Taking Student Retention Seriously

Syracuse University’s Distinguished University Professor in the School of Education, Vincent Tinto, has conducted research and written widely about student retention issues and the role that faculty members can play. He gives five main conditions that support student retention: expectation, advice, support, involvement, and learning. That is, students are more likely to persist and graduate in settings that:

a. expect students to succeed

b. provide students with clear and consistent information about institutional requirements and give students effective advising about programs of study and career goals

c. provide academic, social, and personal support

d. involve students as valued members of the institution

e. foster learning

Fostering learning is ranked as the most important condition for student retention. The implications for what happens in the classroom and the importance of the faculty role are therefore evident.

What Faculty Members Can Do

• Set high standards in class. At the same time, provide the academic support that students need to succeed.
• Provide robust opportunities for students to be actively involved in the content.
• Teach explicitly the academic strategies that students need in order to learn the material and be successful in your course.
• Integrate learning and study strategies (note-taking, graphic organization, questioning techniques, vocabulary acquisition, and test prediction and preparation) into your course.

To read the full article click here:
Source: --Vincent Tinto, Syracuse University

Online Enrollment Up 17%

Fall 2008 online enrollments were up 17 percent from a year before, with about 4.6 million students taking at least one class online, according to the 2009 Sloan Survey of Online Learning.

With all higher education enrollments increasing only by 1.2 percent for the same time period, the share of students taking at least one course online reached 25.3 percent. As recently as fall 2002, not even 10 percent of students were taking at least one course online. The data reflect nearly 4,500 colleges and universities, with information gathered by the Babson Survey Research Group and by the College Board, and supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

While the trends outlined in the survey are clearly positive for advocates of online learning, they also point to lingering challenges. A survey of chief academic officers indicated the growth in online enrollments has not been matched by consistent training programs so faculty members can learn how to teach virtually, and that many of these officers doubt that their faculties truly respect online learning.

The doubts appear to be greatest at private nonprofit institutions and least in for-profit higher education. (While this survey relied on chief academic officers to evaluate faculty attitudes, other surveys -- that have asked professors directly -- have found faculty doubts about online education, especially about whether institutions are serious about providing support for those engaged in it.)

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Source: --Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed

Measuring Student Learning, Globally

WASHINGTON -- Nearly two years after the Bush administration said it would not participate in an international experiment aimed at developing a global assessment of student learning, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development on Wednesday formally announced the launch of the effort -- with the full participation of the United States and the Obama administration.

The Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) project aims to gauge whether it is possible to develop "reliable and useful comparisons of learning outcomes" that are valid across countries with different cultures and languages, said Richard Yelland, who heads the Education Management and Infrastructure Division at the OECD. The experiment will focus on producing three separate measures: one designed to measure general skills, and two in disciplines, economics and engineering.

The Australian Council for Educational Research will lead a consortium that will develop the discipline-specific tests. The general skills exam, meanwhile, will be developed by the Council for Aid to Education, to which OECD will pay $1.2 million to develop an international version of its Collegiate Learning Assessment, which has gained many institutional clients -- and its fair share of critics -- in the United States, where it has been framed as a tool for measuring the educational value that institutions add for their students.

OECD ultimately hopes to add a "value added strand" to its international assessments, but that will happen, Yelland told an audience at the Council for Higher Education Accreditation's international forum here Wednesday, only if the organization's research study concludes that it is possible to develop a single assessment that can cross the major divides presented by language, culture and country.

If you can prove that you can develop a tool to measure learning across cultures, "you should be able to run the test at two different times" to calculate "value added," Yelland said. "That's why we’re concentrating on [the toughest task of] proving cross-country validity.... We do not prejudge the outcome."

Details about the roughly $12.5 million project are still being developed, but Yelland said the experiment would aim to test about 200 students at roughly 10 institutions of diverse types in each of six countries: Finland, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Mexico and the United States, with participation in the U.S. limited to four states: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Missouri and Pennsylvania. The students will be tested "near the end" of their either three- or four-year (depending on the country) bachelor's degree programs, and groups of experts will, by the early part of next year, decide whether the measures provide reliably comparable measures across the various countries.

If the "proof of concept" experiment is positive, and OECD decides to promulgate international learning outcomes measures that it believes are meaningful and reliable, "we will have a tool that will help us to help those who are responsible for higher education in the various countries," Yelland said. Given the vast sums of money that governments are investing in expanding the quantity of postsecondary education they provide -- roughly $1 trillion a year, about 1.5 percent of the global gross domestic product, Yelland estimated -- "it's probably worth spending a little bit of time and effort in supporting quality," he said.

