Are student usages of FaceBook correlated with lower grades?
Concerns About Social Networking, Blogging, and Twittering in Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on Cognitive Processes and Artificial Intelligence are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#CognitiveProcesses

Degrees Versus Piecemeal Distance (Online) Education

Bob Jensen's threads on memory and metacognition are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm

Full Disclosure to Consumers of Higher Education (including assessment of colleges and the Spellings Commission Report) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#FullDisclosure
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Bok

Publish Exams Online ---
http://www.examprofessor.com/main/index.cfm

Controversies in Higher Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating and plagiarism ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm

Effort Reporting Technology for Higher Education ---
http://www.huronconsultinggroup.com/uploadedFiles/ECRT_email.pdf

Some Thoughts on Competency-Based Training and Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/competency.htm

You can download (for free) hours of MP3 audio and the PowerPoint presentation slides from several of the best education technology workshops that I ever organized. --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm

Center for Research on Learning and Teaching --- http://www.engin.umich.edu/teaching/crltengin/researchscholarship/index.html

Asynchronous Learning Advantages and Disadvantages ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm

Dark Sides of Education Technologies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

For threaded audio and email messages from early pioneers in distance education, go http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ideasmes.htm

Full Disclosure to Consumers of Higher Education at 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#FullDisclosure

American Council on Education - GED Testing --- http://www.acenet.edu/Content/NavigationMenu/ged/index.htm

From PhD Comics: Helpers for Filling Out Teaching Evaluations --- 
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=847

As David Bartholomae observes, “We make a huge mistake if we don’t try to articulate more publicly what it is we value in intellectual work. We do this routinely for our students — so it should not be difficult to find the language we need to speak to parents and legislators.” If we do not try to find that public language but argue instead that we are not accountable to those parents and legislators, we will only confirm what our cynical detractors say about us, that our real aim is to keep the secrets of our intellectual club to ourselves. By asking us to spell out those secrets and measuring our success in opening them to all, outcomes assessment helps make democratic education a reality.
Gerald Graff, "Assessment Changes Everything," Inside Higher Ed, February 21, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/02/21/graff
Gerald Graff is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and president of the Modern Language Association. This essay is adapted from a paper he delivered in December at the MLA annual meeting, a version of which appears on the MLA’s Web site and is reproduced here with the association’s permission. Among Graff’s books are Professing Literature, Beyond the Culture Wars and Clueless in Academe: How School Obscures the Life of the Mind.

Would-be lawyers in Wisconsin who have challenged the state’s policy of allowing graduates of state law schools to practice law without passing the state’s bar exam will have their day in court after all, the Associated Press reported. A federal appeals court has reinstated a lawsuit challenging the practice, which apparently is unique in the United States.
Katherine Mangan, "Appeals Court Reinstates Lawsuit Over Wisconsin's Bar-Exam Exemption," Chronicle of Higher Education, January 29, 2008 ---
Click Here

Forwarded by John Stancil

Seems that a prof allowed an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper for the note card during a closed-book examination.

One student says “Let me get this straight. I can use anything I put on the card?”

Prof say, “Yes.”

The day of the test, the student brought a blank sheet of paper, put it on the floor and had a grad student stand on the paper.

"How Do People Learn," Sloan-C Review, February 2004 --- 
http://www.aln.org/publications/view/v3n2/coverv3n2.htm

Like some of the other well known cognitive and affective taxonomies, the Kolb figure illustrates a range of interrelated learning activities and styles beneficial to novices and experts. Designed to emphasize reflection on learners’ experiences, and progressive conceptualization and active experimentation, this kind of environment is congruent with the aim of lifelong learning. Randy Garrison points out that:

From a content perspective, the key is not to inundate students with information. The first responsibility of the teacher or content expert is to identify the central idea and have students reflect upon and share their conceptions. Students need to be hooked on a big idea if learners are to be motivated to be reflective and self-directed in constructing meaning. Inundating learners with information is discouraging and is not consistent with higher order learning . . . Inappropriate assessment and excessive information will seriously undermine reflection and the effectiveness of asynchronous learning.

Reflection on a big question is amplified when it enters collaborative inquiry, as multiple styles and approaches interact to respond to the challenge and create solutions. In How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, John Bransford and colleagues describe a legacy cycle for collaborative inquiry, depicted in a figure by Vanderbilt University researchers (see image, lower left).

Continued in the article

December 12, 2003 message from Tracey Sutherland [return@aaahq.org]

THE EDUCATIONAL COMPETENCY ASSESSMENT (ECA) WEB SITE IS LIVE! http://www.aicpa-eca.org

The AICPA provides this resource to help educators integrate the skills-based competencies needed by entry-level accounting professionals. These competencies, defined within the AICPA Core Competency Framework Project, have been derived from academic and professional competency models and have been widely endorsed within the academic community. Created by educators for educators, the evaluation and educational strategies resources on this site are offered for your use and adaptation.

The ECA site contains a LIBRARY that, in addition to the Core Competency Database and Education Strategies, provides information and guidance on Evaluating Competency Coverage and Assessing Student Performance.

To assist you as you assess student performance and evaluate competency coverage in your courses and programs, the ECA ORGANIZERS guide you through the process of gathering, compiling and analyzing evidence and data so that you may document your activities and progress in addressing the AICPA Core Competencies.

The ECA site can be accessed through the Educator's page of aicpa.org, or at the URL listed above.

The Downfall of Lecturing

Bob Jensen's threads on metacognitive learning ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm

Micro Lectures and Student-Centered Learning ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#MicroLectures

Center for Research on Learning and Teaching --- http://www.engin.umich.edu/teaching/crltengin/researchscholarship/index.html

Socratic Method Thread on the AECM

September 25, 2010 message from super accounting teacher Joe Hoyle

-----Original Message----- From: Hoyle, Joe [mailto:jhoyle@richmond.edu]
Sent: Saturday, September 25, 2010 8:42 AM
To: Jensen, Robert Subject: RE: Question for Joe Hoyle: The Quickest 2011 CPA Exam Breakdown You'll Ever Read

Hi Bob,

Hope this finds you well. I just got through giving a bunch of tests last week (Intermediate Accounting II and Introduction to Financial Accounting) and, as always, some learned it all and some learned a lot less. I am using my own new Financial Accounting textbook this semester. As you may know, the book is written in an entirely Socratic Method (question and answer style). I find that approach stimulates student curiosity much better than the traditional textbook which uses what I call a sermon or monologue style. The Socratic Method has been around for 2,500 years -- isn't it strange that it has been ignored as a possible textbook model? I'm not a big fan of college education presently (that is college education and not just accounting education). There are three major components to education: professors, students, and the textbook (or other course material). It is hard to change the professors and the students. I think if we want to create a true evolution in college education in a hurry (my goal), the way to do that is produce truly better college textbooks. I wish more college accounting professors would think seriously about how textbooks could be improved. At the AAA meeting in San Francisco in August, I compared a 1925 intermediate accounting textbook to a 2010 intermediate accounting textbook and there was a lot less difference than you might have expected. Textbooks have simply failed to evolve very much (okay, they are now in color). It is my belief that textbooks were created under a "conveyance of information" model. An educated person writes a textbook to convey tons of information to an uneducated person. In the age of Google, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia, I think the need to convey information is no longer so urgent. I think we need to switch to a "thinking about information" model. And, if that is the goal, the Socratic Method is perfect. You can start off with a question like "Company X reports inventory at $500,000. What does that mean? Is it the cost or is the retail value? And, if it is one, why is not the other?" Accounting offers thousands of such delightful questions.

But, I digress -- you asked about CPAreviewforFREE. We just finished our 117th week and it has been so much fun. We had a person write in this week (on our Facebook page) to tell us that she had made three 99s and an 89. Over the summer, we averaged about 300,000 page views per week. That is page views and not hits but that is still a lot of people answering a lot of questions.

We are currently writing new questions for the new exam starting in 2011 including task-based simulations, IFRS, and written communications questions for BEC. I personally think the exam will change less than people expect. Currently, roughly 50 percent of the people who take a part pass that part. I would expect that in January under the new CPA exam format, roughly 50 percent of the people who take a part will pass that part. And, I would guess it will be almost exactly the same 50 percent.

However, to be honest with you, we are in the process of adding a subscription service. I don't know if you ever go to ESPN.com but they give a lot of free information (Red Sox beat the Yankees last night 10-8) but they also have a subscription service where you can learn about things in more depth for a monthly fee (almost like a newspaper). Our 2,100 free questions and answers will ALWAYS stay free. But we found that people really wanted to have some content. If they missed a question on earnings per share, for example, they wanted to know more about how convertible bonds are handled in that computation. They didn't feel the need to pay $2,500 (don't get me started on what I think about that) but they wanted a bit more information.

To date, we have subscription content for FAR and Regulation. Each is available for $15 per month which I think is a reasonable price (especially in a recession). (As an aside, I have long felt that the high cost of CPA review programs keeps poor people out of the profession which I think is extremely unfair and even unAmerican.) In our FAR content, for example, we have 621 slides that cover everything I could think of that FAR will probably ask about. There are probably more slides in Regulation but I haven't counted them yet. BEC and Auditing will be ready as quickly as possible. When you have no paid employees, things only get done as fast as you can get them done.

Bob, I was delighted to see your name on my email this morning. I'm actually in Virginia Beach on a 2 day vacation but decided I'd rather write you than go walk on the beach :). If I can ever address more questions about textbooks, CPAreviewforFREE, or the Red Sox and the Yankees, please let me know. As my buddy Paul Clikeman (who is on the AECM list) will tell you, I am a person of opinion.

Joe

September 25, 2010 for New Zealand Accounting Practitioner Robert Bruce Walker

-----Original Message-----
From: THE Internet Accounting List/Forum for CPAs [mailto:CPAS-L@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Robert Bruce Walker
Sent: Sunday, September 26, 2010 5:16 AM
To: CPAS-L@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU
Subject: Re: Question for Joe Hoyle: The Quickest 2011 CPA Exam Breakdown You'll Ever Read

Interesting thesis from your friend in regard to teaching method. I must admit, though I attempt to use the Socratic method, I am suspicious of it. I use it when teaching my staff. I lay out the double entry and leave the conceptual points empty and invite my employee to complete the entries. What happens is that I continue to ask the questions giving more and more away until I lose my temper and complete the exercise and say: 'There you are. Why can't you do that?!?' This may merely tell you that I am too impatient, probably true.

The problem with the Socratic method is that it is based on a proposition related to the nature of knowledge. Plato, or perhaps Socrates, held the view that true knowledge was innate. It is there from the moment of birth or earlier and the Socratic method is applied to reveal or assist to reveal that which lies within the knowledgeable but ill-formed brain. But then it is concerned only with the knowledge that is true knowledge, which essentially reduces to a knowledge of mathematics or a priori deductive 'truth'- we all have, for instance, Pythagoras' theorem in our heads. Other 'things' are not knowledge. That is material that is derived from sense experience. Whilst I only have a cursory knowledge of his work, I think that Chomsky essentially adopts a view that language lies innate in the human baby for otherwise they could not acquire a facility with language as rapidly as they do.

I do recall many years ago studying a Platonic dialogue, I can't even remember its name, in which Socrates attempts to demonstrate how a geometrical problem can solved by a slave boy simply from Socrates' questioning. The slave boy doesn't get it. Socrates is reduced to drawing a picture in the sand. I was taught that this necessity is the implied concession from Plato that the Socratic method doesn't actually work.

Does the discipline that is accounting lie latent and ill-formed in our brains? That might depend on what accounting actually is. Possibly, as I am essentially innumerate, accounting is the only mathematical thing I have ever truly understood. Once I saw the essence of it - I can remember where and when this happened (Putney public library, London) and from that moment I held my sense of accounting as if a religious truth. That sense of religiosity has driven everything I have done ever since. In other words I have a sense of wonder. But then I know that accounting is as much about words as numbers. It is where the words meet the numbers, where the numerical ideal of accounting meets the reality of economic events, that the accountant must stand.

Here is a thought from TS Eliot, the quintessential Trans-Atlantic soul, in his poem The Hollow Men:

Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow

September 26, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen

-----Original Message-----
From: Jensen, Robert
Sent: Sunday, September 26, 2010 5:16 AM
To: CPAS-L@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU
Subject: RE: Question for Joe Hoyle: The Quickest 2011 CPA Exam Breakdown You'll Ever Read

Hi Robert and Todd,

Socratic Method is the preferred pedagogy in law schools --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_Method

Psychologists indeed study memory and learning with particular focus on metacognition ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm

Socratic Method has various metacognitive benefits.

I don't think we should take Socrates/Plato too literally about latent knowledge. There is some evidence of latent knowledge such as when three year olds, notably savants, can play music or perform math tasks they've never been taught.

But accountants and chemists have to be taught. The question is by what pedagogy? The Socratic Method is more closely aligned with "learning on your own" using Socratic questions to guide students learning and reasoning on their own. It engages critical thinking and reasoning. It is not, however, as efficient as most other pedagogies when a lot of material must be covered in a short period of time. For example, I don't particularly recommend the Socratic Method in an audience of 200 CPAs seeking to quickly pick up tips about updates to the tax code or IFRS in a six-hour CPE session.

Even though Joe Hoyle attempts Socratic Method by giving students problems that they must then solve on their own, Joe does use a textbook that guides their learning asynchronously. He also lectures.

A better example of "learning on your own" is the BAM pedagogy in intermediate accounting which has demonstrated superiority for long-term memory in spite of only having one lecture a year and no textbook. This is closer to the adage that experience is the best teacher. But "learning on your own" is a painful and slimy-sweat pedagogy when administered at its best.

Professors Catenach, Croll, and Grinacker received an AAA Innovation in Accounting Education Award for introducing the BAM pedagogy in two semesters of Intermediate Accounting at the University of Virginia. Among other things was a significant increase in performance on the CPA examination in a program that, under the BAM pedagogy, had no assigned textbook and taught even less to the CPA examination than before instigating the BAM pedagogy.
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm

The undisputed advantage of the BAM pedagogy is better long-term memory.

BAM is closest to an ideal when combined with competency-based assessment, although such assessment might be carried too far in terms of limiting critical thinking learning (if students tend to rote memorize for their competency-based final examinations) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ECA

The BAM pedagogy is probably Socratic Method at nearly its best in terms of learning. There can be a price to be paid in the sense that it is more time consuming for students (probably far too much for a single course taken) and tends to burn out instructors and students. If a student had to take five simultaneous courses all using the BAM pedagogy, the top students would probably drop out of college from lack of sleep and health deterioration.

My threads on alternate pedagogies, including Mastery Learning, are at --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#Teaching
Mastery Learning, like the BAM pedagogy, burns out students and instructors.

By the way it is not so simple to test “learning” because the term “learning” is very ambiguous. We easiest test learning of facts such as a geography test on state capitols or a spelling bee. We can test problem solving ability such as in a mathematics test. However, since students vary so much at the beginning of a math course, it is difficult to measure what the incremental benefit of the course has been apart from measuring problem solving ability at the start of the course.

Bob Jensen

September 26, 2010 reply from Joe Hoyle,

Bob,
I can’t speak for Socrates or Plato about the innate nature of knowledge but I do think students can be led to figure things out on their own by the use of carefully sequenced questions. And, isn’t that what we want: for them to figure things out on their own now so they can figure things out on their own after they leave our class.

Virtually all of us have been taught by a standard lecture style so it is difficult to even conceive of something different. Let me give you an example of a question and answer class.

After about three weeks of the semester, I started my sophomore class recently with the following series of questions. As it happened, there was no reading here. The students pretty much (but not entirely) started out as blank slates which I think Socrates would have preferred. I’ll give the questions here; you can figure out how the students would have answered. I do try to move through these questions at lightning speed—I want students on the edge of their seats.

--My company owns a few thousand shares of Ford Motor Company. These shares cost $40,000 but had a fair value of $65,000. On a set of financial statements, where is this investment reported?

--Why is it shown as an asset?

--What do I mean by cost?

--What do I mean by fair value?

--Do you think US GAAP allows my company to make the choice of whether to use cost or fair value for reporting purposes?

--Okay if US GAAP only allows one method of reporting, let’s take a class vote on whether FASB would have picked cost or fair value. (Note – the vote was roughly 50-50.)

--(To a student): You picked cost – what would be the advantages of reporting cost?

--(To a different student): You picked fair value – what would be the advantage of reporting fair value?

--Is one method totally right and one method totally wrong? Is that what we are trying to determine -- right versus wrong?

--Why did the company make this investment?

--When will they want to sell this investment?

--Are they able to sell the investment immediately if they so choose?

--Can they get roughly $65,000 immediately if they decide to sell?

--US GAAP requires this investment to be reported at fair value. What does that tell us?

--My company owns two acres of land that it bought to use for a parking lot at some point in the future. The land cost $40,000 but had a fair value of $65,000. On a set of financial statements, where is this investment reported?

--Okay, this is another asset. Do you think US GAAP allows my company to make the choice of whether to use cost or fair value for reporting purposes?

--If the land is like the investment, how will it be reported?

--When will my company choose to sell this land?

--Will the company be able to sell the land immediately if it so chooses?

--Can they get roughly $65,000 immediately if they decide to sell the land?

--If they didn’t buy the land to sell, if they cannot necessarily sell the land immediately, and if there is no market to create an immediate sale, is there sufficient reason to report the land at its $65,000 fair value?

--So, investments are reported at fair value whereas land is reported at cost. Does it surprise you that these two assets are reported in different ways?

--Let’s take one more and see if you can figure it out – your company has inventory that has a cost of $40,000 and a fair value of $65,000.

--Did you buy the inventory to sell or to keep and use?

--Are you sure you can get the $65,000 right now if you need the money?

--Are you sure you can make a sale immediately?

--Inventory resembles an investment in that it was bought in hopes of selling for a gain. However, it also resembles land in that a sale at a certain amount is not guaranteed without a formal market. Consequently, whether you use cost or fair value is not obvious. US GAAP says inventory should be reported at cost (we will later discuss lower of cost or market). What does that tell us about when we should report an asset at fair value?

--On our first test, if I gave you another asset that we have not yet discovered, could you determine whether it was likely to be reported at cost or fair value?

It took us about 20 minutes to get this far in the class and every student had to answer at least one question orally. At the end, I felt that they all had a better understanding of the reporting of assets. Often students have the view that all accounts report the same information. I want them to understand that US GAAP requires different accounts to be reported in different ways and that each way has its own logic based on the rules of accounting. I want them to be engaged and I want them to figure as much out for themselves as possible. At the end, I think they know that investments in stocks are reported at fair value whereas land and inventory are reported at cost (well, until we discuss lower of cost or market). Better still, I think they understand why and can make use of that knowledge.

Does it always work? Oh, of course not. But I do think it gets them thinking about accounting rather than memorizing accounting. One day in 1991, I switched overnight from lecturing to asking questions. Try it – you might like it.

Joe

My threads on alternate pedagogies, including Mastery Learning, are at --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#Teaching
Mastery Learning, like the BAM pedagogy, burns out students and instructors.

My Hero at the American Accounting Association Meetings in San Antonio on August 13, 2002 --- Amy Dunbar

How to students evaluate Amy Dunbar's online tax courses?

This link is a pdf doc that I will be presenting at a CPE session with Bob Jensen, Nancy Keeshan, and Dennis Beresford at the AAA on Tuesday. I updated the paper I wrote that summarized the summer 2001 online course. You might be interested in the exhibits, particularly Exhibit II, which summarizes student responses to the learning tools over the two summers. This summer I used two new learning tools: synchronous classes (I used Placeware) and RealPresenter videos. My read of the synchronous class comments is that most students liked having synchronous classes, but not often and not long ones! 8 of the 57 responding students thought the classes were a waste of time. 19 of my students, however, didn't like the RealPresenter videos, partly due to technology problems. Those who did like them, however, really liked them and many wanted more of them. I think that as students get faster access to the Internet, the videos will be more useful.

http://www.sba.uconn.edu/users/adunbar/genesis_of_an_online_course_2002.pdf

Amy Dunbar
UConn

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth learning can be taught.
Oscar Wilde

"The Objective of Education is Learning, Not Teaching (audio version available)," University of Pennsylvania's Knowledge@Wharton, August 20, 2008 --- http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm;jsessionid=9a30b5674a8d333e4d18?articleid=2032

In their book, Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track, authors Russell L. Ackoff and Daniel Greenberg point out that today's education system is seriously flawed -- it focuses on teaching rather than learning. "Why should children -- or adults -- be asked to do something computers and related equipment can do much better than they can?" the authors ask in the following excerpt from the book. "Why doesn't education focus on what humans can do better than the machines and instruments they create?"

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth learning can be taught."
-- Oscar Wilde

Traditional education focuses on teaching, not learning. It incorrectly assumes that for every ounce of teaching there is an ounce of learning by those who are taught. However, most of what we learn before, during, and after attending schools is learned without its being taught to us. A child learns such fundamental things as how to walk, talk, eat, dress, and so on without being taught these things. Adults learn most of what they use at work or at leisure while at work or leisure. Most of what is taught in classroom settings is forgotten, and much or what is remembered is irrelevant.

In most schools, memorization is mistaken for learning. Most of what is remembered is remembered only for a short time, but then is quickly forgotten. (How many remember how to take a square root or ever have a need to?) Furthermore, even young children are aware of the fact that most of what is expected of them in school can better be done by computers, recording machines, cameras, and so on. They are treated as poor surrogates for such machines and instruments. Why should children -- or adults, for that matter -- be asked to do something computers and related equipment can do much better than they can? Why doesn't education focus on what humans can do better than the machines and instruments they create?

When those who have taught others are asked who in the classes learned most, virtually all of them say, "The teacher." It is apparent to those who have taught that teaching is a better way to learn than being taught. Teaching enables the teacher to discover what one thinks about the subject being taught. Schools are upside down: Students should be teaching and faculty learning.

After lecturing to undergraduates at a major university, I was accosted by a student who had attended the lecture. After some complimentary remarks, he asked, "How long ago did you teach your first class?"

I responded, "In September of 1941."

"Wow!" The student said. "You mean to say you have been teaching for more than 60 years?"

"Yes."

"When did you last teach a course in a subject that existed when you were a student?"

This difficult question required some thought. After a pause, I said, "September of 1951."

"Wow! You mean to say that everything you have taught in more than 50 years was not taught to you; you had to learn on your own?"

"Right."

"You must be a pretty good learner."

I modestly agreed.

The student then said, "What a shame you're not that good a teacher."

The student had it right; what most faculty members are good at, if anything, is learning rather than teaching. Recall that in the one-room schoolhouse, students taught students. The teacher served as a guide and a resource but not as one who force-fed content into students' minds.

Ways of Learning

There are many different ways of learning; teaching is only one of them. We learn a great deal on our own, in independent study or play. We learn a great deal interacting with others informally -- sharing what we are learning with others and vice versa. We learn a great deal by doing, through trial and error. Long before there were schools as we know them, there was apprenticeship -- learning how to do something by trying it under the guidance of one who knows how. For example, one can learn more architecture by having to design and build one's own house than by taking any number of courses on the subject. When physicians are asked whether they leaned more in classes or during their internship, without exception they answer, "Internship."

In the educational process, students should be offered a wide variety of ways to learn, among which they could choose or with which they could experiment. They do not have to learn different things the same way. They should learn at a very early stage of "schooling" that learning how to learn is largely their responsibility -- with the help they seek but that is not imposed on them.

The objective of education is learning, not teaching.

There are two ways that teaching is a powerful tool of learning. Let's abandon for the moment the loaded word teaching, which is unfortunately all too closely linked to the notion of "talking at" or "lecturing," and use instead the rather awkward phrase explaining something to someone else who wants to find out about it. One aspect of explaining something is getting yourself up to snuff on whatever it is that you are trying to explain. I can't very well explain to you how Newton accounted for planetary motion if I haven't boned up on my Newtonian mechanics first. This is a problem we all face all the time, when we are expected to explain something. (Wife asks, "How do we get to Valley Forge from home?" And husband, who does not want to admit he has no idea at all, excuses himself to go to the bathroom; he quickly Googles Mapquest to find out.) This is one sense in which the one who explains learns the most, because the person to whom the explanation is made can afford to forget the explanation promptly in most cases; but the explainers will find it sticking in their minds a lot longer, because they struggled to gain an understanding in the first place in a form clear enough to explain.

The second aspect of explaining something that leaves the explainer more enriched, and with a much deeper understanding of the subject, is this: To satisfy the person being addressed, to the point where that person can nod his head and say, "Ah, yes, now I understand!" explainers must not only get the matter to fit comfortably into their own worldview, into their own personal frame of reference for understanding the world around them, they also have to figure out how to link their frame of reference to the worldview of the person receiving the explanation, so that the explanation can make sense to that person, too. This involves an intense effort on the part of the explainer to get into the other person's mind, so to speak, and that exercise is at the heart of learning in general. For, by practicing repeatedly how to create links between my mind and another's, I am reaching the very core of the art of learning from the ambient culture. Without that skill, I can only learn from direct experience; with that skill, I can learn from the experience of the whole world. Thus, whenever I struggle to explain something to someone else, and succeed in doing so, I am advancing my ability to learn from others, too.

Learning through Explanation

This aspect of learning through explanation has been overlooked by most commentators. And that is a shame, because both aspects of learning are what makes the age mixing that takes place in the world at large such a valuable educational tool. Younger kids are always seeking answers from older kids -- sometimes just slightly older kids (the seven-year old tapping the presumed life wisdom of the so-much-more-experienced nine year old), often much older kids. The older kids love it, and their abilities are exercised mightily in these interactions. They have to figure out what it is that they understand about the question being raised, and they have to figure out how to make their understanding comprehensible to the younger kids. The same process occurs over and over again in the world at large; this is why it is so important to keep communities multi-aged, and why it is so destructive to learning, and to the development of culture in general, to segregate certain ages (children, old people) from others.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment, learning, and technology in education are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

Question
What types of students benefit most versus least from video lectures?

"Video Lectures May Slightly Hurt Student Performance," by Sophia Li, Inside Higher Ed, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 21, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Video-Lectures-May-Slightly/24963/

No clear winner emerges in the contest between video and live instruction, according to the findings of a recent study led by David N. Figlio, a professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University. The study found that students who watched lectures online instead of attending in-person classes performed slightly worse in the course over all.

A previous analysis by the U.S. Department of Education that examined existing research comparing online and live instruction favored online learning over purely in-person instruction, according to the working paper by Mr. Figlio and his colleagues, which was released this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

But Mr. Figlio's study contradicted those results, showing that live instruction benefits Hispanic students, male students, and lower-achieving students in particular.

Colleges and universities that are turning to video lectures because of their institutions' tight budgets may be doing those students a disservice, said Mark Rush, a professor of economics at the University of Florida and one of the working paper's authors.

More research will be necessary, however, before any definite conclusions can be drawn about the effectiveness of video lectures, said Lu Yin, a graduate student at the University of Florida who worked on the project. Future research could study the effectiveness of watching lectures online for topics other than microeconomics, which was the subject of the course evaluated in the study, Ms. Yin said.

Jensen Comment
Studies like this just do not extrapolate well into the real world, because so very, very much depends upon both how instructors use videos and how students use videos. My students had to take my live classes, but my Camtasia video allowed them to keep going over and over, at their own learning pace, technical modules (PQQ Possible Quiz Questions) until they got technical things down pat ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/
Students who did not use the videos as intended usually paid a price.

However, some outcomes in the above study conform to my priors. For example, Brigham Young University (BYU) has very successfully replaced live lectures with variable-speed video lectures in the first two basic accounting courses ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo

However, BYU students most likely have mostly high achieving students to begin with, especially in accounting. It would be interesting to formally study the use such variable-speed video in colleges having a higher proportion of lower-achieving students. My guess is that the variable-speed video lectures would be less effective with lower-achieving students who are not motivated to keep replaying videos until they get the technical material down pat. The may be lower achieving in great measure because they are less motivated learners or learners who have too many distractions (like supportingchildren) to have as much quality study time.

And live lecturing/mentoring is hard to put in a single category because there are so many types of live lecturing/mentoring ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#Teaching

In conclusion, I think much depends upon the quality of the video versus lecture, class size, and student motivation. Videos offer the tremendous advantage of instant replay and being able to adjust to the best learning pace of the student. Live lectures can, and often do, lead to more human interactive factors that can be good (if they motivate) and bad (if they distract or instill dysfunctional fear).

The best video lectures are probably those that are accompanied with instant messaging with an instructor or tutor that can provide answers or clues to answers not on the video.

"More Faculty Members Adopt 'Student Centered' Teaching," Chronicle of Higher Education, October 18, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Chart-More-Faculty-Members/48848/

Professors are warming to new methods of teaching and testing that experts say are more likely to engage students, a UCLA survey found last year. Below are percentages of faculty members who said they used these approaches in all or most of the courses they taught. Those trends may continue, UCLA says, as full professors retire. Assistant professors were much more likely, for example, to structure teaching around small groups of students, while full professors were more likely to lecture extensively.

2005 2008

Selected teaching methods

Cooperative learning (small groups of students) 48% 59%

Using real-life problems* n/a 56%

Group projects 33% 36%

Multiple drafts of written work 25% 25%

Student evaluations of one another‚Äôs work 16% 24%

Reflective writing/journaling 18% 22%

Electronic quizzes with immediate feedback in class* n/a 7%

Extensive lecturing (not student-centered) 55% 46%

Selected examination methods

Short-answer exams 37% 46%

Term and research papers 35% 44%

Multiple-choice exams 32% 33%

Grading on a curve 19% 17%

* Not asked in the 2005 survey

Note: The figures are based on survey responses of 22,562 faculty members at 372 four-year colleges and universities nationwide. The survey was conducted in the fall and winter of 2007-8 and covered full-time faculty members who spent at least part of their time teaching undergraduates. The figures were statistically adjusted to represent the total population of full-time faculty members at four-year institutions. Percentages are rounded.

Source: "The American College Teacher: National Norms for the 2007-8 HERI Faculty Survey," University of California at Los Angeles Higher Education Research Institute

	2005	2008
Selected teaching methods
Cooperative learning (small groups of students)	48%	59%
Using real-life problems*	n/a	56%
Group projects	33%	36%
Multiple drafts of written work	25%	25%
Student evaluations of one another‚Äôs work	16%	24%
Reflective writing/journaling	18%	22%
Electronic quizzes with immediate feedback in class*	n/a	7%
Extensive lecturing (not student-centered)	55%	46%
Selected examination methods
Short-answer exams	37%	46%
Term and research papers	35%	44%
Multiple-choice exams	32%	33%
Grading on a curve	19%	17%
* Not asked in the 2005 survey
Note: The figures are based on survey responses of 22,562 faculty members at 372 four-year colleges and universities nationwide. The survey was conducted in the fall and winter of 2007-8 and covered full-time faculty members who spent at least part of their time teaching undergraduates. The figures were statistically adjusted to represent the total population of full-time faculty members at four-year institutions. Percentages are rounded.
Source: "The American College Teacher: National Norms for the 2007-8 HERI Faculty Survey," University of California at Los Angeles Higher Education Research Institute

Bob Jensen's threads on metacognitive learning ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

"Web Surfing in the Classroom: Sound Familiar?" by Catherine Rampell, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 15, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3004&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Over at the New York Times’s Freakonomics blog, Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres praises the University of Chicago Law School’s decision to eliminate Internet access in some classrooms. But more importantly, he recounts an amusing sketch from the Yale’s “Law Revue” skit night, which is worth sharing in full:

One of the skits had a group of students sitting at desks, facing the audience, listening to a professor drone on.

All of the students were looking at laptops except for one, who had a deck of cards and was playing solitaire. The professor was outraged and demanded that the student explain why she was playing cards. When she answered “My laptop is broken,” I remember there was simultaneously a roar of laughter from the student body and a gasp from the professors around me. In this one moment, we learned that something new was happening in class.

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

Random Thoughts (about learning from a retired professor of engineering) --- http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Columns.html

Dr. Felder's column in Chemical Engineering Education

Focus is heavily upon active learning and group learning.

Bob Jensen's threads on learning are in the following links:

http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm

http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm

March 3, 2005 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

WHAT LEADS TO ACHIEVING SUCCESS IN DISTANCE EDUCATION?

"Achieving Success in Internet-Supported Learning in Higher Education," released February 1, 2005, reports on the study of distance education conducted by the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness (A-HEC). A-HEC surveyed 21 colleges and universities to "uncover best practices in achieving success with the use of the Internet in higher education." Some of the questions asked by the study included:

"Why do institutions move online? Are there particular conditions under which e-Learning will be successful?"

