This blog focuses on my scholarship in my five research projects: learning assistance and equity programs, student peer study group programs, learning technologies, Universal Design for Learning, and history simulations. And occasional observations about life.
Web links added for 2010-04-14
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Achieving the Dream is a multiyear national initiative to help more community college students succeed. The initiative is particularly concerned about student groups that traditionally have faced significant barriers to success, including students of color and low-income students.
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The Developmental Education Initiative is a three-year effort begun in 2009 to identify and develop programs that increase the number of community college students who complete preparatory classes and successfully move on to college-level studies. Funded by the Lumina Foundation for Education, it includes 15 colleges and six states that were early participants in the Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count initiative. This password-protected Web site is an essential part of creating a learning community where participating colleges and states can share questions, answers, discoveries, and challenges.
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The Developmental Education Initiative, a three-year project funded by the Lumina Foundation for Education, recently unveiled the state policy framework and strategies that its six participating state partners plan to implement so that they can dramatically increase the number of students who complete college preparatory work and move on to complete college-level work. The six states – Connecticut, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Virginia – were selected for this project because of their prior commitment to community college reform; institutions from these states were first-round participants in Achieving the Dream, a multi-year and -state initiative to increase the success of two-year college students.
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This collection of online journals focus on teaching and learning at the postsecondary level. They include general interest as well as devoted to specific academic disciplines.
New web links for 2010-04-13
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Can create simple audio podcasts. This utility is part of a larger suite of audio and visual tools mentioned earlier under posting for http://aviary.com online software.
Foundation for Best Practices in Postsecondary Education
Commonly accepted principles for improved learning of college students serve as guides for identifying best practices. Chickering and Gamson (1987) identify seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education: (a) encourage frequent student-faculty contact in and out of class, (b) facilitate cooperation among students since learning is a social process, (c) promote active learning through social interaction and engagement with the content material, (d) give prompt feedback to students to allow them to reflect and make changes in behavior, (e) increase time on task to increase higher outcomes, (f) communicate high expectations to prompt extra effort by learners, and (g) respect diverse talents and ways of learning.
Blimling and Whitt (1999) extend several of these best practices outside of the classroom by identifying seven principles of good practice in student affairs: (a) engage in active learning, (b) develop coherent values and ethical standards, (c) set and communicates high learning expectations, (d) use systematic inquiry to improve performance, (e) use resources effectively to achieve institutional mission and goals, (f) forge educational partnerships among stakeholders, and (g) build supportive and inclusive communities.
- Blimling, G. S., & Whitt, E. J. (1999). Good practice in student affairs. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
- Chickering, A. W., & Gamson, Z. F. (1987). Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. Washington, D.C.: American Association of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://learningcommons.evergreen.edu/pdf/fall1987.pdf.
New web links for 2010-04-09
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Aviary photo editing, logos, web templates, screen capture, more Free basic services, $24.99 for pro version per year. (tags: photo_editing screen_capture software_utilitiy)
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Vision 2020 - CEHD Intranet This website provides an information hub for strategic planning for the College of Education and Human Development at the Univ. of Minnesota. A central question is what does CEHD want to look like by 2020. This site restricted to CEHD employees through password.(tags: CEHD strategic_planning 2020)
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Transana voice transcription and analysis software (tags: voice_recognition transcription research software_utilitiy)
Making sense of the terms used to describe "best practices"
The language used to describe best practices in education can become quickly unclear and confusing. The following lexicon provides a prelimianry set of definitions to make the conversation more clear.
Best education practice: Refers to the wide range of individual activities, policies, and programmatic approaches to achieving positive changes in student attitudes or academic behaviors.
Promising education practice: An education practice that appears to result in positive outcomes for students. The practice is clearly defined and preliminary analysis suggests its usefulness, but has not undergone rigorous evaluation.
Validated education practice: A promising education practice that has been undergone rigorous evaluation and found to result in positive outcomes for students in one education setting. The evaluation design could be quasi-experimental quantitative, qualitative, or mixed design.