How does testing support quality? "Diagnosis is the beginning of any improvement," Yelland said, and right now countries have no way other than international rankings -- which are based mostly on factors such as scholarly output and reputation, rather than educational factors -- to assess the quality of their institutions.

The U.S. Role

The United States' role in the project will go beyond having colleges in the four states participate; the governments in the AHELO initiative will also provide money for it, OECD officials said.

Education Department officials could not be reached for comment about the OECD announcement (it was a busy day, given President Obama's State of the Union speech last night), but an OECD news release included a statement from Under Secretary Martha J. Kanter that praised OECD for its leadership "to assess student performance on an international scale."

The U.S. participation represents a change of heart from 2008, when Bush administration officials more or less stunned higher education officials by saying they did not plan to join the OECD effort to develop an international higher education assessment. Education Department officials at the time said they "do not anticipate, as a U.S. government, funding ... a feasibility study" for such an assessment.

The decision was a shocker, as many in American higher education saw it, because the administration had pressed hard (too hard, in their eyes) to force colleges within the United States to use comparable measures of student learning. "There are certainly people who may have thought that the department is going to push for internationalization of the use of something like the CLA," Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, then director of the Education Department's Institute for Education Sciences and the U.S. representative on the OECD's education policy committee, said at the time.

Exactly what it means that the Obama administration is backing exactly such an approach, when the outcomes-obsessed Bush administration did not, probably depends on one's perspective. It could be seen as a sign that this administration is much more interested, on any range of matters, in international collaboration and partnership; it could also be evidence that this administration is just as interested in data-driven higher education accountability and testing as its predecessor -- if not more so.

Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/28/oecd

Why Do I Need This Class?

A common challenge that educators face from students is the question “Why do I need this class?” Though we want to believe that students intuitively understand the importance of our subjects, often they do not. Many struggle to relate our disciplines to their lives. Without a sense of relevance, students experience a disconnection between our enthusiasm for our subjects and their experiences with it in and outside of class. This disconnection can hamper self-motivation, engagement and meaningful learning. Because of this dynamic, many of us now work to teach the relevance of our content disciplines. After attending an On Course workshop last year, I now employ a number of new tools in my history classes.

With them, I have been enhancing what I call a “subject-value pedagogy” that encourages students to make meaningful connections between discipline-based skills/knowledge and other aspects of their lives. In every way possible, I encourage my students to find personal value in the content of my courses. My students know this approach as “Why History?” skills. This article discusses how subject-value pedagogy can be used in any content area to increase students’ intrinsic motivation to learn it.

BEGINNING THE PERSONAL CONNECTION

Beyond usual active-learning methods, I now ask students to own and be the creators of their “Why History?” experiences. Starting in week one, I employ activities that reveal history as a practical tool for self-empowerment in the present. To be discipline specific, I adapted the wording of the On Course principles to read: “People from the past can role model for us how to take personal responsibility for our lives, have self-motivation, use self-management skills to get things done, be interdependent by working with others to achieve results, be self-aware about the ways we impact ourselves and others, look at life as a learning process, be realistic about managing our emotions, and believe in ourselves and abilities!” Then via written assignments, surveys, and discussions students reflect upon the manner in which they already value and employ “Why History?” skills. Though initially some do not see cross-pollination with other aspects of their lives, this approach sets a tone that shifts students’ perceptions of history from the impersonal and disconnected to the personal and connected.

SUSTAINING THE PERSONAL CONNECTION

Here is a quartet of “Why History?” activities that I employ:

1. Quotations: As a means of further prompting student thinking, a “Why History?” bulletin board displays quotations from and images of historical figures. For example, Philosopher Herbert Spencer reminds them that “The great aim of education is not knowledge but action”; while President Abraham Lincoln offers, “People are about as happy as they make up their mind to be.” At mid-term, my students then add their own group-created “advice to the future” along with their pictures. For example, one group metaphorically advised: “Today is homework for tomorrow’s exam.” Another group offered: “People who dwell too much on the past may come to realize that they are preventing their future.” During discussions, my students said this activity helped connect them to their role in shaping history.

2. Mission Statements: To encourage semester-long engagement, another classroom bulletin board, displays inspirational “Why History?” quotes. After reading and reflecting on words like Paul McElroy’s “We are the living link through which will be transmitted to the timeless future all that will be preserved of value from the ageless past,” students create personal “Why History?” mission statements. For example, one young man wrote: “I will use the information from the past, so I can apply what I learn to help better myself as well as other people who may need help in their own lives.” Another female student wrote: “I will strive to learn about the important events of history so I can relate past events with my choices, decisions, and ideas today.” Such statements are placed on the bulletin board, and at various times in the semester students share their “Why History?” thinking with the class. For fun, each person who shares places a star on his/her mission statement. From this activity, I have witnessed improved individual ownership of the class as well as an increased interdependence amongst students. This outcome has been anecdotally evidenced by their willingness to spontaneously offer “Why History?” thoughts and to ask others to share ideas. For example, one student shared that as a result of studying World War II, she was able to make a personal connection with a veteran at the nursing home where she worked. By asking questions and talking about what she knew, she felt she made a difference in the quality of his life.

