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

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

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

"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

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

"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

Concept Knowledge and Assessment of Deep Understanding

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

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.

"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

Online Versus Onsite for Students

"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

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

AICPA Educational Competency Assessment for Accounting Students

Educational Competency Assessment (ECA) Web Site --- http://www.aicpa-eca.org/
The AICPA recently won a National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Excellence Award for Educational Programming for developing this ECA site to help accounting educators integrate the skill-based competencies needed by entry-level accounting professionals.

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.

Online Education Effectiveness and Testing

Learning Effectiveness in Corporate Universities
A group of colleges that serve adult students on Monday formally announced their effort to measure and report their effectiveness, focusing on outcomes in specific programs. The initiative known as “Transparency by Design, on which Inside Higher Ed reported earlier, has grown to include a mix of 10 nonprofit and for-profit institutions: Capella University, Charter Oak State College, Excelsior College, Fielding Graduate University, Franklin University, Kaplan University, Regis University, Rio Salado College, Western Governors University, and Union Institute & University.
Inside Higher Ed, October 23, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/23/qt

"Keeping an Eye on Online Students," by Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 21, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3181&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Technology vendors are eager to sell college officials hardware and software designed to verify the identify of online students—and thereby prevent cheating. A free article in The Chronicle describes some of the technologies that colleges are trying out to make certain that the person taking an online exam is, in fact, the student enrolled in the course. The technologies include Web cameras that watch students taking tests and scanners that capture students’ fingerprints.

A provision in a bill reauthorizing the Higher Education Act is fueling much of the interest in this issue. A paper released in February by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education says the provision—while not onerous to most distance-learning providers—could “drive up the cost of these important education programs.”

And some online institutions fear that the provision would require them to have their students travel to distant locations to take proctored exams on paper. The result? Some states would conclude that the institutions have a “physical presence” in their states, and would subject the institutions to “a whole new set of state regulations,” says John F. Ebersole, president of Excelsior College.

"Keeping an Eye on Online Students," by Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 21, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3181&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Technology vendors are eager to sell college officials hardware and software designed to verify the identify of online students—and thereby prevent cheating. A free article in The Chronicle describes some of the technologies that colleges are trying out to make certain that the person taking an online exam is, in fact, the student enrolled in the course. The technologies include Web cameras that watch students taking tests and scanners that capture students’ fingerprints.

A provision in a bill reauthorizing the Higher Education Act is fueling much of the interest in this issue. A paper released in February by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education says the provision—while not onerous to most distance-learning providers—could “drive up the cost of these important education programs.”

And some online institutions fear that the provision would require them to have their students travel to distant locations to take proctored exams on paper. The result? Some states would conclude that the institutions have a “physical presence” in their states, and would subject the institutions to “a whole new set of state regulations,” says John F. Ebersole, president of Excelsior College.

Question
What are some of the features of UserView from TechSmith for evaluating student learning

Some of the reviews of the revised “free” Sound Recorder in Windows Vista are negative. It’s good to learn that Richard Campbell is having a good experience with it when recording audio and when translating the audio into text files --- http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/archives/2006/05/24/windows-vista-sound-recorder

For those of you on older systems as well as Vista there is a free recorder called Audacity that I like --- http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
I really like Audacity. There are some Wiki tutorials at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/tutorials
Some video tutorials are linked at http://youtube.com/results?search_query=audacity+tutorial&search=Search

I have some dated threads on speech recognition at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/speech.htm Mac users can find options at http://www.macspeech.com/

In addition, I like Camtasia (recording screen shots and camera video) and Dubit (for recording audio and editing audio) from TechSmith --- http://www.techsmith.com/
TechSmith products are very good, but they are not free downloads.

UserView --- http://www.techsmith.com/uservue/features.asp
TechSmith has a newer product called UserView that really sounds exciting, although I’ve not yet tried it. It allows you to view and record what is happening on someone else’s computer like a student’s computer. Multiple computers can be viewed at the same time. Images and text can be recorded. Pop-up comments can be inserted by the instructor to text written by students.

UserView can be used for remote testing!

Userview offers great hope for teaching disabled students such as sight and/or hearing impaired students --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped

"Ways to prevent cheating on online exams," by Gail E. Krovitz, eCollege Newsletter, Vol 8, Issue 6 November 15, 2007 ---
http://www.ecollege.com/Educators_Voice.learn

Write every exam as if it is open book. As much as we try to convince ourselves otherwise, we need to assume that students use resources on their exams (the book, Internet search engines and so on) and write our exams accordingly. Are all of our questions asking for information that can be gathered quickly from the textbook or from a simple Internet search? Then we should re-think our questions (see following guideline). Open-book exams have the potential to test higher level thinking skills, instead of just memorizing facts. Unfortunately, scores on open-book exams are often lower, as students don’t take exam preparation as seriously when they know they can use their book, so training in open-book exam-taking skills would be helpful (Rakes).

Write effective multiple-choice exam questions. Because it is so easy to use prohibited materials during online exams, it is foolish to design tests that simply test factual information that is easily looked up. Although it is difficult to do, online exams are most effective when they test higher order thinking skills (application, synthesis and evaluation) and ask questions that cannot be answered by glancing at the book or a quick internet search. See Christe, Dewey and Rohrer for more information about developing quality multiple-choice questions.

Set tight time limits per question. Even with open book exams (and especially for ones that are not open book), it is important to give a tight time frame for the test, so students will not have time to look up each question in the book. The time limit chosen will obviously vary depending on subject matter, type of questions asked, etc. For strict fact recall, instructors might start by giving a total time based on allowing 60- 90 seconds per question and then adjusting as necessary based on their student body. More time would need to be given for higher-level thinking questions or for those involving calculations.