"What is the role of leadership and by whom? What level of investment or commitment is necessary for success?"

"How do institutions evaluate and measure success?"

"What are the most important and successful factors for student support and faculty support?"

"Where do institutions get stuck? What are the key challenges?"

The complete report is available online, at no cost, at http://www.a-hec.org/e-learning_study.html.

The "core focus" of the nonprofit Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness (A-HEC) "is on communicating how higher education leaders are creating positive change by crystallizing their mission, offering more effective academic programs, defining their role in society, and putting in place balanced accountability measures." For more information, go to http://www.a-hec.org/ . Individual membership in A-HEC is free.

Hi Yvonne,

For what it is worth, my advice to new faculty is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm

One thing to remember is that the employers of our students (especially the public accounting firms) are very unhappy with our lecture/drill pedagogy at the introductory and intermediate levels. They believe that such pedagogy turns away top students, especially creative and conceptualizing students. Employers believe that lecture/drill pedagogy attracts savant-like memorizers who can recite their lessons book and verse but have few creative talents and poor prospects for becoming leaders. The large accounting firms believed this so strongly that they donated several million dollars to the American Accounting Association for the purpose of motivating new pedagogy experimentation. This led to the Accounting Change Commission (AECC) and the mixed-outcome experiments that followed. See http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aaa/facdev/aecc.htm

The easiest pedagogy for faculty is lecturing, and it is appealing to busy faculty who do not have time for students outside the classroom. When lecturing to large classes it is even easier because you don't have to get to know the students and have a great excuse for using multiple choice examinations and graduate student teaching assistants. I always remember an economics professor at Michigan State University who said that when teaching basic economics it did not matter whether he had a live class of 300 students or a televised class of 3,000 students. His full-time teaching load was three hours per week in front of a TV camera. He was a very good lecturer and truly loved his three-hour per week job!

Lecturing appeals to faculty because it often leads to the highest teaching evaluations. Students love faculty who spoon feed and make learning seem easy. It's much easier when mom or dad spoon the pudding out of the jar than when you have to hold your own spoon and/or find your own jar.

An opposite but very effective pedagogy is the AECC (University of Virginia) BAM Pedagogy that entails live classrooms with no lectures. BAM instructors think it is more important for students to learn on their own instead of sitting through spoon-fed learning lectures. I think it takes a special kind of teacher to pull off the astoundingly successful BAM pedagogy. Interestingly, it is often some of our best lecturers who decided to stop lecturing because they experimented with the BAM and found it to be far more effective for long-term memory. The top BAM enthusiasts are Tony Catanach at Villanova University and David Croll at the University of Virginia. Note, however, that most BAM applications have been at the intermediate accounting level. I have my doubts (and I think BAM instructors will agree) that BAM will probably fail at the introductory level. You can read about the BAM pedagogy at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm

At the introductory level we have what I like to call the Pincus (User Approach) Pedagogy. Karen Pincus is now at the University of Arkansas, but at the time that her first learning experiments were conducted, she taught basic accounting at the University of Southern California. The Pincus Pedagogy is a little like both the BAM and the case method pedagogies. However, instead of having prepared learning cases, the Pincus Pedagogy sends students to on-site field visitations where they observe on-site operations and are then assigned tasks to creatively suggest ways of improving existing accounting, internal control, and information systems. Like the BAM, the Pincus Pedagogy avoids lecturing and classroom drill. Therein lies the controversy. Students and faculty in subsequent courses often complain that the Pincus Pedagogy students do not know the fundamental prerequisites of basic accounting needed for intermediate and advanced-level accounting courses. Two possible links of interest on the controversial Pincus Pedagogy are as follows:

Where the Pincus Pedagogy and the BAM Pedagogy differ lies in subject matter itself and stress on creativity. The BAM focuses on traditional subject matter that is found in such textbooks as intermediate accounting textbooks. The BAM Pedagogy simply requires that students learn any way they want to learn on their own since students remember best what they learned by themselves. The Pincus Pedagogy does not focus on much of the debit and credit "rules" found in most traditional textbooks. Students are required to be more creative at the expense of memorizing the "rules."

The Pincus Pedagogy is motivated by the belief that traditional lecturing/drill pedagogy at the basic accounting and tax levels discourages the best and more-creative students to pursue careers in the accountancy profession. The BAM pedagogy is motivated more by the belief that lecturing is a poor pedagogy for long-term memory of technical details. What is interesting is that the leading proponents of getting away from the lecture/drill pedagogy (i.e., Karen Pincus and Anthony Catenach) were previously two of the very best lecturers in accountancy. If you have ever heard either of them lecture, I think you would agree that you wish all your lecturers had been only half as good. I am certain that both of these exceptional teachers would agree that lecturing is easier than any other alternatives. However, they do not feel that lecturing is the best alternative for top students.

Between lecturing and the BAM Pedagogy, we have case method teaching. Case method teaching is a little like lecturing and a little like the BAM with some instructors providing answers in case wrap ups versus some instructors forcing students to provide all the answers. Master case teachers at Harvard University seldom provide answers even in case wrap ups, and often the cases do not have any known answer-book-type solutions. The best Harvard cases have alternative solutions with success being based upon discovering and defending an alternative solution. Students sometimes interactively discover solutions that the case writers never envisioned. I generally find case teaching difficult at the undergraduate level if students do not yet have the tools and maturity to contribute to case discussions. Interestingly, it may be somewhat easier to use the BAM at the undergraduate level than Harvard-type cases. The reason is that BAM instructors are often dealing with more rule-based subject matter such as intermediate accounting or tax rather than conceptual subject matter such as strategic decision making, business valuation, and financial risk analysis.

The hardest pedagogy today is probably a Socratic pedagogy online with instant messaging communications where an instructor who's on call about 60 hours per week from his or her home. The online instructor monitors the chats and team communications between students in the course at most any time of day or night. Amy Dunbar can tell you about this tedious pedagogy since she's using it for tax courses and will be providing a workshop that tells about how to do it and how not to do it. The next scheduled workshop precedes the AAA Annual Meetings on August 1, 2003 in Hawaii. You can also hear Dr. Dunbar and view her PowerPoint show from a previous workshop at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm#2002

In conclusion, always remember that there is no optimal pedagogy in all circumstances. All learning is circumstantial based upon such key ingredients as student maturity, student motivation, instructor talent, instructor dedication, instructor time, library resources, technology resources, and many other factors that come to bear at each moment in time. And do keep in mind that how you teach may determine what students you keep as majors and what you turn away.

I tend to agree with the accountancy firms that contend that traditional lecturing probably turns away many of the top students who might otherwise major in accountancy.

At the same time, I tend to agree with students who contend that they took accounting courses to learn accounting rather than economics, computer engineering, and behavioral science.

Bob Jensen

-----Original Message-----
From: Lou&Bonnie [mailto:gyp1@EARTHLINK.NET]
Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 5:03 PM

I am a beginning accounting instructor (part-time) at a local community college. I am applying for a full-time faculty position, but am having trouble with a question. Methodology in accounting--what works best for a diversified group of individuals. Some students work with accounting, but on a computer and have no understanding of what the information they are entering really means to some individuals who have no accounting experience whatsoever. What is the best methodology to use, lecture, overhead, classroom participation? I am not sure and I would like your feedback. Thank you in advance for your help.

Yvonne

January 20, 2003 reply from Thomas C. Omer [omer@UIC.EDU]

Don’t forget about Project Discovery going on at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana

Thomas C. Omer Associate Professor
Department of Accounting University of Illinois At Chicago
The Art of Discovery: Finding the forest in spite of the trees.

Thanks for reminding me Tom. A good link for Project Discovery is at http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aaa/facdev/aeccuind.htm

January 17, 2003 reply from David R. Fordham [fordhadr@JMU.EDU]

I'll add an endorsement to Bob's advice to new teachers. His page should be required reading for Ph.D.s.

And I'll add one more tidbit.

Most educators overlook the distinction between "lectures" and "demonstrations".

There is probably no need for any true "lecture" in the field of accounting at the college level, even though it is still the dominant paradigm at most institutions.

However, there is still a great need for "live demonstrations", **especially** at the introductory level.

Accounting is a complex process. Introductory students in ANY field learn more about complex processes from demonstrations than probably any other method.

Then, they move on and learn more from "practicing" the process, once they've learned the steps and concepts of the process. And for intermediate and advanced students, practice is the best place to "discover" the nuances and details.

While "Discovery" is probably the best learning method of all, it is frequently very difficult to "discover" a complex process correctly from its beginning, on your own. Thus, a quick demonstration can often be of immense value at the introductory level. It's an efficient way of communicating sequences, relationships, and dynamics, all of which are present in accounting processes.

Bottom line: You can (and should) probably eliminate "lectures" from your classes. You should not entirely eliminate "demonstrations" from your classes.

Unfortunately, most education-improvement reform literature does not draw the distinction: anytime the teacher is doing the talking in front of a class, using blackboard and chalk or PowerPoint, they label it "lecture" and suggest you don't do it! This is, in my view, oversimplification, and very bad advice.

Your teaching will change a whole lot (for the better!) once you realize that students only need demonstrations of processes. You will eliminate a lot of material you used to "lecture" on. This will make room for all kinds of other things that will improve your teaching over the old "lecture" method: discussions, Socratic dialogs, cases and dilemmas, even some entertainment here and there.

Plus, the "lectures" you retain will change character. Take your cue from Mr. Wizard or Bill Nye the Science Guy, who appear to "lecture" (it's about the only thing you can do in front of a camera!), but whose entire program is pretty much devoted to demonstration. Good demonstrations do more than just demonstrate, they also motivate! Most lectures don't!

Another two pennies from the verbose one...

David R. Fordham
PBGH Faculty Fellow
James Madison University

January 16, 2003 message from Peter French [pjfrench@CELESTIAL.COM.AU]

I found this source http://www.thomson.com/swcp/gita.html and also Duncan Williamson has some very good basic material on his sites http://duncanwil.co.uk/index.htm ; http://www.duncanwil.co.uk/objacc.html ;

Don't forget the world lecture hall at http://www.utexas.edu/world/lecture/ ;

This reminds me of how I learned ... the 'real learning' in the workplace...

I remember my first true life consolidation - 130 companies in 1967. We filled a wall with butchers paper and had 'callers', 'writers' and 'adders' who called out the information to others who wrote out the entries and others who did the adding. I was 25 and quite scared. The Finance Director knew this and told me [1] to stick with 'T' accounts to be sure I was making the right entry - just stick the ones you are sure in and don't even think about the other entry - it must 'balance' it out; [2] just because we are dealing with 130 companies and several hundreds of millions of dollars don't lose sight of the fact that really it is no different from the corner store. I have never forgotten the simplistic approach. He said - if the numbers scare you, decimalise them to 100,000's in your mind - it helps ... and it did. He often used to say the Dr/Cr entries out aloud

I entered teaching aged 48 after having been in industry and practice for nearly 30 years. Whether i am teaching introductory accounting, partnership formation/dissolution, consolidations, asset revaluation, tax affect accounting, I simply write up the same basic entries on the white board each session - I never use an overhead for this, I always write it up and say it out aloud, and most copy/follow me - and then recap and get on with the lesson. I always take time out to 'flow chart' what we are doing so that they never loose sight of the real picture ... this simple system works, and have never let my students down.

There have been several movements away form rote learning in all levels of education - often with disastrous consequences. It has its place and I am very proud to rely on it. This works and when it isn't broken, I am not about to try to fix it.

Good luck - it is the greatest responsibility in the world, and gives the greatest job satisfaction. It is worth every hour and every grey hair. To realise that you have enabled someone to change their lives, made a dream come true, eclipses every successful takeover battle or tax fight that I won i have ever had.

Good luck - may it be to you what is has been to me.

Peter French

January 17, 2003 reply from Michael O'Neil, CPA Adjunct Prof. Weber [Marine8105@AOL.COM]

I am currently teaching high school students, some of whom will hopefully go on to college. Parents expect you to teach the children, which really amounts to lecturing, or going over the text material. When you do this they do not read the textbook, nor do they know how to use the textbook to answer homework questions. If you don't lecture then the parents will blame you for "not" teaching their children the material.

I agree that discovery is the best type of learning, and the most fun. I teach geometry and accounting/consumer finance. Geometry leans itself to discovery, but to do so you need certain materials. At our level (high school) we are also dealing several other issues you don't have at the college level. In my accounting classes I teach the debit/credit, etc. and then have them do a lot of work using two different accounting programs. When they make errors I have them discover the error and correct it. They probably know very little about posting, and the formatting of financial statements although we covered it. Before we used the programs we did a lot of pencil work.

Even when I taught accounting at the college and junior college level I found students were reluctant to, and not well prepared to, use their textbooks. Nor were they inclined to DO their homework.

I am sure that many of you have noticed a drop off in quality of students in the last years. I wish I could tell you that I see that it will change, but I do not see any effort in that direction. Education reminds me of a hot air balloon being piloted by people who lease the balloon and have no idea how to land it. They are just flying around enjoying the view. If we think in terms of bankruptcy education is ready for Chapter 11.

Mike ONeil

January 17, 2003 reply from Chuck Pier [texcap@HOTMAIL.COM]

While not in accounting, I would like to share some information on my wife's experience with online education. She has a background (10 years) as a public school teacher and decided to get her graduate degree in library science. Since I was about to finish my doctoral studies and we knew we would be moving she wanted to find a program that would allow her to move away and not lose too many hours in the transfer process. What she found was the online program at the University of North Texas (UNT) in Denton. Through this program she will be able to complete a 36 hour American Library Association accredited Master's degree in Library Science and only spend a total of 9 days on campus. The 9 days are split into a one day session and 2 four day sessions, which can be combined into 1 five and 1 four day session. Other than these 9 days the entire course is conducted over the internet. The vast majority is asynchronous, but there are some parts conducted in a synchronous manner.

She has completed about 3/4 of the program and is currently in Denton for her last on campus session. While I often worry about the quality of online programs, after seeing how much work and time she is required to put in, I don't think I should worry as much. I can honestly say that I feel she is getting a better, more thorough education than most traditional programs. I know at a minimum she has covered a lot more material.

All in all her experience has been positive and this program fit her needs. I think the MLS program at UNT has been very successful to date and appears to be growing quite rapidly. It may serve as a role model for programs in other areas.

Chuck Pier

Charles A. Pier
Assistant Professor Department of Accounting
Walker College of Business
Appalachian State University
Boone, NC 28608 email: pierca@appstate.edu 828-262-6189

Academic Whores: School Systems into Lowering Standards for Achievement Tests and Graduation
Some states are rigging achievement tests to get more money and deceive the public
Will future college graduates in President Obama's home town be able to read and divide 37/13?
But they will be college "graduates" if community colleges lower standards like their K-12 counterparts.

President Obama's American Graduation Initiative

From the Creative Commons on July 15, 2009 --- http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15818

President Obama announced yesterday the American Graduation Initiative, a twelve billion dollar plan to reform U.S. community colleges. The initiative calls for five million additional community college graduates by 2020, and plans that “increase the effectiveness and impact of community colleges, raise graduation rates, modernize facilities, and create new online learning opportunities” to aid this goal.

A significant component of the initiative is the plan to “create a new online skills laboratory.” From the fact sheet,

“Online educational software has the potential to help students learn more in less time than they would with traditional classroom instruction alone. Interactive software can tailor instruction to individual students like human tutors do, while simulations and multimedia software offer experiential learning. Online instruction can also be a powerful tool for extending learning opportunities to rural areas or working adults who need to fit their coursework around families and jobs. New open online courses will create new routes for students to gain knowledge, skills and credentials. They will be developed by teams of experts in content knowledge, pedagogy, and technology and made available for modification, adaptation and sharing. The Departments of Defense, Education, and Labor will work together to make the courses freely available through one or more community colleges and the Defense Department’s distributed learning network, explore ways to award academic credit based upon achievement rather than class hours, and rigorously evaluate the results.”

It is important to note here the difference between “open” and simply accessible “online”. Truly open resources for education are clearly designated as such with a standard license that allows not only access, but the freedoms to share, adapt, remix, or redistribute those resources. The educational materials that make up the new open online courses for this initiative should be open in this manner, especially since they will result from a government plan. We are excited about this initiative and hope the license for its educational materials will allow all of these freedoms. Catherine Casserly, formerly in charge of open educational resources at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (now at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching), writes,

“Today at Macomb College, President Barack Obama announced a proposal to commit $50 million for the development of open online courses for community colleges as part of the American Graduation Initiative: Stronger American Skills through Community Colleges. As proposed, the courses will be freely available for use as is and for adaption as appropriate for targeted student populations. The materials will carry a Creative Commons license.”

You can read the official announcement at the White House site on their blog and visit the briefing room for the full fact sheet.

Jensen Comment
Given the troublesome fact that 80% of U.S. college graduates seeking jobs could not find jobs requiring college degrees, there is much more needed that getting more students in the U.S. to graduate form college.

July 15, 2009 reply from AMY HAAS [haasfive@MSN.COM]

Excuse me for bringing up an often overlooked point, but getting students into community colleges is easy. Getting them to do the college level work needed to graduate is not! As a instructor at an urban community college for more than 16 years I find that they typical community college student lacks study skills and or the motivation to succeed. They will come to class but getting them do actually work outside the classroom, even with tons of online resources available is often like "pulling teeth". They do not make the time for it.

Amy Haas

July 15 reply from Flowers, Carol [cflowers@OCC.CCCD.EDU]

I am in agreement with Amy. This piece that Bob published implies to me that EVERYONE should have a college education. I think that is the problem with education. This mentality creates, once again, entitlement, not motivation. Society has taken the motivation that individuals once had, away. Why work for it when it, when it can be given to you! There is an old adage................you can lead a horse to water, but.......................................!!!

I see this as more tax dollars going to waste. I have robust epacks and online classes, and do students take advantage of it.....some do, most "don't have the time" -- they are attempting to carry full loads at two schools and work a full time job. Maybe, we should be funding time management and realistic expectations programs.

The two examples I had this Easter, were doing poorly -- one was carrying two full time jobs and a full school load; the other, two full time school loads and 1 1/2 work load . Both felt I was requiring too much and should drop my standards because of their poor time management. I worked full time and carried 12 units (no social life).............why not more units or work, because I wanted to be successful. If school takes longer than 4 years to complete, so be it. I received no help. My family couldn't afford it, so I realized if I wanted it I had to do it myself. I think many of us can tell the same story and don't feel it diminished but enhanced our motivation.

July 15, 2009 reply from Patricia Doherty [pdoherty@BU.EDU]

The "time" factor is another issue entirely, I think. Many of my students (at a 4-year private university) also have jobs, ranging from 10-hour work study to fill time or nearly so, to afford our astronomical tuition. That's become life. Should there be more options for them? Yes, I think so. Many of them are very motivated - one of my summer term students is working full time while attending school ... and has a 4.0 GPA! Her mom is a single parent with limited means, so she has to help because she wants to be at this school. My own adult daughter is back in school. Her financial aid is not full tuition. She also works nearly full time - and remains on the Dean's List. I am meantime trying to figure out this year where my husband and I will find the money to meet the rest of the tuition, because I don't want her to have to drop out. So I completely understand students who are pressed for time because of work obligations. But the ones who really want to be there find a way to use the resources available to them to succeed. For the others, the lack of time to use what you provide is an excuse, nothing more. They need to find a better reason for not doing well.

July 15, 2009 reply from Ed Scribner [escribne@NMSU.EDU]

Amy et al.,

I kind of like Zucker’s article that I may have mentioned before:

http://www.ams.org/notices/199608/comm-zucker.pdf

Ed Scribner New Mexico State University Las Cruces, NM, USA

American RadioWorks: Testing Teachers (radio broadcast) --- http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/testing_teachers/

"GRE and SAT validity," by Stephen Hsu, Information Processing, June 8, 2011 ---
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/gre-and-sat-validity.html

GPA-SAT correlations
"Psychometric thresholds for physics and mathematics," by Stephen Hsu and James Schombert, MIT's Technology Review, May 24, 2010 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/posts.aspx?bid=354

This is a follow up to our earlier paper on GPA-SAT correlations. Click below for the pdf.

Non-linear Psychometric Thresholds for Physics and Mathematics

ABSTRACT
We analyze 5 years of student records at the University of Oregon to estimate the probability of success (as deﬁned by superior undergraduate record; sufficient for admission to graduate school) in Physics and Mathematics as a function of SAT-M score. We ﬁnd evidence of a non-linear threshold: below SAT-M score of roughly 600, the probability of success is very low. Interestingly, no similar threshold exists in other majors, such as Sociology, History, English or Biology, whether on SAT combined, SAT-R or SAT-M. Our ﬁndings have signiﬁcant implications for the demographic makeup of graduate populations in mathematically intensive subjects, given the current distribution of SAT-M scores.

There is clearly something different about the physics and math GPA vs SAT distributions compared to all of the other majors we looked at (see figure 1 in the paper). In the other majors (history, sociology, etc.) it appears that hard work can compensate for low SAT score. But that is not the case in math and physics.

One interesting question is whether the apparent cognitive threshold is a linear or non-linear effect. Our data suggests that the probability of doing well in any particular quarter of introductory physics may be linear with SAT-M, but the probability of having a high cumulative GPA in physics or math is very non-linear in SAT-M. See figure below: the red line is the upper bound at 95% confidence level on the probability of getting an A in a particular quarter of introductory physics, and the blue line is the probability of earning a cumulative GPA of at least 3.5 or so.
Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Near perfection in grade averages is increasing due to grade inflation in both high school and college ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#RateMyProfessor

Hence I would think SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, and MCAT standardized tests would be used to further partition graduates with stellar grade averages.

Tests measure cognitive ability, but grades measure motivation as long as grade inflation does not ruin everything in education.

About ETS Research --- http://www.ets.org/research
More credit should be give to efforts made my ETS to reduce cultural and disability factors in testing.

Paying Students to Raise Text Scores ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GMAT

"Obama’s Union-Friendly, Feel-Good Approach to Education." by Kyle Olson, Townhall, March 30, 2011 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/kyleolson/2011/03/30/obama%E2%80%99s_union-friendly,_feel-good_approach_to_education

The Obama administration, principally the president and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, are now routinely making public statements which are leading to one conclusion: instead of fixing American education, we should dumb down the standards.

According to the Associated Press, President Obama “is pushing a rewrite of the nation’s education law that would ease some of its rigid measurement tools” and wants “a test that ‘everybody agrees makes sense’ and administer it in less pressure-packed atmospheres, potentially every few years instead of annually.”

The article goes on to say that Obama wants to move away from proficiency goals in math, science and reading, in favor of the ambiguous and amorphous goals of student readiness for college and career.

Obama’s new focus comes on the heels of a New York Times report that 80% of American public schools could be labeled as failing under the standards of No Child Left Behind.

Put another way: the standards under NCLB have revealed that the American public education system is full of cancer. Instead of treating the cancer, Obama wants to change the test, as if ignoring the MRI somehow makes the cancer go away.

So instead of implementing sweeping policies to correct the illness, Obama is suggesting that we just stop testing to pretend it doesn’t exist.

If Obama were serious about curing the disease, one of the best things he could do is to ensure that there is a quality teacher in every classroom in America. Of course, that would mean getting rid teacher tenure and scrapping seniority rules that favor burned-out teachers over ambitious and innovative young teachers.

That means standing up to the teacher unions. For a while, it looked like Obama would get tough with the unions, but not anymore. With a shaky economy and three wars, it looks like Obama’s re-election is in serious jeopardy. He needs all hands on deck – thus the new union-friendly education message.

Obama’s new direction will certainly make the unionized adults happy. They’ve hated NCLB from the get-go.

And the unions will love Obama’s talk about using criteria other than standardized testing in evaluating schools.

He doesn’t get specific, of course, but I bet I can fill in the gaps. If testing is too harsh, perhaps we can judge students and schools based on how hard they try or who can come up with the most heart-wrenching excuse for failure or how big the dog was that ate their homework.

Continued in article

"Department of Injustice," by Walter E. Williams, Townhall, March 30. 2011 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2011/03/30/department_of_injustice

One of the requirements to become a Dayton, Ohio police officer is to successfully pass the city's two-part written examination. Applicants must correctly answer 57 of 86 questions on the first part (66 percent) and 73 of 102 (72 percent) on the second part. Dayton's Civil Service Board reported that 490 candidates passed the November 2010 written test, 57 of whom were black. About 231 of the roughly 1,100 test takers were black.

The U.S. Department of Justice, led by Attorney General Eric Holder, rejected the results of Dayton's Civil Service examination because not enough blacks passed. The DOJ has ordered the city to lower the passing score. The lowered passing grade requires candidates to answer 50 of 86 (58 percent) questions correctly on the first part and 64 of 102 (63 percent) of questions on the second. The DOJ-approved scoring policy requires potential police officers to earn the equivalent of an "F" on the first part and a "D" on the second. Based on the DOJ-imposed passing scores, a total of 748 people, 258 more than before, were reported passing the exam. Unreported was just how many of the 258 are black.

Keith Lander, chairman of the Dayton chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Dayton NAACP president Derrick Foward condemned the DOJ actions.

Mr. Lander said, "Lowering the test score is insulting to black people," adding, "The DOJ is creating the perception that black people are dumb by lowering the score. It's not accomplishing anything."

Mr. Foward agreed and said, "The NAACP does not support individuals failing a test and then having the opportunity to be gainfully employed," adding, "If you lower the score for any group of people, you're not getting the best qualified people for the job."

I am pleased by the positions taken by Messrs. Lander and Foward. It is truly insulting to suggest that black people cannot meet the same standards as white people and somehow justice requires lower standards. Black performance on Dayton's Civil Service exam is really a message about fraudulent high school diplomas that many black students receive.

Continued in article

"Racial Stupidity and Malevolence," by Walter E. Williams, Townhall, September 8, 2010 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2010/09/08/racial_stupidity_and_malevolence

The white liberal's agenda, coupled with that of black race hustlers, has had and continues to have a devastating impact on ordinary black people. Perhaps the most debilitating aspect of this liberal malevolence is in the area of education.

Recently, I spoke with a Midwestern university engineering professor who was trying to help an inner-city black student who was admitted to the university's electrical engineering program. The student was sure that he was well prepared for an engineering curriculum; his high school had convinced him of that and the university recruiters supported that notion. His poor performance on the university's math placement exam required that he take remedial math courses. He's failed them and is now on academic probation after two semesters of earning less than a 2.0 grade point average.

The young man and his parents were sure of his preparedness. After all, he had good high school grades, but those grades only meant that he was well behaved. The college recruiters probably knew this youngster didn't have the academic preparation for an electrical engineering curriculum. They were more concerned with racial diversity.

This young man's background is far from unique. Public schools give most black students fraudulent diplomas that certify a 12th-grade achievement level. According to a report by Abigail Thernstrom, "The Racial Gap in Academic Achievement," black students in 12th grade dealt with scientific problems at the level of whites in the sixth grade; they wrote about as well as whites in the eighth grade. The average black high school senior had math skills on a par with a typical white student in the middle of ninth grade. The average 17-year-old black student could only read as well as the typical white child who had not yet reached age 13.

Black youngsters who take the SAT exam earn an average score that's 70 to 80 percent of the score of white students, and keep in mind, the achievement level of white students is nothing to write home about. Under misguided diversity pressures, colleges recruit many black students who are academically ill equipped. Very often, these students become quickly disillusioned, embarrassed and flunk out, or they're steered into curricula that have little or no academic content, or professors practice affirmative-action grading. In any case, the 12 years of poor academic preparation is not repaired in four or five years of college. This is seen by the huge performance gap between blacks and whites on exams for graduate school admittance such as the GRE, MCAT and LSAT.

Is poor academic performance among blacks something immutable or pre-ordained? There is no evidence for such a claim. Let's sample some evidence from earlier periods. In "Assumptions Versus History in Ethnic Education," in Teachers College Record (1981), Dr. Thomas Sowell reports on academic achievement in some of New York city's public schools. He compares test scores for sixth graders in Harlem schools with those in the predominantly white Lower East Side for April 1941 and December 1941.

In paragraph and word meaning, Harlem students, compared to Lower East Side students, scored equally or higher. In 1947 and 1951, Harlem third-graders in paragraph and word meaning, and arithmetic reasoning and computation scored about the same as -- and in some cases, slightly higher, and in others, slightly lower than -- their white Lower East Side counterparts.

Going back to an earlier era, Washington, D.C.'s Dunbar High School's black students scored higher in citywide tests than any of the city's white schools. In fact, from its founding in 1870 to 1955, most of Dunbar's graduates went off to college.

Let's return to the tale of the youngster at the Midwestern college. Recruiting this youngster to be a failure is cruel, psychologically damaging and an embarrassment for his family. But the campus hustlers might come to the aid of the student by convincing him that his academic failure is a result of white racism and Eurocentric values.

Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation

"GRE and SAT validity," by Stephen Hsu, Information Processing, June 8, 2011 ---
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/gre-and-sat-validity.html

This is a follow up to our earlier paper on GPA-SAT correlations. Click below for the pdf.

Non-linear Psychometric Thresholds for Physics and Mathematics

ABSTRACT
We analyze 5 years of student records at the University of Oregon to estimate the probability of success (as deﬁned by superior undergraduate record; sufficient for admission to graduate school) in Physics and Mathematics as a function of SAT-M score. We ﬁnd evidence of a non-linear threshold: below SAT-M score of roughly 600, the probability of success is very low. Interestingly, no similar threshold exists in other majors, such as Sociology, History, English or Biology, whether on SAT combined, SAT-R or SAT-M. Our ﬁndings have signiﬁcant implications for the demographic makeup of graduate populations in mathematically intensive subjects, given the current distribution of SAT-M scores.

There is clearly something different about the physics and math GPA vs SAT distributions compared to all of the other majors we looked at (see figure 1 in the paper). In the other majors (history, sociology, etc.) it appears that hard work can compensate for low SAT score. But that is not the case in math and physics.

One interesting question is whether the apparent cognitive threshold is a linear or non-linear effect. Our data suggests that the probability of doing well in any particular quarter of introductory physics may be linear with SAT-M, but the probability of having a high cumulative GPA in physics or math is very non-linear in SAT-M. See figure below: the red line is the upper bound at 95% confidence level on the probability of getting an A in a particular quarter of introductory physics, and the blue line is the probability of earning a cumulative GPA of at least 3.5 or so.
Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Near perfection in grade averages is increasing due to grade inflation in both high school and college ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#RateMyProfessor

Hence I would think SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, and MCAT standardized tests would be used to further partition graduates with stellar grade averages.

Tests measure cognitive ability, but grades measure motivation as long as grade inflation does not ruin everything in education.

About ETS Research --- http://www.ets.org/research
More credit should be give to efforts made my ETS to reduce cultural and disability factors in testing.

Paying Students to Raise Text Scores ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GMAT

Some states are rigging achievement tests to get more money and deceive the public
Will future college graduates in President Obama's home town be able to read and divide 37/13?
But they will be college "graduates" if community colleges lower standards like their K-12 counterparts.

"Second City Ruse: How states like Illinois rig school tests to hype phony achievement," The Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124786847585659969.html#mod=djemEditorialPage

When President Obama chose Arne Duncan to lead the Education Department, he cited Mr. Duncan's success as head of Chicago's public school system from 2001 to 2008. But a new education study suggests that those academic gains aren't what they seemed. The study also helps explain why big-city education reform is unlikely to occur without school choice.

Mr. Obama noted in December that "in just seven years, Arne's boosted elementary test scores here in Chicago from 38% of students meeting the standard to 67%" and that "the dropout rate has gone down every year he's been in charge." But according to "Still Left Behind," a report by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, a majority of Chicago public school students still drop out or fail to graduate with their class. Moreover, "recent dramatic gains in the reported number of CPS elementary students who meet standards on state assessments appear to be due to changes in the tests . . . rather than real improvements in student learning."

Our point here isn't to pick on Mr. Duncan, but to illuminate the ease with which tests can give the illusion of achievement. Under the 2001 No Child Left Behind law, states must test annually in grades 3 through 8 and achieve 100% proficiency by 2014. But the law gives states wide latitude to craft their own exams and to define math and reading proficiency. So state tests vary widely in rigor, and some have lowered passing scores and made other changes that give a false impression of academic success.

The new Chicago report explains that most of the improvement in elementary test scores came after the Illinois Standards Achievement Test was altered in 2006 to comply with NCLB. "State and local school officials knew that the new test and procedures made it easier for students throughout the state -- and throughout Chicago -- to obtain higher marks," says the report.