To read the full article click here:
Source: --June Klees, Faculty, History, Bay College , MI
On Course Newsletter 2/2010

True Costs of Student Success

"Student success" programs of various types -- learning communities, first-year experience programs, and the like -- have proliferated on college campuses, driven by the reality that it's easier to keep current students than recruit new ones. The programs are popular, but as is true of just about all campus efforts these days, they are open to scrutiny about their effectiveness -- and their cost effectiveness.

Given that climate, many student affairs officials would probably be wary of looking too closely at what their programs cost and whether they provide a meaningful return on that "investment," for fear that the data, if they don't look good, might be used against them in the fight for resources. But putting those trepidations aside, 13 colleges -- as part of a project sponsored by Jobs for the Future and the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability -- agreed to examine both the full costs of first-year retention efforts focused on first-generation and low-income students, and the extent to which their success in keeping students enrolled produces revenue to help pay for themselves.

A report on the Investing in Student Success effort, published this week by the two organizations, suggested that a majority of the programs had produced gains in retention that went a long way toward offsetting their costs. Most of the others could not complete the analysis, using a "cost return calculator" that includes a wide range of data, because they didn't have all the necessary cost and retention statistics (for students in the programs and for a comparison group).

But by looking at their first-year programs through the prisms of cost and return on investment, all 13 of the participating colleges experienced what the sponsors of the initiative call a "change in conversation" about those programs -- with some saying that they planned to apply similar scrutiny to other academic programs on their campuses. Officials at several of the campuses said they believed it was important to take financial considerations into account in assessing these programs, as long as they didn't overwhelm other, more qualitative factors, such as the programs' quality and the beneficial impact on students.

To read the full article click here:
Source: --Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed

Think Aloud Pair Problem Solving

As an instructor of English composition (mostly developmental), I have struggled to find ways to get students to engage themselves actively in their learning activities. Like many instructors, I get tired of seeing my students looking out the window, sending text messages, or doing some other equally non-productive activity during my class sessions. To diminish these behaviors, I have incorporated many active-learning strategies into my classroom, but I continue to see many non-engaged behaviors that suggest to me that students are still not actively engaging in the planned activities. I still often see students who refuse to speak or contribute in any way during small-group discussions, students who write one or two sentences and close their journals when I have asked them to write non-stop for five minutes, and students who are doing homework for some other subject during my class.

Because I know my students will be much more successful if they actively engage themselves in their learning experiences, I am constantly on the lookout for activities that will better facilitate active student engagement. In the activity I describe here, students work in pairs to solve a series of problems. Students have specific roles—problem solver and listener—that they alternate with each problem. The problem solver “thinks aloud,” verbalizing the steps he or she takes to solve the problem. The listener listens carefully, following the steps taken by the problem solver, attempting to understand the reasoning behind the steps, and offering suggestions if necessary.

Although I used the activity with grammar rules, it could easily be adapted to suit the needs of any instructor in any discipline. Approximate time needed: 30-45 minutes.

PURPOSE

• To have students actively engage in the learning process
• To have students learn to identify relevant information and apply it in the solution of a problem
• To have students learn and practice problem-solving strategies

SUPPLIES/SET UP

• A set of problems to solve (I used problems from the grammar workbook I use in my class
• Plenty of writing instruments for writing on the board (dry erase markers for whiteboards, chalk for blackboards, etc.)

To read the full article click here:
Source: --Adrienne Peek, Faculty, English, Modesto Junior College , CA
On Course Newsletter 2/2010

Why You Shouldn’t Use PowerPoints in (Most) Online Courses

Sigh. Where to begin? There are so many reasons why using PowerPoint for online courses is a Bad Idea. PowerPoint is just a tool, of course, but it’s so often the wrong tool for the job, especially in teaching online. A hammer is only a tool, but in the wrong hands, well, it makes a mess of things. So it is with PowerPoint.

It’s not that PowerPoint—henceforth referred to as PPT—can’t be used effectively for teaching online. It’s just that most people have developed deplorable PPT habits and now believe that textually dense PPT slides, cheesy animated transitions, and gaudy 3-D graphs are de rigueur for teaching in the classroom and therefore are the perfect choice for online courses, too. To that I say “Nuh-uh. Not. FAIL!” Who else says so? Well, these guys:

To read the full article (with videos) click here:
Source: http://nauelearning.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/nopptonline/