Use large question pools to offer different, randomly-selected questions to each student. See “Tip: getting the most out of exam question pools” for a good description of using question pools in the eCollege system. The question pools must be large enough to minimize overlap of questions between tests. Rowe provides a chart comparing the average number of questions in common for two students with different question pool sizes and different numbers of questions drawn from the pool. For example, 5 questions drawn from a pool of 10 questions results in 2.5 questions in common between two students, while 5 questions drawn from a pool of 25 questions results in only 1 question in common between two students. You can consult the mathematical formula or go with common sense: a larger question pool is better for reducing the likelihood that students will get the same questions.

Manually create different versions of the exam with the same general question pools, but with scrambled answers for each question. For example, in one version of the exam, the correct answer could be B, while the answer choices are scrambled in the other version so the correct answer is D. You could use the Group function to assign half of the class to one exam, and the other half the class to the other one. Cizek cites research showing that scrambling questions and answer choices does reduce cheating, while simply changing the order of the same questions does not reduce cheating. In fact, in a study of student’s perceived effectiveness of cheating prevention strategies, having scrambled test forms was the number one factor perceived by students to prevent cheating (Cizek).

Assign a greater number of smaller tests instead of one or two large ones. This reduces the incentive to cheat, as each test isn’t as likely to make or break a student’s grade; the pressure of the midterm and final-only structure in some classes is a strong incentive to cheat on those exams. Also, this increases the logistical difficulties of cheating if a student is relying on someone else to help them or to take the test for them.

Provide a clear policy for what happens if students cheat… and enforce it! There are many important things instructors can do from this perspective, such as discussing what constitutes cheating, the importance of academic honesty, any honor codes in place, what measures will be in place to prevent and detect cheating and the punishments for cheating. If students perceive that the instructor does not care about cheating, then incidents of both spontaneous and planned cheating increase (Cizek). Students know that most cheaters don’t get caught and that punishments aren’t harsh for those who do get caught (Kleiner and Lord). Research has found that punishment for cheating is one of the main deterrents to cheating (Kleiner and Lord).

Set the exam Gradebook Review Date for after the exam has closed. The Gradebook Review Date is when the students can access their graded exam in the Gradebook. If this date is set before the end of the exam, students who take the exam early could access their exam in the Gradebook (and usually the correct answers as well) and distribute the questions to students who would take the exam later.

Revise tests every term. Sooner or later exam questions are likely to get out into the student world and get distributed between students. This is especially possible when students view their graded exams in the Gradebook, as they have all the time in the world to copy or print their questions (usually with the correct answers provided). Periodic changes to the test bank can help minimize the impact of this. Minor changes such as rewording the questions and changing the order of answers (especially if different versions with scrambled answers are not used) can help extend the useful life of a test bank.

Use ExamGuard^TM if the feature is available at your school. ExamGuard prohibits the following actions while students are taking online exams: printing, copying and pasting anything into or from the assessment, surfing the Web, opening or using other applications, using Windows system keys functions or clicking on any other area within the course. Also note that ExamGuard prohibits students from printing or copying exam materials while viewing the exam in the Gradebook. If you are interested in learning more about ExamGuard, please contact your Account Executive or Client Services Consultant.

Give proctored exams in a traditional classroom. While this is not an option for many online courses, it is a route that some schools take, especially if they largely serve a local population. With proctored exams, instructors feel more in control of the testing environment and more able to combat cheating in a familiar classroom setting (or at least to have cheating levels on par with those seen in a traditional exam setting). In a study on cheating in math or fact-based courses, Trenholm concludes that proctoring is “the single greatest tool we presently have to uphold the integrity of the educational process in instruction in online MFB (math or fact based) courses” (p. 297). Also, Cizek showed that attentive proctoring reduced cheating directly and by giving the impression that academic integrity is valued.

December 1, 2007 reply from Charles Wankel [wankelc@VERIZON.NET]

Thanks Bob for sharing.

Some of the points seem to fall back to face-to-face course ideas but others were very helpful. I found the emphasis on higher order thinking skills (application, synthesis and evaluation) to be a great one. I am going to try to work on putting synthesis into my students’ assignments and projects.

Charlie Wankel

St. John’s University,
New York

December 1, 2007 reply from David Raggay [draggay@TSTT.NET.TT]

Please be so kind as to refer me to the specific article or articles wherein I can find a discussion on “higher order thinking skills (application, synthesis and evaluation)”

Thanks,

David Raggay,
IFRS Consultants,
Trinidad and Tobago

December 1, 2007 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi David,

There are several tacks to take on this question. Charlie provides some key words (see above).

I prefer to think of higher order metacognition --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition
For specific examples in accounting education see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
One of the main ideas is to make students do their own discovery learning. Blood, sweat, and tears are the best teachers.

Much of the focus in metacognitive learning is how to examine/discover what students have learned on their own and how to control cheating when assessing discovery and concept learning --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Higher order learning attempts to make students think more conceptually. In particular, note the following quotation from Bob Kennelly at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

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.

Along broader lines we might think of it in terms of self-organizing of atomic-level knowledge --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organization

Issues are still in great dispute on the issues of over 80 suggested “learning styles” --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles
Assessment and control of cheating are still huge problems.

Bob Jensen

December 2, 2007 reply from Henry Collier [henrycollier@aapt.net.au]

G’day Bob … I’m not sure whether David is asking for the Bloom citation or not. I do not disagree with your post in any way, but wonder if David is looking for the ‘start’ of the art/science. I have also suggested that he may want to look at Bob Gagne’s approach to the same issues. Perhaps William Graves Perry’s 1970 book could / would also be useful.

Best regards from spring time in New South Wales where the roses in my garden are blooming and very pretty.