Chicago students fared much worse on national exams that weren't designed by state officials. On the 2007 state test, for example, 71% of Chicago's 8th graders met or exceeded state standards in math, up from 32% in 2005. But results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam, a federal standardized test sponsored by the Department of Education, show that only 13% of the city's 8th graders were proficient in math in 2007. While that was better than 11% in 2005, it wasn't close to the 39 percentage-point increase reflected on the Illinois state exam.

In Mr. Duncan's defense, he wasn't responsible for the new lower standards, which were authorized by state education officials. In 2006, he responded to a Chicago Tribune editorial headlined, "An 'A' for Everybody!" by noting (correctly) that "this is the test the state provided; this is the state standard our students were asked to meet." But this doesn't change the fact that by defining proficiency downward, states are setting up children to fail in high school and college. We should add that we've praised New York City test results that the Thomas B. Fordham Institute also claims are inflated, but we still favor mayoral control of New York's schools as a way to break through the bureaucracy and drive more charter schools.

And speaking of charters, the Chicago study says they "provide one bright spot in the generally disappointing performance of Chicago's public schools." The city has 30 charters with 67 campuses serving 30,000 students out of a total public school population of 408,000. Another 13,000 kids are on wait lists because the charters are at capacity, and it's no mystery why. Last year 91% of charter elementary schools and 88% of charter high schools had a higher percentage of students meeting or exceeding state standards than the neighborhood schools that the students otherwise would have attended.

Similar results have been observed from Los Angeles to Houston to Harlem. The same kids with the same backgrounds tend to do better in charter schools, though they typically receive less per-pupil funding than traditional public schools. In May, the state legislature voted to increase the cap on Chicago charter schools to 70 from 30, though Illinois Governor Pat Quinn has yet to sign the bill.

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley deserves credit for hiring Mr. Duncan, a charter proponent. But in deference to teachers unions that oppose school choice, Mr. Daley stayed mostly silent during the debate over the charter cap. That's regrettable, because it's becoming clear that Chicago's claim of reform success among noncharter schools is phony.

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

One Impact of Higher Admission Standards --- Less Revenue
"New Approach at U. of Phoenix Drives Down Parent Company's Stock," Inside Higher Ed, March 30, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/03/30/qt#255383

The Apollo Group on Tuesday announced a quarterly loss and enrollment declines at the University of Phoenix that were largely attributable to changes in the for-profit institution's policies aimed at ensuring that more of the students it enrolls can succeed academically. The company's announcement of its second quarter results drove down its stock price, Bloomberg reported. Apollo saw enrollment of new students in University of Phoenix degree programs fall by 45 percent from a year ago, and said its policy of requiring new students with few academic credits to enroll in a free orientation program to see if they are cut out for college-level work had suppressed enrollments in the short term but put it "on a path of more consistently delivering high quality growth" in the future. Phoenix, as the biggest and most visible player in the for-profit higher education sector, has been under intense scrutiny amid discussion of increased federal regulation, and it has put in place a series of changes (including changing how it compensates recruiters), its officials have said, to try to lead the industry in a new direction.

Bob Jensen's threads on for-profit universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud

Performance Evaluation
Let's face it! Accounting, professors' job performance, and vegetable nutrition have a lot systemic problems in common ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews

American Council on Education - GED Testing --- http://www.acenet.edu/Content/NavigationMenu/ged/index.htm

"Why I Hate Annual Evaluations," by Ben Yagoda, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 28, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-I-Hate-Annual-Evaluations/64815/

There are three things I don't like about my job. Two of them are pretty obvious and completely unoriginal: correcting papers and attending department meetings. The third thing is somewhat obvious as well, but I hesitate to name it, for fear that it will make me look whiny.

However, that battle has probably already been lost, so here goes: I hate my annual evaluation.

To the extent that this evaluation is necessary, it is because of the collective-bargaining agreement between the University of Delaware and our campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors. As long as I've been here—going on 18 years—the agreement has divided our annual pay raises into two parts. The first part is across the board. This year our raise was 4 percent, of which 1.5 percent was across the board, meaning, for example, that a full professor making the minimum salary of about $85,000 got a raise of about $1,275.

The other part of the raise is based on "merit," and it works as follows. The average faculty salary is calculated. Say it is $100,000. Every unit gets a pot of cash equivalent to 2.5 percent, or $2,500, multiplied by the number of faculty members in the unit. In my unit, the English department, that would be roughly 50 bodies. The chairman of the department evaluates each professor's performance. The professor who is precisely in the middle gets a $2,500 merit raise. Those rated higher will get more, those rated lower will get less, but the average merit raise has to be $2,500.

In other words, no department can be a Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average.

On paper, this all seems reasonable, and I freely admit that part of my outsized resentment of the process stems from my own quirks. It requires a lot of paperwork and rewards good record keeping. I despise paperwork and am truly terrible at record keeping. (It is a cruel twist of fate in my world that evaluation time and tax time arrive together.) My early experience in the working world taught me that I also deeply and irrationally resent being judged by a boss, which is probably the main reason why, before becoming an academic, I was a freelance writer and thus my own boss. Now here I am being evaluated by the department chair, who isn't really my boss, but at this point the difference seems negligible.

But I maintain that some of my gripes have objective merit. American colleges and universities, including the University of Delaware, still view faculty members as a group of scholars and teachers devoted to and bound by self-instilled standards of excellence. Tenure, as long as it continues to exist, must and does require evaluation. But—crucially—at Delaware and elsewhere, that evaluation and judgment are performed not by the chair but by one's peers (ultimately ratified or not, to be sure, by provosts, presidents, and other higher-ups).

For faculty members who will eventually go up for tenure, it definitely makes sense to get input from as many sources as possible, so I'll grant that for them an annual evaluation by the chair makes sense. But for tenured faculty members? No—at least not the way we do it at my university.

Every year around this time, we submit our materials—publications, syllabi, evidence of service, and so forth—and fill out a Web form. The chair, who has meanwhile received copies of students' evaluations of our teaching, rates all of us on a scale of 1 (the worst) to 9 (the best) in scholarship, service, and teaching. Different percentages are accorded to each area based on an elaborate formula, but generally speaking, for tenured and tenure-track professors, scholarship counts for roughly 50 percent, teaching 40 percent, and service 10 percent.

The whole thing is undignified and unseemly. What, exactly, is the difference between a 5 and 7 in service? Number of committees served on? Hours spent? Scholarship is even more thorny, because as everyone knows, an article does not equal an article. Do two short articles in PMLA equal a New York Review of Books mega-essay, or do I have to throw in a draft choice and a player to be named later? Number of words produced and place of publication are important, to be sure, but quality trumps them both. And how can our chair be expected to judge the quality of the work of every faculty member, some of whom work in fields very different from his? The answer is he can't.

Evaluating teaching has its own well-documented set of problems. We honor faculty autonomy to the extent that evaluators are not welcome in another professor's classroom, and we are still a good distance away from giving students No Child Left Behind tests that would "assess" the extent to which a certain course has achieved its "goals." That's well and good, but it doesn't leave much as a basis for judgment. There are syllabi and the narrative Teaching Statements we provide each year, and sometimes the evidence of a new course devised and designed, but the main thing used to assess teaching are student evaluations. Those have some value, but they are most assuredly not the whole story when it comes to the quality of one's teaching. If they were, we might as well outsource the whole process to RateMyProfessors.com.

The unseemliness multiplies when my colleagues (as they often do) complain loudly and frequently about the marks they have gotten. I would be embarrassed to tell you how many laments I have listened to along the lines of, "I published a book, and he only gave me a 7!" I would bet our students don't kvetch as much about their grades.

And what are the consequences of our evaluations? In the 50-40-10 scholarship-teaching-service ratio, the difference between a 7 and a 9 rating in scholarship is about $540 a year. After taxes, that comes out to maybe $400 a year, or $8 a week. Not only is that not much, but for almost everyone, it gets evened out over time; some years, you can expect to get maybe a little lower rating than you "really" deserve, some years a little higher. For this my colleagues gnash their teeth and lose sleep?

Several years ago, I came up with another way to evaluate faculty performance, based on the understanding that we all expect excellent work from ourselves and one another. Take the average merit raise and give almost everyone in the department a raise slightly lower than that; in the example I've been working with, that could be $2,300. That way, a handful of colleagues who publish major books or get major awards or stellar teaching evaluations can receive a slightly higher raise. And if a couple of people are blatantly not carrying their weight, they can get a little less.

I proposed my idea at a department meeting, and it was summarily shot down. My explanation for this is Freud's notion of the narcissism of small differences—our need to exaggerate the minimal distinctions between ourselves and people very much like ourselves.

Even as I write, we are negotiating our next collective-bargaining agreement. Word on the street is that salaries will be frozen for next year. If that happens, I will be secretly glad, and you know why: It could very possibly mean no annual evaluation!

Ben Yagoda is a professor of English at the University of Delaware and author, most recently, of Memoir: A History (Riverhead Books, 2009). His blog on higher education is at http://campuscomments.wordpress.com

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

American RadioWorks: Testing Teachers (radio broadcast) --- http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/testing_teachers/

It's About Time
"Settlement Reached in Essay-Mill Lawsuit." by Paige Chapman, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 25, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/settlement-reached-in-essay-mill-lawsuit/27852?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Bob Jensen's threads about academic cheating ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm

Questions
Should a doctoral student be allowed to hire an editor to help write her dissertation?
If the answer is yes, should this also apply to any student writing a course project, take home exam, or term paper?

Answer
Forwarded by Aaron Konstam
"Academic Frauds," The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 3, 2003 --- http://chronicle.com/jobs/2003/11/2003110301c.htm

Question (from "Honest John"): I'm a troubled member of a dissertation committee at Private U, where I'm not a regular faculty member (although I have a doctorate). "Bertha" is a "mature" student in chronological terms only. The scope of her dissertation research is ambiguous, and the quality of her proposal is substandard. The committee chair just told me that Bertha is hiring an editor to "assist" her in writing her dissertation. I'm outraged. I've complained to the chair and the director of doctoral studies, but if Bertha is allowed to continue having an "editor" to do her dissertation, shouldn't I report the university to an accreditation agency? This is too big a violation of integrity for me to walk away.

Answer: Ms. Mentor shares your outrage -- but first, on behalf of Bertha, who has been betrayed by her advisers.

In past generations, the model of a modern academician was a whiz-kid nerd, who zoomed through classes and degrees, never left school, and scored his Ph.D. at 28 or so. (Nietzsche was a full professor at 24.) Bertha is more typical today. She's had another life first.

Most likely she's been a mom and perhaps a blue-collar worker -- so she knows about economics, time management, and child development. Maybe she's been a musician, a technician, or a mogul -- and now wants to mentor others, pass on what she's known. Ms. Mentor hears from many Berthas.

Returning adult students are brave. "Phil" found that young students called him "the old dude" and snorted when he spoke in class. "Barbara" spent a semester feuding with three frat boys after she told them to "stop clowning around. I'm paying good money for this course." And "Millie's" sister couldn't understand her thirst for knowledge: "Isn't your husband rich enough so you can just stay home and enjoy yourself?"

Some tasks, Ms. Mentor admits, are easier for the young -- pole-vaulting, for instance, and pregnancy. Writing a memoir is easier when one is old. And no one under 35, she has come to suspect, should give anyone advice about anything. But Bertha's problem is more about academic skills than age.

Her dissertation plan may be too ambitious, and her writing may be rusty -- but it's her committee's job to help her. All dissertation writers have to learn to narrow and clarify their topics and pace themselves. That is part of the intellectual discipline. Dissertation writers learn that theirs needn't be the definitive word, just the completed one, for a Ph.D. is the equivalent of a union card -- an entree to the profession.

But instead of teaching Bertha what she needs to know, her committee (except for Honest John) seems willing to let her hire a ghost writer.

Ms. Mentor wonders why. Do they see themselves as judges and credential-granters, but not teachers? Ms. Mentor will concede that not everyone is a writing genius: Academic jargon and clunky sentences do give her twitching fits. But while not everyone has a flair, every academic must write correct, clear, serviceable prose for memos, syllabuses, e-mail messages, reports, grant proposals, articles, and books.

Being an academic means learning to be an academic writer -- but Bertha's committee is unloading her onto a hired editor, at her own expense. Instead of birthing her own dissertation, she's getting a surrogate. Ms. Mentor feels the whole process is fraudulent and shameful.

What to do?

Ms.Mentor suggests that Honest John talk with Bertha about what a dissertation truly involves. (He may include Ms. Mentor's column on "Should You Aim to Be a Professor?") No one seems to have told Bertha that it is an individual's search for a small corner of truth and that it should teach her how to organize and write up her findings.

Moreover, Bertha may not know the facts of the job market in her field. If she aims to be a professor but is a mediocre writer, her chances of being hired and tenured -- especially if there's age discrimination -- may be practically nil. There are better investments.

But if Bertha insists on keeping her editor, and her committee and the director of doctoral studies all collude in allowing this academic fraud to take place, what should Honest John do?

He should resign from the committee, Ms. Mentor believes: Why spend his energies with dishonest people? He will have exhausted "internal remedies" -- ways to complain within the university -- and it is a melancholy truth that most bureaucracies prefer coverups to confrontations. If there are no channels to go through, Honest John may as well create his own -- by contacting the accrediting agencies, professional organizations in the field, and anyone else who might be interested.

Continued in the article.

November 3, 2003 reply from David R. Fordham [fordhadr@JMU.EDU]

Bob, there are two very different questions being addressed here.

The first deals with the revelation that “her dissertation research is ambiguous, and the quality of her proposal is substandard”.

The editing of a manuscript is a completely different issue.

The ambiguity of the research and the flaws with the proposal should be addressed far more forcefully than the editing issue!

Care should be used to ensure that the editor simply edits (corrects grammar, tense, case, person, etc.), and isn’t responsible for the creation of ideas. But if the editor is a professional editor who understands the scope of his/her job, I don’t see why editing should be an issue for anyone, unless the purpose of the dissertation exercise is to evaluate the person’s mastery of the minutiae of the English language (in which case the editor is indeed inappropriate).

Talk about picking your battles … I’d be a lot more upset about ambiguous research than whether someone corrected her sentence structure. I believe the whistle-blower needs to take a closer look at his/her priorities. A flag needs to be raised, but about the more important of the two issues.

David R. Fordham
PBGH Faculty Fellow
James Madison University

Assessment in Math and Science: What's the Point? --- http://www.learner.org/resources/series93.html

Head Start Programs

It is now 45 years later. We spend more than $7 billion providing Head Start to nearly 1 million children each year. And finally there is indisputable evidence about the program's effectiveness, provided by the Department of Health and Human Services: Head Start simply does not work.
"Time to Ax Public Programs That Don't Yield Results," Liberal Columnist Joe Klein, Time Magazine, July 26, 2011, Page 27 ---
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2081778,00.html

Barack Obama has been accused of "class warfare" because he favors closing several tax loopholes — socialism for the wealthy — as part of the deficit-cutting process. This is a curious charge: class warfare seems to be a one-way street in American politics. Over the past 30 years, the superwealthy have waged far more effective warfare against the poor and the middle class, via their tools in Congress, than the other way around. How else can one explain the fact that the oil companies, despite elephantine profits, are still subsidized by the federal government? How else can one explain the fact that hedge-fund managers pay lower tax rates than their file clerks? Or that farm subsidies originally meant for family farmers go to huge corporations that hardly need the help?

Actually, there is an additional explanation. Conservatives, like liberals, routinely take advantage of a structural flaw in the modern welfare state: there is no creative destruction when it comes to government programs. Both "liberal" and "conservative" subsidies linger in perpetuity, sometimes metastasizing into embarrassing giveaways. Even the best-intentioned programs are allowed to languish in waste and incompetence. Take, for example, the famed early-education program called Head Start.
(See more about the Head Start reform process.)

The idea is, as Newt Gingrich might say, simple liberal social engineering. You take the million or so poorest 3- and 4-year-old children and give them a leg up on socialization and education by providing preschool for them; if it works, it saves money in the long run by producing fewer criminals and welfare recipients — and more productive citizens. Indeed, Head Start did work well in several pilot programs carefully run by professionals in the 1960s. And so it was "taken to scale," as the wonks say, as part of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.

It is now 45 years later. We spend more than $7 billion providing Head Start to nearly 1 million children each year. And finally there is indisputable evidence about the program's effectiveness, provided by the Department of Health and Human Services: Head Start simply does not work.

According to the Head Start Impact Study, which was quite comprehensive, the positive effects of the program were minimal and vanished by the end of first grade. Head Start graduates performed about the same as students of similar income and social status who were not part of the program. These results were so shocking that the HHS team sat on them for several years, according to Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution, who said, "I guess they were trying to rerun the data to see if they could come up with anything positive. They couldn't."
(See how California's budget woes will hurt the state's social services.)

The Head Start situation is a classic among government-run social programs. Why do so many succeed as pilots and fail when taken to scale? In this case, the answer is not particularly difficult to unravel. It begins with a question: Why is Head Start an HHS program and not run by the Department of Education? The answer: Because it is a last vestige of Johnson's War on Poverty, which was run out of the old Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The War on Poverty attempted to rebuild poor communities from the bottom up, using local agencies called community action programs. These outfits soon proved slovenly; often they were little more than patronage troughs for local Democratic Party honchos — and, remarkably, to this day, they remain the primary dispensers of Head Start funds. As such, they are far more adept at dispensing make-work jobs than mastering the subtle nuances of early education. "The argument that Head Start opponents make is that it is a jobs program," a senior Obama Administration official told me, "and sadly, there is something to that."

Continued in article

Assessment in Math and Science: What's the Point? --- http://www.learner.org/resources/series93.html

Assessment by Ranking May Be a Bad Idea

An interesting article on forced performance rankings (might be read as grading) ---
Olympics 1, AIG 0: Why Forced Ranking Is a Bad Idea --- Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2010/02/olympics-1-aig-0-why-forced-ra.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE

Jensen Comment
I think some readers fail to see the importance of just what the title means when it reads “Olympics 1, AIG 0."

They're apt to look for some relationship between the Olympics and AIG. There may well be some very obscure relationship, but that’s not the point.

February 19, 2010 reply from David Albrecht [albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]

Bob,

This is one of the most interesting stories you've passed along in quite a while. I especially like the part of the article that says once a ranking criterion is selected, all other tasks an employee might perform (such as learning/training) are counter productive. I think this is a situation very present in academe. GPA becomes an important metric for students quest for either employment or graduate school after graduation with a BSBA. If GPA is the primary criterion for awarding entry and scholarships, than any activity a student takes that could result in a lower grade is to be avoided at all costs.

Moreover, learning within a course is a multivariate activity. I can think of memorization, application, affectation and personal growth. If a professor is untrained in education (and most biz profs are), professor selection of inappropriate grading criteria can place a huge cost on students.

David Albrecht

February 19, 2010 reply from James R. Martin/University of South Florida [jmartin@MAAW.INFO] (I combined two replies)

According to Deming:
Annual reviews and ranking employees indicates the absence of a knowledge of variation and an absence of an understanding of the system. A manager who understands variation would not rank people because he or she would understand that ranking people merely ranks the effect of the system on the people. This causes tampering & destroys motivation and teamwork.

See http://maaw.info/DemingMain.htm for Deming's theory of management.

This hit one of my buttons. The point: There is nothing wrong with ranking people in games. Some one wins and someone losses. But life, business, and education are not games. Everyone can win if they cooperate and work together. Ranking people prevents them from doing that and causes winners and losers in the short run. In the long run, everyone losses.

February 20, 2010 reply from Francine McKenna [retheauditors@GMAIL.COM]

Bob/Dave
Agree wholeheartedly. I've written a lot about forced ranking for partners on down and the negative effect it's had on professionalism and morale in the Big 4. They've followed their big ideal client GE into the abyss.

http://retheauditors.com/2009/11/05/live-our-values-demonstrate-our-behaviors-support-our-strategy/

http://retheauditors.com/2009/08/12/goingconcern-ratings-raises-and-promotions-forced-ranking-in-the-big-4/

http://retheauditors.com/2007/06/26/when-is-a-layoff-not-a-layoff/

Francine

February 19, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen

And I forgot to cringe properly when remembering all the times I thought I was making the job easier when I had students rank each other’s term papers --- because I thought ordinal-scale ranking would be easier for them than assigning a letter grade or ratio-scaled score. Ratio scales differ from interval scales by having a common zero point, which is what makes correlations different from covariances.

In small graduate classes I thought it would be a learning exercise for students to both read each others’ papers and rank them. Students were asked not to rank their own papers in the set of submitted rankings.

However, for grading purposes I graded the papers before I read the student rankings. I reserved the right to only mark a paper’s grade upward after reading the student commentaries that accompanied their rankings. I suspect I would’ve graded downward as well if plagiarism was detected by student rankers, but not once in my career did a student ranker ever disclose a case of plagiarism.

Still, I’m now wondering about the propriety of making students rank papers.

Bob Jensen

If a student doesn’t come to school,” he continued, “how can you justify passing that kid?
Fernanda Santos

"Bronx School’s Top Ranking Stirs Wider Doubts About Rating System," by Fernanda Santos, The New York Times, January 20, 2011 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/education/21grades.html?_r=1&hpw

One of the trademarks of New York City’s school accountability system is an equation that assigns every school a letter grade, A through F, based on a numerical score from 1 to 100.

Bronx School’s Top Ranking Stirs Wider Doubts About Rating System By FERNANDA SANTOS Published: January 20, 2011

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One of the trademarks of New York City’s school accountability system is an equation that assigns every school a letter grade, A through F, based on a numerical score from 1 to 100. Enlarge This Image Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Lynn Passarella, facing camera, the principal of the Theater Arts Production Company School, outside the school on Thursday. She declined to comment on the allegations about her school’s grading practices.

A parent pulling up the latest report card for the Theater Arts Production Company School in the Bronx would find that it earned the score of 106.3 (including extra credit).

But that very empiric-sounding number, which was the highest of any high school in the city, is based in part on subjective measures like “academic expectations” and “engagement,” as measured by voluntary parent, teacher and student surveys.

And, according to some teachers at the school, even the more tangible factors in the score — graduation rates and credits earned by students — were not to be taken at face value. The school has a policy that no student who showed up for class should fail, and even some who missed many days of school were still allowed to pass and graduate.

The Department of Education, which revealed on Wednesday that it was investigating grading practices at the school, says that it has a team devoted to analyzing school statistics every year and looking for red flags like abnormal increases in student scores or dropout rates. But a department official said that nothing in its data had raised suspicions about the school, known as Tapco, until a whistle-blower filed a complaint in October.

Still, in a data-driven system where letter grades can determine a school’s fate, one big question looms over the investigation: If the allegations turn out to be true, are they an exception or a sign of a major fault in the school accountability system?

“The D.O.E. has absolutely created a climate for these types of scandals to happen,” Michael Mulgrew, the president of the teachers’ union, said in an interview. “Their culture of ‘measure everything and question nothing a principal tells you’ makes it hard to figure out what’s real and what’s not real inside a school.”

There are many gradations of impropriety, and it is unclear if any of them apply to Tapco, which has about 500 students and also includes a middle school. The school’s teacher handbook states that no student should fail a class if he or she regularly attends, and that students who miss work should be given “multiple opportunities for student success and work revision.”

Current and former teachers at the school said that even students who were regularly absent were given passing grades, in some cases with course credits granted by the principal without a teacher’s knowledge. Some students’ records showed credits for courses the school did not offer.

The investigation over the irregularities at Tapco, which began in October, also include allegations that the school’s principal, Lynn Passarella, manipulated teacher and parent surveys, which represent 10 of the 100 points in a school’s score. Graduation rates, passing rates on Regents exams and earned credits constitute most of the score.

Ms. Passarella declined to comment on the allegations.

A spokesman for the Education Department, Matthew Mittenthal, said: “We take every allegation of misconduct seriously, and hope that the public can reserve judgment until the investigation is complete.”

Sometimes, the analysts who pore over the data uncover serious problems. Last year, the Education Department lowered the overall scores of three high schools. At Jamaica High School in Queens, the department discovered that the school had improperly granted credit to some transfer students. At John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx and W. H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School in Brooklyn, administrators could not provide documentation to explain why some students had left the schools.

Since 2008, at least four principals and assistant principals have been reprimanded — two retired, one served a 30-day unpaid suspension and another paid a $6,500 fine — on charges that included tampering with tests.

Principals can get as much as $25,000 in bonuses if their schools meet or exceed performance targets, and some experts are skeptical that the department’s system of checks and balances is as trustworthy as it should be, particularly when money is at stake.

Tapco’s administrators got a bonus once, for the 2008-9 school year, when the high school’s overall score was 85.8, which earned it an A. (The middle school scored 73.) Ms. Passarella received $7,000, while her assistant principals got $3,500 each, according to the Education Department. (Administrator bonuses for 2009-10 performance have not been doled out.)

“There’s an inherent temptation towards corruption when you create a situation where there are rewards for things like higher test scores or favorable surveys,” said Sol Stern, an education researcher at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group. “It’s an invitation to cheating.”

One mother, Cathy Joyner, whose daughter, Sapphire Connor, is a junior, said the school was excellent, adding that “the children are respectful” and that the school was “concentrating on their talents.”

But one teacher, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he said he feared for his job, gave a different account. For teachers who do not do what the principal wants, the teacher said, “it’s difficult to get tenure.”

“If a student doesn’t come to school,” he continued, “how can you justify passing that kid?"

Wow: 97% of Elementary NYC Public Students Get A or B Grades --- There must be higher IQ in the water!
"City Schools May Get Fewer A’s," by Jennifer Medina, The New York Times, January 28, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/education/30grades.html?hpw

Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, criticized the decision to reduce the number of schools that receive top grades.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Concept Knowledge and Assessment of Deep Understanding

"A Measure of Education Is Put to the Test Results of national exam will go public in 2012," by David Glenn, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 19, 2010 --- http://chronicle.com/article/A-Measure-of-Learning-Is-Put/124519/

You have 90 minutes to complete this test.

Here is your scenario: You are the assistant to a provost who wants to measure the quality of your university's general-education program. Your boss is considering adopting the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA, a national test that asks students to demonstrate their ability to synthesize evidence and write persuasively.

The CLA is used at more than 400 colleges. Since its debut a decade ago, it has been widely praised as a sophisticated alternative to multiple-choice tests. At some colleges, its use has helped spark sweeping changes in instruction and curriculum. And soon, many more of the scores will be made public.

But skeptics say the test is too detached from the substantive knowledge that students are actually expected to acquire. Others say those who take the test have little motivation to do well, which makes it tough to draw conclusions from their performance.

You may review the following documents:

Graphs of Collegiate Learning Assessment scores on the University of Texas system's campuses over a four-year period. An essay in which an assistant provost at a flagship campus describes her "grave concerns" about using CLA scores to compare different colleges. A report in which the CLA's creators reply to their critics. Your task: Write a two-page memorandum to your boss that describes and analyzes the major arguments for and against adopting the CLA. When you have finished, please hand your materials to the proctor and leave the room quietly.

It is easy to see why the test format that you just tasted has been so appealing to many people in higher education. The CLA is a direct measure of skills, in contrast to surveys about how much time students spend studying or how much they believe they have learned. And unlike multiple-choice-based measures of learning, the CLA aspires to capture a student's ability to make an argument and to interpret multiple types of evidence. Those skills are close to the heart of a liberal-arts education.

"Everything that No Child Left Behind signified during the Bush administration—we operate 180 degrees away from that," says Roger Benjamin, president of the Council for Aid to Education, which developed and promotes the CLA. "We don't want this to be a high-stakes test. We're putting a stake in the ground on classic liberal-arts issues. I'm willing to rest my oar there. These core abilities, these higher-order skills, are very important, and they're even more important in a knowledge economy where everyone needs to deal with a surplus of information." Only an essay test, like the CLA, he says, can really get at those skills.

Richard J. Shavelson, an educational psychologist at Stanford University and one of the CLA's creators, makes a similar point in his recent book, Measuring College Learning Responsibly: Accountability in a New Era (Stanford University Press). "If you want to find out not only whether a person knows the laws governing driving but also whether she can actually drive a car," he writes, "don't judge her performance solely with a multiple-choice test. Rather, also administer a behind-the-wheel driving test."

"The CLA is really an authentic assessment process," says Pedro Reyes, associate vice chancellor for academic planning and assessment at the University of Texas system. "The Board of Regents here saw that it would be an important test because it measures analytical ability, problem-solving ability, critical thinking, and communication. Those are the skills that you want every undergraduate to walk away with." (Other large systems that have embraced the CLA include California State University and the West Virginia system.)

One feature that appealed to Mr. Reyes and his colleagues is that the CLA typically reports scores on a "value added" basis, controlling for the scores that students earned on the SAT or ACT while in high school. In raw terms, the highest scores in the Texas system are at Austin and Dallas, the most-selective campuses. But in value-added terms, it appears that students at San Antonio and El Paso make stronger gains between their freshman and senior years.

The CLA's overseers, however, say they do not want colleges to become overly concerned with bean-counting and comparing public scores. Instead, they emphasize the ways in which colleges can use their own CLA scores to experiment with improved models of instruction. Since 2007, Mr. Benjamin's organization has invested heavily in "performance-task academies," which encourage colleges to add CLA-style assignments to their liberal-arts courses.

One campus that has gone down that road is the University of Evansville, where first-year-experience courses have begun to ask students to do performance tasks.

"We began by administering a retired CLA question, a task that had to do with analyzing crime-reduction strategies," says Brian R. Ernsting, an associate professor of biology at Evansville. "We talked with the students about the modes of thinking that were involved there, how to distinguish correlation from causation and anecdotes from data."

Similar things are happening at Pacific Lutheran University. "Our psychology department is working on a performance task that mirrors the CLA, but that also incorporates disciplinary content in psychology," says Karen E. McConnell, director of assessment. "They're planning to make that part of their senior capstone course."

How to Interpret the Scores? Mr. Ernsting and Ms. McConnell are perfectly sincere about using CLA-style tasks to improve instruction on their campuses. But at the same time, colleges have a less high-minded motive for familiarizing students with the CLA style: It just might improve their scores when it comes time to take the actual test.

And that matters, in turn, because by 2012, the CLA scores of more than 100 colleges will be posted, for all the world to see, on the "College Portrait" Web site of the Voluntary System of Accountability, an effort by more than 300 public colleges and universities to provide information about life and learning on their campuses. (Not all of the colleges have adopted the CLA. Some use the Educational Testing Service's "Proficiency Profile," and others use the ACT's Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency.)

A few dozen colleges in the voluntary project, including those in the Texas system, have already made their test scores public. But for most, the 2012 unveiling will be a first.

"If a college pays attention to learning and helps students develop their skills—whether they do that by participating in our programs or by doing things on their own—they probably should do better on the CLA," says Marc Chun, a research scientist at the Council for Aid to Education. Such improvements, he says, are the main point of the project.

But that still raises a question: If familiarizing students with CLA-style tasks does raise their scores, then the CLA might not be a pure, unmediated reflection of the full range of liberal-arts skills. How exactly should the public interpret the scores of colleges that do not use such training exercises?

Trudy W. Banta, a professor of higher education and senior adviser to the chancellor for academic planning and evaluation at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, believes it is a serious mistake to publicly release and compare scores on the test. There is too much risk, she says, that policy makers and the public will misinterpret the numbers.

"Standardized tests of generic skills—I'm not talking about testing in the major—are so much a measure of what students bring to college with them that there is very little variance left out of which we might tease the effects of college," says Ms. Banta, who is a longtime critic of the CLA. "There's just not enough variance there to make comparative judgments about the comparative quality of institutions."

Compounding that problem, she says, is the fact that most colleges do not use a true longitudinal model: That is, the students who take the CLA in their first year do not take it again in their senior year. The test's value-added model is therefore based on a potentially apples-and-oranges comparison.

The test's creators reply that they have solved that problem by doing separate controls for the baseline skills of freshman test-takers and senior test-takers. That is, the freshman test-takers' scores are assessed relative to their SAT and ACT scores, and so are senior test-takers' scores. For that reason, colleges cannot game the test by recruiting an academically weak pool of freshmen and a strong pool of seniors.

Another concern is that students do not always have much motivation to take the test seriously. That problem is especially challenging with seniors, who are typically recruited to take the CLA toward the end of their final semester, when they can already taste the graduation champagne. Who at that stage of college wants to carefully write a 90-minute essay that isn't required for any course?

For that reason, many colleges have had to come up with elaborate incentives to get students to take the test at all. (See the graphic below.) A recent study at Central Connecticut State University found that students' scores were highly correlated with how long they had spent writing their essays.

