Are College Lectures Unfair? Photo DOES the college lecture discriminate? Is it biased against undergraduates who are not white, male and affluent? The notion may seem absurd on its face. Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that the lecture is not generic or neutral, but a specific cultural form that favors some people while discriminating against others, including women, minorities and low-income and first-generation college students. The partiality of the lecture format has been made visible by studies that compare it with a different style of instruction, called active learning. Continue reading the main story Research comparing the two methods has consistently found that students over all perform better in active-learning courses than in traditional lecture courses. There are several possible reasons. Active-learning courses deliberately structure in-class and out-of-class assignments to ensure that students repeatedly engage with the material.
Types of Aid Financial aid is money to help pay for college or career school. Aid can come from Besides financial aid, you also should think about what you can do to lower your costs when you go to college. “Types of Federal Student Aid” Video Check out this video to learn about grants, loans, and work-study jobs and how they can help fund your education. View accessible version (wmv) Aid and Other Resources From the Federal Government The federal government offers a number of financial aid programs. The U.S. Federal student aid includes: Grants—financial aid that doesn’t have to be repaid (unless, for example, you withdraw from school and owe a refund)Loans— borrowed money for college or career school; you must repay your loans, with interestWork-Study—a work program through which you earn money to help you pay for school Use FAFSA4caster to get an estimate of how much aid you might receive from the U.S. Apply for federal student aid using the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA®). Top
A New Approach to Internships? Maybe a little less time preparing this… [Photo by flickr user chichacha. Used under a Creative Commons license. Click image to view source.] Guest Contribution by Timothy Muirhead Although we all like to talk about sound work as a very creative discipline it is also a technical one. As the business model for audio post-production has been changing in the last decade, internships aren’t fitting into the system in the same way. At the same time there really is an important principle we all have to remember. One path that needs a lot more attention is the idea of a virtual internship. I corresponded with Michał Fojcik about his experience as one of the students in Prebble’s internship program. That was back in 2009, but just this week on a LinkedIn sound design group a sound editor working on his first feature reached out to the community for someone to mentor him through the experience. It is easy to get caught up in the day to day and feel like our schedules are full to capacity.
Great Teachers Don't Teach In a conversation on LinkedIn, one person asked, "What are the characteristics of an effective teacher?" I read quite a few excellent remarks that describe what such a teacher does to be effective. I couldn't help thinking about some of my best teachers. I had an amazing psychology professor in college. He was on fire every class period and his enthusiasm was contagious. But the things I remember most are the psychological experiments in which we participated. My psychology professor was an effective teacher because he provided experiences that created long-term memories. "I appreciate all of the comments that have been made so far. My experience is that good teachers care about students. All of this is good but great teachers engineer learning experiences that maneuver the students into the driver's seat and then the teachers get out of the way. In The Classroom Long past are the times when we teach content just in case a student might need it. Taking Action
'Strings Attached' Co-Author Offers Solutions for Education Sept. 27, 2013 7:17 p.m. ET I had a teacher once who called his students "idiots" when they screwed up. He was our orchestra conductor, a fierce Ukrainian immigrant named Jerry Kupchynsky, and when someone played out of tune, he would stop the entire group to yell, "Who eez deaf in first violins!?" He made us rehearse until our fingers almost bled. He corrected our wayward hands and arms by poking at us with a pencil. Today, he'd be fired. I was stunned by the outpouring for the gruff old teacher we knew as Mr. We're in the midst of a national wave of self-recrimination over the U.S. education system. I would ask a different question. As it turns out, quite a lot. Now I'm not calling for abuse; I'd be the first to complain if a teacher called my kids names. All of which flies in the face of the kinder, gentler philosophy that has dominated American education over the past few decades. But the conventional wisdom is wrong. 1. Psychologist K. 2. 3. 4. What makes a teacher successful? 5. 8.
Lecture Me. Really. Photo BEFORE the semester began earlier this fall, I went to check out the classroom where I would be teaching an introductory American history course. Like most classrooms at my university, this one featured lots of helpful gadgets: a computer console linked to an audiovisual system, a projector screen that deploys at the touch of a button and USB ports galore. But one thing was missing. Perhaps my request was unusual. In many quarters, the active learning craze is only the latest development in a long tradition of complaining about boring professors, flavored with a dash of that other great American pastime, populist resentment of experts. In the humanities, there are sound reasons for sticking with the traditional model of the large lecture course combined with small weekly discussion sections. Today’s vogue for active learning is nothing new. Eliot was a chemist, so perhaps we should take his criticisms with a grain of salt. Holding their attention is not easy.
Log In We weren’t too surprised that most people didn’t know the exact jobless rate; most people aren’t economists. What was truly intriguing was that so many people answered in the completely wrong direction. We set out wanting to learn about people’s perceptions of the value of college, now nearly seven years after the recession, when a big supply of college graduates and low demand for work had made the case for college seem weaker. Late last year, we asked Google Consumer Surveys to ask Americans about college costs, wages after college, and unemployment rates of college graduates and nongraduates. The really interesting result was how people answered the jobless rate questions. We asked: “What would you guess is the current unemployment rate for four-year college graduates between the ages of 25 and 34?” Initially, people were way off. We were so surprised that we thought we had done something wrong. Can this really be true? We posed the same question to our friends and parents.
What Students Don’t Know About Their Loans Student debt is a vexing issue, because it’s a legitimate problem, but not the problem that many people assume. The common narrative about debt involves a recent graduate from a top college with $50,000 or $100,000 in loans, working as a barista or not working at all. Yet people fitting some version of this tale are vastly less common than media coverage sometimes suggests. The real problem are people who tend to have less debt — say, $10,000 or $20,000 — but who never graduate from college or who earn a degree or certificate with relatively little value. Many of these students don’t understand what they’re getting into when they enroll in college. Compounding the problem, these students also tend to underestimate how they much debt they will take on, according to a study released today by the . Continue reading the main story Private non-profit four-year But the study also came with a fascinating wrinkle. This college, no doubt, has a higher graduation rate than most colleges do.
Why Flunking Exams Is Actually a Good Thing Photo Imagine that on Day 1 of a difficult course, before you studied a single thing, you got hold of the final exam. The motherlode itself, full text, right there in your email inbox — attached mistakenly by the teacher, perhaps, or poached by a campus hacker. No answer key, no notes or guidelines. Would that help you study more effectively? But what if, instead, you took a test on Day 1 that was just as comprehensive as the final but not a replica? This is the idea behind pretesting, one of the most exciting developments in learning-science. That is: The (bombed) pretest drives home the information in a way that studying as usual does not. The excitement around prefinals is rooted in the fact that the tests appear to improve subsequent performance in topics that are not already familiar, whether geography, sociology or psychology. The basic insight is as powerful as it is surprising: Testing might be the key to studying, rather than the other way around. Why does this happen? a. b.
‘Is It Safe?’ Foreign Students Consider College in Donald Trump’s U.S. College admissions officials in the United States caution that it is too early to draw firm conclusions about overseas applications, because deadlines for applications are generally in January and February. But they are worried that Mr. Trump’s election as president could portend a drop in international candidates. Canadian universities have already detected a postelection surge in interest from overseas. “We have seen an increase in applications from the U.S. and from international students in the last week,” Jocelyne Younan, the director of global undergraduate recruitment at McGill University in Montreal, wrote in an email. Traffic on a University of Toronto website for international applicants surged the day after the election, officials there said — and most of it came from Americans. On the same day, there was an increase in visitors from Britain and India, Mr. “We have already received inquiries from prospective students who are in the applicant pool,” Mr. Photo But Mr. Mr. Ms.