Henry

New Technology for Proctoring Distance Education Examinations
"Proctor 2.0," by Elia Powers, Inside Higher Ed, June 2, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/02/proctor

Bob Jensen's threads on online versus onsite assessment are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline

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

Accounting Professors in Support of Online Testing That, Among Other Things, Reduces Cheating
These same professors became widely known for their advocacy of self-learning in place of lecturing

"In Support of the E-Test," by Elia Powers, Inside Higher Ed, August 29, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/29/e_test

Critics of testing through the computer often argue that it’s difficult to tell if students are doing their own work. It’s also unclear to some professors whether using the technology is worth their while. A new study makes the argument that giving electronic tests can actually reduce cheating and save faculty time.
Anthony Catanach Jr. and Noah Barsky, both associate professors of accounting at the Villanova School of Business, came to that conclusion after speaking with faculty members and analyzing the responses of more than 100 students at Villanova and Philadelphia University. Both Catanach and Barsky teach a course called Principles of Managerial Accounting that utilizes the WebCT Vista e-learning platform. The professors also surveyed undergraduates at Philadelphia who took tests electronically.

The Villanova course follows a pattern of Monday lecture, Wednesday case assignment, Friday assessment. The first two days require in-person attendance, while students can check in Friday from wherever they are.

“It never used to make sense to me why at business schools you have Friday classes,” Catanach said. “As an instructor it’s frustrating because 30 percent of the class won’t show up, so you have to redo material. We said, how can we make that day not lose its effectiveness?”

The answer, he and Barsky determined, was to make all electronically submitted group work due on Fridays and have that be electronic quiz day. That’s where academic integrity came into play. Since the professors weren’t requiring students to be present to take the exams, they wanted to deter cheating. Catanach said programs like the one he uses mitigate the effectiveness of looking up answers or consulting friends.

In electronic form, questions are given to students in random order so that copying is difficult. Professors can change variables within a problem to make sure that each test is unique while also ensuring a uniform level of difficulty. The programs also measure how much time a student spends on each question, which could signal to an instructor that a student might have slowed to use outside resources. Backtracking on questions generally is not permitted. Catanach said he doesn’t pay much attention to time spent on individual questions. And since he gives his students a narrow time limit to finish their electronic quizzes, consulting outside sources would only lead students to be rushed by the end of the exam, he added.

Forty-five percent of students who took part in the study reported that the electronic testing system reduced the likelihood of their cheating during the course.

Stephen Satris, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University, said he applauds the use of technology to deter academic dishonesty. Students who take these courses might think twice about copying or plagiarizing on other exams, he said.

“It’s good to see this program working,” Satris said. “It does an end run around cheating.”

The report also makes the case that both faculty and students save time with e-testing. Catanach is up front about the initial time investment: For instructors to make best use of the testing programs, they need to create a “bank” of exam questions and code them by topic, learning objectives and level of difficulty. That way, the program knows how to distribute questions. (He said instructors should budget roughly 10 extra hours per week during the course for this task.)

The payoff, he said, comes later in the term. In the study, professors reported recouping an average of 80 hours by using the e-exams. Faculty don’t have to hand-grade tests (that often being a deterrent for the Friday test, Catanach notes), and graduate students or administrative staff can help prepare the test banks, the report points out.

Since tests are taken from afar, class time can be used for other purposes. Students are less likely to ask about test results during sessions, the study says, because the computer program gives them immediate results and points to pages where they can find out why their answers were incorrect. Satris said this type of system likely dissuades students from grade groveling, because the explanations are all there on the computer. He said it also make sense in other ways.

“I like that professors can truly say, ‘I don’t know what’s going to be on the test. There’s a question bank; it’s out of my control,’ ” he said.

And then there’s the common argument about administrative efficiency: An institution can keep a permanent electronic record of its students.

Survey results showed that Villanova students, who Catanach said were more likely to have their own laptop computers and be familiar with e-technology, responded better to the electronic testing system than did students at Philadelphia, who weren’t as tech savvy. Both Catanach and Satris said the e-testing programs are not likely to excite English and philosophy professors, whose disciplines call for essay questions rather than computer-graded content.

From a testing perspective, Catanach said the programs can be most helpful for faculty with large classes who need to save time on grading. That’s why the programs have proven popular at community colleges in some of the larger states, he said.

“It works for almost anyone who wants to have periodic assessment,” he said. “How much does the midterm and final motivate students to keep up with material? It doesn’t. It motivates cramming. This is a tool to help students keep up with the material.”

August 29, 2007 reply from Stokes, Len [stokes@SIENA.EDU]

I am also a strong proponent of active learning strategies. I have the luxury of a small class size. Usually fewer than 30 so I can adapt my classes to student interaction and can have periodic assessment opportunities as it fits the flow of materials rather than the calendar. I still think a push toward smaller classes with more faculty face time is better than computer tests. One lecture and one case day does not mean active learning. It is better than no case days but it is still a lecture day. I don’t have real lecture days every day involves some interactive material from the students.

While I admit I can’t pick up all trends in grading the tests, but I do pick up a lot of things so I have tendency to have a high proportion of essays and small problems. I then try to address common errors in class and also can look at my approach to teaching the material.

Len

Bob Jensen attempts to make a case that self learning is more effective for metacognitive reasons --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
This document features the research of Tony Catanach, David Croll, Bob Grinaker, and Noah Barsky.

Bob Jensen's threads on the myths of online education are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Myths

Barbara gave me permission to post the following message on March 15, 2006
My reply follows her message.

Professor Jensen:

I need your help in working with regulators who are uncomfortable with online education.

I am currently on the faculty at the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas and I abruptly learned yesterday that the Texas State Board of Public Accountancy distinguishes online and on campus offering of ethics courses that it approves as counting for students to meet CPA candidacy requirements. Since my school offers its ethics course in both modes, I am suddenly faced with making a case to the TSBPA in one week's time to avoid rejection of the online version of the University of Dallas course.

I have included in this email the "story" as I understand it that explains my situation. It isn't a story about accounting or ethics, it is a story about online education.

I would like to talk to you tomorrow because of your expertise in distance education and involvement in the profession. In addition, I am building a portfolio of materials this week for the Board meeting in Austin March 22-23 to make a case for their approval (or at least not rejection) of the online version of the ethics course that the Board already accepts in its on campus version. I want to include compelling research-based material demonstrating the value of online learning, and I don't have time to begin that literature survey myself. In addition, I want to be able to present preliminary results from reviewers of the University of Dallas course about the course's merit in presentation of the content in an online delivery.