Take My Test — Please The Collegiate Learning Assessment has been widely praised. But it involves an arduous 90 minutes of essay writing. As a result, many colleges have resorted to incentives and requirements to get students to take the test, and to take it seriously.

As of last week, there were some significant bugs in the presentation of CLA scores on the College Portrait Web site. Of the few dozen universities that had already chosen to publish CLA data on that site, roughly a quarter of the reports appeared to include erroneous descriptions of the year-to-year value-added scores. In some cases, the errors made the universities' gains appear better than they actually were. In other cases, they made them seem worse.

Seniors at California State University at Bakersfield, for example, had CLA scores that were 155 points higher than freshmen's, while the two cohorts' SAT scores were similar. The College Portrait site said that the university's score gains were "below what would be expected." The University of Missouri at St. Louis, meanwhile, had senior scores that were only 64 points higher than those of freshmen, and those two cohorts had identical ACT scores. But those score gains were reported as "well above what would be expected."

"It doesn't make sense, what's presented here," said Stephen Klein, the CLA's director of research and development, when The Chronicle pointed out such discrepancies. "This doesn't look like something we would produce." Another official at the Council for Aid to Education confirmed that at least three of the College Portrait reports were incorrect, and said there appeared to be systematic problems with the site's presentation of the data.

As The Chronicle went to press, the Voluntary System of Accountability's executive director, Christine M. Keller, said her office would identify and fix any errors. The forms that institutions fill out for the College Portrait, she said, might be confusing for administrators because they do not always mirror the way the CLA itself (and the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency and ETS's Proficiency Profile) present their official data. In any case, Ms. Keller said, a revised version of the College Portrait site is scheduled to go online in December.

It is clear that CLA scores do reflect some broad properties of a college education. In a study for their forthcoming book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press), the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa asked students at 24 colleges to take the CLA during their first semester and then again during their fourth. Their study was conducted before any significant number of colleges began to consciously use CLA-style exercises in the classroom.

The two authors found one clear pattern: Students' CLA scores improved if they took courses that required a substantial amount of reading and writing. Many students didn't take such courses, and their CLA scores tended to stay flat.

The pattern was consistent across the ability spectrum: Regardless of whether a student's CLA scores were generally low or high, their scores were more likely to improve if they had taken demanding college courses.

So there is at least one positive message in Mr. Arum and Ms. Roksa's generally gloomy book. Colleges that make demands on students can actually develop their skills on the kinds of things measured by the CLA.

"We found that students in traditional liberal-arts fields performed and improved more over time on the CLA," says Mr. Arum, a professor at New York University. "In other fields, in education, business, and social work, they didn't do so well. Some of that gap we can trace back to time spent studying. That doesn't mean that students in education and business aren't acquiring some very valuable skills. But at the same time, the communication and reasoning skills measured by the CLA really are important to everyone."

Dueling Purposes For more than a century, scholars have had grand visions of building national tests for measuring college-level learning. Mr. Shavelson, of Stanford, sketches several of those efforts in his book, including a 1930s experiment that tested thousands of students at colleges throughout Pennsylvania. (Sample question: "Of Corneille's plays, 1. Polyeucte, 2. Horace, 3. Cinna, 4. Le Cid shows least the influence of classical restraint.")

Mr. Shavelson believes the CLA's essays and "performance tasks" offer an unusually sophisticated way of measuring what colleges do, without relying too heavily on factual knowledge from any one academic field. But in his book he also notes the tension between the two basic uses of nationally normed tests: Sometimes they're used for internal improvements, and sometimes they're used as benchmarks for external comparisons. Those two uses don't always sit easily together. Politicians and consumers want easily interpretable scores, while colleges need subtler and more detailed data to make internal improvements.

Can the CLA fill both of those roles? That is the experiment that will play out as more colleges unveil their scores.

Teaching to the Test Somewhat
"An Assessment Test Inspires Tools for Teaching," by David Glenn. Chronicle of Higher Education, September 19, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/An-Assessment-Test-Inspires/124537/

"Oregon Trains Educators to Improve Learning for All Students," by Tanya Roscorla, Converge Magazine, January 6, 2012 ---
http://www.convergemag.com/curriculum/Oregon-DATA-Year5.html?elq=1e13f85f2dc34e84b8b1397c797c2f58

For years, Oregon school districts have collected student test data. In field assessments, the Oregon Education Department found that 125 different assessments existed in the state to track student progress.

But the data sat in warehouses, unused or misused. Teachers and administrators didn't know how to easily find, analyze and use student assessment results to inform instruction, said Mickey Garrison, data literacy director for the Oregon Department of Education.

Five years ago, the department started the Oregon Direct Access to Achievement Project with a $4.7 million federal grant to improve student learning. This week, the project is publishing its Year 5 report.

Through the project, Oregon now has an adaptable data framework and a network for districts that connects virtual teams of administrators and teachers around the state. The framework has also helped the state mesh the Common Core State Standards with its own.

"Moving ideas from paper into practice is not something that I'm gonna say we in education have necessarily done a good job of in the past, but the model that we created for data definitely goes deep into implementation, and that's essential," Garrison said.

Continued in article

The problem is that our students choose very bland, low nourishment diets in our modern day smorgasbord curricula. Their concern is with their grade averages rather than their education. And why not? Grades for students and turf for faculty have become the keys to the kingdom!
Bob Jensen

"Are Undergraduates Actually Learning Anything?" by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. Chronicle of Higher Education, January 18, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Undergraduates-Actually/125979/

Drawing on survey responses, transcript data, and results from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (a standardized test taken by students in their first semester and at the end of their second year), Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa concluded that a significant percentage of undergraduates are failing to develop the broad-based skills and knowledge they should be expected to master. Here is an excerpt from Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press), their new book based on those findings.

Continued in article

Our Compassless Colleges: What are students really not learning?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Berkowitz

What questions might classroom teachers ask of their students,
the answers to which would allow a strong inference that the students "understood"?

"The Assessment of “Understanding,” by Lloyd Bond, Carnegie Foundation for Advancement in Teaching --- Click Here

Study to remember and you will forget.
Study to understand and you will remember.
—Anonymous

I once sat on the dissertation committee of a graduate student in mathematics education who had examined whether advanced graduate students in math and science education could explain the logic underlying a popular procedure for extracting square roots by hand. Few could explain why the procedure worked. Intrigued by the results, she decided to investigate whether they could explain the logic underlying long division. To her surprise, most in her sample could not. All of the students were adept at division, but few understood why the procedure worked.

In a series of studies at Johns Hopkins University, researchers found that first year physics students could unerringly solve fairly sophisticated problems in classical physics involving moving bodies, but many did not understand the implications of their answers for the behavior of objects in the real world. For example, many could not draw the proper trajectories of objects cut from a swinging pendulum that their equations implied.

What then does it mean to “understand” something—a concept, a scientific principle, an extended rhetorical argument, a procedure or algorithm? What questions might classroom teachers ask of their students, the answers to which would allow a strong inference that the students “understood”? Every educator from kindergarten through graduate and professional school must grapple almost daily with this fundamental question. Do my students really “get it”? Do they genuinely understand the principle I was trying to get across at a level deeper than mere regurgitation? Rather than confront the problem head on, some teachers, perhaps in frustration, sidestep it. Rather then assign projects or construct examinations that probe students’ deep understanding, they require only that students apply the learned procedures to problems highly similar to those discussed in class. Other teachers with the inclination, time and wherewithal often resort to essay tests that invite their students to probe more deeply, but as often as not their students decline the invitation and stay on the surface.

I have thought about issues surrounding the measurement of understanding on and off for years, but have not systematically followed the literature on the topic. On a lark, I conducted three separate Google searches and obtained the following results:

“nature of understanding” 41,600 hits

“measurement of understanding” 66,000 hits

“assessment of understanding” 34,000 hits

Even with the addition of “classroom” to the search, the number of hits exceeded 9,000 for each search. The listings covered the spectrum—from suggestions to elementary school teachers on how to detect “bugs” in children’s understanding of addition and subtraction, to discussions of laboratory studies of brain activity during problem solving, to abstruse philosophical discussions in hermeneutics and epistemology. Clearly, this approach was taking me everywhere, which is to say, nowhere.

Fully aware that I am ignoring much that has been learned, I decided instead to draw upon personal experience—some 30 years in the classroom—to come up with a list of criteria that classroom teachers might use to assess understanding. The list is undoubtedly incomplete, but it is my hope that it will encourage teachers to not only think more carefully about how understanding might be assessed, but also—and perhaps more importantly—encourage them to think more creatively about the kinds of activities they assign their classes. These activities should stimulate students to study for understanding, rather than for mere regurgitation at test time.

The student who understands a principle, rule, procedure or concept should be able to do the following tasks (these are presented in no particular order and their actual difficulties are an empirical question):

Construct problems that illustrate the concept, principle, rule or procedure in question.
As the two anecdotes above illustrate, students may know how to use a procedure or solve specific textbook problems in a domain, but may still not fully understand the principle involved. A more stringent test of understanding would be that they can construct problems themselves that illustrate the principle. In addition to revealing much to instructors about the nature of students’ understanding, problem construction by students can be a powerful learning experience in its own right, for it requires the student to think carefully about such things as problem constraints and data sufficiency.

Identify and, if possible, correct a flawed application of a principle or procedure.
This is basically a check on conceptual and procedural knowledge. If a student truly understands a concept, principle or procedure, she should be able to recognize when it is faithfully and properly applied and when it is not. In the latter case, she should be able to explain and correct the misapplication.

Distinguish between instances and non-instances of a principle; or stated somewhat differently, recognize and explain “problem isomorphs,” that is, problems that differ in their context or surface features, but are illustrations of the same underlying principle.
In a famous and highly cited study by Michelene Chi and her colleagues at the Learning Research and Development Center, novice physics students and professors of physics were each presented with problems typically found in college physics texts and asked to sort or categorized them into groups that “go together” in some sense. They were then asked to explain the basis for their categorization. The basic finding (since replicated in many different disciplines) was that the novice physics students tended to sort problems on the basis of their surface features (e.g., pulley problems, work problems), whereas the experts tended to sort problems on the basis of their “deep structure,” the underlying physical laws that they illustrated (e.g., Newton’s third law of motion, the second law of thermodynamics). This profoundly revealing finding is usually discussed in the context of expert-novice comparisons and in studies of how proficiency develops, but it is also a powerful illustration of deep understanding.

Explain a principle or concept to a naïve audience.
One of the most difficult questions on an examination I took in graduate school was the following: “How would you explain factor analysis to your mother?” That I remember this question over 30 years later is strong testimony to the effect it had on me. I struggled mightily with it. But the question forced me to think about the underlying meaning of factor analysis in ways that had not occurred to me before.

Mathematics educator and researcher, Liping Ma, in her classic exposition Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999), describes the difficulty some fifth and sixth grade teachers in the United States encounter in explaining fundamental mathematical concepts to their charges. Many of the teachers in her sample, for example, confused division by 1/2 with division by two. The teachers could see on a verbal level that the two were different but they could neither explain the difference nor the numerical implications of that difference. It follows that they could not devise simple story problems and other exercises for fifth and sixth graders that would demonstrate the difference.

To be sure, students may well understand a principle, procedure or concept without being able to do all of the above. But a student who can do none of the above almost certainly does not understand, and students who can perform all of the above tasks flawlessly almost certainly do understand.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
This is a huge problem in accounting education, because so many of us teach "how to" procedures, often very complex procedures, without really knowing whether our students truly understand the implications of what they are doing for decision makers who use accounting information, for fraud detection, for fraud prevention, etc. For example, when teaching rules for asset capitalization versus expensing, it might help students better understand if they simultaneously learned about how and why Worldcom understated earnings by over a billion dollars by capitalizing expenditures that should have been expensed --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnron.htm#WorldCom

Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth learning can be taught.
Oscar Wilde

In their book, Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track, authors Russell L. Ackoff and Daniel Greenberg point out that today's education system is seriously flawed -- it focuses on teaching rather than learning. "Why should children -- or adults -- be asked to do something computers and related equipment can do much better than they can?" the authors ask in the following excerpt from the book. "Why doesn't education focus on what humans can do better than the machines and instruments they create?"

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth learning can be taught."
-- Oscar Wilde

Traditional education focuses on teaching, not learning. It incorrectly assumes that for every ounce of teaching there is an ounce of learning by those who are taught. However, most of what we learn before, during, and after attending schools is learned without its being taught to us. A child learns such fundamental things as how to walk, talk, eat, dress, and so on without being taught these things. Adults learn most of what they use at work or at leisure while at work or leisure. Most of what is taught in classroom settings is forgotten, and much or what is remembered is irrelevant.

In most schools, memorization is mistaken for learning. Most of what is remembered is remembered only for a short time, but then is quickly forgotten. (How many remember how to take a square root or ever have a need to?) Furthermore, even young children are aware of the fact that most of what is expected of them in school can better be done by computers, recording machines, cameras, and so on. They are treated as poor surrogates for such machines and instruments. Why should children -- or adults, for that matter -- be asked to do something computers and related equipment can do much better than they can? Why doesn't education focus on what humans can do better than the machines and instruments they create?

When those who have taught others are asked who in the classes learned most, virtually all of them say, "The teacher." It is apparent to those who have taught that teaching is a better way to learn than being taught. Teaching enables the teacher to discover what one thinks about the subject being taught. Schools are upside down: Students should be teaching and faculty learning.

After lecturing to undergraduates at a major university, I was accosted by a student who had attended the lecture. After some complimentary remarks, he asked, "How long ago did you teach your first class?"

I responded, "In September of 1941."

"Wow!" The student said. "You mean to say you have been teaching for more than 60 years?"

"Yes."

"When did you last teach a course in a subject that existed when you were a student?"

This difficult question required some thought. After a pause, I said, "September of 1951."

"Wow! You mean to say that everything you have taught in more than 50 years was not taught to you; you had to learn on your own?"

"Right."

"You must be a pretty good learner."

I modestly agreed.

The student then said, "What a shame you're not that good a teacher."

The student had it right; what most faculty members are good at, if anything, is learning rather than teaching. Recall that in the one-room schoolhouse, students taught students. The teacher served as a guide and a resource but not as one who force-fed content into students' minds.

Ways of Learning

There are many different ways of learning; teaching is only one of them. We learn a great deal on our own, in independent study or play. We learn a great deal interacting with others informally -- sharing what we are learning with others and vice versa. We learn a great deal by doing, through trial and error. Long before there were schools as we know them, there was apprenticeship -- learning how to do something by trying it under the guidance of one who knows how. For example, one can learn more architecture by having to design and build one's own house than by taking any number of courses on the subject. When physicians are asked whether they leaned more in classes or during their internship, without exception they answer, "Internship."

In the educational process, students should be offered a wide variety of ways to learn, among which they could choose or with which they could experiment. They do not have to learn different things the same way. They should learn at a very early stage of "schooling" that learning how to learn is largely their responsibility -- with the help they seek but that is not imposed on them.

The objective of education is learning, not teaching.

There are two ways that teaching is a powerful tool of learning. Let's abandon for the moment the loaded word teaching, which is unfortunately all too closely linked to the notion of "talking at" or "lecturing," and use instead the rather awkward phrase explaining something to someone else who wants to find out about it. One aspect of explaining something is getting yourself up to snuff on whatever it is that you are trying to explain. I can't very well explain to you how Newton accounted for planetary motion if I haven't boned up on my Newtonian mechanics first. This is a problem we all face all the time, when we are expected to explain something. (Wife asks, "How do we get to Valley Forge from home?" And husband, who does not want to admit he has no idea at all, excuses himself to go to the bathroom; he quickly Googles Mapquest to find out.) This is one sense in which the one who explains learns the most, because the person to whom the explanation is made can afford to forget the explanation promptly in most cases; but the explainers will find it sticking in their minds a lot longer, because they struggled to gain an understanding in the first place in a form clear enough to explain.

The second aspect of explaining something that leaves the explainer more enriched, and with a much deeper understanding of the subject, is this: To satisfy the person being addressed, to the point where that person can nod his head and say, "Ah, yes, now I understand!" explainers must not only get the matter to fit comfortably into their own worldview, into their own personal frame of reference for understanding the world around them, they also have to figure out how to link their frame of reference to the worldview of the person receiving the explanation, so that the explanation can make sense to that person, too. This involves an intense effort on the part of the explainer to get into the other person's mind, so to speak, and that exercise is at the heart of learning in general. For, by practicing repeatedly how to create links between my mind and another's, I am reaching the very core of the art of learning from the ambient culture. Without that skill, I can only learn from direct experience; with that skill, I can learn from the experience of the whole world. Thus, whenever I struggle to explain something to someone else, and succeed in doing so, I am advancing my ability to learn from others, too.

Learning through Explanation

This aspect of learning through explanation has been overlooked by most commentators. And that is a shame, because both aspects of learning are what makes the age mixing that takes place in the world at large such a valuable educational tool. Younger kids are always seeking answers from older kids -- sometimes just slightly older kids (the seven-year old tapping the presumed life wisdom of the so-much-more-experienced nine year old), often much older kids. The older kids love it, and their abilities are exercised mightily in these interactions. They have to figure out what it is that they understand about the question being raised, and they have to figure out how to make their understanding comprehensible to the younger kids. The same process occurs over and over again in the world at large; this is why it is so important to keep communities multi-aged, and why it is so destructive to learning, and to the development of culture in general, to segregate certain ages (children, old people) from others.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment, learning, and technology in education are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

In particular note the document on assessment --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

June 18, 2006 message from Bob Kennelly [bob_kennelly@YAHOO.COM]

I am a data analyst with the Federal Government, recently assigned a project to integrate our accounting codes with XBRL accounting codes, primarily for the quarterly reporting of banking financial information.

For the past few weeks, i've been searching the WEB looking for educational materials that will help us map, rollup and orr olldown the data that we recieve from the banks that we regulate, to the more generic XBRL accounting codes.

Basically, i'm hoping to provide my team members with the tools to help them make more informed decisions on how to classify accounting codes and capture their findings for further review and discussion.

To my suprise there isn't the wealth of accounting information that i thought there would be on the WEB, but i am very relieved to have found Bob Jensen's site and in particular an article which refers to the kind of information gathering

approaches that i'm hoping to discover!

Here is the brief on that article:
"Using Hypertext in Instructional Material: Helping Students Link Accounting Concept Knowledge to Case Applications," by Dickie Crandall and Fred Phillips, Issues in Accounting Education, May 2002, pp. 163-184 ---

http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aaa/pubs.htm

We studied whether instructional material that connects accounting concept discussions with sample case applications through hypertext links would enable students to better understand how concepts are to be applied to practical case situations.

Results from a laboratory experiment indicated that students who learned from such hypertext-enriched instructional material were better able to apply concepts to new accounting cases than those who learned from instructional material that contained identical content but lacked the concept-case application hyperlinks.

Results also indicated that the learning benefits of concept-case application hyperlinks in instructional material were greater when the hyperlinks were self-generated by the students rather than inherited from instructors, but only when students had generated appropriate links.

Could anyone be so kind as to please suggest other references, articles or tools that will help us better understand and classify the broad range of accounting terminologies and methodologies please?

For more information on XBRL, here is the XBRL link: http://xbrl.org

Thanks very much!
Bob Kennelly
OFHEO

June 19, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Bob,

You may find the following documents of related interest:

"Internet Financial Reporting: The Effects of Hyperlinks and Irrelevant Information on Investor Judgments," by Andrea S. Kelton (Ph.D. Dissertation at the University of Tennessee) --- http://www.mgt.ncsu.edu/pdfs/accounting/kelton_dissertation_1-19-06.pdf

Extendible Adaptive Hypermedia Courseware: Integrating Different Courses and Web Material
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Publisher: Springer Berlin / Heidelberg ISSN: 0302-9743 Subject: Computer Science Volume 1892 / 2000 Title: Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems: International Conference, AH 2000, Trento, Italy, August 2000. Proceedings Editors: P. Brusilovsky, O. Stock, C. Strapparava (Eds.) --- Click Here

"Concept, Knowledge, and Thought," G. C. Oden, Annual Review of Psychology Vol. 38: 203-227 (Volume publication date January 1987) --- Click Here

"A Framework for Organization and Representation of Concept Knowledge in Autonomous Agents," by Paul Davidsson, Department of Computer Science, University of Lund, Box 118, S–221 00 Lund, Sweden email: Paul.Davidsson@dna.lth.se

"Active concept learning for image retrieval in dynamic databases," by Dong, A. Bhanu, B. Center for Res. in Intelligent Syst., California Univ., Riverside, CA, USA; This paper appears in: Computer Vision, 2003. Proceedings. Ninth IEEE International Conference on Publication Date: 13-16 Oct. 2003 On page(s): 90- 95 vol.1 ISSN: ISBN: 0-7695-1950-4 --- Click Here

"Types and qualities of knowledge," by Ton de Jong, ‌Monica G.M. Ferguson-Hessler, Educational Psychologist 1996, Vol. 31, No. 2, Pages 105-113 --- Click Here

Also note http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#DownfallOfLecturing

Hope this helps
Bob Jensen

Assessing-to-Learn Physics: Project Website --- http://a2l.physics.umass.edu/

Bob Jensen's threads on science and medicine tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science

Onsite Versus Online Differences for Faculty

"U. of Phoenix Reports on Its Students' Academic Achievement," by Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 5, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/06/3115n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

The University of Phoenix is often derided by traditional academics for caring more about its bottom line than about academic quality, and every year, the annual report issued by its parent company focuses more on profits than student performance.

The institution that has become the largest private university in North America is releasing its first "Annual Academic Report," which it will make available on its Web site today. The university's leaders say the findings show that its educational model is effective in helping students succeed in college, especially those who are underprepared.

Freshmen at the University of Phoenix enter with reading, writing, and mathematical skills that are, on average, below those of other college students, but according to data from standardized tests, Phoenix students appear to improve in those skills at a greater rate than do students at other colleges.

And in a comparison of students who enter college with "risk factors" that often contribute to their dropping out, Phoenix's rates of completion for a bachelor's degree were substantially higher than for institutions over all.

William J. Pepicello, president of the 330,000-student university, said those and other findings shared in advance with The Chronicle show that the 32-year-old, open-access institution is fulfilling its goals.

"This ties into our social mission for our university," said Mr. Pepicello, in an interview at the company's headquarters here. "We take these students and we do give them a significant increase in skills."

Phoenix for years has been extensively measuring and monitoring student progress for internal purposes, using the data to change the content and design of its courses or to reshape its approach to remedial education.

It decided to develop and publish this report—distinct from the financial reports that its parent company, the $2.6-billion Apollo Group Inc., regularly provides—as "a good-faith attempt on our part" to show the university's commitment to growing public demand for more accountability by institutions of higher education, said Mr. Pepicello.

He and other university leaders fully expect some challenges to the findings, but they say the institution, by publishing the report, is showing its willingness to confront scrutiny of its educational record from within academe. "It lets us, in a public forum, talk to our colleagues about what we do and how well we do it," said Mr. Pepicello.

The introduction this academic year of a test that could be administered to both campus-based and distance-education students—the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress exam by the Educational Testing Service—also made this kind of reporting possible, he said. Nearly two-thirds of Phoenix students attend online.

Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, said that although he had not yet seen Phoenix's data, its decision to publish such a report was "a very positive development."

He has urged colleges to be open in their reporting on themselves. Even if the university has chosen to release data that put it in the best light, as others often do, Mr. Callan said the report will be a significant piece of the national debate over what value an institution can add to a student.

"For higher education, it is a positive and useful and constructive approach," Mr. Callan said. Publication of the report, he added, was in line with other efforts by the university "to be part of the discussion on the outcomes of higher education." Those efforts include the university's recent creation of a research center on adult learners (for which Mr. Callan is an unpaid adviser).

A Mixed Report Card

In the report, some of those outcomes look better than others.

"It certainly is not perfect," said Mr. Pepicello of some of the test scores. "It is where we are."

In its report, Phoenix shows the results from its 1,966 students who took the MAPP test this year, compared with the national sample of more than 376,000 students from about 300 institutions.

The results show that in reading, critical thinking, and writing, its freshmen scored below those of the population over all, but the difference between those scores and those of its seniors was greater than for the population at large. The difference was more marked in mathematics, although the university's freshmen and seniors' scores were both notably lower than those of the whole test-taking pool.

Bill Wynne, MAPP test product specialist, said that without knowing more about the makeup of the comparative samples and other information, he could not characterize the statistical significance of the gains the university was reporting, except that they were at least as good as those reported by the national cross section. "The magnitude of the change is in the eye of the beholder," he said.

Mr. Pepicello said he wished the seniors' scores were higher, particularly in math, but he considered all of the findings positive because they indicated that students improve when they attend. "This doesn't embarrass me," he said. "This is really good information for us to really improve our institution."

(Phoenix did not track the progress of individual students, but MAPP officials said the university's pool of freshmen and seniors taking the test was large enough and random enough to justify its using different groups of students for comparisons.)

In another test, involving a smaller pool of students, the Phoenix students' "information literacy" skills for such tasks as evaluating sources and understanding economic, legal, and social issues were also comparable to or significantly higher than the mean scores in several categories. Adam Honea, the provost, said the findings from the Standardized Assessment of Information Literacy Skills test, developed at Kent State University, were important to the institution since "information literacy is a goal of ours."

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on asynchronous learning are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm
Keep in mind that the University of Phoenix has a combination of onsite and online degree programs.

Bob Jensen's threads on controversies of education technology and online learning are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education alternatives are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

The Chronicle's Goldie Blumenstyk has covered distance education for more than a decade, and during that time she's written stories about the economics of for-profit education, the ways that online institutions market themselves, and the demise of the 50-percent rule. About the only thing she hadn't done, it seemed, was to take a course from an online university. But this spring she finally took the plunge, and now she has completed a class in government and nonprofit accounting through the University of Phoenix. She shares tales from the cy ber-classroom -- and her final grade -- in a podcast with Paul Fain, a Chronicle reporter.
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2008 (Audio) --- http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v54/i40/cyber_classroom/

· All course materials (including textbooks) online; No additional textbooks to purchase

· $1,600 fee for the course and materials

· Woman instructor with respectable academic credentials and experience in course content

· Instructor had good communications with students and between students

· Total of 14 quite dedicated online students in course, most of whom were mature with full-time day jobs

· 30% of grade from team projects

· Many unassigned online helper tutorials that were not fully utilized by Goldie

· Goldie earned a 92 (A-)

· She gave a positive evaluation to the course and would gladly take other courses if she had the time

· She considered the course to have a heavy workload

"The Chronicle's special report on Online Learning explores how calls for quality control and assessment are reshaping online learning," (Not Free), Chronicle of Higher Education, November 2011 ---
https://www.chronicle-store.com/Store/ProductDetails.aspx?CO=CQ&ID=78602&cid=ol_nlb_wc

The Chronicle's special report on Online Learning explores how calls for quality control and assessment are reshaping online learning. As online learning spreads throughout higher education, so have calls for quality control and assessment. Accrediting groups are scrambling to keep up, and Congress and government officials continue to scrutinize the high student-loan default rates and aggressive recruiting tactics of some for-profit, mostly online colleges. But the push for accountability isn't coming just from outside. More colleges are looking inward, conducting their own self-examinations into what works and what doesn't.

Also in this year's report:

Strategies for teaching and doing research online

Members of the U.S. military are taking online courses while serving in Afghanistan

Community colleges are using online technology to keep an eye on at-risk students and help them understand their own learning style

The push to determine what students learn online, not just how much time they spend in class

Presidents' views on e-learning

Bob Jensen's threads on asynchronous learning ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on online course and degree programs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

Soaring Popularity of E-Learning Among Students But Not Faculty
How many U.S. students took at least on online course from a legitimate college in Fall 2005?

More students are taking online college courses than ever before, yet the majority of faculty still aren’t warming up to the concept of e-learning, according to a national survey from the country’s largest association of organizations and institutions focused on online education . . . ‘We didn’t become faculty to sit in front of a computer screen,’
Elia Powers, "Growing Popularity of E-Learning, Inside Higher Ed, November 10, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/10/online

More students are taking online college courses than ever before, yet the majority of faculty still aren’t warming up to the concept of e-learning, according to a national survey from the country’s largest association of organizations and institutions focused on online education.

Roughly 3.2 million students took at least one online course from a degree-granting institution during the fall 2005 term, the Sloan Consortium said. That’s double the number who reported doing so in 2002, the first year the group collected data, and more than 800,000 above the 2004 total. While the number of online course participants has increased each year, the rate of growth slowed from 2003 to 2004.

The report, a joint partnership between the group and the College Board, defines online courses as those in which 80 percent of the content is delivered via the Internet.

The Sloan Survey of Online Learning, “Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006,” shows that 62 percent of chief academic officers say that the learning outcomes in online education are now “as good as or superior to face-to-face instruction,” and nearly 6 in 10 agree that e-learning is “critical to the long-term strategy of their institution.” Both numbers are up from a year ago.

Researchers at the Sloan Consortium, which is administered through Babson College and Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, received responses from officials at more than 2,200 colleges and universities across the country. (The report makes few references to for-profit colleges, a force in the online market, in part because of a lack of survey responses from those institutions.)

Much of the report is hardly surprising. The bulk of online students are adult or “nontraditional” learners, and more than 70 percent of those surveyed said online education reaches students not served by face-to-face programs.

What stands out is the number of faculty who still don’t see e-learning as a valuable tool. Only about one in four academic leaders said that their faculty members “accept the value and legitimacy of online education,” the survey shows. That number has remained steady throughout the four surveys. Private nonprofit colleges were the least accepting — about one in five faculty members reported seeing value in the programs.

Elaine Allen, co-author of the report and a Babson associate professor of statistics and entrepreneurship, said those numbers are striking.

“As a faculty member, I read that response as, ‘We didn’t become faculty to sit in front of a computer screen,’ ” Allen said. “It’s a very hard adjustment. We sat in lectures for an hour when we were students, but there’s a paradigm shift in how people learn.”

Barbara Macaulay, chief academic officer at UMass Online, which offers programs through the University of Massachusetts, said nearly all faculty members teaching the online classes there also teach face-to-face courses, enabling them to see where an online class could fill in the gap (for instance, serving a student who is hesitant to speak up in class).

She said she isn’t surprised to see data illustrating the growing popularity of online courses with students, because her program has seen rapid growth in the last year. Roughly 24,000 students are enrolled in online degree and certificate courses through the university this fall — a 23 percent increase from a year ago, she said.

“Undergraduates see it as a way to complete their degrees — it gives them more flexibility,” Macaulay said.

The Sloan report shows that about 80 percent of students taking online courses are at the undergraduate level. About half are taking online courses through community colleges and 13 percent through doctoral and research universities, according to the survey.

Nearly all institutions with total enrollments exceeding 15,000 students have some online offerings, and about two-thirds of them have fully online programs, compared with about one in six at the smallest institutions (those with 1,500 students or fewer), the report notes. Allen said private nonprofit colleges are often set in enrollment totals and not looking to expand into the online market.

The report indicates that two-year colleges are particularly willing to be involved in online learning.

“Our institutions tend to embrace changes a little more readily and try different pedagogical styles,” said Kent Phillippe, a senior research associate at the American Association of Community Colleges. The report cites a few barriers to what it calls the “widespread adoption of online learning,” chief among them the concern among college officials that some of their students lack the discipline to succeed in an online setting. Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents defined that as a barrier.

Allen, the report’s co-author, said she thinks that issue arises mostly in classes in which work can be turned in at any time and lectures can be accessed at all hours. “If you are holding class in real time, there tends to be less attrition,” she said. The report doesn’t differentiate between the live and non-live online courses, but Allen said she plans to include that in next year’s edition.

Few survey respondents said acceptance of online degrees by potential employers was a critical barrier — although liberal arts college officials were more apt to see it as an issue.

November 10, 2006 reply from John Brozovsky [jbrozovs@vt.edu]

Hi Bob:

One reason why might be what I have seen. The in residence accounting students that I talk with take online classes here because they are EASY and do not take much work. This would be very popular with students but not generally so with faculty.

John

November 10, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi John,

Then there is a quality control problem whereever this is a fact. It would be a travesty if any respected college had two or more categories of academic standards or faculty assignments.

Variations in academic standards have long been a problem between part-time versus full-time faculty, although grade inflation can be higher or lower among part-time faculty. In one instance, it’s the tenure-track faculty who give higher grades because they're often more worried about student evaluations. At the opposite extreme it is part-time faculty who give higher grades for many reasons that we can think of if we think about it.

One thing that I'm dead certain about is that highly motivated students tend to do better in online courses ceteris paribus. Reasons are mainly that time is used more efficiently in getting to class (no wasted time driving or walking to class), less wasted time getting teammates together on team projects, and fewer reasons for missing class.

