the District of Columbia, the tables, figures, and text contain data on projections of public elementary and secondary enrollment and public high school graduates to the year 2019."
I will also put a link to this source in the Education subject guide on the "Statistics and Demographics" page. http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2011017

US News will start ranking teacher prep programs

Couple of articles describing U.S. News & World Report's intentions to start a survey of 1,000 teacher prep programs, utilizing the National Council on Teacher Quality methodology.

From PR Newswire:
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-news--world-report-and-national-council-on-teacher-quality-launch-comprehensive-review-of-nations-teacher-preparation-programs-114163659.html

From Inside Higher Ed:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/19/qt#248429

National Center for Public Policy & Higher Ed to close

A short news item from Inside Higher Ed (Dec. 13, 2010) notes that the higher ed policy body is slated to close next July.  An editorial by two board members in the latest issue of the policy center's publication, CrossTalk, discusses the decision

Newest data on college retention and graduation

photo © 2008 Jackie Bucci | more info (via: Wylio)
Nice summary from Inside Higher Ed today (Dec. 2, 2010) on the graduation rates of the 2003-04 cohort of students entering college. 49% had earned a certificate or degree from a post-secondary institution within 6 years and these rates have not improved since the last cohort (1994-95) was surveyed. The article provides a table comparing data from the two cohorts. This survey looks at retention and graduation from the student rather than the institutional perspective so is able to offer information on the relative completion rates of students who do and don't transfer, as well as comparisons between those who start at community colleges vs. 4-year institutions. Data on different ethnic groups is also provided. A link to the full report from NCES/IES is here: http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2011151

New COACHE report on best institutions for tenure track faculty

Harvard's Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education has published the results of their most recent job-satisfaction survey of tenure-track faculty in four-year institutions. They state, "two inescapable conclusions: first, that positive climates and cultures are the sine qua non of pre-tenure faculty retention and success; and second, that climates and cultures—and institutional quality—are defined and defended by tenured faculty in their roles as colleagues, collaborators, mentors and chairs."


This Inside Higher Ed article (Nov. 15, 2010) provides an overview with one summary table. The criteria include clarity of tenure expxectations, climate/culture/collegiality, and "nature of the work" in several areas (research, teaching, etc.). The COACHE site has links to the report and all tables (about half way down on the left under "latest news")

National survey finds college students lack basic research skills

The newest in a series of studies and reports from Project Information Literacy is summarized in today's (Nov. 10, 2010) Chronicle of Higher Ed. I wanted to highlight just a couple of their findings that I can attest to based on my own years of experience working with student researchers...

"Alison J. Head, a co-principal investigator for the project, said the results suggest that today’s students... [are]basically taking how they learned to research in high school with them to college, since it’s worked for them in the past... findings show that college students approach research as a hunt for the right answer instead of a process of evaluating different arguments and coming up with their own interpretation.  'Not being aware of the diverse resources that exist or the different ways knowledge is created and shared is dangerous.' she said. 'College is a time to find information and learn about multiple arguments, and exploring gets sacrificed if you conduct research in this way.'”

Improving group work in your classes

Good article in today's CHE (Mon., Nov. 8) on using team based learning (TBL) to improve group work in classes (large and small). Included a link to an informative video of TBL used in several classes at UT-Austin. Included interviews with faculty and students, overviews of the key steps to make this process work, etc. http://www.utexas.edu/academic/ctl/teaching/tblvideo.php
There was also a link to a web-site for a community of practitioners, with a growing "case bank" of activities: http://teambasedlearning.apsc.ubc.ca/
If you're already doing a successful TBL activity, submit a poster proposal (Dec. 15 deadline). The national conference will be here in Las Vegas next March: http://tblc.roundtablelive.org/

Searching for better researchers

Today's (Sept. 29) Inside Higher Ed had this article, "Searching for better research habits," describing a couple of presentations at the recent Ithaka Sustainable Scholarship Conference.  I couldn't agree more with those interviewed that we need to be teaching students concepts of research, not just how to use the tools. Google's Daniel M. Russell, a senior research scientist for search quality, said, "One of the things we have to do is not teach the little twiddlybits about search...Technical knowledge of... search interface ... becomes obsolete, because the interfaces are constantly changing. So I don’t want to teach them algorithms...I don’t want to teach them what’s in the index and all that stuff...I do want to teach them what’s possible.” In other words: If students do not know what is out there to find, they cannot search for it effectively.

Top 100 Universities for Federal R & D Expenditures

2009 data on institutions receiving/spending the most federal research dollars:
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Top-100-Institutions-in/124626/
And no, UNLV is not in the list. The accompanying article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed discusses the large increases in corporate funding of research at universities.

U. of Washington a case study of declining state support for higher ed

The more successful they are, the less money they get...at least that seems to be the equation at universities that strive to be the research and education leaders in their state. As a two-time alumna of University of Washington graduate programs, this article in the Chronicle (Aug. 29, 2010) caught my attention. It describes the perverse dynamic that makes success in generating grants the legislative rationale for cutting state funding. Several major research universities now receive a larger proportion of their funding from student tuition than state support monies. Overall, state support for higher education has declined significantly in the last 8 years (see chart in article). One noteworthy observation here is that legislatures have a very short-term view of funding; whereas, universities take decades to build momentum--through good hiring and retention of faculty as well as by gradually building reputation and support for research. The response by universities is to seek more private (read corporate) funding.

College rankings--what's important?

Looking at several of the major college ranking bodies (e.g., U.S.News and World Report, Kiplinger, Forbes, Times Higher Education, Washington Monthly) the Chronicle (Aug. 29, 2010)  found few factors that most--or even a few--would agree upon.

New IPEDS data released

Findings from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) fall 2009 data collection,  includes three survey components: institutional characteristics for 2009-10 (e.g.,  degrees offered, type of program, application information, tuition and other costs); the number and type of degrees conferred from July 2008 through June 2009; and 12-month enrollment data for the 2008-09 academic year.
Among other findings:

• An increasingly higher percentage of women are getting higher education degrees (2- and 4-year)
• Tuition has increase across the spectrum of higher education institutions (duh!)

To view the full report please visit: http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2010161