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.
MAEOPP Center 2015 Best Education Practices Directory
MAEOPP Center 2015 Best Education Practices Directory
Copyright ©2015 by Mid-America Association of Educational Opportunity Program Personnel (MAEOPP) and the University of Minnesota by its College of Education and Human Development, Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning, Minneapolis, MN.
MAEOPP is pleased to release the 2015 directory of peer-reviewed education practices approved by the MAEOPP Center for Best Education Practices. Each practice has undergone a rigorous external review process. This directory contains those approved at the promising and validated levels. Readers can use this publication as a guide for implementing the evidence-based education strategies contained within it. Detailed information about the education practice purposes, educational theories that guide the practice, curriculum outlines, resources needed for implementation, evaluation process, and contact information are provided by the submitters of the practice who have practical experience implementing it. Consider using them with current programs and in grant submissions that require evidence-based practices to improve student success.
The thirteen practices approved thus far by the MAEOPP Center represent each of the five major TRIO grant programs: Educational Talent Search, Upward Bound, Educational Opportunity Centers, Student Support Services, and Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Programs. One practice is from a GEAR UP program. For readers unfamiliar with TRIO programs, a short history is provided. While the education practices come from TRIO and GEAR UP programs, they could be adapted for use with nearly any student academic support and student development program. These programs are incubators of best practices to serve the needs of historically underrepresented students and the general student population as well.
Promising GEAR-UP Practice Added: High School Financial Literacy
High School Financial Literacy GEAR-UP Students. Wichita State University (approved Promising Practice October 31, 2014). Strong financial knowledge is important to people of all ages. Finance makes a difference in our lives both on a short and long term basis. It effects how we interpret everyday life and analyze information. Improved financial literacy, particularly early in life, results in a higher standard of living over the long term, aids in career choices and helps determine retirement savings. Providing young people with the knowledge, skills, and opportunity to establish healthy financial futures is far preferable to having to provide credit repair or debt management services later on in their lives (M.S. Sherraden, 2013). Kansas Kids @ GEAR UP (KKGU) designed an online high school financial literacy program based on the National Standards for K-12 Personal Finance Education created by Jump$tart. The high school program consists of six components that teach students financial knowledge in financial responsibility, income and careers, planning and money, credit and debt, risk management and insurance, and saving and investing.
The goal is to ensure seniors do not graduate without a basic knowledge of finance. The design of the program begins with an introduction to financial literacy, which includes a pre-test to assess the students’ knowledge of financial literacy. After completing each module students must be pass a multiple choice test with a score 80% or better before advancing to the next module. The program randomly selects questions and their multiple-choice answers so that students cannot copy down answers to pass each test without reviewing the modules again. Instead of a posttest, the questions that are asked throughout the six module tests serve as comparison questions for the pre test instead of students taking a separate posttest. <Click on this link to downlad the best education practice.>
Facebook Addiction and GPA
Chronicle of Higher Education, January 21, 2015 by Steve KolowichFacebook is a tempting distraction. I have it open as a tab in my browser as I write this. And look, it’s showing that I have a new notification! I must see it, immediately. Facebook designed the site to make me feel that way. This doesn’t bode well for college students. If professionals, and even some professors, have a hard time resisting the lure of Facebook, then what chance do 18-year-olds have?
New research suggests that the kids may be all right. A study of Facebook activity and grade-point averages suggests that students may learn to regulate their use of Facebook, both as a distraction from coursework and in their free time, as they move through college. Reynol Junco, an associate professor of education at Iowa State University, collected data from about 1,800 students at a four-year college. He found that students who spent a lot of time on Facebook while also trying to complete assignments tended to get worse grades.
The correlation, however, held true only for freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. Seniors tended to use Facebook less in general. For them, time spent on the site did not correlate negatively with GPA. “Seniors were less likely to post status updates than freshmen and sophomores, comment on content less than the other class ranks, use Facebook chat less than freshmen and sophomores, post photos less than juniors, tag photos less than freshmen and juniors, and view videos less than all the other class ranks,” Mr. Junco wrote in a paper published this month in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. It could be that freshmen are simply not as good at resisting the urge to use Facebook when they should be working, and that they get better at it as they get older.
Mr. Junco also pointed out that freshmen are scrambling to find their social footing in a strange new place while clinging to the relationships they’ve recently left behind. “Freshmen must not only adapt to a new academic environment, but also a social one in order to be successful,” he wrote. The self-regulation skills of individual students no doubt play a role at any age. Mr. Junco’s snapshot is of four groups of students, not a single group evolving over time. But he hopes the study will at least help higher-education professionals move past their own antipathy to Facebook use. An “abstinence only” approach, Mr. Junco said, is more likely to “alienate students and not allow for the leveraging of the important social affordances of Facebook in support of the first-year transition process.”