Also online alternatives offer some key advantages for certain types of handicapped students --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

My opinions on learning advantages of E-Learning were heavily influenced by the most extensive and respected study of online versus onsite learning experiments in the SCALE experiments using full-time resident students at the University of Illinois --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois

In the SCALE experiments cutting across 30 disciplines, it was generally found that motivated students learned better online then their onsite counterparts having the same instructors. However, there was no significant impact on students who got low grades in online versus onsite treatment groups.

I think the main problem with faculty is that online teaching tends to burn out instructors more frequently than onsite instructors. This was also evident in the SCALE experiments. When done correctly, online courses are more communication intent between instructors and faculty. Also, online learning takes more preparation time if it is done correctly.

My hero for online learning is still Amy Dunbar who maintains high standards for everything:

http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm

http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book01q4.htm#Dunbar

Bob Jensen

November 10, 2006 reply from John Brozovsky [jbrozovs@vt.edu]

Hi Bob:

Also why many times it is not done 'right'. Not done right they do not get the same education. Students generally do not complain about getting 'less for their money'. Since we do not do online classes in department the ones the students are taking are the university required general education and our students in particular are not unhappy with being shortchanged in that area as they frequently would have preferred none anyway.

John

Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing and education technology are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education alternatives are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

Motivations for Distance Learning --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#Motivations

Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side of online learning and teaching are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

Question
Why should teaching a course online take twice as much time as teaching it onsite?

Answer
Introduction to Economics: Experiences of teaching this course online versus onsite
With a growing number of courses offered online and degrees offered through the Internet, there is a considerable interest in online education, particularly as it relates to the quality of online instruction. The major concerns are centering on the following questions: What will be the new role for instructors in online education? How will students' learning outcomes be assured and improved in online learning environment? How will effective communication and interaction be established with students in the absence of face-to-face instruction? How will instructors motivate students to learn in the online learning environment? This paper will examine new challenges and barriers for online instructors, highlight major themes prevalent in the literature related to “quality control or assurance” in online education, and provide practical strategies for instructors to design and deliver effective online instruction. Recommendations will be made on how to prepare instructors for quality online instruction.
Yi Yang and Linda F. Cornelious, "Preparing Instructors for Quality Online Instruction, Working Paper --- http://www.westga.edu/%7Edistance/ojdla/spring81/yang81.htm

Jensen Comment: The bottom line is that teaching the course online took twice as much time because "largely from increased student contact and individualized instruction and not from the use of technology per se."

Online teaching is more likely to result in instructor burnout. These and other issues are discussed in my "dark side" paper at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

April 1, 2005 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

COMPUTERS IN THE CLASSROOM AND OPEN BOOK EXAMS

In "PCs in the Classroom & Open Book Exams" (UBIQUITY, vol. 6, issue 9, March 15-22, 2005), Evan Golub asks and supplies some answers to questions regarding open-book/open-note exams. When classroom computer use is allowed and encouraged, how can instructors secure the open-book exam environment? How can cheating be minimized when students are allowed Internet access during open-book exams? Golub's suggested solutions are available online at http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v6i9_golub.html

Ubiquity is a free, Web-based publication of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), "dedicated to fostering critical analysis and in-depth commentary on issues relating to the nature, constitution, structure, science, engineering, technology, practices, and paradigms of the IT profession." For more information, contact: Ubiquity, email: ubiquity@acm.org ; Web: http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/

For more information on the ACM, contact: ACM, One Astor Plaza, 1515 Broadway, New York, NY 10036, USA; tel: 800-342-6626 or 212-626-0500; Web: http://www.acm.org/

NEW EDUCAUSE E-BOOK ON THE NET GENERATION

EDUCATING THE NET GENERATION, a new EDUCAUSE e-book of essays edited by Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger, "explores the Net Gen and the implications for institutions in areas such as teaching, service, learning space design, faculty development, and curriculum." Essays include: "Technology and Learning Expectations of the Net Generation;" "Using Technology as a Learning Tool, Not Just the Cool New Thing;" "Curricula Designed to Meet 21st-Century Expectations;" "Faculty Development for the Net Generation;" and "Net Generation Students and Libraries." The entire book is available online at no cost at http://www.educause.edu/educatingthenetgen/ .

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. For more information, contact: Educause, 4772 Walnut Street, Suite 206, Boulder, CO 80301-2538 USA; tel: 303-449-4430; fax: 303-440-0461; email: info@educause.edu; Web: http://www.educause.edu/

See also:

GROWING UP DIGITAL: THE RISE OF THE NET GENERATION by Don Tapscott McGraw-Hill, 1999; ISBN: 0-07-063361-4 http://www.growingupdigital.com/

EFFECTIVE E-LEARNING DESIGN

"The unpredictability of the student context and the mediated relationship with the student require careful attention by the educational designer to details which might otherwise be managed by the teacher at the time of instruction." In "Elements of Effective e-Learning Design" (INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF RESEARCH IN OPEN AND DISTANCE LEARNING, March 2005) Andrew R. Brown and Bradley D. Voltz cover six elements of effective design that can help create effective e-learning delivery. Drawing upon examples from The Le@rning Federation, an initiative of state and federal governments of Australia and New Zealand, they discuss lesson planning, instructional design, creative writing, and software specification. The paper is available online at http://www.irrodl.org/content/v6.1/brown_voltz.html

International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) [ISSN 1492-3831] is a free, refereed ejournal published by Athabasca University - Canada's Open University. For more information, contact Paula Smith, IRRODL Managing Editor; tel: 780-675-6810; fax: 780-675-672; email: irrodl@athabascau.ca ; Web: http://www.irrodl.org/

The Le@rning Federation (TLF) is an "initiative designed to create online curriculum materials and the necessary infrastructure to ensure that teachers and students in Australia and New Zealand can use these materials to widen and enhance their learning experiences in the classroom." For more information, see http://www.thelearningfederation.edu.au/

RECOMMENDED READING

"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.ed u for possible inclusion in this column.

Author Clark Aldrich recommends his new book:

LEARNING BY DOING: A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO SIMULATIONS, COMPUTER GAMES, AND PEDAGOGY IN E-LEARNING AND OTHER EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCES Wiley, April 2005 ISBN: 0-7879-7735-7 hardcover $60.00 (US)

Description from Wiley website:

"Designed for learning professionals and drawing on both game creators and instructional designers, Learning by Doing explains how to select, research, build, sell, deploy, and measure the right type of educational simulation for the right situation. It covers simple approaches that use basic or no technology through projects on the scale of computer games and flight simulators. The book role models content as well, written accessibly with humor, precision, interactivity, and lots of pictures. Many will also find it a useful tool to improve communication between themselves and their customers, employees, sponsors, and colleagues."

The table of contents and some excerpts are available at http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0787977357.html

Aldrich is also author of SIMULATIONS AND THE FUTURE OF LEARNING: AN INNOVATIVE (AND PERHAPS REVOLUTIONARY) APPROACH TO E-LEARNING. See http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0787969621.html for more information or to request an evaluation copy of this title.

Also see
Looking at Learning….Again, Part 2 --- http://www.learner.org/resources/series114.html

Bob Jensen's documents on education technology are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

More on this topic appears in the module below.

"Far From Honorable," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, October 25, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/25/online-students-might-feel-less-accountable-honor-codes

Much of the urgency around creating a “sense of community” in online courses springs from a desire to keep online students from dropping out. But a recent paper suggests that strengthening a sense of social belonging among online students might help universities fight another problem: cheating.

In a series of experiments, researchers at Ohio University found that students in fully online psychology courses who signed an honor code promising not to cheat broke that pledge at a significantly higher rate than did students in a “blended” course that took place primarily in a classroom.

“The more distant students are, the more disconnected they feel, and the more likely it is that they’ll rationalize cheating,” Frank M. LoSchiavo, one of the authors, conjectured in an interview with Inside Higher Ed.

While acknowledging the limitations inherent to a study with such a narrow sample, and the fact that motivations are particularly hard to pin down when it comes to cheating, LoSchiavo and Mark A. Shatz, both psychology professors at Ohio University's Zanesville campus, said their findings may indicate that meeting face-to-face with peers and professors confers a stronger sense of accountability among students. “Honor codes,” LoSchiavo said, “are more effective when there are [strong] social connections.”

Honor codes are not, of course, the only method of deterring cheating in online courses. The proliferation of online programs has given rise to a cottage industry of remote proctoring technology, including one product that takes periodic fingerprint readings while monitoring a student’s test-taking environment with a 360-degree camera. (A 2010 survey by the Campus Computing Project suggests that a minority of institutions authenticate the identities of online students as a rule.)

But LoSchiavo said that he and Shatz were more interested in finding out whether honor codes held any sway online. If so, then online instructors might add pledges to their arsenal of anti-cheating tools, LoSchiavo said. If not, it provides yet an intriguing contribution to the discussion about student engagement and “perceived social distance” in the online environment.

They experimented with the effectiveness of honor codes in three introductory psychology courses at Ohio University. The first course had 40 students and was completely online. These students, like those in subsequent trials, were a mix of traditional-age and adult students, mostly from regional campuses in the Ohio University system. There was no honor code. Over the course of the term, the students took 14 multiple-choice quizzes with no proctoring of any kind. At the end of the term, 73 percent of the students admitted to cheating on at least one of them.

The second trial involved another fully online introductory course in the same subject. LoSchiavo and Shatz divided the class evenly into two groups of 42 students, and imposed an honor code -- posted online with the other course materials -- to one group but not the other. The students “digitally signed the code during the first week of the term, prior to completing any assignments.” The definition of cheating was the same as in the first trial: no notes, no textbooks, no Internet, no family or friends. There was no significant difference in the self-reported cheating between the two groups.

In a third trial, the professors repeated the experiment with 165 undergraduates in a “blended” course, where only 20 percent of the course was administered online and 80 percent in a traditional classroom setting. Again, they split the students into two groups: one in which they were asked to sign an honor code, and another in which they were not.

This time, when LoSchiavo and Shatz surveyed the students at the end of the term, there was a significant difference: Students who promised not to cheat were about 25 percent less likely to cheat than were those who made no such promise. Among the students who had not signed the code, 82 percent admitted to cheating.

LoSchiavo concedes that this study offers no definitive answers on the question of whether students are more likely to cheat in fully online courses. Cheating is more often than not a crime of opportunity, and containing integrity violations probably has much more to do with designing a system that limits the opportunities to cheat and gives relatively little weight to those assignments for which cheating is hardest to police.

“The bottom line is that if there are opportunities, students will cheat,” he said. “And the more opportunities they have, the more cheating there will be, and it is incumbent upon professors to put in a system that, when it’s important, cheating will be contained.”

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I think universities like Trinity University that expanded their honor codes to include student courts are generally happy with the operations of those honor codes. However, Trinity has only full time students and no distance education courses.

One thing that I hated giving up was grading control. For most of my teaching career I gave F grades to students who seriously cheated in my courses. Under the revised Trinity Honor Code, instructors can no longer control the granting of F grades for cheating.

When I was a student at Stanford the Honor Code included a pledge to report cheating of other students. I think most universities have watered down this aspect of their honor codes because, in this greatly increased era of litigation, student whistle blowers can be sued big time. Universities may continue to encourage such whistle blowing, but they no longer make students sign pledges that on their honor they will be whistleblowers if they do not want to bear the risk of litigation by students they report.

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm

"Nationally Recognized Assessment and Higher Education Study Center Findings as Resources for Assessment Projects," by Tracey Sutherland, Accounting Education News, 2007 Winter Issue, pp. 5-7

While nearly all accounting programs are wrestling with various kinds of assessment initiatives to meet local assessment plans and/or accreditation needs, most colleges and universities participate in larger assessment projects whose results may not be shared at the College/School level. There may be information available on your campus through campus-level assessment and institutional research that generate data that could be useful for your accounting program/school assessment initiatives. Below are examples of three such research projects, and some of their recent findings about college students.

The Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) The American Freshman: National Norms for 2006

The 2006 Report of the National Survey of Student Engagement

From the National Freshman Attitudes Report 2007

Some things in the The 2006 Report of the National Survey of Student Engagement especially caught my eye:

Promising Findings from the National Surveyof Student Engagement

• Student engagement is positively related to first-year and senior student grades and to persistence between the first and second year of college.

• Student engagement has compensatory effects on grades andpersistence of students from historically underserved backgrounds.

• Compared with campus-basedstudents, distance education learners reported higher levels ofacademic challenge, engaged more often in deep learning activities, and reported greater developmental gains from college.

• Part-time working students reported grades comparable to other students and also perceived the campus to be as supportive of their academic and social needs as theirnon-working peers.

• Four out of five beginning college students expected that reflective learning activities would be an important part of their first-year experience.

Disappointing Findings from the National

Survey of Student Engagement

• Students spend on average only about 13–14 hours a week preparingfor class, far below what faculty members say is necessary to do well in their classes.

• Students study less during the first year of college than they expected to at the start of the academic year.

• Women are less likely than men to interact with faculty members outside of class including doing research with a faculty member.

• Distance education students are less involved in active and collaborative learning.

• Adult learners were much lesslikely to have participated in such enriching educational activities as community service, foreign language study, a culminating senior experience, research with faculty,and co-curricular activities.

• Compared with other students, part-time students who are working had less contact with facultyand participated less in active and collaborative learning activities and enriching educational experiences.

Some additional 2006 NSSE findings

• Distance education studentsreported higher levels of academic challenge, and reported engaging more often in deep learning activities such as the reflective learning activities. They also reported participating less in collaborative learning experiences and worked more hours off campus.

• Women students are more likely to be engaged in foreign language coursework.

• Male students spent more time engaged in working with classmates on projects outside of class.

• Almost half (46%) of adult students were working more than 30 hours per week and about three-fourths were caring for dependents. In contrast, only 3% of traditional age students worked more than 30 hours per week, and about four fifths spend no time caring for dependents.

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

Students Reviewing Each Others' Projects

January 30, 2009 message from David Fordham, James Madison University [fordhadr@JMU.EDU]

I teach an MBA section of "Introduction to Information Security". One of the course requirements is an Information Security Policy Manual for a hypothetical company. Students submit their manuals electronically, with the only identifying information being their name as the title of the file. I strip off all other identifying information (Tools-Options, File-Properties, etc.) from the document and change the name of the file to "Student 1" "Student 2" etc.

Then, I distribute the file to two other students for blind review.

In reality, each author receives THREE (3) reviews, because I myself provide a review, in addition to the two students. I do NOT identify the reviewers, either, so the author gets three reviews, but does not know which one is mine and which are the other two student reviews. Two are blind, and one is mine, but all the student gets is "review 1", "review 2", and "review 3". I am NOT always "review 3".

This has proven to be very effective. Each student gets to actually SEE two other students' work up close and personal and has to put thought into evaluating it, and in so doing, can compare their peers' work to their own. Plus, each student then gets three reviews from three other individuals, making a total of FIVE (5) different perspectives which to compare with their own.

This "reviewed" submission is the "mid-term" submission. The students then have the option (all of them take it!) to revise their manual if they wish for the final submission. The quality of the final product is day-and-night difference from what I used to get: truly professional level work. Hence, I'm a believer in the system.

(Plus, I can rage all I want in my review of the first submission if its really bad, and the student doesn't know it's me!)

Incidentally, part of the course grade is how well they review their two assigned manuals... I expect good comments, constructive criticism, useful suggestions, etc. Because the students are all in the executive MBA program, and because this approach is novel, I usually get some really good participation and high-quality reviews.

No, it doesn't save me a lot of time, since I still personally "grade" (e.g., do a review of) each submission. But I'm doing it to save time, I'm doing it because it gives high value to the student. I can, however, easily see where peer review would be a fantastic time-saver when a professor gives lengthy assignments to large numbers of students.

David Fordham
JMU

The inmates are running the asylum
From Duke University: One of the Most Irresponsible Grading Systems in the World
Her approach? "So, this year, when I teach 'This Is Your Brain on the Internet,' I'm trying out a new point system. Do all the work, you get an A. Don't need an A? Don't have time to do all the work? No problem. You can aim for and earn a B. There will be a chart. You do the assignment satisfactorily, you get the points. Add up the points, there's your grade. Clearcut. No guesswork. No second-guessing 'what the prof wants.' No gaming the system. Clearcut. Student is responsible." That still leaves the question of determining whether students have done the work. Here again, Davidson plans to rely on students. "Since I already have structured my seminar (it worked brilliantly last year) so that two students lead us in every class, they can now also read all the class blogs (as they used to) and pass judgment on whether they are satisfactory. Thumbs up, thumbs down," she writes.
Scott Jaschik, "Getting Out of Grading," Inside Higher Education, August 3, 2009
Jensen Comment
No mention of how Professor Davidson investigates and punishes plagiarism and other easy ways to cheat in this system. My guess is that she leaves it up to the students to police themselves any way they like. One way to cheat is simply hire another student to do the assignment. With no examinations in a controlled setting, who knows who is doing whose work?

It is fairly common for professors use grading inputs when students evaluate each others' term projects, but this is the first time I ever heard of turning the entire grading process (with no examinations) over to students in the class. Read about how David Fordham has students evaluate term projects at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#StudentPeerReview

August 4, 2009 reply from David Fordham, James Madison University [fordhadr@JMU.EDU]

Bob, While I feel the way you do about it, it is interesting to note that this type of thing isn't new.

In the fall semester of 1973, at the North Campus of what today is the Florida State College in Jacksonville (formerly FCCJ, and when I was going there it was called FJC), I enrolled in a sophomore-level psychology class taught by Dr. Pat Greene. The very first day, Dr. Greene handed out a list of 30 assignments. Each assignment was independent study, and consisted of viewing a 15 to 60 minute video/filmstrip/movie/etc. in the library, or reading a chapter in the textbook, followed by completion of a 1 to 3 page "worksheet" covering the major concepts covered in the "lesson".

As I recall, the worksheet was essentially a set of fill-in-the-blank questions. It was open book, open note, open anything, and when you completed the worksheet, you put your name on it and dropped it in Dr. Greene's mailbox in the faculty offices lobby at your convenience.

The first 10 assignments were required in order to pass the course, but students could pick and choose from the remainder. If you stopped after the 10 required assignments, you got a D in the class. If you did 15 assignments, you got a C; 20 a B, and if you completed all 30, you got an A in the class. Students could pick which lessons to complete (after the first 10) if they elected not to do all 30.

This was before email, YouTube, and PDF's. Students worked at their own pace, there was no class meeting whatsoever after that first day. After the first day of class where I received the syllabus and assignment sheet, I never attended the classroom again. Dr. Greene supposedly held office hours during class time for students who wanted to ask questions, but I never needed it (nor did anyone else I knew of) because the assignments were so simple and easy, especially since they were open book, open note, and there was no time limit! There was no deadline, either, you could take till the end of the semester if you wanted to.

Oh, and no exams, either.

This was also before FERPA. Dr. Greene had a roll taped to his office door with all students' names on it. It was a manual spreadsheet, and as you turned in assignments, you got check marks beside your name in the columns showing which assignments you had "completed". We never got any of the assignments back, but supposedly if an assignment had too many errors, the student would get a dash mark instead of a check mark, indicating the need to do it over again.

Within 2 weeks, I had completed all 30 assignments, got my A, and never saw Dr. Greene again. I learned at lot about psychology (everything from Maslow's Hierarchy to Pavlov's slobbering dogs, from the (now infamous) Hawthorne Effect to the impact of color on emotions), so I guess the class was a success. But what astounded me was that so many of my classmates quit after earning the B. The idea of having to do half-again as much work for an A compared to a B was apparently just too much for most of my classmates, because when I (out of curiosity) stopped by his office at the end of the semester, I was blown away by the fact that only a couple of us had A's, whereby almost everyone else had the B (and a couple had C's, again to my astonishment). I can't remember if there were any D's or F's.

At the time, I was new to the college environment, and in my conversations with other faculty members, I discovered that professors enjoyed something called "academic freedom", and none of my other professors seemed to have any problem with what Dr. Greene was doing. In later years, it occurred to me that perhaps we were guinea-pigs for a psychology study he was doing on motivation. But since he was still using this method six years later for my younger sister (and using the same videos, films, and filmstrips!), I have my doubts.

Dr. Greene was a professor for many, many years. Perhaps he was ahead of his time, with today's camtasia and snag-it and you-tube recordings... None of his assigned work was his own, it was all produced by professional producers, with the exception of his worksheets, which were all the "purple plague" spirit-duplicator handouts.

I've often wondered how much more, if any, I could have learned if he'd really met with the class and actually tried to teach. But then again, as I took later psychology classes as part of my management undergrad (org behavior, supervision, human relations, etc.) I was pleased with how much I had learned in Dr. Greene's class, so I guess it wasn't a complete waste of time. Many of my friends who were in his class with me found the videos and filmstrips a nice break from the dry lectures of some of our other profs at the time. Plus, we liked the independent-study convenience. Oh, well...

Bottom line: this type of thing isn't new: 1973 was 35 years ago. Since academic freedom is still around, it doesn't surprise me that Dr. Greene's teaching (and in this case, his grading) style is still around too.

David Fordham
James Madison University

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm

Online Versus Onsite for Students

August 25, 2009 message from

A lot of the face-to-face students I talk with like online classes BECAUSE THEY ARE EASY. While it is very possible to have a good solid online class (as evidenced my several on this listserve) my perception is that an awful lot of them out there are not. Students can load up with 21+ hours and work fulltime and still have a good GPA.

John

August 26, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi John,

I would not say that out loud to Amy Dunbar or Denny Beresford that they’re easy graders ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm

I would not say that out loud to the graduates of two principles of accounting weed out courses year after year at Brigham Young University where classes meet on relatively rare occasion for inspiration about accountancy but not technical learning --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo

Try to tell the graduates of Stanford University’s ADEPT Masters of Electrical Engineering program that they had an easier time of it because the entire program is online.

There’s an interesting article entitled how researchers misconstrue causality:
Like elaborately plumed birds … we preen and strut and display our t-values.” That was Edward Leamer’s uncharitable description of his profession in 1983.
“Cause and Effect: Instrumental variable help to isolate causal relationships, but they can be taken too far,” The Economist, August 15-21, 20098 Page 68.

It is often the case that distance education courses are taught by non-tenured faculty, and non-tenured faculty may be easier with respect to grading than regular faculty because they are even more in need of strong teaching evaluations to not lose their jobs. The problem may have nothing whatsoever to do with online versus onsite education.

I think it is very rewarding to look at grading in formal studies using the same full-time faculty teaching sections of online versus onsite students. By formal study, I mean using the same instructors, the same materials, and essentially the same examinations. The major five-year, multimillion dollar study that first caught my eye was the SCALE experiments on the campus of the University of Illinois where 30 courses from various disciplines were examined over a five year experiment.

Yes the SCALE experiments showed that some students got higher grades online, notably B students who became A students and C students who became A students. The online pedagogy tended to have no effect on D and F students --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois

Listen to Dan Stone’s audio about the SCALE Experiments --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000cpe/00start.htm

But keep in mind that in the SCALE experiments, the same instructor of a course was grading both the online and onsite sections of the same course. The reason was not likely to be that online sections were easier. The SCALE experiments collected a lot of data pointing to more intense communications with instructors and more efficient use of student’s time that is often wasted in going to classes.

The students in the experiment were full time on campus students, such that the confounding problems of having adult part-time students was not a factor in the SCALE experiments of online, asynchronous learning.

A Statement About Why the SCALE Experiments Were Funded
ALN = Asynchronous Learning
We are particularly interested in new outcomes that may be possible through ALN. Asynchronous computer networks have the potential to improve contact with faculty, perhaps making self-paced learning a realizable goal for some off- and on-campus students. For example, a motivated student could progress more rapidly toward a degree. Students who are motivated but find they cannot keep up the pace, may be able to slow down and take longer to complete a degree, and not just drop out in frustration. So we are interested in what impact ALN will have on outcomes such as time-to-degree and student retention. There are many opportunities where ALN may contribute to another outcome: lowering the cost of education, e.g., by naturally introducing new values for old measures such as student-faculty ratios. A different kind of outcome for learners who are juggling work and family responsibilities, would be to be able to earn a degree or certification at home. This latter is a special focus for us.

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program in
Learning Outside the Classroom at
http://w3.scale.uiuc.edu/scale/

Another study that I love to point to was funded by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Read about when one of the Chronicle’s senior editors took a Governmental Accounting Course at the University of Phoenix during which the instructor of the course had no idea that Goldie Blumenstyk was assessing how difficult or how easy the course was for students in general. I think Goldie’s audio report of her experience is still available from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Goldie came away from the course exhausted.

· All course materials (including textbooks) online; No additional textbooks to purchase

· $1,600 fee for the course and materials

· Woman instructor with respectable academic credentials and experience in course content

· Instructor had good communications with students and between students

· Total of 14 quite dedicated online students in course, most of whom were mature with full-time day jobs

· 30% of grade from team projects

· Many unassigned online helper tutorials that were not fully utilized by Goldie

· Goldie earned a 92 (A-)

· She gave a positive evaluation to the course and would gladly take other courses if she had the time

· She considered the course to have a heavy workload

The best place to begin searching for research on ALN learning is at
http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/jaln/index.asp

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Bob Jensen’s threads on the dark side of online education and distance education in general can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on asynchronous learning are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm
Keep in mind that the University of Phoenix has a combination of onsite and online degree programs.

Bob Jensen's threads on controversies of education technology and online learning are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education alternatives are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

An Online Learning Experiment Overwhelms the University of Southern California
"An Experiment Takes Off," by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, October 7, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/10/07/uscmat#

When Karen Symms Gallagher ran into fellow education deans last year, many of them were "politely skeptical," the University of Southern California dean says (politely), about her institution's experiment to take its master's program in teaching online.

Many of them seemed to appreciate Gallagher's argument that the traditional model of teacher education programs had largely failed to produce the many more top-notch teachers that California (and so many other states) desperately needed. But could a high-quality MAT program be delivered online? And through a partnership with a for-profit entity (2Tor), no less? Really?

Early results about the program known as MAT@USC have greatly pleased Gallagher and USC. One hundred forty-four students enrolled in the Rossier School of Education program's first full cohort in May, 50 percent more than anticipated and significantly larger than the 100 students who started at that time in the traditional master's in teaching program on the university's Los Angeles campus.

And this month, a new group of 302 students started in the second of three planned "starts" per year, meaning that USC has already quadrupled the number of would-be teachers it is educating this year and, depending on how many students enroll in January, is on track to increase it a few times more than that.

It will be a while -- years, probably, until outcomes on teacher certification exams are in and the program's graduates have been successful (or not) in the classroom -- before questions about the program's quality and performance are fully answered (though officials there point out that the technology platform, like much online learning software, provides steady insight into how successfully students are staying on track). But USC officials say that short of quantitative measures such as those, they believe the online program is attracting equally qualified students and is providing an education that is fully equivalent to Rossier's on-ground master's program -- goals that the institution viewed as essential so as not to "dilute the brand" of USC's well-regarded program.

"So far, we've beaten the odds," says Gallagher. "We're growing in scale while continuing to ensure that we have a really good program."

"Scale" is a big buzzword in higher education right now, as report after report and new undertaking after new undertaking -- including the Obama administration's American Graduation Initiative -- underscore the perceived need for more Americans with postsecondary credentials. Many institutions -- especially community colleges and for-profit colleges -- are taking it to heart, expanding their capacity and enrolling more students. The push is less evident at other types of colleges and universities, and almost a foreign concept at highly selective institutions.

That's what is atypical, if not downright exceptional, about the experiment at USC, which Inside Higher Ed explored in concept last fall. At that time, some experts on distance learning and teacher education -- not unlike some of Gallagher's dean peers -- wondered whether students would be willing to pay the tuition of an expensive private university for an online program, among other things.

Officials at the university and 2Tor -- the company formed by the Princeton Review founder John Katzman, which has provided the technology and administrative infrastructure for the USC program -- were confident that they would be able to tap into the market of Ivy League and other selective college graduates who flock to programs like Teach for America in ever-growing numbers each year but are also interested in getting a formal teaching credential right away.

While those students certainly have other options -- major public universities such as the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Virginia, and private institutions like Columbia University's Teachers College and Vanderbilt University, among others -- all of them require students to take up residence in way that doesn't work for everyone.

Haley Hiatt, a 2005 graduate of Brigham Young University, actually does reside in Los Angeles -- but she's also a relatively new mother who "didn't want to have to put [her nearly 2-year-old daughter] in day care all the time," she says. So after first contemplating master's programs in history at institutions like Vanderbilt and George Washington University, and then weighing a series of graduate programs at institutions in and around Los Angeles, Hiatt entered the first cohort of the MAT@USC program. She now joins her fellow students in "face to face" meetings (on the Internet, using video chat technology) twice a week, but otherwise does most of her other course work on her own time. "I find it takes more discipline than I needed when I was in the classroom" every day at BYU, she says.

Of the initial cohort of 144 students, about 5 percent got their bachelor's degrees from Ivy League institutions, and about 10 percent came from the crosstown rival University of California at Los Angeles, says Gallagher. About 10 percent hail from historically black colleges and universities -- the proportion of students in the online program who are black (about 11 percent) is about double the proportion in the on-ground program, though the campus program has slightly higher minority numbers overall. Students in the online program are somewhat older (average age 28 vs. 25 for the face-to-face program) and the average college grade point average is identical for both iterations of the program: 3.0, USC officials say.

Other numbers please Gallagher even more. A greater proportion of students in the online program are in science-related fields than is true in the campus-based program, a heartening sign given the pressure on American teacher education programs to ratchet up the number of science teachers they produce.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
The key to this kind of explosion in online enrollments is mostly triggered by reputation of the university in general.

Many universities are finding online programs so popular that they are now treating them like cash cows where students pay more for online tuition than for onsite tuition. One university that openly admits this is the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee (UMW).

Bob Jensen's threads on why so many students prefer online education to onsite education (even apart from cost savings) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DistanceEducation
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnlineVersusOnsite

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education training and education alternatives ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers

"Students prefer online courses: Classes popular with on-campus students," CNN, January 13, 2006 --- http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/01/13/oncampus.online.ap/index.html

At least 2.3 million people took some kind of online course in 2004, according to a recent survey by The Sloan Consortium, an online education group, and two-thirds of colleges offering "face-to-face" courses also offer online ones. But what were once two distinct types of classes are looking more and more alike -- and often dipping into the same pool of students.

At some schools, online courses -- originally intended for nontraditional students living far from campus -- have proved surprisingly popular with on-campus students. A recent study by South Dakota's Board of Regents found 42 percent of the students enrolled in its distance-education courses weren't so distant: they were located on campus at the university that was hosting the online course.

Numbers vary depending on the policies of particular colleges, but other schools also have students mixing and matching online and "face-to-face" credits. Motives range from lifestyle to accommodating a job schedule to getting into high-demand courses.

Classes pose challenges Washington State University had about 325 on-campus undergraduates taking one or more distance courses last year. As many as 9,000 students took both distance and in-person classes at Arizona State Univesity last year.

"Business is really about providing options to their customers, and that's really what we want to do," said Sheila Aaker, extended services coordinator at Black Hills State.

Still, the trend poses something of a dilemma for universities.

They are reluctant to fill slots intended for distance students with on-campus ones who are just too lazy to get up for class. On the other hand, if they insist the online courses are just as good, it's hard to tell students they can't take them. And with the student population rising and pressing many colleges for space, they may have little choice.

In practice, the policy is often shaded. Florida State University tightened on-campus access to online courses several years ago when it discovered some on-campus students hacking into the system to register for them. Now it requires students to get an adviser's permission to take an online class.

Online, in-person classes blending Many schools, like Washington State and Arizona State, let individual departments and academic units decide who can take an online course. They say students with legitimate academic needs -- a conflict with another class, a course they need to graduate that is full -- often get permission, though they still must take some key classes in person.

In fact, the distinction between online and face-to-face courses is blurring rapidly. Many if not most traditional classes now use online components -- message boards, chat rooms, electronic filing of papers. Students can increasingly "attend" lectures by downloading a video or a podcast.

At Arizona State, 11,000 students take fully online courses and 40,000 use the online course management system, which is used by many "traditional" classes. Administrators say the distinction between online and traditional is now so meaningless it may not even be reflected in next fall's course catalogue.

Arizone State's director of distance learning, Marc Van Horne, says students are increasingly demanding both high-tech delivery of education, and more control over their schedules. The university should do what it can to help them graduate on time, he says.