Thank you for any assistance that you can give me.

Barbara W. Scofield
Associate Professor of Accounting
University of Dallas
1845 E Northgate Irving, TX 75062
972-721-5034
scofield@gsm.udallas.edu

A statement of the University of Dallas and Texas State Board of Public Accountancy and Online Learning

The TSBPA approved the University of Dallas ethics program in 2004. The course that was approved was a long-standing course, required in several different graduate programs, called Business Ethics. The course was regularly taught on campus (since 1995) and online (since 2001).

The application for approval of the ethics course did not ask for information about whether the class was on campus or online and the syllabus that was submitted happened to be the syllabus of an on campus section. The TSBPA's position (via Donna Hiller) is that the Board intended to approve only the on campus version of the course, and that the Board inferred it was an on campus course because the sample syllabus that was submitted was an on campus course.

Therefore the TSBPA (via Donna Hiller) is requiring that University of Dallas students who took the online version of the ethics course retake the exact same course in its on campus format. While the TSBPA (via Donna Hiller) has indicated that the online course cannot at this time be approved and its scheduled offering in the summer will not provide students with an approved course, Donna Hiller, at my request, has indicated that she will take this issue to the Board for their decision next week at the Executive Board Meeting on March 22 and the Board Meeting on March 23.

There are two issues:

1. Treatment of students who were relying on communication from the Board at the time they took the class that could reasonably have been interpreted to confer approval of both the online and on campus sections of the ethics course.

2. Status of the upcoming summer online ethics class.

My priority is establishing the status of the upcoming summer online ethics class. The Board has indicated through its pilot program with the University of Texas at Dallas that there is a place for online ethics classes in the preparation of CPA candidates. The University of Dallas is interested in providing the TSBPA with any information or assessment necessary to meet the needs of the Board to understand the online ethics class at the University of Dallas. Although not currently privy to the Board specific concerns about online courses, the University of Dallas believes that it can demonstrate sufficient credibility for the course because of the following factors:

A. The content of the online course is the same as the on campus course. Content comparison can be provided. B. The instructional methods of the online course involve intense student-to-student, instructor-to-student, and student-to-content interaction at a level equivalent to an on campus course. Empirical information about interaction in the course can be provided.

C. The instructor for the course is superbly qualified and a long-standing ethics instructor and distance learning instructor. The vita of the instructor can be provided.

D. There are processes for course assessment in place that regularly prompt the review of this course and these assessments can be provided to the board along with comparisons with the on campus assessments.

E. The University of Dallas will seek to coordinate with the work done by the University of Texas at Dallas to provide information at least equivalent to that provided by the University of Texas at Dallas and to meet at a minimum the tentative criteria for online learning that UT Dallas has been empowered to recommend to the TSBPA. Contact with the University of Texas at Dallas has been initiated.

When the online ethics course is granted a path to approval by the Board, I am also interested in addressing the issue of TSBPA approval of students who took the class between the original ethics course approval date and March 13, 2006, the date that the University of Dallas became aware of the TSBPA intent (through Donna Hiller) that the TSBPA distinguished online and on campus ethics classes.

The University of Dallas believes that the online class in fact provided these students with a course that completely fulfilled the general intent of the Board for education in ethics, since it is the same course as the approved on campus course (see above). The decision on the extent of commitment of the Board to students who relied on the Board's approval letter may be a legal issue of some sort that is outside of the current decision-making of the Board, but I want the Board take the opportunity to consider that the reasonableness of the students' position and the students' actual preparation in ethics suggest that there should also be a path created to approval of online ethics courses taken at the University of Dallas during this prior time period. The currently proposed remedy of a requirement for students to retake the very same course on campus that students have already taken online appears excessively costly to Texans and the profession of accounting by delaying the entry of otherwise qualified individuals into public accountancy. High cost is justified when the concomitant benefits are also high. However, the benefit to Texans and the accounting profession from students who retake the ethics course seems to exist only in meeting the requirements of regulations that all parties diligently sought to meet in the first place and not in producing any actual additional learning experiences.

A reply to her from Bob Jensen

Hi Barbara,

May I share your questions and my responses in the next edition of New Bookmarks? This might be helpful to your efforts when others become informed. I will be in my office every day except for March 17. My phone number is 210-999-7347. However, I can probably be more helpful via email.

As discouraging as it may seem, if students know what is expected of them and must demonstrate what they have learned, pedagogy does not seem to matter. It can be online or onsite. It can be lecture or cases. It can be no teaching at all if there are talented and motivated students who are given great learning materials. This is called the well-known “No Significant Difference” phenomenon --- http://www.nosignificantdifference.org/

I think you should stress that insisting upon onsite courses is discriminatory against potential students whose life circumstances make it difficult or impossible to attend regular classes on campus.

I think you should make the case that online education is just like onsite education in the sense that learning depends on the quality and motivations of the students, faculty, and university that sets the employment and curriculum standards for quality. The issue is not onsite versus online. The issue is quality of effort.

The most prestigious schools like Harvard and Stanford and Notre Dame have a large number of credit and non-credit courses online. Entire accounting undergraduate and graduate degree programs are available online from such quality schools as the University of Wisconsin and the University of Maryland. See my guide to online training and education programs is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

My main introductory document on the future of distance education is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm

Anticipate and deal with the main arguments against online education. The typical argument is that onsite students have more learning interactions with themselves and with the instructor. This is absolutely false if the distance education course is designed to promote online interactions that do a better job of getting into each others’ heads. Online courses become superior to onsite courses.

Amy Dunbar teaches intensely interactive online courses with Instant Messaging. See Dunbar, A. 2004. “Genesis of an Online Course.” Issues in Accounting Education (2004),19 (3):321-343.

