I have a couple posts brewing, but they will be delayed by my pile of scut work. Meanwhile, I have a new post at WAAGNFNP with my thoughts about why the (unionized) faculty in my university system took such a long time to feel ready to strike. It’s something you can read while you dodge your own stack of scut work.
Category Archives: Academia
Some quick thoughts on undergraduate research.
Jake, Chad, and Rob have posted about a newly published study about the benefits of research experiences for undergraduates. The quick version is that involvement in research (at least in science/technology/engineering/mathematics disciplines) seems to boost the student’s enthusiasm for the subject and confidence, not to mention nearly doubling the chances that the student will pursue a Ph.D.
I’m going to chime in with some observations of my own:
Any questions for Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education Margaret Spellings?
This Friday, as part of my university’s sesquicentennial celebration, there’s going to be a two hour session on “The Future of Higher Education”. The keynote speaker will be Margaret Spellings, the U.S. Secrtetary of Education. There will also be a “panel discussion with national experts”, after which they will entertain questions from the audience.
So, what questions about the future of higher education would you like me to ask?
In case you’re stuck for ideas, here’s a potential prompt: Spellings’ Commission on the Future of Higher Education has been hailed as a way to bring No Child Left Behind-like reforms to colleges and universities. How does that idea sit with you?
Thanks in advance!
UPDATE: SInce the link to information on the Spellings commission is apparently a little pokey today, here’s a viewpoint piece about the commision. It’s a critical view, but may be useful in illuminating some of what the commission is asking for. Also, here’s a page with links to the extensive coverage of the commission at Inside Higher Ed.
I thought I understood the extent of the bureaucracy here.
I haven’t mentioned it here before, but I’m currently working on a project to launch an online dialogue at my university (using a weblog, of course) to engage different members of the campus community with the question of what they think the college experience here ought to be, and how we can make that happen. The project team has a bunch of great people on it, and we thought we had anticipated all the “stake holders” at the university from whom we ought to seek “buy-in”.
As we were poised to execute the project, we discovered that we had forgotten one:
Question: How have you adapted the laboratory for students and researchers with disabilities?
I have some posts gestating on ethical issues in science, but I have to clear a bit more grading and committee work before I can do them justice. In the meantime, I want to pose a set of questions to those of you who teach labs and/or supervise laboratory research:
Have you been asked to adapt your laboratories for students or researchers with disabilities?
Reeling from today’s news.
Today was fully scheduled for me. Prepping for class, participating in a phone interview, teaching, midday meeting with my department chair and a dean to discuss developing an ethics module for an intro class in another department, more teaching, power-photocopying for this week’s Socrates Cafe, then a dash to the car to get the sprogs in time for elder offspring’s soccer practice.
It wasn’t until about 20 minutes into my drive home that I heard the news about the shootings at Virginia Tech.
What exactly are grades supposed to mean?
I’m just back from a committee meeting at which the subject of grades and grade distributions came up, and it became clear to me that academics (even at the same institution, even in the same field) have wildly different philosophies about just what grades ought to mean.
Is solving the absenteeism/attendance issue really a matter of framing?
After I posted on the issue twice and Julie posted on it once (although she might blog further on it), I got a brainwave about what’s at the core of our frustration with our students who ditch lots of classes.
At bottom, it’s our feeling that we are not succeeding in our attempts to communicate with them — about why being in class can help them succeed in a course, about the value that course could have beyond filling a necessary requirement for graduation, about the larger value a college education could have in their lives. We’re trying to get all this across, but sometimes we wonder whether we’re the grown-ups in a Charlie Brown special; to the kids, what we’re saying might as well be “WAH-WAH WAH WAH WAH” (as played by a trombone).
And perhaps the reason our attempts at communicating with our students are failing is that we are not framing these attempts as well as we could.
A few more words on the class-attendance issue.
The reponses to my earlier post on an admittedly nutty idea to get students to come to class seem, so far, to hold that the choice of whether or not to attend class ought to rest solely with the college student, and that he or she ought to live with the consequences of that choice. (Also, there was a fair bit of reminiscing about pointless class meetings that had been attended and about classes aced despite chronic absenteeism.)
I don’t disagree that cultivating a sense of personal responsibility is a good thing (nor that poorly planned or poorly delivered lectures are bad). But how to cultivate that sense of responsibility is the head-scratcher, especially when one’s students seem to have a very different motivation structure than one remembers having when one was a student.
Incentivizing class attendance.
Over sushi last night, Julie and I had one of those “kids today!” discussions so common among people teaching college students. The locus of our old-fart incomprehension was the reluctance of a significant number of students to actually attend class meetings, even when not attending class meetings has disasterous (and entirely predictable) consequences. (For example, some significant number of Julie’s students are now at the point where it is numerically impossible for them to pass the course, and this is strongly correlated with their absenteeism — not their writing skills.)
We didn’t ditch our classes when we were undergraduates. Wasn’t that where the learning was going to happen? Wasn’t there a reason we weren’t just buying textbooks and trying to teach ourselves? (And what would our professors have thought of us if we had cut more classes than we attended? Who would want to carry around that kind of shame?)
Clearly, our students are making decisions differently than we used to. Just as clearly, they seem to miss — to their detriment — that class meetings are frequently essential to their academic success. What could we possibly do to help them get themselves to class?