Updated Postsecondary Peer Cooperative Learning Groups Annotated Bibliography(Updated 1/1/2015)
Postsecondary Peer Cooperative Learning Programs: Annotated Bibliography by David R. Arendale is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://z.umn.edu/peerbib
Background on the Bibliography
For many years I have maintained an annotated bibliography of publications about peer learning programs at the postsecondary level. I wanted to share it more widely with others so it is provided in several forms: PDF, Word, and EndNote database. Please observe the license under which it is made available for your use. Links to versions of the bibliography are at the bottom of this page.
This annotated bibliography does not attempt to be inclusive of this broad field of literature concerning peer collaborative learning. Instead, it is focused intentionally on a subset of the educational practice that shares a common focus with increasing student persistence towards graduation. At the end of this overview, several suggestions are made for differentiating the models from each other and the level of institutional resources and resolve with implementing them.
The six student peer learning programs included in this bibliography meet the following characteristics: (a) the program must have been implemented at the postsecondary or tertiary level; (b) the program has a clear set of systematic procedures for its implementation that could be replicated by another institution; (c) program evaluation studies have been conducted and are available for review; (d) the program intentionally embeds learning strategy practice along with review of the academic content material; (e) the program outcomes include increased content knowledge, higher final course grades, higher pass rates, and higher college persistence rates; and (f) the program has been replicated at another institution with similar positive student outcomes. From a review of the professional literature, six programs emerged: (a) Accelerated Learning Groups (ALGs), (b) Emerging Scholars Program (ESP), (c) Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL), (d) Structured Learning Assistance (SLA), (e) Supplemental Instruction (SI), and (f) Video-based Supplemental Instruction (VSI). As will be described in the following narrative, some of the programs share common history and seek to improve upon previous practices.Other programs were developed independently.
Versions of the Bibliography for Downloading
Click on this link to download the bibliography as a PDF format document (Updated 1/1/2015). This version will always be months behind the current database. If you want the most recent database, download the EndNote database file below and you can create your own custom print version of the latest citations.
Click on this link to download the bibliography as a Word document which you can easily edit (Updated 1/1/2015). Using Microsoft Word software makes it easy to edit the bibliography as you like and use the search engine to find key words of your own choice.
Click on this link to download the actual database file of the bibliography in the EndNote format (Updated 1/1/2015). This file has been "compressed" and will require "unzipping" to open and use it with EndNote. Click on the above web link and "save" the file to your computer (I recommend saving it to the desktop to make it easy to find.) If you are unsure how to import into your own copy of EndNote, talk with someone who knows or search for the answer through Google and YouTube. Use of this database requires purchase of the EndNote software or importing into another citation reference manager. There are other free citation management systems such as Zotario. It is possible to import this database into these other software systems. However, I can not provide technical information how to do so.
Click on one of the two links below to download the Directory of Keywords I created to code the database entries and make it easier to search through EndNote: [Word document version] [PDF format version] (Updated 5/8/14) While you can search the bibliography by keywords within the titles or abstract, many of my additional keywords added to the database entry will not appear within the text. Using EndNote's search function along with this list of the keywords I used to index it will allow more productive searchers. It would be easy to create custom bibliographies as needed. For example, "SI" plus "science" plus "academic achievement" would create a custom bibliography of every SI research document that included data for improved academic achievement of participating students.
Important New Book on Developmental Education Policy and Practice
The State of Developmental Education captures the current condition of state developmental education policy as it is implemented in higher education institutions. Few studies have examined the role that policy plays in the implementation and execution of developmental education on campuses, particularly at four-year institutions. Parker, Bustillos, and Barrett examine state developmental education policies of five states by exploring the impact these policies have on institutions and documenting how institutional actors respond to these policies. If states and indeed the nation are to meet the educational attainment goals, particularly bachelor's degree attainment, it is important that both four- and two-year colleges and universities share in the responsibility of educating students.
I found the book through Amazon and Barnes&Noble online for $85. I had a chance to review the original manuscript and found it really informative. Just so you know, I didn't get paid to do an endorsement. In fact, I need to order my own copy. But I think it is worth it.
Colleges Reinvent Classes to Keep More Students in Science By Richard Perez-Pena, December 26, 2014
To read the entire article from the NY Times, click on this link http://nyti.ms/1wr3l7C
“We have not done a good job of teaching the intro courses or gateway courses in science and math,” said Hunter R. Rawlings III, president of the Association of American Universities and a former president of Cornell University and the University of Iowa. “Teaching freshman- and sophomore-level classes has not had a high enough priority, and that has to change.” Multiple studies have shown that students fare better with a more active approach to learning, using some of the tools being adopted here at Davis, while in traditional classes, students often learn less than their teachers think.
The University of Colorado, a national leader in the overhaul of teaching science, tested thousands of students over several years, before and after they each took an introductory physics class, and reported in 2008 that students in transformed classes had improved their scores by about 50 percent more than those in traditional classes. At the University of North Carolina, researchers reported recently that an overhaul of introductory biology classes had increased student performance over all and yielded a particularly beneficial effect for black students and those whose parents did not go to college.
Given the strength of the research findings, it seems that universities would be desperately trying to get into the act. They are not. The norm in college classes — especially big introductory science and math classes, which have high failure rates — remains a lecture by a faculty member, often duplicating what is in the assigned reading.