ABSTRACT: This paper presents a descriptive and evaluative analysis of the transformation of a face-to-face graduate tax accounting course to an online course. One hundred fifteen students completed the compressed six-week class in 2001 and 2002 using WebCT, classroom environment software that facilitates the creation of web-based educational environments. The paper provides a description of the required technology tools and the class conduct. The students used a combination of asynchronous and synchronous learning methods that allowed them to complete the coursework on a self-determined schedule, subject to semi-weekly quiz constraints. The course material was presented in content pages with links to Excel® problems, Flash examples, audio and video files, and self-tests. Students worked the quizzes and then met in their groups in a chat room to resolve differences in answers. Student surveys indicated satisfaction with the learning methods.

I might add that Amy is a veteran world class instructor both onsite and online. She’s achieved all-university awards for onsite teaching in at least three major universities. This gives her the credentials to judge how well her online courses compare with her outstanding onsite courses.

A free audio download of a presentation by Amy Dunbar is available at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/02start.htm#2002

The argument that students cannot be properly assessed for learning online is more problematic. Clearly it is easier to prevent cheating with onsite examinations. But there are ways of dealing with this problem. My best example of an online graduate program that is extremely difficult is the Chartered Accountant School of Business (CASB) masters program for all of Western Canada. Students are required to take some onsite testing even though this is an online degree program. And CASB does a great job with ethics online. I was engaged to formally assess this program and came away extremely impressed. My main contact there is Don Carter carter@casb.com . If you are really serious about this, I would invite Don to come down and make a presentation to the Board. Don will convince them of the superiority of online education.

You can read some about the CASB degree program at http://www.casb.com/

You can read more about assessment issues at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

I think a lot of the argument against distance education comes from faculty fearful of one day having to teach online. First there is the fear of change. Second there is the genuine fear that is entirely justified --- if online teaching is done well it is more work and strain than onsite teaching. The strain comes from increased hours of communication with each and every student.

Probably the most general argument in favor of onsite education is that students living on campus have the social interactions and maturity development outside of class. This is most certainly a valid argument. However, when it comes to issues of learning of course content, online education can be as good as or generally better than onsite classes. Students in online programs are often older and more mature such that the on-campus advantages decline in their situations. Online students generally have more life, love, and work experiences already under their belts. And besides, you’re only talking about ethics courses rather than an entire undergraduate or graduate education.

I think if you deal with the learning interaction and assessment issues that you can make a strong case for distance education. There are some “dark side” arguments that you should probably avoid. But if you care to read about them, go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

Bob Jensen

March 15, 2006 reply from Bruce Lubich [BLubich@UMUC.EDU]

Bob, as a director and teacher in a graduate accounting program that is exclusively online, I want to thank you for your support and eloquent defense of online education. Unfortunately, Texas's predisposition against online teaching also shows up in its education requirements for sitting for the CPA exam. Of the 30 required upper division accounting credits, at least 15 must "result from physical attendance at classes meeting regularly on the campus" (quote from the Texas State Board of Public Accountancy website at www.tsbpa.state.tx.us/eq1.htm)

Cynically speaking, it seems the state of Texas wants to be sure its classrooms are occupied.

Barbara, best of luck with your testimony.

Bruce Lubich
Program Director,
Accounting Graduate School of Management and Technology
University of Maryland University College

March 15, 2006 reply from David Albrecht [albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]

At my school, Bowling Green, student credits for on-line accounting majors classes are never approved by the department chair. He says that you can't trust the schools that are offering these. When told that some very reputable schools are offering the courses, he still says no because when the testing process is done on-line or not in the physical presence of the professor the grades simply can't be trusted.

David Albrecht

March 16, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi David,

One tack against a luddites like that is to propose a compromise that virtually accepts all transfer credits from AACSB-accredited universities. It's difficult to argue that standards vary between online and onsite courses in a given program accredited by the AACSB. I seriously doubt that the faculty in that program would allow a double academic standard.

In fact, on transcripts it is often impossible to distinguish online from onsite credits from a respected universities, especially when the same course is offered online and onsite (i.e., merely in different sections).

You might explain to your department chair that he's probably been accepting online transfer credits for some time. The University of North Texas and other major universities now offer online courses to full-time resident students who live on campus. Some students and instructors find this to be a better approach to learning.

And you ask him why Bowling Green's assessment rigor is not widely known to be vastly superior to online courses from nearly all major universities that now offer distance education courses and even total degree programs, including schools like the Fuqua Graduate School at Duke, Stanford University (especially computer science and engineering online courses that bring in over $100 million per year), the University of Maryland, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Texas, Texas Tech, and even, gasp, The Ohio State University.

You might tell your department chair that by not offering some online alternatives, Bowling Green is not getting the most out of its students. The University of Illinois conducted a major study that found that students performed better in online versus onsite courses when matched pair sections took the same examinations.

And then you might top it off by asking your department chair how he justifies denying credit for Bowling Green's own distance education courses --- http://adultlearnerservices.bgsu.edu/index.php?x=opportunities
The following is a quotation from the above Bowling Green site:

*****************************
The advancement of computer technology has provided a wealth of new opportunities for learning. Distance education is one example of technology’s ability to expand our horizons and gain from new experiences. BGSU offers many distance education courses and two baccalaureate degree completion programs online.

The Advanced Technological Education Degree Program is designed for individuals who have completed a two-year applied associate’s degree. The Bachelor of Liberal Studies Degree Program is ideal for students with previous college credit who would like flexibility in course selection while completing a liberal education program.

Distance Education Courses and Programs --- http://ideal.bgsu.edu/ONLINE/ ***************************

Bob Jensen

March 16, 2006 reply from Amy Dunbar [Amy.Dunbar@BUSINESS.UCONN.EDU]

Count me in the camp that just isn't that concerned about online cheating. Perhaps that is because my students are graduate students and my online exams are open-book, timed exams, and a different version is presented to each student (much like a driver's license exam). In my end-of-semester survey, I ask whether students are concerned about cheating, and on occasion, I get one who is. But generally the response is no.

