High school, college teachers differ in their views on students’ readiness for college work, study finds

ACT, Inc. (developers of the ACT college admissions exam) announces:

The ACT National Curriculum Survey, conducted every three to five years, collects data about what entering college students should know and be able to do to be ready for college-level coursework in English/writing, math, reading and science.

[Thousands] of secondary teachers and postsecondary instructors across the U.S. were surveyed… [The survey] sheds light on the gap between high school preparation and college expectations. It also details the specific subject-area knowledge and skills that are most important for students to learn to be ready for college-level coursework.

The findings suggest that current U.S. high school learning standards are still not sufficiently aligned with postsecondary expectations. The skills and knowledge that college instructors expect entering students to have are more focused and specific than what high school teachers view as important.

Among the survey’s findings:

• High school teachers rate media literacy and financial literacy as much more important than do college professors
• Professors most value content areas such as math, English, and science
• Professors feel high school students are not prepared for vigorous college-level reading
• High school teachers report that they (or their fellow teachers) have lower expectations for students perceived not to be college-bound

The full report, as well as a shorter summary,  is available here.

Other research has found that the unpreparedness of college students can have an economic cost on society in addition to the challenges faced by individual students. See, for example, this report (PDF) by the Alliance for Excellent Education entitled “Paying Double: Inadequate High Schools and Community College Remediation”.

For-profit colleges facing increased scrutiny, criticism

For-profit colleges have long been controversial – see this 2001 article (PDF) by Columbia University’s Henry Levin for an historical perspective. Recently, for-profits have been back in the news:

• The AP reports that students at for-profit schools are more likely to default on student loans
• In a two-part series, the Denver Post reports that some for-profit schools have drawn complaints from students regarding the non-transferability of course credits and high debt burdens among students.
• In addition, the Post reports, various entities involved in monitoring and accrediting higher education are considering increasing regulation of for-profit institutions.

Attracting students to computer technology jobs

The NY Times reports:

Hybrid careers… that combine computing with other fields will increasingly be the new American jobs of the future, labor experts say. In other words, the nation’s economy is going to need more cool nerds. But not enough young people are embracing computing — often because they are leery of being branded nerds.

Educators and technologists say two things need to change: the image of computing work, and computer science education in high schools. Teacher groups, professional organizations like the Association for Computing Machinery and the National Science Foundation are pushing for these changes, but so are major technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Intel. One step in their campaign came the week of Dec. 7, National Computer Science Education Week, which was celebrated with events in schools and online.

Today, introductory courses in computer science are too often focused merely on teaching students to use software like word processing and spreadsheet programs, said Janice C. Cuny, a program director at the National Science Foundation. The Advanced Placement curriculum, she added, concentrates narrowly on programming. “We’re not showing and teaching kids the magic of computing,” Ms. Cuny said.

The dangers of ‘overparenting’

TIME Magazine reports:

Overparenting had been around long before Douglas MacArthur’s mom Pinky moved with him to West Point in 1899 and took an apartment near the campus, supposedly so she could watch him with a telescope to be sure he was studying. But in the 1990s something dramatic happened, and the needle went way past the red line. From peace and prosperity, there arose fear and anxiety; crime went down, yet parents stopped letting kids out of their sight; the percentage of kids walking or biking to school dropped from 41% in 1969 to 13% in 2001. Death by injury has dropped more than 50% since 1980, yet parents lobbied to take the jungle gyms out of playgrounds, and strollers suddenly needed the warning label “Remove Child Before Folding.” Among 6-to-8-year-olds, free playtime dropped 25% from 1981 to ’97, and homework more than doubled. Bookstores offered Brain Foods for Kids: Over 100 Recipes to Boost Your Child’s Intelligence. The state of Georgia sent every newborn home with the CD Build Your Baby’s Brain Through the Power of Music, after researchers claimed to have discovered that listening to Mozart could temporarily help raise IQ scores by as many as 9 points. By the time the frenzy had reached its peak, colleges were installing “Hi, Mom!” webcams in common areas, and employers like Ernst & Young were creating “parent packs” for recruits to give Mom and Dad, since they were involved in negotiating salary and benefits.

College students “unimpressed” with their professors’ use of technology

Campus Technology reports:

While students and faculty seem to agree on the importance of technology in education, the two groups do not agree on how well it’s being implemented. According to new research released Monday, only 38 percent of students indicated that their instructors “understand technology and fully integrate it into their classes.” Students also rated that lack of understanding as “the biggest obstacle to classroom technology integration.”

