Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a learning approach to maximize learning for everyone in the classroom or with a student development activity. This humorous YouTube video explains the three major principles of UDL. <Click on this link for more information about UDL.>
Active Learning Is Found to Foster Higher Pass Rates in STEM Courses
<Click on the following web link to download the complete report> “Active Learning Increases Student Performance in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics”
Authors: Scott Freeman, Mary Wenderoth, Sarah Eddy, Miles McDonough, Nnadozie Okoroafor, Hannah Jordt, and Michelle Smith Organizations: The lead researchers are at the University of Washington. The paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Summary: The researchers conducted a meta-analysis of 225 studies of undergraduate education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the STEM disciplines. The studies compared the failure rates of students whose STEM courses used some form of active-learning methods—like requiring students to participate in discussions and problem-solving activities while in class—with those of students whose courses were traditional lectures, in which they generally listened. The studies were conducted at two- and four-year institutions chiefly in the United States and previously appeared in STEM-education journals, databases, dissertations, and conference proceedings. To be included, the studies had to assure that the students in each kind of course were equally qualified and able, their instructors were largely similar, and the examinations they took either were alike or used questions from the same pool.
Results: A 12-point difference emerged. While 34 percent of students in the lecture courses failed, 22 percent of students failed in courses that used active-learning methods.
Bottom Line: Calls for more STEM graduates have long been stymied by attrition in those majors, and introductory courses have often proved to be a big obstacle. Different teaching methods may help remedy that pattern.
Free Interstate College Access Evaluation Project Teleconference
The College and Career Readiness Evaluation Consortium
Please join the free teleconference on Thursday, March 20th, 2014 at 10:00 am (Central) To register, subscribe to our group mailings here. You will receive an invitation for the event that includes the telephone number (not toll free) and your unique registration code. If you would like to receive automatic calendar invites to our group calls, please email us at CollegeAccessAffinityGroup@ed.gov with the address where you would like to receive the notifications.
NOTE: Due to the high volume of calls please dial in 10 minutes prior to the scheduled call time to ensure that you are on the line by 10:00 am (Central).
Join us to learn about an interstate college access evaluation project that is using multi-state data to effectively enhance our work. This effort grew out of project directors wanting to conduct a self-evaluation of the GEAR UP program nationally, partnerships with the National Council for Community and Education Partnerships, ACT, Inc., and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center that have proven invaluable to the project, and a desire to conduct the first large-scale longitudinal GEAR UP evaluation. The first deliverable that the Consortium has accomplished is common definitions for services in GEAR UP/college access programs. Ultimately, this research and evaluation will strengthen the GEAR UP project, as well as inform college access programming in local education agencies outside of GEAR UP—all while working to meet the President’s 2020 goal.
Please cut and paste the link below into your browser to down load the power point presentation for this Affinity Group Call. There you will also find updated information on news and events within the US Department of Education, White House, and much more. http://www2.ed.gov/news/av/audio/college-access/index.html
NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education
Following are just a few of the upcoming trends in technology use. Some seem obvious, others not. <To read the complete report, click on this web link.>
Fast moving trend likely to create substantive change (or burn out) in one to two years: Online, Hybrid, and Collaborative Learning
Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning, and collaborative models. Students already spend much of their free time on the Internet, learning and exchanging new information. Institutions that embrace face-to-face/online hybrid learning mode ls have the potential to leverage the online skills learners have already developed independent of academia. Online learning environments can offer different affordances than physical campuses, including opportunities for increased collaboration while equipping students with stronger digital skills. Hybrid models, when designed and implemented successfully, enable students to travel to campus for some activities, while using the network for others, taking advantage of the best of both environments.
Fast moving trend likely to create substantive change (or burn out) in one to two years: Social Media Use in Learning
Social media is changing the way people interact, present ideas and information, and judge the quality of content and contributions. More than one billion people use Facebook regularly; other social media platforms extend those numbers to nearly one third of all people on the planet. Educators, students, alumni, and even the general public routinely use social media to share news about scientific and other developments. The impact of these changes in scholarly communication and on the credibility of information remains to be seen, but it is clear that social media has found significant traction in almost every education sector.
Transforming Remediation: Understanding the Research, Policy, and Practice (Webinar)
Transforming Remediation: Understanding the Research, Policy, and Practice was a webinar conducted October 4, 2013 highlights research into the problems of remediation, along with promising practices from community colleges across the country. Speakers include Complete College America’s Bruce Vandal, the California Acceleration Project’s Katie Hern, North Carolina’s Cynthia Lyston, and researcher Michelle Hodara. The webinar was co-sponsored by the American Youth Policy Forum and the American Institutes for Research. Through the California Acceleration Project, the state is seeking alternatives to traditinoal approaches of developmental-level courses for meeting the needs of the students and the state.