The UConn accounting department was just reviewed by the AACSB, and they were impressed by our MSA online program. They commented that they now believed that an online MSA program was possible. I am convinced that the people who are opposed to online education are unwilling to invest the time to see how online education is implemented. Sure there will be bad examples, but there are bad examples of face to face (FTF) teaching. How many profs do you know who simply read powerpoint slides to a sleeping class?! Last semester, I received the School of Business graduate teaching award even though I teach only online classes. I believe that the factor that really matters is that the students know you care about whether they are learning. A prof who cares interacts with students. You can do that online as well as FTF.

Do I miss FTF teaching -- you bet I do. But once I focused on what the student really needs to learn, I realized, much to my dismay, interacting FTF with Dunbar was not a necessary condition.

Amy Dunbar

March 16, 2006 message from Carol Flowers [cflowers@OCC.CCCD.EDU]

To resolve this issue and make me more comfortable with the grade a student earns, I have all my online exams proctored. I schedule weekends (placing them in the schedule of classes) and it is mandatory that they take the exams during this weekend period (Fir/Sat) at our computing center. It is my policy that if they can't take the paced exams during those periods, then the class is not one that they can participate in. This is no different from having different times that courses are offered. They have to make a choice in that situation, also, as to which time will best serve their needs.

March 16, 2006 reply from David Fordham, James Madison University [fordhadr@JMU.EDU]

Our model is similar to Carol Flowers. Our on-line MBA program requires an in-person meeting for four hours at the beginning of every semester, to let the students and professor get to know each other personally, followed by the distance-ed portion, concluding with another four-hour in- person session for the final examination or other assessment. The students all congregate at the Sheraton at Dulles airport, have dinner together Friday night, spend Saturday morning taking the final for their previous class, and spend Saturday afternoon being introduced to their next class. They do this between every semester. So far, the on- line group has outperformed (very slightly, and not statistically significant due to small sample sizes) the face-to-face counterparts being used as our control groups. We believe the outperformance might have an inherent self- selection bias since the distance-learners are usually professionals, whereas many of our face-to-face students are full-time students and generally a bit younger and more immature.

My personal on-line course consists of exactly the same readings as my F2F class, and exactly the same lectures (recorded using Tegrity) provided on CD and watched asynchronously, followed by on-line synchronous discussion sessions (2-3 hours per week) where I call on random students asking questions about the readings, lectures, etc., and engaging in lively discussion. I prepare some interesting cases and application dilemmas (mostly adapted from real world scenarios) and introduce dilemmas, gray areas, controversy (you expected maybe peace and quiet from David Fordham?!), and other thought-provoking issues for discussion. I have almost perfect attendance in the on-line synchronous because the students really find the discussions engaging. Surprisingly, I have no problem with freeloaders who don't read or watch the recorded lectures. My major student assessment vehicle is an individual policy manual, supplemented by the in-person exam. Since each student's manual organization, layout, approach, and perspective is so very different from the others, cheating is almost out of the question. And the in-person exam is conducted almost like the CISP or old CPA exams... total quiet, no talking, no leaving the room, nothing but a pencil, etc.

And finally, no, you can't tell the difference on our student's transcript as to whether they took the on-line or in-person MBA. They look identical on the transcript.

We've not yet had any problem with anyone "rejecting" our credential that I'm aware of.

Regarding our own acceptance of transfer credit, we make the student provide evidence of the quality of each course (not the degree) before we exempt or accept credit. We do not distinguish between on-line or F2F -- nor do we automatically accept a course based on institution reputation. We have on many occasions rejected AACSB- accredited institution courses (on a course-by-course basis) because our investigation showed that the course coverage or rigor was not up to the standard we required. (The only "blanket" exception that we make is for certain familiar Virginia community college courses in the liberal studies where history has shown that the college and coursework reliably meets the standards -- every other course has to be accepted on a course-by-course basis.)

Just our $0.02 worth.

David Fordham
James Madison University

DOES DISTANCE LEARNING WORK?
A LARGE SAMPLE, CONTROL GROUP STUDY OF STUDENT SUCCESS IN DISTANCE LEARNING
by James Koch --- http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/docs/vol8_no1/fullpapers/distancelearning.htm

The relevant public policy question is this---Does distance learning "work" in the sense that students experience as least as much success when they utilize distance learning modes as compared to when they pursue conventional bricks and mortar education? The answer to this question is a critical in determining whether burgeoning distance learning programs are cost-effective investments, either for students, or for governments.

Of course, it is difficult to measure the "learning" in distance learning, not the least because distance learning courses now span nearly every academic discipline. Hence, most large sample evaluative studies utilize students’ grades as an imperfect proxy for learning. That approach is followed in the study reported here, as well.

A recent review of research in distance education reported that 1,419 articles and abstracts appeared in major distance education journals and as dissertations during the 1990-1999 period (Berge and Mrozowski, 2001). More than one hundred of these studies focused upon various measures of student success (such as grades, subsequent academic success, and persistence) in distance learning courses. Several asked the specific question addressed in this paper: Why do some students do better than others, at least as measured by the grade they receive in their distance learning course? A profusion of contradictory answers has emanated from these studies (Berge and Mrozowski, 2001; Machtmes and Asher, 2000). It is not yet clear how important to individual student success are factors such as the student’s characteristics (age, ethnic background, gender, academic background, etc.). However, other than knowing that experienced faculty are more effective than less experienced faculty (Machtmes and Asher, 2000), we know even less about how important the characteristics of distance learning faculty are to student success, particularly where televised, interactive distance learning is concerned.

Perhaps the only truly strong conclusion emerging from previous empirical studies of distance learning is the oft cited "no significant difference" finding (Saba, 2000). Indeed, an entire web site, http://teleeducation.nb.ca/nosignificantdifference, exists that reports 355 such "no significant difference" studies. Yet, without quarreling with such studies, they do not tell us why some students achieve better grades than others when they utilize distance learning.