"Is that a worthwhile goal for us to pursue? I'd say 'absolutely,"' Van Horne said. "Is it strictly speaking the mission of a distance learning unit? Not really."

Then there's the question of whether students are well served by taking a course online instead of in-person. Some teachers are wary, saying showing up to class teaches discipline, and that lectures and class discussions are an important part of learning.

But online classes aren't necessarily easier. Two-thirds of schools responding to a recent survey by The Sloan Consortium agreed that it takes more discipline for students to succeed in an online course than in a face-to-face one.

"It's a little harder to get motivated," said Washington State senior Joel Gragg, who took two classes online last year (including "the psychology of motivation"). But, he said, lectures can be overrated -- he was still able to meet with the professor in person when he had questions -- and class discussions are actually better online than in a college classroom, with a diverse group exchanging thoughtful postings.

"There's young people, there's old people, there's moms, professional people," he said. "You really learn a lot more."

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education and training alternatives are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

The 2006 National Survey of Student Engagement, released November 13, 2006, for the first time offers a close look at distance education, offering provocative new data suggesting that e-learners report higher levels of engagement, satisfaction and academic challenge than their on-campus peers --- http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2006_Annual_Report/index.cfm

"The Engaged E-Learner," by Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed, November 13, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/13/nsse

The 2006 National Survey of Student Engagement, released today, for the first time offers a close look at distance education, offering provocative new data suggesting that e-learners report higher levels of engagement, satisfaction and academic challenge than their on-campus peers.

Beyond the numbers, however, what institutions choose to do with the data promises to attract extra attention to this year’s report.

NSSE is one of the few standardized measures of academic outcomes that most officials across a wide range of higher education institutions agree offers something of value.Yet NSSE does not release institution-specific data, leaving it to colleges to choose whether to publicize their numbers.

Colleges are under mounting pressure, however, to show in concrete, measurable ways that they are successfully educating students, fueled in part by the recent release of the report from the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which emphasizes the need for the development of comparable measures of student learning. In the commission’s report and in college-led efforts to heed the commission’s call, NSSE has been embraced as one way to do that. In this climate, will a greater number of colleges embrace transparency and release their results?

Anywhere between one-quarter and one-third of the institutions participating in NSSE choose to release some data, said George Kuh, NSSE’s director and a professor of higher education at Indiana University at Bloomington. But that number includes not only those institutions that release all of the data, but also those that pick and choose the statistics they’d like to share.

In the “Looking Ahead” section that concluded the 2006 report, the authors note that NSSE can “contribute to the higher education improvement and accountability agenda,” teaming with institutions to experiment with appropriate ways to publicize their NSSE data and developing common templates for colleges to use. The report cautions that the data released for accountability purposes should be accompanied by other indicators of student success, including persistence and graduation rates, degree/certificate completion rates and measurements of post-college endeavors.

“Has this become a kind of a watershed moment when everybody’s reporting? No. But I think what will happen as a result of the Commission on the Future of Higher Ed, Secretary (Margaret) Spelling’s workgroup, is that there is now more interest in figuring out how to do this,” Kuh said.

Charles Miller, chairman of the Spellings commission, said he understands that NSSE’s pledge not to release institutional data has encouraged colleges to participate — helping the survey, first introduced in 1999, get off the ground and gain wide acceptance. But Miller said he thinks that at this point, any college that chooses to participate in NSSE should make its data public.

“Ultimately, the duty of the colleges that take public funds is to make that kind of data public. It’s not a secret that the people in the academy ought to have. What’s the purpose of it if it’s just for the academy? What about the people who want to get the most for their money?”

Participating public colleges are already obliged to provide the data upon request, but Miller said private institutions, which also rely heavily on public financial aid funds, should share that obligation.

Kuh said that some colleges’ reluctance to publicize the data stems from a number of factors, the primary reason being that they are not satisfied with the results and feel they might reflect poorly on the institution.

In addition, some college officials fear that the information, if publicized, may be misused, even conflated to create a rankings system. Furthermore, sharing the data would represent a shift in the cultural paradigm at some institutions used to keeping sensitive data to themselves, Kuh said.

“The great thing about NSSE and other measures like it is that it comes so close to the core of what colleges and universities are about — teaching and learning. This is some of the most sensitive information that we have about colleges and universities,” Kuh said.

But Miller said the fact that the data get right to the heart of the matter is precisely why it should be publicized. “It measures what students get while they’re at school, right? If it does that, what’s the fear of publishing it?” Miller asked. “If someone would say, ‘It’s too hard to interpret,’ then that’s an insult to the public.” And if colleges are afraid of what their numbers would suggest, they shouldn’t participate in NSSE at all, Miller said.

However, Douglas Bennett, president of Earlham College in Indiana and chair of NSSE’s National Advisory Board, affirmed NSSE’s commitment to opening survey participation to all institutions without imposing any pressure that they should make their institutional results public. “As chair of the NSSE board, we believe strongly that institutions own their own data and what they do with it is up to them. There are a variety of considerations institutions are going to take into account as to whether or not they share their NSSE data,” Bennett said.

However, as president of Earlham, which releases all of its NSSE data and even releases its accreditation reports, Bennett said he thinks colleges, even private institutions, have a professional and moral obligation to demonstrate their effectiveness in response to accountability demands — through NSSE or another means a college might deem appropriate.

This Year’s Survey

The 2006 NSSE survey, which is based on data from 260,000 randomly-selected first-year and senior students at 523 four-year institutions(NSSE’s companion survey, the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, focuses on two-year colleges) looks much more deeply than previous iterations of the survey did into the performance of online students.

Distance learning students outperform or perform on par with on-campus students on measures including level of academic challenge; student-faculty interaction; enriching educational experiences; and higher-order, integrative and reflective learning; and gains in practical competence, personal and social development, and general education. They demonstrate lower levels of engagement when it comes to active and collaborative learning.

Karen Miller, a professor of education at the University of Louisville who studies online learning, said the results showing higher or equal levels of engagement among distance learning students make sense: “If you imagine yourself as an undergraduate in a fairly large class, you can sit in that class and feign engagement. You can nod and make eye contact; your mind can be a million miles away. But when you’re online, you’ve got to respond, you’ve got to key in your comments on the discussion board, you’ve got to take part in the group activities.

Plus, Miller added, typing is a more complex psycho-motor skill than speaking, requiring extra reflection. “You see what you have said, right in front of your eyes, and if you realize it’s kind of half-baked you can go back and correct it before you post it.”

Also, said Kuh, most of the distance learners surveyed were over the age of 25. “Seventy percent of them are adult learners. These folks are more focused; they’re better able to manage their time and so forth,” said Kuh, who added that many of the concerns surrounding distance education focus on traditional-aged students who may not have mastered their time management skills.

Among other results from the 2006 NSSE survey:

Those students who come to college less well-prepared academically or from historically underrepresented groups tend to benefit from engagement in educationally purposeful activities even more than their peers do.

First-year and senior students spend an average of about 13 to 14 hours per week preparing for classes, much less than what faculty members say is needed.

Student engagement is positively correlated to grades and persistence between the first and second year of college.

New students study fewer hours during their first year than they expected to when starting college.

First-year students at research universities are more likely than students at other types of institutions to participate in a learning community.

First-year students at liberal arts colleges participate in class discussions more often and view their faculty more positively than do students at other institutions.

Seniors at master’s level colleges and universities give class presentations and work with their peers on problems in class more than students at other types of institutions do.

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education and training alternatives around the world are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

Soaring Popularity of E-Learning Among Students But Not Faculty
How many U.S. students took at least on online course from a legitimate college in Fall 2005?

More students are taking online college courses than ever before, yet the majority of faculty still aren’t warming up to the concept of e-learning, according to a national survey from the country’s largest association of organizations and institutions focused on online education.

Roughly 3.2 million students took at least one online course from a degree-granting institution during the fall 2005 term, the Sloan Consortium said. That’s double the number who reported doing so in 2002, the first year the group collected data, and more than 800,000 above the 2004 total. While the number of online course participants has increased each year, the rate of growth slowed from 2003 to 2004.

The report, a joint partnership between the group and the College Board, defines online courses as those in which 80 percent of the content is delivered via the Internet.

The Sloan Survey of Online Learning, “Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006,” shows that 62 percent of chief academic officers say that the learning outcomes in online education are now “as good as or superior to face-to-face instruction,” and nearly 6 in 10 agree that e-learning is “critical to the long-term strategy of their institution.” Both numbers are up from a year ago.

Researchers at the Sloan Consortium, which is administered through Babson College and Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, received responses from officials at more than 2,200 colleges and universities across the country. (The report makes few references to for-profit colleges, a force in the online market, in part because of a lack of survey responses from those institutions.)

Much of the report is hardly surprising. The bulk of online students are adult or “nontraditional” learners, and more than 70 percent of those surveyed said online education reaches students not served by face-to-face programs.

What stands out is the number of faculty who still don’t see e-learning as a valuable tool. Only about one in four academic leaders said that their faculty members “accept the value and legitimacy of online education,” the survey shows. That number has remained steady throughout the four surveys. Private nonprofit colleges were the least accepting — about one in five faculty members reported seeing value in the programs.

Elaine Allen, co-author of the report and a Babson associate professor of statistics and entrepreneurship, said those numbers are striking.

“As a faculty member, I read that response as, ‘We didn’t become faculty to sit in front of a computer screen,’ ” Allen said. “It’s a very hard adjustment. We sat in lectures for an hour when we were students, but there’s a paradigm shift in how people learn.”

Barbara Macaulay, chief academic officer at UMass Online, which offers programs through the University of Massachusetts, said nearly all faculty members teaching the online classes there also teach face-to-face courses, enabling them to see where an online class could fill in the gap (for instance, serving a student who is hesitant to speak up in class).

She said she isn’t surprised to see data illustrating the growing popularity of online courses with students, because her program has seen rapid growth in the last year. Roughly 24,000 students are enrolled in online degree and certificate courses through the university this fall — a 23 percent increase from a year ago, she said.

“Undergraduates see it as a way to complete their degrees — it gives them more flexibility,” Macaulay said.

The Sloan report shows that about 80 percent of students taking online courses are at the undergraduate level. About half are taking online courses through community colleges and 13 percent through doctoral and research universities, according to the survey.

Nearly all institutions with total enrollments exceeding 15,000 students have some online offerings, and about two-thirds of them have fully online programs, compared with about one in six at the smallest institutions (those with 1,500 students or fewer), the report notes. Allen said private nonprofit colleges are often set in enrollment totals and not looking to expand into the online market.

The report indicates that two-year colleges are particularly willing to be involved in online learning.

“Our institutions tend to embrace changes a little more readily and try different pedagogical styles,” said Kent Phillippe, a senior research associate at the American Association of Community Colleges. The report cites a few barriers to what it calls the “widespread adoption of online learning,” chief among them the concern among college officials that some of their students lack the discipline to succeed in an online setting. Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents defined that as a barrier.

Allen, the report’s co-author, said she thinks that issue arises mostly in classes in which work can be turned in at any time and lectures can be accessed at all hours. “If you are holding class in real time, there tends to be less attrition,” she said. The report doesn’t differentiate between the live and non-live online courses, but Allen said she plans to include that in next year’s edition.

Few survey respondents said acceptance of online degrees by potential employers was a critical barrier — although liberal arts college officials were more apt to see it as an issue.

November 10, 2006 reply from John Brozovsky [jbrozovs@vt.edu]

Hi Bob:

One reason why might be what I have seen. The in residence accounting students that I talk with take online classes here because they are EASY and do not take much work. This would be very popular with students but not generally so with faculty.

John

November 10, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi John,

Then there is a quality control problem whereever this is a fact. It would be a travesty if any respected college had two or more categories of academic standards or faculty assignments.

Variations in academic standards have long been a problem between part-time versus full-time faculty, although grade inflation can be higher or lower among part-time faculty. In one instance, it’s the tenure-track faculty who give higher grades because they're often more worried about student evaluations. At the opposite extreme it is part-time faculty who give higher grades for many reasons that we can think of if we think about it.

One thing that I'm dead certain about is that highly motivated students tend to do better in online courses ceteris paribus. Reasons are mainly that time is used more efficiently in getting to class (no wasted time driving or walking to class), less wasted time getting teammates together on team projects, and fewer reasons for missing class.

Also online alternatives offer some key advantages for certain types of handicapped students --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

My opinions on learning advantages of E-Learning were heavily influenced by the most extensive and respected study of online versus onsite learning experiments in the SCALE experiments using full-time resident students at the University of Illinois --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois

In the SCALE experiments cutting across 30 disciplines, it was generally found that motivated students learned better online then their onsite counterparts having the same instructors. However, there was no significant impact on students who got low grades in online versus onsite treatment groups.

I think the main problem with faculty is that online teaching tends to burn out instructors more frequently than onsite instructors. This was also evident in the SCALE experiments. When done correctly, online courses are more communication intent between instructors and faculty. Also, online learning takes more preparation time if it is done correctly.

My hero for online learning is still Amy Dunbar who maintains high standards for everything:

http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm

http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book01q4.htm#Dunbar

Bob Jensen

November 10, 2006 reply from John Brozovsky [jbrozovs@vt.edu]

Hi Bob:

Also why many times it is not done 'right'. Not done right they do not get the same education. Students generally do not complain about getting 'less for their money'. Since we do not do online classes in department the ones the students are taking are the university required general education and our students in particular are not unhappy with being shortchanged in that area as they frequently would have preferred none anyway.

John

Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing and education technology are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education alternatives are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

Motivations for Distance Learning --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#Motivations

Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side of online learning and teaching are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

October 5, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

STUDENTS' PERCEPTIONS OF ONLINE LEARNING

"The ultimate question for educational research is how to optimize instructional designs and technology to maximize learning opportunities and achievements in both online and face-to-face environments." Karl L.Smart and James J. Cappel studied two undergraduate courses -- an elective course and a required course -- that incorporated online modules into traditional classes. Their research of students' impressions and satisfaction with the online portions of the classes revealed mixed results:

-- "participants in the elective course rated use of the learning modules slightly positive while students in the required course rated them slightly negative"

-- "while students identified the use of simulation as the leading strength of the online units, it was also the second most commonly mentioned problem of these units"

-- "students simply did not feel that the amount of time it took to complete the modules was worth what was gained"

The complete paper, "Students' Perceptions of Online Learning: A Comparative Study" (JOURNAL OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION, vol. 5, 2006, pp. 201-19), is available online at http://jite.org/documents/Vol5/v5p201-219Smart54.pdf.

Current and back issues of the Journal of Information Technology Education (JITE) [ISSN 1539-3585 (online) 1547-9714 (print)] are available free of charge at http://jite.org/. The peer-reviewed journal is published annually by the Informing Science Institute. For more information contact: Informing Science Institute, 131 Brookhill Court, Santa Rosa, California 95409 USA; tel: 707-531-4925; fax: 480-247-5724;

Web: http://informingscience.org/.

I have heard some faculty argue that asynchronous Internet courses just do not mesh with Trinity's on-campus mission. The Scale Experiments at the University of Illinois indicate that many students learn better and prefer online courses even if they are full-time, resident students. The University of North Texas is finding out the same thing. There may be some interest in what our competition may be in the future even for full-time, on-campus students at private as well as public colleges and universities.
On January 17, 2003, Ed Scribner forwarded this article from The Dallas Morning News

Students Who Live on Campus Choosing Internet Courses Syndicated From: The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS - Jennifer Pressly could have walked to a nearby lecture hall for her U.S. history class and sat among 125 students a few mornings a week.

But the 19-year-old freshman at the University of North Texas preferred rolling out of bed and attending class in pajamas at her dorm-room desk. Sometimes she would wait until Saturday afternoon.

The teen from Rockwall, Texas, took her first college history class online this fall semester. She never met her professor and knew only one of her 125 classmates: her roommate.

"I take convenience over lectures," she said. "I think I would be bored to death if I took it in lecture."

She's part of a controversial trend that has surprised many university officials across the country. Given a choice, many traditional college students living on campus pick an online course. Most universities began offering courses via the Internet in the late 1990s to reach a different audience - older students who commute to campus and are juggling a job and family duties.

During the last year, UNT began offering an online option for six of its highest-enrollment courses that are typically taught in a lecture hall with 100 to 500 students. The online classes, partly offered as a way to free up classroom space in the growing school, filled up before pre-registration ended, UNT officials said. At UNT, 2,877 of the about 23,000 undergraduates are taking at least one course online.

Nationwide, colleges are reporting similar experiences, said Sally Johnstone, director of WCET, a Boulder, Colo., cooperative of state higher education boards and universities that researches distance education. Kansas State University, in a student survey last spring, discovered that 80 percent of its online students were full-time and 20 percent were part-time, the opposite of the college's expectations, Johnstone said.

"Why pretend these kids want to be in a class all the time? They don't, but kids don't come to campus to sit in their dorm rooms and do things online exclusively," she said. "We're in a transition, and it's a complex one."

The UT Telecampus, a part of the University of Texas System that serves 15 universities and research facilities, began offering online undergraduate classes in state-required courses two years ago. Its studies show that 80 percent of the 2,260 online students live on campus, and the rest commute.

Because they are restricted to 30 students each, the UT System's online classes are touted as a more intimate alternative to lecture classes, said Darcy Hardy, director of the UT Telecampus.

"The freshman-sophomore students are extremely Internet-savvy and understand more about online options and availability than we could have ever imagined," Hardy said.

Online education advocates say professors can reach students better online than in lecture classes because of the frequent use of e-mail and online discussion groups. Those who oppose the idea say they worry that undergraduates will miss out on the debate, depth and interaction of traditional classroom instruction.

UNT, like most colleges, is still trying to figure out the effect on its budget. The professorial salary costs are the same, but an online course takes more money to develop. The online students, however, free up classroom space and eliminate the need for so many new buildings in growing universities. The price to enroll is typically the same for students, whether they go to a classroom or sit at their computer.

Mike Campbell, a history professor at UNT for 36 years, does not want to teach an online class, nor does he approve of offering undergraduate history via the Internet.

"People shouldn't be sitting in the dorms doing this rather than walking over here," he said. "That is based on a misunderstanding of what matters in history."

In his class of 125, he asks students rhetorical questions they answer en masse to be sure they're paying attention, he said. He goes beyond the textbook, discussing such topics as the moral and legal issues surrounding slavery.

He said he compares the online classes to the correspondence courses he hated but had to teach when he came to UNT in 1966. Both methods are too impersonal, he said, recalling how he mailed assignments and tests to correspondence students.

UNT professors who teach online say the courses are interactive, unlike correspondence courses.

Matt Pearcy has lectured 125 students for three hours at a time.

"You'd try to be entertaining," he said. "You have students who get bored after 45 minutes, no matter what you're doing. They're filling out notes, doing their to-do list, reading their newspaper in front of you."

In his online U.S. history class at UNT, students get two weeks to finish each lesson. They read text, complete click-and-drag exercises, like one that matches terms with historical figures, and take quizzes. They participate in online discussions and group projects, using e-mail to communicate.

"Hands-down, I believe this is a more effective way to teach," said Pearcy, who is based in St. Paul, Minn. "In this setting, they go to the class when they're ready to learn. They're interacting, so they're paying attention."

Pressly said she liked the hands-on work in the online class. She could do crossword puzzles to reinforce her history lessons. Or she could click an icon and see what Galileo saw through his telescope in the 17th century.

"I took more interest in this class than the other ones," she said.

The class, though, required her to be more disciplined, she said, and that added stress. Two weeks in a row, she waited till 11:57 p.m. Sunday - three minutes before the deadline - to turn in her assignment.

Online courses aren't for everybody.

"The thing about sitting in my dorm, there's so much to distract me," said Trevor Shive, a 20-year-old freshman at UNT. "There's the Internet. There's TV. There's radio."

He said students on campus should take classes in the real, not virtual, world.

"They've got legs; they can walk to class," he said.

Continued in the article at http://www.dallasnews.com/

January 17, 2003 response from John L. Rodi [jrodi@IX.NETCOM.COM]

I would have added one additional element. Today I think too many of us tend to teach accounting the way you teach drivers education. Get in the car turn on the key and off you go. If something goes wrong with the car you a sunk since you nothing conceptually. Furthermore, it makes you a victim of those who do. Conceptual accounting education teaches you to respond to choices, that is not only how to drive but what to drive. Thanks for the wonderful analogy.

John Rodi
El Camino College

January 21 reply from

On the subject of technology and teaching accounting, I wonder how many of you are in the SAP University Alliance and using it for accounting classes. I just teach advanced financial accounting, and have not found a use for it there. However, I have often felt that there is a place for it in intro financial, in managerial and in AIS. On the latter, there is at least one good text book containing SAP exercises and problems.

Although there are over 400 universities in the world in the program, one of the areas where use is lowest is accounting courses. The limitation appears to be related to a combination of the learning curve for professors, together with an uncertainty as to how it can be used to effectively teach conceptual material or otherwise fit into curricula.

Gerald Trites, FCA
Professor of Accounting and Information Systems
St Francis Xavier University
Antigonish, Nova Scotia
Website - http://www.stfx.ca/people/gtrites

The SAP University Alliance homepage is at http://www.sap.com/usa/company/ua/

In today's fast-paced, technically advanced society, universities must master the latest technologies, not only to achieve their own business objectives cost-effectively but also to prepare the next generation of business leaders. To meet the demands for quality teaching, advanced curriculum, and more technically sophisticated graduates, your university is constantly searching for innovative ways of acquiring the latest information technology while adhering to tight budgetary controls.

SAP^™ can help. A world leader in the development of business software, SAP is making its market-leading, client/server-based enterprise software, the R/3^® System, available to the higher education community. Through our SAP University Alliance Program, we are proud to offer you the world's most popular software of its kind for today's businesses. SAP also provides setup, follow-up consulting, and R/3 training for faculty - all at our expense. The SAP R/3 System gives you the most advanced software capabilities used by businesses of all sizes and in all industries around the world.

There are many ways a university can benefit from an educational alliance with SAP. By partnering with SAP and implementing the R/3 System, your university can:

Take advantage of a powerful cross-functional teaching tool
Because R/3 is a comprehensive, integrated business system with a proven track record in the real world, it is an excellent tool for teaching students how a business really works.
Access advanced software technology
Sophisticated in both architecture and functionality, R/3 is the world's most advanced business enterprise software available today. Faculty and students have the opportunity to stay in the forefront of business software innovation.
Enhance marketability
Experience with R/3 is prized by corporate recruiters. Students well-versed in the principles of management and the uses of R/3 are highly marketable to SAP, our customers, and partners.
Attract leading educators
Prominent educators in business and information technology may find the university's alliance with SAP attractive in terms of access to research opportunities, advanced software, and users of R/3.
Pursue research opportunities
Faculty members can pursue research in many areas of business and information technology.
Broaden outreach
SAP maintains an extensive network of contacts with leading consulting firms that work as our partners in implementing R/3. What's more, our customers are some of the largest and most prestigious corporations around the world. As an Alliance member, your university can tap into this network of contacts to broaden your reach into the business community.
Stay in touch with industry and product trends
SAP strategic business units work closely with customers, user groups, industry associations, and leading consulting firms to ensure that we continue to deliver leading-edge capability. As an Alliance member, your university can keep abreast of new enterprise computing ideas and trends through the SAP strategic business units.

January 6, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

No Significant Difference Phenomenon website http://www.nosignificantdifference.org/

The website is a companion piece to Thomas L. Russell's book THE NO SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE PHENOMENON, a bibliography of 355 research reports, summaries, and papers that document no significant differences in student outcomes between alternate modes of education delivery.

DISTANCE LEARNING AND FACULTY CONCERNS

Despite the growing number of distance learning programs, faculty are often reluctant to move their courses into the online medium. In "Addressing Faculty Concerns About Distance Learning" (ONLINE JOURNAL OF DISTANCE LEARNING ADMINISTRATION, vol. VIII, no. IV, Winter 2005) Jennifer McLean discusses several areas that influence faculty resistance, including: the perception that technical support and training is lacking, the fear of being replaced by technology, and the absence of a clearly-understood institutional vision for distance learning. The paper is available online at
http://www.westga.edu/%7Edistance/ojdla/winter84/mclean84.htm

The Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration is a free, peer-reviewed quarterly published by the Distance and Distributed Education Center, The State University of West Georgia, 1600 Maple Street, Carrollton, GA 30118 USA; Web: http://www.westga.edu/~distance/jmain11.html .

December 10, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

E-LEARNING ONLINE PRESENTATIONS

The University of Calgary Continuing Education sponsors Best Practices in E-Learning, a website that provides a forum for anyone working in the field to share their best practices. This month's presentations include:

-- "To Share or Not To Share: There is No Question" by Rosina Smith Details a new model for permitting "the reuse, multipurposing, and repurposing of existing content"

-- "Effective Management of Distributed Online Educational Content" by Gary Woodill "[R]eviews the history of online educational content, and argues that the future is in distributed content learning management systems that can handle a wide diversity of content types . . . identifies 40 different genres of online educational content (with links to examples)"

Presentations are in various formats, including Flash, PDF, HTML, and PowerPoint slides. Registered users can interact with the presenters and post to various discussion forums on the website. There is no charge to register and view presentations. You can also subscribe to their newsletter which announces new presentations each month. (Note: No archive of past months' presentations appears to be on the website.)

For more information, contact: Rod Corbett, University of Calgary Continuing Education; tel:403-220-6199 or 866-220-4992 (toll-free); email: rod.corbett@ucalgary.ca ; Web: http://elearn.ucalgary.ca/showcase/.

NEW APPROACHES TO EVALUATING ONLINE LEARNING

"The clear implication is that online learning is not good enough and needs to prove its worth before gaining full acceptance in the pantheon of educational practices. This comparative frame of reference is specious and irrelevant on several counts . . ." In "Escaping the Comparison Trap: Evaluating Online Learning on Its Own Terms (INNOVATE, vol. 1, issue 2, December 2004/January 2005), John Sener writes that, rather than being inferior to classroom instruction, "[m]any online learning practices have demonstrated superior results or provided access to learning experiences not previously possible." He describes new evaluation models that are being used to judge online learning on its own merits. The paper is available online at http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=11&action=article.

You will need to register on the Innovate website to access the paper; there is no charge for registration and access.

Innovate [ISSN 1552-3233] is a bimonthly, peer-reviewed online periodical published by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University. The journal focuses on the creative use of information technology (IT) to enhance educational processes in academic, commercial, and government settings. Readers can comment on articles, share material with colleagues and friends, and participate in open forums. For more information, contact James L. Morrison, Editor-in-Chief, Innovate; email: innovate@nova.edu ; Web: http://www.innovateonline.info/.

I read the following for a scheduled program of the 29th Annual Accounting Education Conference, October 17-18, 2003 Sponsored by the Texas CPA Society, San Antonio Airport Hilton.

WEB-BASED AND FACE-TO-FACE INSTRUCTION:
A COMPARISON OF LEARNING OUTCOMES IN A FINANCIAL ACCOUNTING COURSE

Explore the results of a study conducted over a four-semester period that focused on the same graduate level financial accounting course that was taught using web-based instruction and face-to-face instruction. Discuss the comparison of student demographics and characteristics, course satisfaction, and comparative statistics related to learning outcomes.

Doug Rusth/associate professor/University of Houston at Clear Lake/Clear Lake

Bob Jensen's threads on asynchronous versus synchronous learning are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm
Note in particular the research outcomes of The Scale Experiment at the University of Illinois --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois

Once again, my advice to new faculty is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm

Minimum Grades as a School Policy

Question
Should a student who gets a zero (for not doing anything) or 23% (for doing something badly) on an assignment, exam, or term paper be automatically (as a matter of school policy) upgraded to a 60% no matter what proportion the grade is toward a course's final grade?
Should a student get 60% even if he or she fails to show up for an examination?

Jensen Comment
This could lead to some strategies like "don't spend any time on the term paper and concentrate on passing the final examination or vice versa."
Such strategies are probably not in the spirit of the course design, especially when the instructor intended for students to have to write a paper.

"Time to Add Basket Weaving as a Course," by Ben Baker, The Irascible Professor, June 22, 2008 --- http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-06-22-08.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

If a student doesn’t come to school,” he continued, “how can you justify passing that kid?
Fernanda Santos

One of the trademarks of New York City’s school accountability system is an equation that assigns every school a letter grade, A through F, based on a numerical score from 1 to 100.

Bronx School’s Top Ranking Stirs Wider Doubts About Rating System By FERNANDA SANTOS Published: January 20, 2011

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One of the trademarks of New York City’s school accountability system is an equation that assigns every school a letter grade, A through F, based on a numerical score from 1 to 100. Enlarge This Image Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Lynn Passarella, facing camera, the principal of the Theater Arts Production Company School, outside the school on Thursday. She declined to comment on the allegations about her school’s grading practices.

A parent pulling up the latest report card for the Theater Arts Production Company School in the Bronx would find that it earned the score of 106.3 (including extra credit).

But that very empiric-sounding number, which was the highest of any high school in the city, is based in part on subjective measures like “academic expectations” and “engagement,” as measured by voluntary parent, teacher and student surveys.

And, according to some teachers at the school, even the more tangible factors in the score — graduation rates and credits earned by students — were not to be taken at face value. The school has a policy that no student who showed up for class should fail, and even some who missed many days of school were still allowed to pass and graduate.

The Department of Education, which revealed on Wednesday that it was investigating grading practices at the school, says that it has a team devoted to analyzing school statistics every year and looking for red flags like abnormal increases in student scores or dropout rates. But a department official said that nothing in its data had raised suspicions about the school, known as Tapco, until a whistle-blower filed a complaint in October.

Still, in a data-driven system where letter grades can determine a school’s fate, one big question looms over the investigation: If the allegations turn out to be true, are they an exception or a sign of a major fault in the school accountability system?

“The D.O.E. has absolutely created a climate for these types of scandals to happen,” Michael Mulgrew, the president of the teachers’ union, said in an interview. “Their culture of ‘measure everything and question nothing a principal tells you’ makes it hard to figure out what’s real and what’s not real inside a school.”

There are many gradations of impropriety, and it is unclear if any of them apply to Tapco, which has about 500 students and also includes a middle school. The school’s teacher handbook states that no student should fail a class if he or she regularly attends, and that students who miss work should be given “multiple opportunities for student success and work revision.”

Current and former teachers at the school said that even students who were regularly absent were given passing grades, in some cases with course credits granted by the principal without a teacher’s knowledge. Some students’ records showed credits for courses the school did not offer.

The investigation over the irregularities at Tapco, which began in October, also include allegations that the school’s principal, Lynn Passarella, manipulated teacher and parent surveys, which represent 10 of the 100 points in a school’s score. Graduation rates, passing rates on Regents exams and earned credits constitute most of the score.

Ms. Passarella declined to comment on the allegations.

A spokesman for the Education Department, Matthew Mittenthal, said: “We take every allegation of misconduct seriously, and hope that the public can reserve judgment until the investigation is complete.”

Sometimes, the analysts who pore over the data uncover serious problems. Last year, the Education Department lowered the overall scores of three high schools. At Jamaica High School in Queens, the department discovered that the school had improperly granted credit to some transfer students. At John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx and W. H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School in Brooklyn, administrators could not provide documentation to explain why some students had left the schools.

Since 2008, at least four principals and assistant principals have been reprimanded — two retired, one served a 30-day unpaid suspension and another paid a $6,500 fine — on charges that included tampering with tests.

Principals can get as much as $25,000 in bonuses if their schools meet or exceed performance targets, and some experts are skeptical that the department’s system of checks and balances is as trustworthy as it should be, particularly when money is at stake.

Tapco’s administrators got a bonus once, for the 2008-9 school year, when the high school’s overall score was 85.8, which earned it an A. (The middle school scored 73.) Ms. Passarella received $7,000, while her assistant principals got $3,500 each, according to the Education Department. (Administrator bonuses for 2009-10 performance have not been doled out.)

“There’s an inherent temptation towards corruption when you create a situation where there are rewards for things like higher test scores or favorable surveys,” said Sol Stern, an education researcher at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group. “It’s an invitation to cheating.”

One mother, Cathy Joyner, whose daughter, Sapphire Connor, is a junior, said the school was excellent, adding that “the children are respectful” and that the school was “concentrating on their talents.”

But one teacher, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he said he feared for his job, gave a different account. For teachers who do not do what the principal wants, the teacher said, “it’s difficult to get tenure.”

“If a student doesn’t come to school,” he continued, “how can you justify passing that kid?"

Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, criticized the decision to reduce the number of schools that receive top grades.