Exemplary education practice: A validated education practice that has been successfully replicated at other education settings and undergone rigorous evaluation and found to result in positive outcomes for students. The evaluation design could be quasi-experimental quantitative, qualitative, or mixed design.
Within these aforementioned practices, there are different levels of complexity. Some practices are small, discrete activities or policy decisions. Other practices are programmatic approaches. The following definitions differentiate these levels.
Best education practice activities: These activities are behaviors or policies by faculty, staff, and administrators that result in positive changes in student attitudes or academic behaviors. Examples include mandatory assessment of students for proper advisement and placement of students in their classes, training student tutors before they begin their work, active learning activities within the classroom, and classroom assessment techniques to provide nongraded feedback resulting in changed student learning behaviors.
Best education practice programs: These programs are composed of a carefully coordinated collection of individual best practice activities. Examples of exemplary education practice programs from the area of academic support includes Supplemental Instruction, Peer-led Team Learning, Emerging Scholars Program, and Structured Learning Assistance. For example, the Supplemental Instruction program is composed of many validated best education practice activities such as active learning, classroom assessment techniques, cooperative learning activities, and Universal Instructional Design, just to name a few.
Employing an Effective Change Model to Implement Best Practices
College administrators have a wide variety of responsibilities that are demanding: budget manager, strategic planner, student learning leader, personnel manager, and catalyst for change. Change is often difficult not because of lack of interest by others, but rather because of the energy and resources needed for change itself. Every day new management books are being published with a subset focused on higher education management. A key issue for a successful leader is not only leading others to a desired outcome, but also understanding the complicated stages of change that must occur before arriving at that destination. Implementing best practices at an institution requires careful attention and support throughout the innovation cycle.
A classic model for organizational and personal change is provided by Kurt Lewin. Click on this link for another guide on his change model. Professor Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) was one of early leaders in social psychology and focused his research heavily on organizational dynamics. Lewin’s Force Field Analysis (1947, 1951) provides a model for understanding the forces that either foster or hinder change. He described a multi-stage process.
The first stage requires the early leaders of the innovation to help engender dissatisfaction with the present system. Lewin argued that people would not even consider change unless the status quo was demonstrated to be seriously lacking. Applying this principle to higher education, this activity might include reports about the number of students with disabilities enrolled on campus, drop-out rates for students, student satisfaction survey data, and so on.
The second stage occurs when people “unfreeze” from customary behaviors and implement new ones. Activities at this stage might include a few people at the institution experimenting with several practices as a pilot-test. Data are is collected from this pilot test, such as student survey data, changes in grade performance, and increase in utilization by students.
The next stage builds upon the pilot stage by the campus change agents, in this case senior student affairs administrators, presenting a comprehensive model for implementing the best practices. This stage requires not only advocacy from the administrators for change, but sustained attention and resources such as training.
The final stage, according to Lewin, is the most important and also the most challenging. “Refreezing” occurs when people have deeply adopted the new behavior and feel as comfortable with it as they were with the previous behaviors before the change model began. It requires continued support and rewards for people to continue the new behaviors. He argued that this stage is the one where well intentioned pilot programs sometimes are not continued. Applying this principle to postsecondary education, practices would include supplemental pay for additional work outside of the normal job scope or work-week, recognition of performing the new practices through the annual performance review system, and so on, etc. The new practices must not only be advocated, but ‘valued’ in a practical way from the perspective of the front- line implementers of the practice.
This comprehensive model of change requires not just advocating for adoption of the new practices. The entire cycle of change, especially the final stage of supporting ongoing implementation, is essential for systemic and sustained change. The four stages are arranged in a circle since change within an organization or for an individual is continuous. After reaching stage four of the process, the organization or individual needs to carefully reflect on their current performance indicators, engender dissatisfaction with the status quo, and engage in another round of quality improvement.
Following is a YouTube clip that illustrates some of the principles of Lewin's change process with the U.S. automobile companies and the consumer market.