Several studies have suggested that student learning styles and receptivity to distance learning influence student success (see Taplin and Jegede, 2001, for a short survey). Unfortunately, as Maushak et. al. (2001) point out, these intuitively sensible findings are not yet highly useful, because they are not based upon large sample, control group evidence that relates recognizable student learning styles to student performance. Studies that rely upon "conversation and discourse analysis" (Chen and Willits, 1999, provide a representative example) and interviews with students are helpful, yet are sufficiently anecdotal that they are unlikely to lead us to scientifically based conclusions about what works and what does not.

This paper moves us several steps forward in terms of our knowledge by means of a very large distance education sample (76,866 individual student observations) and an invaluable control group of students who took the identical course at the same time from the same instructor, but did so "in person" in a conventional "bricks and mortar" location. The results indicate that gender, age, ethnic background, distance learning experience, experience with the institution providing the instruction, and measures of academic aptitude and previous academic success are statistically significant determinants of student success. Similarly, faculty characteristics such as gender, age, ethnic background, and educational background are statistically significant predictors of student success, though not necessarily in the manner one might hypothesize.

Continued in this working paper

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

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

Also see Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

.QUESTIONING THE VALUE OF LEARNING TECHNOLOGY

"The notion that the future of education lies firmly in learning technology, seen as a tool of undoubted magnitude and a powerful remedy for many educational ills, has penetrated deeply into the psyche not only of those involved in delivery but also of observers, including those in power within national governments." In a paper published in 1992, Gabriel Jacobs expressed his belief that hyperlink technology would be a "teaching resource that would transform passive learners into active thinkers." In "Hypermedia and Discovery Based Learning: What Value?" (AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY, vol. 21, no. 3, 2005, pp. 355-66), he reconsiders his opinions, "the result being that the guarded optimism of 1992 has turned to a deep pessimism." Jacob's paper is available online at http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet21/jacobs.html .

The Australasian Journal of Educational Technology (AJET) [ISSN 1449-3098 (print), ISSN 1449-5554 (online)], published three times a year, is a refereed journal publishing research and review articles in educational technology, instructional design, educational applications of computer technologies, educational telecommunications, and related areas. Back issues are available on the Web at no cost. For more information and back issues go to http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet.html .

See Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

June 1, 2007 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

TEACHING THE "NET GENERATION"

The April/May 2007 issue of INNOVATE explores and explains the learning styles and preferences of Net Generation learners. "Net Generation learners are information seekers, comfortable using technology to seek out information, frequently multitasking and using multiple forms of media simultaneously. As a result, they desire independence and autonomy in their learning processes."

Articles include:

"Identifying the Generation Gap in Higher Education: Where Do theDifferences Really Lie?"
by Paula Garcia and Jingjing Qin, Northern Arizona University

"MyLiteracies: Understanding the Net Generation through LiveJournals and Literacy Practices"
by Dana J. Wilber, Montclair State University

"Is Education 1.0 Ready for Web 2.0 Students?"
by John Thompson,Buffalo State College

The issue is available at http://innovateonline.info/index.php.

Registration is required to access articles; registration is free.

Innovate: Journal of Online Education [ISSN 1552-3233], an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal, is published bimonthly 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 governmental settings. For more information, contact James L. Morrison, Editor-in-Chief; email: innovate@nova.edu ;
Web: http://innovateonline.info/.

The journal also sponsors Innovate-Live webcasts and discussion forums that add an interactive component to the journal articles. To register for these free events, go to http://www.uliveandlearn.com/PortalInnovate/.

See also:

"Motivating Today's College Students"
By Ian Crone
PEER REVIEW, vol. 9, no. 1, Winter 2007

http://www.aacu.org/peerreview/pr-wi07/pr-wi07_practice.cfm

Peer Review, published quarterly by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU), provides briefings on "emerging trends and key debates in undergraduate liberal education. Each issue is focused on a specific topic, provides comprehensive analysis, and highlights changing practice on diverse campuses." For more information, contact: AACU, 1818 R Street NW, Washington, DC 20009 USA;

tel: 202-387-3760; fax: 202-265-9532;
Web: http://www.aacu.org/peerreview/.

For a perspective on educating learners on the other end of the generational continuum see:

"Boomer Reality"
By Holly Dolezalek
TRAINING, vol. 44, no. 5, May 2007

http://www.trainingmag.com/msg/content_display/publications/e3if330208bec8f4014fac339db9fd0678e

Training [ISSN 0095-5892] is published monthly by Nielsen Business Media, Inc., 770 Broadway, New York, NY 10003-9595 USA;
tel: 646-654-4500; email: bmcomm@nielsen.com ;
Web: http://www.trainingmag.com.

Bob Jensen's threads on learning can be found at the following Web sites:

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

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

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

http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

June 1, 2007 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

TECHNOLOGY AND CHANGE IN EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE

"Even if research shows that a particular technology supports a certain kind of learning, this research may not reveal the implications of implementing it. Without appropriate infrastructure or adequate provisions of services (policy); without the facility or ability of teachers to integrate it into their teaching practice (academics); without sufficient support from technologists and/or educational technologists (support staff), the likelihood of the particular technology or software being educationally effective is questionable."

The current issue (vol. 19, no. 1, 2007) of the JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY presents a selection of papers from the Conference Technology and Change in Educational Practice which was held at the London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, London in October 2005.

The papers cover three areas: "methodological frameworks, proposing new ways of structuring effective research; empirical studies, illustrating the ways in which technology impacts the working roles and practices in Higher Education; and new ways of conceptualising technologies for education."

Papers include:

"A Framework for Conceptualising the Impact of Technology on Teaching and Learning"
by Sara Price and Martin Oliver, London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education

"New and Changing Teacher Roles in Higher Education in a Digital Age"
by Jo Dugstad Wake, Olga Dysthe, and Stig Mjelstad, University of Bergen

"Academic Use of Digital Resources: Disciplinary Differences and the Issue of Progression Revisited"
by Bob Kemp, Lancaster University, and Chris Jones, Open University

"The Role of Blogs In Studying the Discourse and Social Practices of Mathematics Teachers"
by Katerina Makri and Chronis Kynigos, University of Athens

The issue is available at http://www.ifets.info/issues.php?show=current.