MOOCs Don't Work for Academically Underprepared Students by Udacity Founder
Much has been written about MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) as an important advance for making college accessible and inexpensive for students worldwide. Frankly, I have never seen an instructional technology drawn such high visibility from popular and professional media, embraced so quickly, and universal claims made about its efficacy, with little to no evidence. As a technology geek, I would be happy to read of MOOC success with students. But the walls are being to crack in this success story. The following report published in the Chronicle of Higher Education (based on interview through another publication), reveals that even one of the founders of the MOOC movement admitting that MOOCs may not work for academically underprepared students. MOOCs may favor the better prepared and also the more affluent. Does this mean that MOOCs would not be effective with TRiO students? No, there are many TRiO students that may be low-income or first-generation for college that might benefit from MOOCs. But for those that are academically underprepared, caustion is warranted. Watch for more reports on the efficacy of MOOCs. carefully read the reports to see for whom the MOOCs are effective. Time will tell.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Sebastian Thrun, the Udacity founder calls his company’s massive open online courses a “lousy product” to use for educating underprepared college students. Mr. Thrun reflected on the discouraging results of an experiment at San Jose State University in which instructors used Udacity’s online platform to teach mathematics. Some of the students were enrolled at the university, and some at a local high school. “We were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and at the same time, I was realizing, we don’t educate people as others wished, or as I wished. We have a lousy product,” Mr. Thrun told the reporter, Max Chafkin. “It was a painful moment.”
But academics who have studied online education for longer than a few years were not surprised by the Udacity founder’s humbling. “Well, there it is folks,” wrote George Siemens, a researcher and strategist at Athabasca University’s Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute, on his blog. “After two years of hype, breathless proclamations about how Udacity will transform higher education, Silicon Valley blindness to existing learning research, and numerous articles/interviews featuring Sebastian Thrun, Udacity has failed.” “Thrun seems to have ‘discovered’ that open-access, distance-education students struggle to complete,” wrote Martin Weller, a professor of educational technology at the Open University, in Britain. “I don’t want to sound churlish here, but hey, the OU has known this for 40 years.”
Beyond schadenfreude, Mr. Thrun’s humbling has left some academics wondering who MOOCs are good for, if not underprivileged students in California. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania recently noted that the students taking MOOCs from Penn on Coursera, another major MOOC platform, tend to be well educated already. “The individuals the MOOC revolution is supposed to help the most—those without access to higher education in developing countries—are underrepresented among the early adopters,” wrote the researchers.
In a blog post this week, Mr. Thrun responded to the fallout from the Fast Company profile by citing data from Udacity’s summer pilot with San Jose State, whose pass rates compared more favorably to the traditional versions offered on the campus. But he neglected to mention that Udacity had, by then, stopped focusing on underprivileged students. More than half of the students in the summer trial already had a college degree. “Thrun’s cavalier disregard for the SJSU students reveals his true vision of the target audience for MOOCs: students from the posh suburbs, with 10 tablets apiece and no challenges whatsoever—that is, the exact people who already have access to expensive higher education,” wrote Rebecca Schuman, a Slate columnist and adjunct professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis.
Tactics That Engage Community-College Students Get Few Takers, Study Finds
"Most community colleges have begun using a suite of expert-approved strategies to get more students to graduation. But those programs are often just window dressing, as relatively few students participate in them. Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/17/community-college-completion-strategies-lack-scale-report-finds#ixzz2hzE3Mnqe at Inside Higher Ed
That’s the central finding of a new report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement. And Kay McClenney, the center’s director, places blame for the shallow adoption of “high impact” completion practices squarely on colleges and their leaders, rather than on students. “Requiring students to take part in activities likely to enhance their success is a step community colleges can readily take,” McClenney said in a written statement. “They just need to decide to do it.” The study draws from three national surveys that seek to measure student engagement at community colleges that collectively account for 80 percent of the sector’s enrollment. One is the center’s flagship survey -- the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE)....The 13 strategies include the use of academic goal-setting, student orientation, tutoring, accelerated remedial education tracks and student success courses (see box for full list). While experts and faculty members might not agree on whether all of the practices work well, there is an emerging body of evidence that they help boost completion rates.
For example, 84 percent of two-year colleges offer student success courses, which are designed to help new students navigate college and get off to a good start. The courses are particularly helpful to large numbers of lower-income, first-generation college students who attend community college, and who rarely get the support of family members who know the skinny on how college works. Yet only 20 percent of surveyed students took a success courses during their first term, according to the report. The other 12 practices showed similar gaps between being offered and being used. Take tutoring, which has obvious benefits to struggling students. Fully 99 percent of the surveyed colleges offer some form of tutoring, but the report found that only 27 percent of students had taken advantage of it during the current academic year."
Asking students to volunteer for service will not work. They don[t want to face stigma for doing so, they don[t have time for activities that conflict with their two or three part time jobs they have to pay for tuition, and for all the others commitments in their life. The solution is Universal Design for Learning where essential services and support are built directly into classes and required for all students.