After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday voted to approve a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Father’s commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.
» via The New York Times
Forty Questions: Grading Article In Teachers College Record
Average GPA over the time period 1930-2006 as a function of school type. Grey dots represent individual data points. Colored squared represent the mean GPA for each school type over time. Suslow (1976) shown for comparison.
The rise in grades in the 1960s correlates with the social upheavals of the Vietnam War. It was followed by a decade period of static to falling grades. The cause of the renewal of grade inflation, which began in the 1980s and has yet to end, is subject to debate, but it is difficult to ascribe this rise in grades to increases in student achievement. Students’ entrance test scores have not increased (College Board, 2007), students are increasingly disengaged from their studies (Saenz et al., 2007), and the literacy of graduates has declined (Kutner et al., 2006). A likely influence is the emergence of the now common practice of requiring student-based evaluations of college teachers. Whatever the cause, colleges and universities are on average grading easier than ever before.
Private and public schools graded similarly until the 1950s when grading practices for these schools began to bifurcate. The reasons for this bifurcation are not fully understood, but it was during this time that quantitative measures of undergraduates took hold in graduate school and professional school admissions. It appears that sometime in the 1950s to 1960s, the major purpose of grading at colleges and universities changed from an internal measure and motivator of student performance to a measure principally used for external evaluation of graduates. As a Yale dean noted about Yale’s abandonment of their traditional qualitative assessments in favor of the common four point grading system, “We wanted to force graduate schools to look at the student, not at a grade point average. But to a large extent, our effort has been frustrated” (Polan, 1970).
Do you remember to the days of college, when you were required to sort through your curriculum and career goals with your designated college advisor? Education startup MyEdu aims to replace this by helping students virtually access their academic information and create a roadmap tailored to their career goals.
To date, over 2 million students at 750 universities have used MyEdu to earn their degree. MyEdu’s suite of online products try to streamline the entire process of a college student’s lifecycle, from selecting a college through to earning a degree. The suite includes detailed course descriptions, grade distributions, official course evaluations, and student reviews to pick the right classes; and schedule Planner to build the best schedule that fits a student’s time constraints and goals.
» via TechCrunch
The Kansas City school board narrowly approved a plan Wednesday night to close nearly half the district’s schools in a desperate bid to avoid a potential bankruptcy.
The board voted 5-4 after parents and community leaders made final pleas to spare the schools even as the beleaguered district seeks to erase a projected $50 million budget shortfall. The approved plan calls for shuttering 29 of 61 schools — a striking amount even as public school closures rise nationwide while the recession eats away at academic budgets.
» via MSNBC
The students in Michael Dubson’s physics class at the University of Colorado fell silent as a multiple choice question flashed on a screen, sending them scrambling for small white devices on their desks.
Within seconds, a monitor on Dubson’s desk told him that 92 percent of the class had correctly answered the question on kinetic energy, a sign that they grasped the concept.
Clickers — not unlike gadgets used on television game shows — first appeared in college classrooms over a decade ago and have since spread to just about every college and university in the country thanks to cheaper and better technology.
» via MSNBC
Shrinking Newsrooms Put Colleges in the Content Business
As a higher-education reporter for The Ann Arbor News, Geoff S. Larcom used to hang out on the campus of Eastern Michigan University, poking his head into professors’ and administrators’ offices to trawl for stories.
But when the 174-year-old newspaper folded, in July, the university had to come up with new ways to connect with the public. It hired Mr. Larcom to help.
At a time when newspapers are slashing their staffs and squeezing out education coverage, it is more difficult for colleges to communicate their relevance and messages to the public. Many are tapping the expertise of out-of-work journalists as they navigate a media landscape that is increasingly moving online.
But the void those reporters leave in shrinking newsrooms has raised questions about whether colleges are being held accountable, and whether too many college news releases show up, almost verbatim, on newspapers’ Web sites.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
The state of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education in the United States has seen some unflattering appraisals in recent years, and deservedly so. In early February, the House of Representatives heard testimony on undergraduate and graduate education. The message from the panel, which included experts from academia, STEM-based industries, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), was clear: the problems in STEM education are well-known, and it‘s time to take action.
