Teach + tech. Assesment. Fine-tuning college degrees to the job market. Over the next few months, there will be anger, frustration, and the occasional fist-pumping, "Yes! " as this year's graduates send out résumés and students changing schools attempt to transfer credits. Their diplomas and transcripts, they will discover, often don't tell employers and deans what they need to know.
As a result, professors often find students unprepared, while companies subject applicants to tests or hire only graduates of institutions they know well. Skip to next paragraph Prof. Courtesy of Utah State University Subscribe Today to the Monitor Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS ofThe Christian Science MonitorWeekly Digital Edition Experts are encouraging reform that would improve transparency about what institutions of higher education are delivering. Tuning grew out of the Bologna Process, a pan-European strategy to standardize the meaning of degrees across some 4,000 institutions.
European policymakers soon realized, Mr. Refining the Recipe for a Degree, Ingredient by Ingredient - Government. November 28, 2010 Kristin Murphy for The Chronicle Norman L. Jones is chairman of the history department at Utah State U. and a state leader in a project developed by the Lumina Foundation to better articulate goals for student learning. Enlarge Image By Sara Hebel Logan, Utah Christopher A. He finds the grading grid, which has recently captivated many of his faculty colleagues in the history department here at Utah State University, entirely too rigid.
The scoring guide maps out specific learning goals, giving detailed explanations of how a professor will judge a student's mastery of each. Debating the Value of College in America. My first job as a professor was at an Ivy League university. The students were happy to be taught, and we, their teachers, were happy to be teaching them. Whatever portion of their time and energy was being eaten up by social commitments—which may have been huge, but about which I was ignorant—they seemed earnestly and unproblematically engaged with the academic experience.
If I was naïve about this, they were gracious enough not to disabuse me. None of us ever questioned the importance of what we were doing. At a certain appointed hour, the university decided to make its way in the world without me, and we parted company. I didn’t regard this as my business any more than I had the social lives of my Ivy League students. I got the question in that form only once, but I heard it a number of times in the unmonetized form of “Why did we have to read this book?” College is, essentially, a four-year intelligence test. I could have answered the question in a different way. News: Teaching Them How to Think. WASHINGTON -- By any reasonable measure, George Plopper is a skilled and successful teacher. The associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute won awards for his teaching in 2000 and 2001 when he was still at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (and in 1993 as a graduate student at Harvard University).
As a result of his recognition at UNLV, Plopper found himself invited to a summer program in 2004 designed to improve the teaching of science on the undergraduate level. That's where he first encountered Bloom's Taxonomy -- the oft-cited and much-revised classification of levels of thought and learning, which span from the lower levels of basic memorization to the more complex evaluation and creation of knowledge. While those in attendance at the 2004 session casually bandied about Bloomian terms -- including synthesis, comprehension and metacognition -- the jargon left Plopper confused. For years, Plopper did much the same thing. The Quick and the Ed — Published by Education Sector, an independent think tank in Washington, D.C., The Quick and the Ed offers in-depth analysis on the latest in education policy and research.