Posts Tagged ‘educational research’
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it” (Yogi Berra)
A few years ago, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and USA Today arranged for schools to post their NSSE benchmark scores on the USA Today college website. While the Community College Survey of Student Engagement had championed public reporting since its inception, this NSSE-USA Today relationship marked the first time that several hundred four-year schools took the leap of faith and made their student engagement results available to a national audience. More recently, national associations developed templates for their member schools to use to report cost, NSSE or other student experience measures, and—in some instances—selected student learning outcomes. To my knowledge, no institution has closed or been otherwise adversely affected by making public these kinds of student or institutional performance measures.
It’s almost certain that in the future, colleges and universities will be expected to provide much more information about what and how much students learn during college. Institutions are not of one mind, of course, about whether and how to do this. There are justifiable worries about people drawing erroneous conclusions from data. Another risk is that making visible all our laundry—some clean and some not so clean—will have the adverse effect of stifling candid internal discussions about where improvements need to be made and will discourage efforts to address such shortcomings. These concerns are real and not trivial.
By: Michael Kerchner
Consider the answers to the following questions:
- •Who is Margaret Thatcher?
- •What percentage of students in the class of 2010 report having one chronic physical or emotional disability?
As each new academic year begins on college campuses across that nation, one of the widely circulated items of interest has been the College Mindset List compiled by Ron Niefand and Tom McBride at Beloit College. As someone who once felt intrinsically “in tune” with my students, it is always somewhat distressing to browse through the list of attributes that distinguish successive groups of entering first-year students from their predecessors. The net result the list has on me is to invoke nostalgia as well as an increasing concern for the inevitable march toward my own demise.
Last Wednesday, the Washington Post covered the release of a new report issued by the Corporation for National and Public Service, indicating that volunteer rates are on the rise, especially among young people, despite worsening economic times.
According to the Post article, “the number of 16- to 24-year-old volunteers rose 5 percent, from 7.8 million to 8.2 million. The number of applications to AmeriCorps, which puts people to work full time in nonprofit groups for a year, increased 217 percent over the past eight months.” Read the rest of this entry »