Both the hearing’s charter and its chair, Daniel Lipinski (D-IL), pointed out the obvious problem in higher education: students start out interested, but the STEM programs are driving them away. As the National Academies described in its 2005 report Rising Above the Gathering Storm, successful STEM education is not just an academic pursuit—it’s a necessity for competing in the knowledge-based economy that the United States had a key role in creating.
The potential for action comes thanks to the fact that the America COMPETES Act of 2007 is up for reauthorization. Its initial focus was on STEM education at the K-12 levels, but efforts at the undergraduate and graduate levels are needed to retain students to fill the jobs left vacant as baby boomers retire.
» via ars technica
Grades awarded to U.S. undergraduates have risen substantially in the last few decades, and grade inflation has become particularly pronounced at selective and private colleges, a new analysis of data on grading practices has found.
In “Grading in American Colleges and Universities,” published Thursday in Teachers College Record, Stuart Rojstaczer, a former Duke University professor of geology, and Christopher Healy, an associate professor of computer science at Furman University, illustrate that grade point averages have risen nationally throughout most of the last five decades. The study also indicates that the mean G.P.A. at an institution is “highly dependent” upon the quality of its students and whether it is public or private..
» via Inside Higher Ed
The Campus as Living Laboratory
Like all organizations, colleges and universities need to eliminate their direct contributions to unsustainable practices. More importantly, students must experience sustainable living first hand and be involved in helping their schools become powerful role models of sustainable practices for the rest of society. As Michael Crow, President of Arizona State University (ASU), has said of the U.S. higher education sector: “We may only have 2% of the carbon footprint, but we have 100% of the education footprint.”
» via Fast Company
Online courses have been around for nearly two decades, but enrollment has soared in recent years as more universities increase their offerings. More than 4.6 million college students (about one in four) were taking at least one online course in 2008, a 17 percent increase over 2007.
Institutions like Rutgers University and the University of California system are looking at expanding online courses as a way to keep down tuition costs or increase revenues. Recently, Rutgers said it would triple online revenues from $20.5 million to $60 million in five years.
Who benefits most from online courses — students or colleges? Are online classes as educationally effective as in-classroom instruction? Should more post-secondary education take place online?
» via The New York Times
Google is thinking about ways to inject search into the educational process as more than just a quick and dirty cheat sheet.
One of the most amazing things about Internet search is the speed and precision at which it returns answers to specific questions, ideal for students researching subjects for tests or papers. But this also generates criticism that the knowledge gained from services like Google can be a mile wide and an inch deep: data points don’t organize themselves into concepts and ideas.
Google’s Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, has begun exploring “education search,” or ways to help students “get to where they are going,” he said. Norvig told attendees at SMX West during a presentation on Google Research that he’s trying to understand “how can we support people who are looking for not just an answer in five minutes” but over a longer period of learning.
The project is in the very early stages, and Norvig and a Google representative were unwilling to share much more about the thinking behind its plans.
» via CNET news
The highlights are, indeed, a joy to behold, squeeze tightly, and never, ever let go. The perfect wife is five years younger than her husband. She is from the same cultural background. And, please stare at this very carefully: she is at least 27 percent smarter than her husband. Yes, 35 percent smarter seems to be tolerable. But 12 percent smarter seems unacceptable. In an ideal world—which is the goal of every scientist—your wife should have a college degree, and you should not. At least that’s what these scientists believe.
I know your bit will already be chomped with your enthusiasm for learning these learned scientists’ methodology. Well, they interviewed 1,074 married and cohabiting couples. And they declared, “To produce our optimization model, we use the assumption of a central ‘agency’ that would coordinate the matching of couples.” Indeed.
» via CNET news
The testing mandates in No Child Left Behind had generated a sea of data, and researchers were now able to parse student achievement in ways they never had before. A new generation of economists devised statistical methods to measure the “value added” to a student’s performance by almost every factor imaginable: class size versus per-pupil funding versus curriculum. When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to. Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.
» via The New York Times
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Christopher D. Barth.
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