Continued in article

Issues in Group Grading

December 6, 2004 message from Glen Gray [glen.gray@CSUN.EDU]

When I have students do group projects, I require each team member complete a peer review form where the team member evaluates the other team members on 8 attributes using a scale from 0 to 4. On this form they also give their team members an overall grade. In a footnote it is explained that an “A” means the team member receives the full team grade; a “B” means a 10% reduction from the team grade; a “C” means 20% discount; a “D” means 30% discount; “E” means 40%, and an “F” means a 100% discount (in other words, the team member should get a zero).

I assumed that the form added a little peer pressure to the team work process. In the past, students were usually pretty kind to each other. But now I have a situation where the team members on one team have all given either E’s of F’s to one of their team members. Their written comments about this guy are all pretty consistent.

Now, I worried if I actually enforce the discount scale, things are going to get messy and the s*** is going to hit the fan. I’m going to have one very upset student. He is going to be mad at his fellow teammates.

Has anyone had similar experience? What has the outcome been? Is there a confidentially issue here? In other words, are the other teammates also going to be upset that I revealed their evaluations? Is there going to be a lawsuit coming over the horizon?

Glen L. Gray, PhD, CPA
Dept. of Accounting & Information Systems
College of Business & Economics
California State University, Northridge
Northridge, CA 91330-8372
http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f

Most of the replies to the message above encouraged being clear at the beginning that team evaluations would affect the final grade and then sticking to that policy.

December 5, 2004 reply from David Fordham, James Madison University [fordhadr@JMU.EDU]

Glen, the fact that you are in California, by itself, makes it much more difficult to predict the lawsuit question. I've seen some lawsuits (and even worse, legal outcomes) from California that are completely unbelievable... Massachussetts too.

But that said, I can share my experience that I have indeed given zero points on a group grade to students where the peer evaluations indicated unsatisfactory performance. My justification to the students in these "zero" cases has always been, "it was clear from your peers that you were not part of the group effort, and thus have not earned the points for the group assignment".

I never divulge any specific comments, but I do tell the student that I am willing to share the comments with an impartial arbiter if they wish to have a third party confirm my evidence. To date, no student has ever contested the decision.

Every other semester or so, I have to deduct points to some degree for unsatisfactory work as judged by peers. So far, I've had no problems making it stick, and in most cases, the affected student willingly admits their deficiency, although usually with excuses and rationales.

But I'm not in California, and the legal precedents here are unlike those in your neck of the woods.

If I were on the west coast, however, I'd probably be likely to at least try to stick to my principles as far as my university legal counsel would allow. Then, if my counsel didn't support me, I'd look for employment in a part of the country with a more reasonable legal environment (although that is getting harder to find every day).

Good luck,

David Fordham

December 5, 2004 reply from Amy Dunbar

Sometimes groups do blow up. Last summer I had one group ask me to remove a member. Another group had a nonfunctioning member, based on the participation scores. I formed an additional group comprised of just those two. They finally learned how to work. Needless to say they weren’t happy with me, but the good thing about teaching is that every semester we get a fresh start!

Another issue came up for the first time, at least that I noticed. I learned that one group made a pact to rate each other high all semester long regardless of work level, and I still am not sure how I am going to avoid that problem next time around. The agreement came to light when one of the students was upset that he did so poorly on my exams. He told his senior that he had no incentive to do the homework because he could just get the answers from the other group members, and he didn’t have to worry about being graded down because of the agreement. The student was complaining that the incentive structure I set up hurt him because he needed more push do the homework. The senior told me after the class ended. Any suggestions?

TEXAS IS GOING TO THE ROSE BOWL!!!!!!!!! Go Horns! Oops, that just slipped out.

Amy Dunbar
A Texas alum married to a Texas fanatic

December 6, 2004 reply from Tracey Sutherland [tracey@AAAHQ.ORG]

Glen, My first thought on reading your post was that if things get complicated it could be useful to have a context for your grading policy that clearly establishes that it falls within common practice (in accounting and in cooperative college classrooms in general). Now you've already built some context from within accounting by gathering some responses here from a number of colleagues for whom this is a regular practice. Neal's approach can be a useful counterpart to peer evaluation for triangulation purposes -- sometimes students will report that they weren't really on-point for one reason or another (I've done this with good result but only with upper-level grad students). If the issue becomes more complicated because the student challenges your approach up the administrative ladder, you could provide additional context for the consistency of your approach in general by referencing the considerable body of literature on these issues in the higher education research literature -- you are using a well-established approach that's been frequently tested. A great resource if you need it is Barbara Millis and Phil Cottell's book "Cooperative Learning for Higher Education Faculty" published by Oryx Press (American Council on Education Series on Higher Education). They do a great job of annotating the major work in the area in a short, accessible, and concise book that also includes established criteria used for evaluating group work and some sample forms for peer assessment and self-assessment for group members (also just a great general resource for well-tested cooperative/group activities -- and tips for how to manage implementing them). Phil Cottell is an accounting professor (Miami U.) and would be a great source of information should you need it.

Your established grading policy indicates that there would be a reduction of grade when team members give poor peer evaluations -- which wouldn't necessarily mean that you would reveal individual's evaluations but that a negative aggregate evaluation would have an effect -- and that would protect confidentiality consistently with your policy. It seems an even clearer case because all group members have given consistently negative evaluations -- as long as it's not some weird interpersonal thing -- something that sounds like that would be a red flag for the legal department. I hate it that we so often worry about legal ramifications . . . but then again it pays to be prepared!

Peace of the season,

Tracey

December 6, 2004 reply from Bob Jensen

I once listened to an award winning AIS professor from a very major university (that after last night won't be going to the Orange Bowl this year) say that the best policy is to promise everybody an A in the course. My question then is what the point of the confidential evaluations would be other than to make the professor feel bad at the end of the course?

Bob Jensen

Too Good to Grade: How can these students get into doctoral programs and law school if their prestigious universities will not disclose grades and class rankings? Why grade at all in this case?
Students at some top-ranked B-schools have a secret. It's something they can't share even if it means losing a job offer. It's one some have worked hard for and should be proud of, but instead they keep it to themselves. The secret is their grades. At four of the nation's 10 most elite B-schools -- including Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago -- students have adopted policies that prohibit them or their schools from disclosing grades to recruiters. The idea is to reduce competitiveness and eliminate the risk associated with taking difficult courses. But critics say the only thing nondisclosure reduces is one of the most important lessons B-schools should teach: accountability (see BusinessWeek, 9/12/05, "Join the Real World, MBAs"). It's a debate that's flaring up on B-school campuses across the country. (For more on this topic, log on to our B-Schools Forum.) And nowhere is it more intense than at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, where students, faculty, and administrators have locked horns over a school-initiated proposal that would effectively end a decade of grade secrecy at BusinessWeek's No. 3-ranked B-school. It wouldn't undo disclosure rules but would recognize the top 25% of each class -- in effect outing everyone else. It was motivated, says Vice-Dean Anjani Jain in a recent Wharton Journal article, by the "disincentivizing effects" of grade nondisclosure, which he says faculty blame for lackluster academic performance and student disengagement.
"Campus Confidential: Four top-tier B-schools don't disclose grades. Now that policy is under attack," Business Week, September 12, 2005 --- http://snipurl.com/BWSept122

Too Good to Grade: How can these students get into doctoral programs and law schools if their prestigious universities will not disclose grades and class rankings? Why grade at all in this case?
Students at some top-ranked B-schools have a secret. It's something they can't share even if it means losing a job offer. It's one some have worked hard for and should be proud of, but instead they keep it to themselves. The secret is their grades. At four of the nation's 10 most elite B-schools -- including Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago -- students have adopted policies that prohibit them or their schools from disclosing grades to recruiters. The idea is to reduce competitiveness and eliminate the risk associated with taking difficult courses. But critics say the only thing nondisclosure reduces is one of the most important lessons B-schools should teach: accountability (see BusinessWeek, 9/12/05, "Join the Real World, MBAs"). It's a debate that's flaring up on B-school campuses across the country. (For more on this topic, log on to our B-Schools Forum.) And nowhere is it more intense than at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, where students, faculty, and administrators have locked horns over a school-initiated proposal that would effectively end a decade of grade secrecy at BusinessWeek's No. 3-ranked B-school. It wouldn't undo disclosure rules but would recognize the top 25% of each class -- in effect outing everyone else. It was motivated, says Vice-Dean Anjani Jain in a recent Wharton Journal article, by the "disincentivizing effects" of grade nondisclosure, which he says faculty blame for lackluster academic performance and student disengagement.
"Campus Confidential: Four top-tier B-schools don't disclose grades. Now that policy is under attack," Business Week, September 12, 2005 --- http://snipurl.com/BWSept122
Jensen Comment: Talk about moral hazard. What if 90% of the applicants claim to be straight A graduates at the very top of the class, and nobody can prove otherwise?

September 2, 2005 message from Denny Beresford [DBeresford@TERRY.UGA.EDU]

Bob,

The impression I have (perhaps I'm misinformed) is that most MBA classes result in nearly all A's and B's to students. If that's the case, I wonder how much a grade point average really matters.

Denny Beresford

September 2, 2005 reply from Bob Jensen

One of the schools, Stanford, in the 1970s lived with the Van Horn rule that dictated no more than 15% A grades in any MBA class. I guess grade inflation has hit the top business schools. Then again, maybe the students are just better than we were.

I added the following to my Tidbit on this:

Talk about moral hazard. What if 90% of the applicants claim to be straight A graduates at the very top of the class, and nobody can prove otherwise?

After your message Denny, I see that perhaps it's not moral hazard. Maybe 90% of the students actually get A grades in these business schools, in which nearly 90% would graduate summa cum laude.

What a joke! It must be nice teaching students who never hammer you on teaching evaluations because you gave them a C or below.

The crucial quotation is "faculty blame for lackluster academic performance and student disengagement." Isn't this a laugh if they all get A and B grades for "lackluster academic performance and student disengagement."

I think these top schools are simply catering to their customers!

Bob Jensen

Harvard Business School Eliminates Ban on a Graduate's Discretionary Disclosure of Grades
The era of the second-year slump at Harvard Business School is over. Or maybe the days of student cooperation are over. Despite strong student opposition, the business school announced Wednesday that it was ending its ban on sharing grades with potential employers. Starting with new students who enroll in the fall, M.B.A. candidates can decide for themselves whether to share their transcripts. The ban on grade-sharing has been enormously popular with students since it was adopted in 1998. Supporters say that it discouraged (or at least kept to a reasonable level) the kind of cut-throat competition for which business schools are known. With the ban, students said they were more comfortable helping one another or taking difficult courses. But a memo sent to students by Jay O. Light, the acting dean, said that the policy was wrong. “Fundamentally, I believe it is inappropriate for HBS to dictate to students what they can and cannot say about their grades during the recruiting process. I believe you and your classmates earn your grades and should be accountable for them, as you will be accountable for your performance in the organizations you will lead in the future,” he wrote.
Scott Jaschik, "Survival of the Fittest MBA," Inside Higher Ed, December 16, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/16/grades

Bob Jensen's threads on Controversies in Higher Education are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

Software for faculty and departmental performance evaluation and management

May 30, 2006 message from Ed Scribner [escribne@NMSU.EDU]

A couple of months ago I asked for any experiences with systems that collect faculty activity and productivity data for multiple reporting needs (AACSB, local performance evaluation, etc.). I said I'd get back to the list with a summary of private responses.

No one reported any significant direct experience, but many AECMers provided names and e-mail addresses of [primarily] associate deans who had researched products from Sedona and Digital Measures. Since my associate dean was leading the charge, I just passed those addresses on to her.

We ended up selecting Digital Measures mainly because of our local faculty input, the gist of which was that it had a more professional "feel." My recollection is that the risk of data loss with either system is acceptable and that the university "owns" the data. I understand that a grad student is entering our data from the past five years to get us started.

Ed Scribner
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, NM, USA

Jensen Comment
The Digital Measures homepage is at http://www.digitalmeasures.com/

Over 100 universities use Digital Measures' customized solutions to connect administrators, faculty, staff, students, and alumni. Take a look at a few of the schools and learn more about Digital Measures.

Free from the Huron Consulting Group (Registration Required) --- http://www.huronconsultinggroup.com/

Effort Reporting Technology for Higher Education ---
http://www.huronconsultinggroup.com/uploadedFiles/ECRT_email.pdf

Question Mark (Software for Test and Tutorial Generation and Networking)
Barron's Home Page
Metasys Japan Software
Question Mark America home page
Using ExamProc for OMR Exam Marking
Vizija d.o.o. - Educational Programs - Wisdom Tools Yahoo Links TechKnowLogia --- http://www.techknowlogia.org/ TechKnowLogia is an international online journal that provides policy makers, strategists, practitioners and technologists at the local, national and global levels with a strategic forum to:

Full Disclosure to Consumers of Higher Education (including assessment of colleges and the Spellings Commission Report) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#FullDisclosure

Dropping a Bomb on Accreditation
The most provocative vision for changing accreditation put forward at Tuesday’s meeting came from Robert C. Dickeson, president emeritus of the University of Northern Colorado. Dickeson’s presentation was loaded with irony, in some ways; a position paper he wrote in 2006 as a consultant to Margaret Spellings’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education was harshly critical of the current system of accreditation (calling it rife with conflicts of interest and decidedly lacking in transparency) and suggested replacing the regional accrediting agencies with a “national accreditation foundation” that would establish national standards for colleges to meet. Dickeson’s presentation Tuesday acknowledged that there remained legitimate criticisms of accreditation’s rigor and agility, noting that many colleges and accrediting agencies still lacked good information about student learning outcomes “40 years after the assessment movement began in higher education.”
Doug Lederman, "Whither Accreditation," Inside Higher Ed, January 28, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/28/accredit

Dickerson's 2006 Position Paper "Dropping a Bomb on Accreditation" --- http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/03/31/accredit

Here’s something that may be useful when assessing a doctoral program. Note to key items listed near the end of the document.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, November 7, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i11/11a00104.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

11a00104.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

Provosts around the country are anticipating — and some are surely dreading — the long afternoons when they will go over national rankings data for their graduate departments. No later than this winter, after many delays, the National Research Council plans to release its assessments of American doctoral programs.

Student-faculty ratios, time to degree, stipends, faculty research productivity, and citation counts: Those numbers and many others will be under national scrutiny.

But one university couldn't wait. Last year, prodded by anxious faculty members worried about low Ph.D. production, Ohio State University conducted a thorough review of its doctoral programs, drawing heavily on data that its departments had compiled for the council's questionnaire. The Ohio State experience provides a window on what may be coming nationally.

The evaluations had teeth. Of the 90 doctoral programs at Ohio State, five small ones were tagged as "candidates for disinvestment or elimination": comprehensive vocational education (a specialty track in the college of agriculture), soil science, welding engineering, rehabilitation services, and technology education. Another 29 programs were instructed to reassess or restructure themselves.

Some programs got good news, however. Twenty-nine that were identified as "high quality" or "strong" will share hundreds of thousands of dollars in new student-fellowship subsidies.

Many faculty members say the assessments provided a long-overdue chance for Ohio State to think strategically, identifying some fields to focus on and others that are marginal. But the process has also had its share of bumps. The central administration concluded that certain colleges, notably the College of Biological Sciences, were too gentle in their self-reports. And some people have complained that the assessments relied too heavily on "input" variables, such as students' GRE scores.

Despite those concerns, the dean of Ohio State's Graduate School, Patrick S. Osmer, says the assessment project has exceeded his expectations. He hopes it can serve as a model for what other institutions can do with their doctoral data. "The joy of working here," he says, "is that we're trying to take a coordinated, logical approach to all of these questions, to strengthen the university."

A Faculty Mandate

The seeds of the assessment project were planted in 2005, when a high-profile faculty committee issued a report warning that Ohio State was generating proportionally fewer Ph.D.'s than were the other Big Ten universities. "The stark fact is that 482 Ph.D. degrees ... granted in 2003-4 is far below the number expected from an institution the size and (self-declared) quality of OSU," the report read. (The 482 figure excluded doctorates awarded by Ohio State's college of education.) At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, for example, each tenure-track faculty member generated an average of 0.4 Ph.D.'s each year. At Ohio State, the figure was only 0.267.

The committee recommended several steps: Give the central administration more power in graduate-level admissions. Organize stipends, fellowships, and course work in ways that encourage students to complete their doctorates in a timely manner. Stop giving doctoral-student subsidies to students who are likely to earn only master's degrees. And distribute subsidies from the central administration on a strategic basis, rewarding the strongest programs and those with the most potential for improvement.

"One thing that motivated all of this," says Paul Allen Beck, a professor of political science and a former dean of social and behavioral sciences at Ohio State, "was a feeling that the university had not invested enough in Ph.D. education. Our universitywide fellowships were not at a competitive level. We really felt that we should try to do a better job of concentrating our university investments on the very best programs."

Ohio State officials had hoped to use the National Research Council's final report itself for their evaluations. But after its release was postponed for what seemed like the sixth or seventh time, they moved forward without it.

In September 2007, Mr. Osmer asked the deans of Ohio State's 18 colleges to report data about their doctoral students' median time to degree, GRE scores, stipends, fellowships, job-placement outcomes, and racial and ethnic diversity.

Many of those numbers were easy to put together, because departments had compiled them during the previous year in response to the council's questionnaire. But job placements — a topic that will not be covered in the NRC report — were something that certain Ohio State programs had not previously tracked.

"This was a huge new project for us and for some of our departments as well," says Julie Carpenter-Hubin, director of institutional research and planning. "But simply going around and talking to faculty took care of most of it. It's really remarkable the degree to which faculty members stay in touch with their former doctoral students and know where they are. I think we wound up with placement data for close to 80 percent of our Ph.D. graduates, going 10 years back."

Defending Their Numbers

The reports that Ohio State's colleges generated last fall contained a mixture of quantitative data — most prominently GRE scores and time-to-degree numbers — and narrative arguments about their departments' strengths. The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, for example, noted that several recent Ph.D.s in economics, political science, and psychology had won tenure-track positions at Ivy League institutions.

When they had to report poor-looking numbers, departments were quick to cite reasons and contexts. The anthropology program said its median time to degree of 7.3 years might seem high when compared with those of other degree courses, but is actually lower than the national average for anthropology students, who typically spend years doing fieldwork. Economics said its retention-and-completion rate, which is less than 50 percent, might look low but is comparable to those in other highly ranked economics departments, where students are often weeded out by comprehensive exams at the end of the first year.

In April 2008, a committee appointed and led by Mr. Osmer, the graduate-school dean, digested the colleges' reports and issued a report card, ranking the 90 doctoral programs in six categories. (See table on following page.)

The panel did not meekly accept the colleges' self-evaluations. The College of Biological Sciences, for example, had reported that it lacked enough data to draw distinctions among its programs. But the committee's report argued, among other things, that the small program in entomology appeared to draw relatively little outside research support, and that its students had lower GRE scores than those in other biology programs. (Entomology and all other doctoral programs in biology were among the 29 programs that Mr. Osmer's committee deemed in need of reassessment or restructuring.)

The report's points about entomology — and about the general organization of the college — were controversial among the faculty members, says Matthew S. Platz, a professor of chemistry who became interim dean of biological sciences in July. But faculty members have taken the lead in developing new designs for the college, he says, to answer many of the central administration's concerns.

"I'm delighted by the fact that at the grass-roots level, faculty members have been talking about several types of reorganization," Mr. Platz says. "And I'm hopeful that two or three of them will be approved by the end of the year."

'Unacceptably Low Quality'

The five doctoral degrees named as candidates for the ax have also stirred controversy.

Jerry M. Bigham, a professor of soil science and director of Ohio State's School of Environment and Natural Resources, says he was disappointed but not entirely surprised by the committee's suggestion that his program could be terminated. The soil-science program has existed on its own only since 1996; before that it was one of several specializations offered by the doctoral program in agronomy.

"In essence, we've had students and faculty members spread across three programs," he says. So he understands why the university might want to place soil sciences under a larger umbrella, in order to reduce overhead and streamline the administration.

At the same time, he says, several people were offended by the Osmer committee's blunt statement that soil-science students are of "unacceptably low quality."

The panel's analysis of the students' GRE scores was "just a snapshot, and I think it really has to be viewed with caution," Mr. Bigham says. "Even though we're a small program, our students have won university fellowships and have been recognized for their research. So I would really object to any characterization of our students as being weak."

The final verdict on the five programs is uncertain. The colleges that house them might propose folding them into larger degree courses. Or they might propose killing them outright. All such proposals, which are due this fall, are subject to approval by the central administration.

Jason W. Marion, president of the university's Council of Graduate Students, says its members have generally supported the doctoral-assessment project, especially its emphasis on improving stipends and fellowships. But some students, he adds, have expressed concern about an overreliance on GRE scores at the expense of harder-to-quantify "output" variables like job-placement outcomes.

Mr. Osmer replies that job placement actually has been given a great deal of weight. "Placing that alongside the other variables really helped our understanding of these programs come together," he says.

At this summer's national workshop sessions of the Council of Graduate Schools, Mr. Osmer was invited to lecture about Ohio State's assessment project and to discuss how other institutions might make use of their own National Research Council data. William R. Wiener, a vice provost at Marquette University who also spoke on Mr. Osmer's panel, calls the Ohio State project one example of how universities are becoming smarter about assessments.

"Assessments need to have reasonable consequences," Mr. Wiener says. "I think more universities realize that they need to create a culture of assessment, and that improving student learning needs to permeate everything that we do."

Mr. Beck, the former social-sciences dean at Ohio State, says that even for relatively strong departments — his own political-science department was rated "high quality" by Mr. Osmer's committee — a well-designed assessment process can be eye-opening.

"These programs just kind of float along, guided by their own internal pressures," says Mr. Beck. But "the departments here were forced to take a hard look at themselves, and they sometimes saw things that they didn't like."

HOW OHIO STATE U. RATES DOCTORAL PROGRAMS
Until recently, Ohio State University used a simple, quantity-based formula to distribute student-support money to its doctoral programs. In essence, the more credit hours taken by students in a program each quarter, the more money the program collected. But last year the university introduced quality-control measures. It used them to make choices about which programs to invest in — and, more controversially, which ones to eliminate.

Measures used:

Students' time to degree Students' GRE scores

Graduates' job placements, 1996-2005 Student diversity

The program's share of Ph.D. production (both nationally and among Ohio State's peers)

"Overall program quality and centrality to the university's mission"

Resulting ratings:

High quality: 12 programs

Strong: 17 programs

Good: 16 programs

New and/or in transition; cannot be fully assessed: 11 programs

Must reassess and/or restructure: 29 programs

Candidates for disinvestment or elimination: 5 programs

What the ratings mean:

Programs rated "high quality" and "strong" will share new funds from the central administration for graduate-student stipends.

"Good" programs have been asked to make improvements in specific areas. Their support will not significantly change.

Colleges with doctoral programs that were deemed in need of reassessment or restructuring were asked to submit new strategic plans this fall. Those plans are subject to approval by Ohio State's provost.

The new strategic plans will also deal with programs deemed candidates for disinvestment or elimination. Those programs might be folded into larger degree courses, or killed outright.

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

"Minnesota Colleges Seek Accountability by the Dashboard Light," by Paul Basken, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 18, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/06/3423n.htm

When your car starts sputtering, it's easy to look at the dashboard and see if you're running out of gas. What if you could do the same with your local college?

Minnesota's system of state colleges and universities believes it can show the way.

After two years of preparation, the 32-college system unveiled on Tuesday its new Accountability Dashboard. The service is based on a Web site that displays a series of measures—tuition rates, graduates' employment rates, condition of facilities—that use speedometer-type gauges to show exactly how the Minnesota system and each of its individual colleges is performing.

The idea is in response to the growing demand, among both policy makers and the public, for colleges to provide more useful and accessible data about how well they are doing their jobs.

"There's a great call across the country for accountability and transparency, and I don't think it's going to go away," said James H. McCormick, chancellor of the 374,000-student system. "It's just a new way of doing business."

Shining a Light

The information in the new format was already publicly available. But its presentation in the dashboard format, along with comparisons with statewide and national figures as well as the system's own goals, will put pressure on administrators and faculty members for improvement, Mr. McCormick and other state education officials told reporters.

"The dashboard shines a light on where we need to improve," said Ruth Grendahl, vice chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities.

Among the areas the dashboard already indicates as needing improvement is the cost of attending Minnesota's state colleges. The gauges for tuition and fees at all 30 of the system's two-year institutions show needles pointing to "needs attention," a reflection of the fact that their costs are higher than those of 80 percent of their peers nationwide.

The dashboard shows the system faring better in other areas, such as licensure-examination pass rates and degree-completion rates, in which the average figures are in the "meets expectations" range. Other measures, like "innovation" and "student engagement," don't yet show results, as the necessary data are still being collected or the criteria have not yet been defined.

Tool of Accountability

Many private companies already use dashboard-type displays in their computer systems to help monitor business performance, but the data typically serve an internal function rather than being a tool for public accountability.

The Minnesota dashboard stems in part from the system's work through the National Association of System Heads, or NASH, on a project to improve the education of minority and low-income students. The project is known as Access to Success.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Those in my generation might appreciate the fact that this car has a "NASH" dashboard. The problem is that when a car's dashboard signals troubles such as oil leaks and overheating, owner's can easily trade in or junk a clunker automobile. This is not so simple in the politics of state universities.

May 2, 2008 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

REPORT ON E-LEARNING RETURNS ON INVESTMENT

"Within the academic community there remains a sizable proportion of sceptics who question the value of some of the tools and approaches and perhaps an even greater proportion who are unaware of the full range of technological enhancements in current use. Amongst senior managers there is a concern that it is often difficult to quantify the returns achieved on the investment in such technologies. . . . JISC infoNet, the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) and The Higher Education Academy were presented with the challenge of trying to make some kind of sense of the diversity of current e-learning practice across the sector and to seek out evidence that technology-enhanced learning is delivering tangible benefits for learners, teachers and institutions."

The summary of the project is presented in the recently-published report, "Exploring Tangible Benefits of e-Learning: Does Investment Yield Interest?" Some benefits were hard to measure and quantify, and the case studies were limited to only sixteen institutions. However, according to the study, there appears to be "clear evidence" of many good returns on investment in e-learning. These include improved student pass rates, improved student retention, and benefits for learners with special needs.

A copy of the report is available at

http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/publications/camel-tangible-benefits.pdf

A two-page briefing paper is available at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/bptangiblebenefitsv1.pdf

JISC infoNet, a service of the Joint Information Systems Committee, "aims to be the UK's leading advisory service for managers in the post-compulsory education sector promoting the effective strategic planning, implementation and management of information and learning technology." For more information, go to http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/

Association for Learning Technology (ALT), formed in 1993, is "the leading UK body bringing together practitioners, researchers, and policy makers in learning technology." For more information, go to http://www.alt.ac.uk/

The mission of The Higher Education Academy, owned by two UK higher education organizations (Universities UK and GuildHE), is to "help institutions, discipline groups, and all staff to provide the best possible learning experience for their students." For more information, go to http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/

Bob Jensen's threads on asynchronous learning are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm

Assessment Issues --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Threads on Costs and Instructor Compensation (somewhat outdated) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/distcost.htm

Bob Jensen's education technology threads are linked at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

Question
Guess which parents most strongly object to grade inflation?
Hint: Parents Say Schools Game System, Let Kids Graduate Without Skills

The Bredemeyers represent a new voice in special education: parents disappointed not because their children are failing, but because they're passing without learning. These families complain that schools give their children an easy academic ride through regular-education classes, undermining a new era of higher expectations for the 14% of U.S. students who are in special education. Years ago, schools assumed that students with disabilities would lag behind their non-disabled peers. They often were taught in separate buildings and left out of standardized testing. But a combination of two federal laws, adopted a quarter-century apart, have made it national policy to hold almost all children with disabilities to the same academic standards as other students.
John Hechinger and Daniel Golden, "Extra Help: When Special Education Goes Too Easy on Students," The Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2007, Page A1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118763976794303235.html?mod=todays_us_page_one

Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#GradeInflation

Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Question
What Internet sites help you compare neighboring K-12 schools?

"Grading Neighborhood Schools: Web Sites Compare A Variety of Data, Looking Beyond Scores," by Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal, February 20, 2008; Page D6 ---

I performed various school queries using Education.com Inc., GreatSchools Inc.'s GreatSchools.net and SchoolMatters.com by typing in a ZIP Code, city, district or school name. Overall, GreatSchools and Education.com offered the most content-packed environments, loading their sites with related articles and offering community feedback on education-related issues by way of blog posts or surveys. And though GreatSchools is 10 years older than Education.com, which made its debut in June, the latter has a broader variety of content and considers its SchoolFinder feature -- newly available as of today -- just a small part of the site.

Both Education.com and GreatSchools.net base a good portion of their data on information gathered by the Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics, the government entity that collects and analyzes data related to education.

SchoolMatters.com, a service of Standard & Poor's, is more bare-bones, containing quick statistical comparisons of schools. (S&P is a unit of McGraw-Hill Cos.) This site gets its content from various sources, including state departments of education, private research firms, the Census and National Public Education Finance Survey. This is evidenced by lists, charts and pie graphs that would make Ross Perot proud. I learned about where my alma mater high school got its district revenue in 2005: 83% was local, 15% was state and 2% was federal. But I couldn't find district financial information for more recent years on the site.

All three sites base at least some school-evaluation results on test scores, a point that some of their users critique. Parents and teachers, alike, point out that testing doesn't always paint an accurate picture of a school and can be skewed by various unacknowledged factors, such as the number of students with disabilities.

Education.com's SchoolFinder feature is starting with roughly 47,000 schools in 10 states: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey and Georgia. In about two months, the site hopes to have data for all states, totaling about 60,000 public and charter schools. I was granted early access to SchoolFinder, but only Michigan was totally finished during my testing.

SchoolFinder lets you narrow your results by type (public or charter), student-to-teacher ratio, school size or Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), a measurement used to determine each school's annual progress. Search results showed specific details on teachers that I didn't see on the other sites, such as how many teachers were fully credentialed in a particular school and the average years of experience held by a school's teachers.

The rest of the Education.com site contains over 4,000 articles written by well-known education sources like the New York University Child Study Center, Reading is Fundamental and the Autism Society of America. It also contains a Web magazine and a rather involved discussion-board community where members can ask questions of like-minded parents and the site's experts, who respond with advice and suggestions of articles that might be helpful.

Private schools aren't required to release test scores, student or teacher statistics, so none of the sites had as much data on private schools. However, GreatSchools.net at least offered basic results for most private-school queries that I performed, such as a search for Salesianum School in Delaware (where a friend of mine attended) that returned the school's address, a list of the Advanced Placement exams it offered from 2006 to 2007 and six rave reviews from parents and former students.

GreatSchools.net makes it easy to compare schools, even without knowing specific names. After finding a school, I was able to easily compare that school with others in the geographic area or school district -- using a chart with numerous results on one screen. After entering my email address, I saved schools to My School List for later reference.

I couldn't find each school's AYP listed on GreatSchools.net, though these data were on Education.com and SchoolMatters.com.

SchoolMatters.com doesn't provide articles, online magazines or community forums. Instead, it spits out data -- and lots of it. A search for "Philadelphia" returned 324 schools in a neat comparison chart that could, with one click, be sorted by grade level, reading test scores, math test scores or students per teacher. (The Julia R. Masterman Secondary School had the best reading and math test scores in Philadelphia, according to the site.)

SchoolMatters.com didn't have nearly as much user feedback as Education.com or GreatSchools.net. But stats like a school's student demographics, household income distribution and the district's population age distribution were accessible thanks to colorful pie charts.

These three sites provide a good overall idea of what certain schools can offer, though GreatSchools.net seems to have the richest content in its school comparison section. Education.com excels as a general education site and will be a comfort to parents in search of reliable advice. Its newly added SchoolFinder, while it's in early stages now, will only improve this resource for parents and students.

May 2, 2007 message from Carnegie President [carnegiepresident@carnegiefoundation.org]

A different way to think about ... accountability Alex McCormick's timely essay brings to our attention one of the most intriguing paradoxes associated with high-stakes measurement of educational outcomes. The more importance we place on going public with the results of an assessment, the higher the likelihood that the assessment itself will become corrupted, undermined and ultimately of limited value. Some policy scholars refer to the phenomenon as a variant of "Campbell's Law," named for the late Donald Campbell, an esteemed social psychologist and methodologist. Campbell stated his principle in 1976: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

In the specific case of the Spellings Commission report, Alex points out that the Secretary's insistence that information be made public on the qualities of higher education institutions will place ever higher stakes on the underlying measurements, and that very visibility will attenuate their effectiveness as accountability indices. How are we to balance the public's right to know with an institution's need for the most reliable and valid information? Alex McCormick's analysis offers us another way to think about the issue.