Despite this, 74 percent of higher education instructors polled indicated that they “incorporate technology into every class or nearly every class,” and 67 percent said they were “satisfied with their technology professional development.”

Open educational resources bring the world’s universities to your computer desktop

NEWSWEEK reports:

In addition to [YouTube’s education-focused YouTube EDU], Web sites like iTunes U, TED, and Academic Earth allow millions of people to download lectures by some of the world’s top experts—for free. Known as open educational resources—or OER—the movement is turning education into a form of mass entertainment. “There is a real appetite for content that is not just a sneezing-cat video,” says Peter Bradwell, a researcher for the British academic think tank Demos. “There is a growing desire for intellectually stimulating material that is easily accessible.”

MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) offers free access to most of the school’s course material and lectures on subjects like Anglo-American folk music and the behavior of algorithms. iTunes U provides free lectures, discussions, and conferences from schools like Oxford, Yale, and the French business institute HEC Paris. “The beauty of this platform is that it brings your material to a much wider audience,” says Carolyn Culver, head of strategic communications for Oxford.

The debate over 3-year bachelor’s degrees

Recently, NEWSWEEK published this cover story by former US Secretary of Education (and current Republican senator) Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. Sen. Alexander argues that four-year bachelor’s degrees are outmoded and too expensive to maintain in the current economic climate. He concludes:

Expanding the three-year option or year-round schedules may be difficult, but it may be more palatable than asking Congress for additional bailout money, asking legislators for more state support, or asking students for even higher tuition payments. Campuses willing to adopt convenient schedules along with more-focused, less-expensive degrees may find that they have a competitive advantage in attracting bright, motivated students.

 

In the same issue, NEWSWEEK published this very interesting debate between five researchers and policy makers from around higher education. Both these articles are well worth reading.

Can the Amazon Kindle challenge paper textbooks?

In May of this year, Amazon announced a partnership with six universities and a number of textbook publishers. College students would be given Kindles with textbooks pre-loaded onto the devices. The goal of the project was to determine how students’ experiences using the ebook reader compared with traditional paper textbooks.

The AP (via USA Today) reports that students’ response to the Kindle have been, to quote the article, “lukewarm.”

See my previous post about efforts to replace textbooks with digital resources.

Academically demanding colleges tend to have higher graduation rates, study finds

USA Today reports:

Researchers studying how to improve graduation rates at public colleges and universities have come up with a surprising and counter-intuitive finding: Many students may fail to complete a bachelor’s degree not because the work is too hard — but because they’re not challenged enough.

It’s well known that colleges with the most selective admissions criteria tend to have the highest graduation rates. But even when researchers compared groups of students who had similar academic qualifications, they consistently found that those attending schools with the more demanding academic requirements were more likely to graduate.

When colleges fail to graduate students…

I’ve purposely titled this post “When colleges fail to graduate students…” to prompt you to think about the notions underlying this wording, which we hear and read in the media often… Do colleges MAKE students graduate (or not graduate)? What role do students play in their own collegiate success or failure? There’s not easy answer to this question, but this article in the NY Times argues that colleges, like all organizations, have unique cultures, and sometimes, these cultures are more or less supportive of graduation:

[Under-matching] refers to students who choose not to attend the best college they can get into. They instead go to a less selective one, perhaps one that’s closer to home or, given the torturous financial aid process, less expensive.

About half of low-income students with a high school grade-point average of at least 3.5 and an SAT score of at least 1,200 do not attend the best college they could have. Many don’t even apply. Some apply but don’t enroll. “I was really astonished by the degree to which presumptively well-qualified students from poor families under-matched,” Mr. Bowen told me.

They could have been admitted to Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus (graduation rate: 88 percent, according to College Results Online) or Michigan State (74 percent), but they went, say, to Eastern Michigan (39 percent) or Western Michigan (54 percent). If they graduate, it would be hard to get upset about their choice. But large numbers do not…

In effect, well-off students — many of whom will graduate no matter where they go — attend the colleges that do the best job of producing graduates. These are the places where many students live on campus (which raises graduation rates) and graduation is the norm. Meanwhile, lower-income students — even when they are better qualified — often go to colleges that excel in producing dropouts.