Carnegie has created a forum—Carnegie Conversations—where you can engage publicly with the author and read and respond to what others have to say about this article at http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/perspectives/april2007 .

Or you may respond to Alex privately through carnegiepresident@carnegiefoundation.org .

If you would like to unsubscribe to Carnegie Perspectives, use the same address and merely type "unsubscribe" in the subject line of your email to us.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Lee S. Shulman
President The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

Jensen Comment
The fact that an assessment provides incentives to cheat is not a reason to not assess. The fact that we assign grades to students gives them incentives to cheat. That does not justify ceasing to assess, because the assessment process is in many instances the major incentive for a student to work harder and learn more. The fact that business firms have to be audited and produce financial statements provides incentives to cheat. That does not justify not holding business firms accountable. Alex McCormick's analysis and Shulman's concurrence is a bit one-sided in opposing the Spellings Commission recommendations.

Also see Full Disclosure to Consumers of Higher Education at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#FullDisclosure

School Assessment and College Admission Testing

July 25, 2006 query from Carol Flowers [cflowers@OCC.CCCD.EDU]

I am looking for a study that I saw. I was unsure if someone in this group had supplied the link, originally. It was a very honest and extremely comprehensive evaluation of higher education. In it, the

Higher Education Evaluation and Research Group was constantly quoted. But, what organizations it is affiliated with, I am unsure.

They commented on the lack of student academic preparedness in our educational system today along with other challenging areas that need to be addressed inorder to serve the population with which we now deal.

If anyone remembers such a report, please forward to me the url.

Thank You!

July 25, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Carol,

I think the HEERG is affiliated with the Chancellor's Office of the California Community Colleges. It is primarily focused upon accountability and assessment of these colleges.

HEERG --- http://snipurl.com/HEERG

Articles related to your query include the following:

Leopards in the Temple --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/12/caesar

Accountability, Improvement and Money --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/05/03/lombardi

Grade Inflation and Abdication --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/06/03/lombardi

Students Read Less. Should We Care? --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/08/23/lombardi

Missing the Mark: Graduation Rates and University Performance --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/02/14/lombardi2

Assessment of Learning Achievements of College Graduates

"Getting the Faculty On Board," by Freeman A. Hrabowski III, Inside Higher Ed, June 23, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/23/hrabowski

But as assessment becomes a national imperative, college and university leaders face a major challenge: Many of our faculty colleagues are skeptical about the value of external mandates to measure teaching and learning, especially when those outside the academy propose to define the measures. Many faculty members do not accept the need for accountability, but the assessment movement’s success will depend upon faculty because they are responsible for curriculum, instruction and research. All of us — policy makers, administrators and faculty — must work together to develop language, strategies and practices that help us appreciate one another and understand the compelling need for assessment — and why it is in the best interest of faculty and students.

Why is assessment important? We know from the work of researchers like Richard Hersh, Roger Benjamin, Mark Chun and George Kuh that college enrollment will be increasing by more than 15 percent nationally over the next 15 years (and in some states by as much as 50 percent). We also know that student retention rates are low, especially among students of color and low-income students. Moreover, of every 10 children who start 9th grade, only seven finish high school, five start college, and fewer than three complete postsecondary degrees. And there is a 20 percent gap in graduation rates between African Americans (42 percent) and whites (62 percent). These numbers are of particular concern given the rising higher education costs, the nation’s shifting demographics, and the need to educate more citizens from all groups.

At present, we do not collect data on student learning in a systematic fashion and rankings on colleges and universities focus on input measures, rather than on student learning in the college setting. Many people who have thought about this issue agree: We need to focus on “value added” assessment as an approach to determine the extent to which a university education helps students develop knowledge and skills. This approach entails comparing what students know at the beginning of their education and what they know upon graduating. Such assessment is especially useful when large numbers of students are not doing well — it can and should send a signal to faculty about the need to look carefully at the “big picture” involving coursework, teaching, and the level of support provided to students and faculty.

Many in the academy, however, continue to resist systematic and mandated assessment in large part because of problems they see with K-12 initiatives like No Child Left Behind — e.g., testing that focuses only on what can be conveniently measured, unacceptable coaching by teachers, and limiting what is taught to what is tested. Many academics believe that what is most valuable in the college experience cannot be measured during the college years because some of the most important effects of a college education only become clearer some time after graduation. Nevertheless, more institutions are beginning to understand that value-added assessment can be useful in strengthening teaching and learning, and even student retention and graduation rates.

It is encouraging that a number of institutions are interested in implementing value-added assessment as an approach to evaluate student progress over time and to see how they compare with other institutions. Such strategies are more effective when faculty and staff across the institution are involved. Examples of some best practices include the following:

Constantly talking with colleagues about both the challenges and successful initiatives involving undergraduate education.

Replicating successful initiatives (best practices from within and beyond the campus), in order to benefit as many students as possible.

Working continuously to improve learning based on what is measured — from advising practices and curricular issues to teaching strategies — and making changes based on what we learn from those assessments.

Creating accountability by ensuring that individuals and groups take responsibility for different aspects of student success.

Recruiting and rewarding faculty who are committed to successful student learning (including examining the institutional reward structure).

Taking the long view by focusing on initiatives over extended periods of time — in order to integrate best practices into the campus culture.

We in the academy need to think broadly about assessment. Most important, are we preparing our students to succeed in a world that will be dramatically different from the one we live in today? Will they be able to think critically about the issues they will face, working with people from all over the globe? It is understandable that others, particularly outside the university, are asking how we demonstrate that our students are prepared to handle these issues.

Assessment is becoming a national imperative, and it requires us to listen to external groups and address the issues they are raising. At the same time, we need to encourage and facilitate discussions among our faculty — those most responsible for curriculum, instruction, and research — to grapple with the questions of assessment and accountability. We must work together to minimize the growing tension among groups — both outside and inside the university — so that we appreciate and understand different points of view and the compelling need for assessment.

Bob Jensen's threads on controversies in higher education are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

NCLB = No Child Left Behind Law
A September 2007 Thomas B. Fordham Institute report found NCLB's assessment system "slipshod" and characterized by "standards that are discrepant state to state, subject to subject, and grade to grade." For example, third graders scoring at the sixth percentile on Colorado's state reading test are rated proficient. In South Carolina the third grade proficiency cut-off is the sixtieth percentile.
Peter Berger, "Some Will Be Left Behind," The Irascible Professor, November 10, 2007 --- http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-11-10-07.htm

"This is Only a Test," by Peter Berger, The Irascible Professor, December 5, 2005 --- http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-12-05-05.htm

Back in 2002 President Bush predicted "great progress" once schools began administering the annual testing regime mandated by No Child Left Behind. Secretary of Education Rod Paige echoed the President's sentiments. According to Mr. Paige, anyone who opposed NCLB testing was guilty of "dismissing certain children" as "unteachable."

Unfortunately for Mr. Paige, that same week The New York Times documented "recent" scoring errors that had "affected millions of students" in "at least twenty states." The Times report offered a pretty good alternate reason for opposing NCLB testing. Actually, it offered several million pretty good alternate reasons.

Here are a few more.

There's nothing wrong with assessing what students have learned. It lets parents, colleges, and employers know how our kids are doing, and it lets teachers know which areas need more teaching. That's why I give quizzes and tests and one of the reasons my students write essays.

Of course, everybody who's been to school knows that some teachers are tougher graders than others. Traditional standardized testing, from the Iowa achievement battery to the SATs, was supposed to help us gauge the value of one teacher's A compared to another's. It provided a tool with which we could compare students from different schools.

This works fine as long as we recognize that all tests have limitations. For example, for years my students took a nationwide standardized social studies test that required them to identify the President who gave us the New Deal. The problem was the seventh graders who took the test hadn't studied U.S. history since the fifth grade, and FDR usually isn't the focus of American history classes for ten-year-olds. He also doesn't get mentioned in my eighth grade U.S. history class until May, about a month after eighth graders took the test.

In other words, wrong answers about the New Deal only meant we hadn't gotten there yet. That's not how it showed up in our testing profile, though. When there aren't a lot of questions, getting one wrong can make a surprisingly big difference in the statistical soup.

Multiply our FDR glitch by the thousands of curricula assessed by nationwide testing. Then try pinpointing which schools are succeeding and failing based on the scores those tests produce. That's what No Child Left Behind pretends to do.

Testing fans will tell you that cutting edge assessments have eliminated inconsistencies like my New Deal hiccup by "aligning" the tests with new state of the art learning objectives and grade level expectations. The trouble is these newly minted goals are often hopelessly vague, arbitrarily narrow, or so unrealistic that they're pretty meaningless. That's when they're not obvious and the same as they always were.

New objectives also don't solve the timing problem. For example, I don't teach poetry to my seventh grade English students. That's because I know that their eighth grade English teacher does an especially good job with it the following year, which means that by the time they leave our school, they've learned about poetry. After all, does it matter whether they learn to interpret metaphors when they're thirteen or they're fourteen as long as they learn it?

Should we change our program, which matches our staff's expertise, just to suit the test's arbitrary timing? If we don't, our seventh graders might not make NCLB "adequate yearly progress." If we do, our students likely won't learn as much.

Which should matter more?

Even if we could perfectly match curricula and test questions, modern assessments would still have problems. That's because most are scored according to guidelines called rubrics. Rubric scoring requires hastily trained scorers, who typically aren't teachers or even college graduates, to determine whether a student's essay "rambles" or "meanders." Believe it or not, that choice represents a twenty-five percent variation in the score. Or how about distinguishing between "appropriate sentence patterns" and "effective sentence structure," or language that's "precise and engaging" versus "fluent and original."

These are the flip-a-coin judgments at the heart of most modern assessments. Remember that the next time you read about which schools passed and which ones failed.

Unreliable scoring is one reason the General Accountability Office condemned data "comparisons between states" as "meaningless." It's why CTB/McGraw-Hill had to recall and rescore 120,000 Connecticut writing tests after the scores were released. It's why New York officials discarded the scores from its 2003 Regents math exam. A 2001 Brookings Institution study found that "fifty to eighty percent of the improvement in a school's average test scores from one year to the next was temporary" and "had nothing to do with long-term changes in learning or productivity." A senior RAND analyst warned that today's tests aren't identifying "good schools" and "bad schools." Instead, "we're picking out lucky and unlucky schools."

Students aren't the only victims of faulty scoring. Last year the Educational Testing Service conceded that more than ten percent of the candidates taking its 2003-2004 nationwide Praxis teacher licensing exam incorrectly received failing scores, which resulted in many of them not getting jobs. ETS attributed the errors to the "variability of human grading."

The New England Common Assessment Program, administered for NCLB purposes to all students in Vermont, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, offers a representative glimpse of the cutting edge. NECAP is heir to all the standard problems with standardized test design, rubrics, and dubiously qualified scorers.

NECAP security is tight. Tests are locked up, all scrap paper is returned to headquarters for shredding, and testing scripts and procedures are painstakingly uniform. Except on the mathematics exam, each school gets to choose if its students can use calculators.

Whether or not you approve of calculators on math tests, how can you talk with a straight face about a "standardized" math assessment if some students get to use them and others don't? Still more ridiculous, there's no box to check to show whether you used one or not, so the scoring results don't even differentiate between students and schools that did and didn't.

Finally, guess how NECAP officials are figuring out students' scores. They're asking classroom teachers. Five weeks into the year, before we've even handed out a report card to kids we've just met, we're supposed to determine each student's "level of proficiency" on a twelve point scale. Our ratings, which rest on distinguishing with allegedly statistical accuracy between "extensive gaps," "gaps," and "minor gaps," are a "critical piece" and "key part of the NECAP standard setting process."

Let's review. Because classroom teachers' grading standards aren't consistent enough from one school to the next, we need a standardized testing program. To score the standardized testing program, every teacher has to estimate within eight percentage points how much their students know so test officials can figure out what their scores are worth and who passed and who failed.

If that makes sense to you, you've got a promising future in education assessment. Unfortunately, our schools and students don't.

"College Board Asks Group Not to Post Test Analysis," by Diana Jean Schemol, The New York Times, December 4, 2004 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/04/education/04college.html?oref=login

The College Board, which owns the SAT college entrance exam, is demanding that a nonprofit group critical of standardized tests remove from its Web site data that breaks down scores by race, income and sex.

The demand, in a letter to The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, also known as FairTest, accuses the group of infringing on the College Board's copyright.

"Unfortunately, your misuse overtly bypasses our ownership and significantly impacts the perceptions of students, parents and educators regarding the services we provide," the letter said.

The move by the College Board comes amid growing criticism of the exams, with more and more colleges and universities raising questions about their usefulness as a gauge of future performance and discarding them as requirements for admission. The College Board is overhauling parts of the exam and will be using a new version beginning in March

FairTest has led opposition to the exams, and releases the results to support its accusation of bias in the tests, a claim rejected by test makers, who contend the scores reflect true disparities in student achievement. FairTest posts the information in easily accessible charts, and Robert A. Schaeffer, its spokesman, said they were the Web site's most popular features.

In its response to the College Board letter, which FairTest posted on its Web site on Tuesday, the group said it would neither take down the data nor seek formal permission to use it. FairTest has been publicly showing the data for nearly 20 years, Mr. Schaeffer said, until now without objection from the testing company, which itself releases the data in annual reports it posts on its Web site.

"You can't copyright numbers like that," Mr. Schaeffer said. "It's all about public education and making the public aware of score gaps and the potential for bias in the exams."

Devereux Chatillon, a specialist on copyright law at Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal in New York, said case law supported FairTest's position. "Facts are not copyrightable," Ms. Chatillon said. In addition, she said, while the College Board may own the exam, the real authors of the test results are those taking the exams.

Continued in article

2004 Senior Test Scores: ACT --- http://www.fairtest.org/nattest/ACT%20Scores%202004%20Chart.pdf

2004 Senior Test Scores: SAT --- http://www.fairtest.org/nattest/SAT%20Scoresn%202004%20Chart.pdf

Fair Test Reacts to the SAT Outcomes --- http://www.fairtest.org/univ/2004%20SAT%20Score%20Release.html

Fair Test Home --- http://www.fairtest.org/

Jensen Comment:
If there is to be a test that sets apart students that demonstrate higher ability, motivation, and aptitude for college studies, how would it differ from the present Princeton tests that have been designed and re-designed over and over again? I cannot find any Fair Test models of what such a test would look like. One would assume that by its very name Fair Test still agrees that some test is necessary. However, the group's position seems to be that no national test is feasible that will give the same means and standard deviations for all groups (males, females, and race categories). Fair Test advocates "assessments based on students' actual performances, not one-shot, high-stakes exams."

Texas has such a Fair Test system in place for admission to any state university. The President of the University of Texas, however, wants the system to be modified since his top-rated institution is losing all of its admission discretion and may soon be overwhelmed with more admissions than can be seated in classrooms. My module on this issue, which was a special feature on 60 Minutes from CBS, is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book04q4.htm#60Minutes

The problem with performance-based systems (such as the requirement that any state university in Texas must accept any graduate in the top 10% of the graduating class from any Texas high school) is that high schools in the U.S. generally follow the same grading scale as Harvard University. Most classes give over half the students A grades. Some teachers give A grades just for attendance or effort apart from performance. This means that when it comes to isolating the top 10% of each graduating class, we're talking in terms of Epsilon differences. I hardly think Epsilon is a fair criterion for admission to college. Also, as was pointed out on 60 Minutes, students with 3.9 grade averages from some high schools tend to score much lower than students with 3.0 grade averages from other high schools. This might achieve better racial mix but hardly seems fair to the 3.0 student who was unfortunate enough to live near a high school having a higher proportion of top students. That was the theme of the 60 Minutes CBS special contrasting a 3.9 low SAT student who got into UT versus a 3.0 student who had a high SAT but was denied admission to UT.

What we really need is to put more resources into fair chances for those who test poorly or happen to fall Epsilon below that hallowed 10% cut off. in a performance-based system. This may entail more time and remedial effort on the part of students before or after entering college.

Mount Holyoke Dumps the SAT
Mount Holyoke College, which decided in 2001 to make the SAT optional, is finding very little difference in academic performance between students who provided their test scores and those who didn't. The women's liberal arts college is in the midst of one of the most extensive studies to date about the impact of dropping the SAT -- a research project financed with $290,000 from the Mellon Foundation. While the study isn't complete, the college is releasing some preliminary results. So far, Mount Holyoke has found that there is a difference of 0.1 point in the grade-point average of those who do and do not submit SAT scores. That is equivalent to approximately one letter grade in one course over a year of study. Those results are encouraging to Mount Holyoke officials about their decision in 2001.
Scott Jaschik, "Not Missing the SAT," Inside Higher Ed March 9, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/insider/not_missing_the_sat
Jensen Comment:
These results differ from the experiences of the University of Texas system where grades and test scores differ greatly between secondary schools. Perhaps Mount Holyoke is not getting applications from students in the poorer school districts. See http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book04q4.htm#60Minutes

Dangers of Self Assessment

My undergraduate students can’t accurately predict their academic performance or skill levels. Earlier in the semester, a writing assignment on study styles revealed that 14 percent of my undergraduate English composition students considered themselves “overachievers.” Not one of those students was receiving an A in my course by midterm. Fifty percent were receiving a C, another third was receiving B’s and the remainder had earned failing grades by midterm. One student wrote, “overachievers like myself began a long time ago.” She received a 70 percent on her first paper and a low C at midterm.
Shari Wilson, "Ignorant of Their Ignorance," Inside Higher Ed, November 16, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/11/16/wilson
Jensen comment
This does not bode well for self assessment.

Do middle-school students understand how well they actually learn?
Given national mandates to ‘leave no child behind,’ grade-school students are expected to learn an enormous amount of course material in a limited amount of time. “Students have too much to learn, so it’s important they learn efficiently,” says Dr. John Dunlosky, Kent State professor of psychology and associate editor of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition. Today, students are expected to understand and remember difficult concepts relevant to state achievement tests. However, a major challenge is the student’s ability to judge his own learning. “Students are extremely over confident about what they’re learning,” says Dunlosky. Dunlosky and his colleague, Dr. Katherine Rawson, Kent State assistant professor of psychology, study metacomprehension, or the ability to judge your own comprehension and learning of text materials. Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, their research primarily focuses on fifth, seventh and eighth graders as well as college-aged students, and how improving metacomprehension can, in turn, improve students’ self-regulated learning.
PhysOrg, November 26, 2007 --- http://physorg.com/news115318315.html

Competency-Based Assessment

Competency-Based Assessment --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/competency.htm

There are a few really noteworthy competency-based distance education programs including Western Governors University (WGU) and the Chartered Accountancy School of Business (CASB) in Canada. But these compentency-based programs typically have assigned instructors and bear the costs of those instructors. The instructors, however, do not assign grades to students.

It appears that the Southern New Hampshire University (a private institution) is taking competency-based distance education to a new level by eliminating the instructors. It should be noted that SNHU has both an onsite campus and online degree programs.

"Online Education Is Everywhere. What’s the Next Big Thing?" by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/online-education-is-everywhere-whats-the-next-big-thing/32898?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

. . .

The vision is that students could sign up for self-paced online programs with no conventional instructors. They could work at their own speeds through engaging online content that offers built-in assessments, allowing them to determine when they are ready to move on. They could get help through networks of peers who are working on the same courses; online discussions could be monitored by subject experts. When they’re ready, students could complete a proctored assessment, perhaps at a local high school, or perhaps online. The university’s staff could then grade the assessment and assign credit.

And the education could be far cheaper, because there would be no expensive instructor and students could rely on free, open educational resources rather than expensive textbooks. Costs to the student might include the assessment and the credits.

“The whole model hinges on excellent assessment, a rock-solid confidence that the student has mastered the student-learning outcomes,” the memo says. “If we know with certainty that they have, we should no longer care if they raced through the course or took 18 months, or if they worked on their courses with the support of a local church organization or community center or on their own. The game-changing idea here is that when we have assessment right, we should not care how a student achieves learning. We can blow up the delivery models and be free to try anything that shows itself to work.”

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
In its early history, the University of Chicago had competency-based programs where grades were assigned solely on the basis of scores on final examinations. Students did not have to attend class.

Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based assessment ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/competency.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education alternatives are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

I should point out that this is very similar to the AAA's Innovation in Accounting Education Award Winning BAM Pedagogy commenced at the University of Virginia (but there were instructors who did not teach) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm

Critical Thinking Badges for Brains That Do Not Have Course Content Competency
"Online Course Provider, StraighterLine, to Offer Critical-Thinking Tests to Students," by Jeff Selingo, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 19, 2012 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/online-course-provider-straighterline-to-offer-critical-thinking-tests-to-students/35092?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

As alternatives to the college diploma have been bandied about recently, one question always seems to emerge: How do you validate badges or individual classes as a credential in the absence of a degree?

One company that has been hailed by some as revolutionizing introductory courses might have an answer.

The company, StraighterLine, announced on Thursday that beginning this fall it will offer students access to three leading critical-thinking tests, allowing them to take their results to employers or colleges to demonstrate their proficiency in certain academic areas.

The tests—the Collegiate Learning Assessment, sponsored by the Council for Aid to Education, and the Proficiency Profile, from the Educational Testing Service—each measure critical thinking and writing, among other academic areas. The iSkills test, also from ETS, measures the ability of a student to navigate and critically evaluate information from digital technology.

Until now, the tests were largely used by colleges to measure student learning, but students did not receive their scores. That’s one reason that critics of the tests have questioned their effectiveness since students have little incentive to do well.

Burck Smith, the founder and chief executive of StraighterLine, which offers online, self-paced introductory courses, said on Thursday that students would not need to take classes with StraighterLine in order to sit for the tests. But he hopes that, for students who do take both classes and tests, the scores on the test will help validate StraighterLine courses.

StraighterLine doesn’t grant degrees and so can’t be accredited. It depends on accredited institutions to accept its credits, which has not always been an easy task for the company.

“For students looking to get a leg up in the job market or getting into college,” Mr. Smith said, “this will give them a way to show they’re proficient in key academic areas.”

Jensen Comment

Jensen Comment

College diplomas might be obtained in three different scenarios:

Traditional College Courses
Students take onsite or online courses that are graded by their instructors.
Competency-Based College Courses
Students take onsite or online courses and are then given competency-based examinations.
Examples include the increasingly popular Western Governors University and the Canada's Chartered Accountancy School of Business (CASB).
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ComputerBasedAssessment
Competency-Based College Courses That Never Meet or Rarely Meet
Students might study from course materials and videos in classes that do not meet or rarely meet with instructors.
In the 1900s the University of Chicago gave degrees to students who took only examinations to pass courses.
In current times BYU teaches the first two accounting courses from variable speed video disks and then administers competency-based examinations.
The University of New Hampshire now is in the process of developing a degree program for students who only competency-based examinations to pass courses.
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#NoInstructors

Recently, there are increasingly popular certificates of online "attendance" in courses that do not constitute college credits toward diplomas. MIT is providing increasingly popular certificates ---
"Will MITx Disrupt Higher Education?" by Robert Talbert, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 20, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2011/12/20/will-mitx-disrupt-higher-education/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

MITx Open Sharing Wonder
"MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency," by Kevin Carey, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 22, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/MIT-Mints-a-Valuable-New-Form/130410/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
There are no admission requirements or prerequisites to enroll in these online courses. Presumably the only tests of competency might be written or oral examinations of potential employers. For example, if knowledge of Bessel Functions is required on the job, a potential employer might determine in one way or another that the student has a competency in Bessel Functions ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessel_Functions

In all the above instances, a student's transcript is based upon course content whether or not the student takes courses and/or competency-based examinations in the content of those courses.

StraighterLine's new certificates based upon "Critical-Thinking Tests" is an entirely different concept. Presumably the certificates no longer are rooted on knowledge of content. Rather these are certificates based upon critical thinking skills in selected basic courses such as a writing skills course.

In my opinion these will be a much harder sell in the market. Whereas a potential employer can assess whether an applicant has the requisite skills in something like Bessel Functions, how does an employer or college admissions officer verify that StraightLine's "Critical-Thinking Tests" are worth a diddly crap and, if so, what does passing such tests mean in terms of job skills?

Thus far I'm not impressed with Critical Thinking Certificates unless they are also rooted on course content apart from "thinking" alone.

Bob Jensen's threads on the BYU Variable Speed Video Courses ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing courses. lectures, videos, tutorials, and course materials from prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education alternatives ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

"A Russian University Gets Creative Against Corruption: With surveillance equipment and video campaigns, rector aims to eliminate bribery at Kazan State," by Anna Nemtsova, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 17, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Russian-University-Gets/63522/

A student walks down the hallway of a university building and, in a stroke of luck, finds a 1,000-ruble bill lying on the floor. As he bends down to grab it, an idea crosses his mind.

"That is going to be just enough to pay for my exam!" he exclaims.

Then the figure of a man in a suit blocks the light over the squatting student.

"No it won't!" the man says, shaking his head.

In the next moment, the student is literally kicked out of the university, his official file flying down the stairs behind him.

This bit of melodrama is not an exam-time nightmare, but a video by students at Kazan State University. They are part of an unusual campaign to stamp out corruption on the campus. Too many students and professors have a "pay to play" mentality, reformers say, in which grades and test scores are bought and sold.

Anticorruption videos are shown daily. Students participate in classroom discussions about the problem. Kazan State's rector, Myakzyum Salakhov, has installed video cameras in every hallway and classroom, so that the security department can watch students and professors in every corner of the university to catch any bribes as they are made.

"Our job is to change the attitude to corruption at our university, so all students and professors realize that corruption is damaging our system of education, that corruption should be punished," says Mr. Salakhov, who is outspoken, both on campus and off, about the challenges that Russian higher education faces on this front.

"We are working on creating a new trend on our campus," he says. "Soon every student giving bribes or professor making money on students will feel ashamed."

Across Russia, bribery and influence-peddling are rife within academe. Critics cite a combination of factors: Poor salaries lead some professors to pocket bribes in order to make ends meet. Students and their families feel they must pay administrators to get into good universities, if only because everyone else seems to be doing it. And local government officials turn a blind eye, sometimes because they, too, are corrupt.

"Corruption has become a systemic problem, and we therefore need a systemic response to deal with it," Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, said last June.

Last fall a federal law-enforcement operation called Education 2009 reported that law-enforcement officials had uncovered 3,117 instances of corruption in higher education; of those, 1,143 involved bribes. That is a 90-percent increase over the previous year. Law-enforcement agencies prosecuted 265 university employees for taking bribes.

But while many Russians shrug their shoulders over this news—reports on corruption in higher education are hardly new—Kazan State decided to do something about it.

The 200-year-old institution in southwestern Russia, which educated Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Lenin, among others, is considered among the best universities in Russia. It enrolls 14,000 full-time students, most of whom come from the nearby Volga River region of the country.

Grades for Sale Students and administrators alike say that bribery is rampant on the campus, and that it includes everyone from students to department chairs.

"Corruption is just a routine we have to deal with," says Alsu Bariyeva, a student activist and journalism major who joined the campaign after a professor in the physical-culture department suggested that she pay him to get credit for her work that semester. She paid.

Several students said they once saw a list of prices posted in the hallway of the law department. The cost of a good grade on various exams ranged from $50 to $200. Students from other departments report similar scenarios.

Many people on the campus identify the arrest last March of the head of the general-mathematics department as a turning point. Police, tipped off by students and parents, charged in and arrested Maryan Matveichuk, 61, as he was pocketing thousands of rubles from a student for a good mark on a summer exam.

The police investigation concluded that in at least six instances Mr. Matveichuk, a respected professor, had accepted bribes of 4,000 to 6,000 rubbles, or about $135 to $200, from students in other departments for good grades on their math exams and courses.

Last September a court in Kazan found the math professor guilty of accepting a total of 29,500 rubles, or $1,000, in bribes, issued a suspended sentence of three years in prison, and stripped him of his teaching credential.

Mr. Matveichuk's arrest inspired Mr. Salakhov, the rector, to form an anticorruption committee, including administrators and students.

"I personally believe that corruption sits in our mentality," Mr. Salakhov says. "With students' help, I found three professors taking bribes and asked them to leave. The committee's job is to crack down on corruption within these walls."

Constant Surveillance Mr. Salakhov's right-hand man in his fight against corruption is Gennady Sadrislamov, the deputy rector responsible for campus security. A large computer screen on his desk displays images from the cameras placed around the campus.

A former police colonel whose heavy figure appears in the campus anticorruption videos, Mr. Sadrislamov says students are crucial to the campaign's success.

"Matveichuk brought shame to our university, but unfortunately, he was not the only one making money on the side," the deputy rector says. "Corruption sits in everybody's head. We cannot eliminate the idea of bribing and cheating without students' help."

With information provided by students and professors, Mr. Sadrislamov goes to the rector to get investigations under way. At least one professor volunteered to quit after he was confronted by Kazan State's anticorruption council, which comprises the rector, his deputies, the security department, and some students. The group meets monthly to discuss the anticorruption campaign.

The security chief says it will take awhile to rid the campus of corruption, because it is so ingrained.

"I do not believe that professors commit crime because of their low salaries," he says. "They take bribes because it has gone unpunished. That is the real picture in every Russian university all across the country."

Russian professors' salaries are very low. At Kazan State, they make 20,000 to 25,000 rubles a month, or about $667 to $833.

"That is not enough to feed the family. People break the law out of need—they have no option," says one professor at the university, who did not want his name to be used.

Students have mixed views about the corruption campaign. In a conversation among a group of students from the law department, considered to be among the most corrupt, many scoffed at talk of reform.

"Law-enforcement agencies should reform first," said one student, who declined to give his name but said he was the son of an agent in the Federal Security Service, a successor agency to the KGB. "Russia is rotten of corruption. Even the president admits that. I do not believe somebody could put the end to it on our campus."

The reformers seem undeterred by such skepticism.

"Some say we are too naïve to believe that the old traditions can be changed; some avoid even talking to us. But there are students who agree the disease can be treated," says Dmitry Modestov, a third-year student who works with classmates on developing pens, fliers, and other materials with anticorruption slogans.

"We are trying to change the mind-set on our campus. We say, Knowledge is worth more than bribes."

A Reform Effort Backfires Efforts to combat corruption on a national scale have so far failed to have much of an effect.

In 2001, Russia introduced an SAT-like test known as the Unified State Exam. It was created in large measure to eliminate corruption in the college-entrance process. Colleges were to rely primarily on exam results in determining who should be admitted. Last year was the first in which testing became obligatory nationally.

But instead of reducing corruption, the exam apparently has fostered it. Claims arose that exam results were being tampered with by local officials whose job it is to administer the test.

Another avenue of abuse is the so-called "discount" for students with special needs and children of state employees.

Universities are obliged to accept lower scores on the Unified State Exam from members of those groups, which comprise 153 categories, including handicapped students, children of Chernobyl victims, and orphans.

The fixed price for obtaining the needed papers to be labeled as a member of a discount group is 70,000 rubles, or $2,300, says Deliara Yafizova, a first-year student at Kazan State.

"I entered without a bribe, but I heard that there was a price for making life easier," she said one recent morning in the campus cafe.

Mr. Salakhov, the rector, saw the problem firsthand when he looked at the applicants for this year's first-year class. "All of a sudden we had crowds of handicapped students applying to our university," he says. "At one department I had 36 handicapped students per 30 available seats. We tried to check every case, especially the cases where it said that the disability expired in two to three months. Many of these disabled children turned out to have parents working as hospital managers. Their papers turned out fake."

Of the 1,358 full-time students admitted to Kazan State this academic year, more than 250 were from discount categories.

"That is a tiny little opportunity for universities to stay corrupt," says Mr. Salakhov. "If a big bureaucrat from, say, the ministry of education sends his son with a letter of support to a rector, the university might have to admit that son. But not at this university. We do not let in students with just any score, no matter how high-rank their parents are."

As for reporting scores themselves, state-exam corruption has taken on absurd proportions, driven by regional bureaucrats' desire to ensure that the scores of students admitted to local colleges are better than average.

For example, students in Kabardino-Balkaria and Ingushetia, areas of economic hardship and low-level insurgency near Chechnya, achieved record scores last summer in the Russian-language exam. Yet Russian is not the native language of most residents there.

In another instance, Lyubov Glebova, head of the Federal Service for the Oversight of Education and Science, flew to Voronezh, in the southern part of the country, as soon as she found out that students' scores in the city were the highest on most of the seven parts of the national exam.

"You are the country's leaders on Unified State Exam results," she announced at the regional meeting of school and higher-