The Journal of Educational Technology and Society [ISSN 1436-4522]is a peer-reviewed, quarterly publication that "seeks academic articles on the issues affecting the developers of educational systems and educators who implement and manage such systems." Current and back issues are available at http://www.ifets.info/. The journal is published by the International Forum of Educational Technology & Society. For more information, see http://ifets.ieee.org/.

Bob Jensen's threads on blogs and listservs are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm

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

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

Civil Rights Groups That Favor Standardized Testing

"Teachers and Rights Groups Oppose Education Measure ," by Diana Jean Schemo, The New York Times, September 11, 2007 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/education/11child.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The draft House bill to renew the federal No Child Left Behind law came under sharp attack on Monday from civil rights groups and the nation’s largest teachers unions, the latest sign of how difficult it may be for Congress to pass the law this fall.

At a marathon hearing of the House Education Committee, legislators heard from an array of civil rights groups, including the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, the National Urban League, the Center for American Progress and Achieve Inc., a group that works with states to raise academic standards.

All protested that a proposal in the bill for a pilot program that would allow districts to devise their own measures of student progress, rather than using statewide tests, would gut the law’s intent of demanding that schools teach all children, regardless of poverty, race or other factors, to the same standard.

Dianne M. Piché, executive director of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, said the bill had “the potential to set back accountability by years, if not decades,” and would lead to lower standards for children in urban and high poverty schools.

“It strikes me as not unlike allowing my teenage son and his friends to score their own driver’s license tests,” Ms. Piché said, adding, “We’ll have one set of standards for the Bronx and one for Westchester County, one for Baltimore and one for Bethesda.”

Continued in article

What works in education?

As I said previously, great teachers come in about as many varieties as flowers. Click on the link below to read about some of the varieties recalled by students from their high school days. I t should be noted that "favorite teacher" is not synonymous with "learned the most." Favorite teachers are often great at entertaining and/or motivating. Favorite teachers often make learning fun in a variety of ways.

However, students may actually learn the most from pretty dull teachers with high standards and demanding assignments and exams. Also dull teachers may also be the dedicated souls who are willing to spend extra time in one-on-one sessions or extra-hour tutorials that ultimately have an enormous impact on mastery of the course. And then there are teachers who are not so entertaining and do not spend much time face-to-face that are winners because they have developed learning materials that far exceed other teachers in terms of student learning because of those materials.

The recollections below tend to lean toward entertainment and "fun" teachers, but you must keep in mind that these were written after-the-fact by former high school teachers. In high school, dull teachers tend not to be popular before or after the fact. This is not always the case when former students recall their college professors.

Handicapped Learning Aids Work Wonders --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped

Asynchronous Learning --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm
Especially note the SCALE Experiments conducted at the University of Illinois ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois

"'A dozen roses to my favorite teacher," The Philadelphia Enquirer, November 30, 2004 --- http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/special_packages/phillycom_teases/10304831.htm?1c

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.

Classroom Tips
Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive

From the Financial Rounds Blog on May 4, 2009 --- http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/

Using "Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive" In The Classroom I recently started reading Goldstein, Martin, and Cialdini's "Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive." It could easily be described as "Freakonomics for Social Psychology". It's a fun, easy, and very informative read, with each chapter only about 1500-2000 words long, and highlighting one persuasion technique. So, you can knock out a chapter in 10 minutes or so.

It's a very interesting introduction to the social psychology literature on persuasion - it lists all the underlying research in the appendix.

In addition to learning some interesting things, I've also gotten some great ideas to use in my classes. I'll be discussing these over the next few weeks, starting with

Chapters 1 & 2:
"The Bandwagon effect" One way to increase compliance with a request is to mention that a lot of other people have done the same thing. In these chapters, the authors mention a study where they tried to see if they could increase the percentage of people staying in a hotel who reused towels at least once during their stay. Their solution was simple. The hotels who do this typically put a little card in the hotel room touting the benefits of reusing towels. All they did was add a line to the extent that the majority of people who stay in hotels do in fact reuse their towels at least once during their stay. This dramatically increased the percentage of people who chose to reuse.

In a related study, they added another line stating that XX% of the people who stayed in this room reused towels. This increased compliance even more.

Chapter 3:
"What common mistake causes messages to self-destruct?" The bandwagon effect can also cause messages to backfire. In one study, they seeded the Petrified Forest with fake pieces of petrified wood, and then posted signs stating that "many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the natural state of the petrified forest", accompanied by a picture of several visitors to taking pieces of wood. These signs actually increased the incidences of the behavior they were intended to stop. Here are the applications to my classes: First off, to use the bandwagon effect in my case course, I'm going to state figures (made up, of course) at the beginning of class as to the average amount of time past students in that class have spent preparing each week. I'm also going to tell my classes that the average evaluation for the professors in the college ranges from 4.2 to 4.8 on a 5 point scale (I know, it's inflated, but it might be interesting to see what happens if I state that several times during the semester). If I really want to use the bandwagon effect, I'll mention that evaluations in THAT particular class have been a bit higher.

As for avoiding the "self-destruct" part of the bandwagon effect, I plan on spending less time talking about how many students are absent. If I need to mention it, I'll focus on the flip side that 94% of the students in this class make the vast majority of classes, and commend them on that fact.

More to come later. It's a great book, and inexpensive, too (the paperback is less than $20).

In Defense of "Traditional" Learning and Assessment

April 27, 2009 message from David Albrecht [albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]

Bob,

Here's another article from the CHE newsletter.

The conclusion from these latest two articles rings true.

Collegiate business courses in general, and collegiate accounting courses, in particular, have taken their fair share of hits in recent years, because of the lack of experiential learning built into the curriculum and so many courses. The traditional approach to collegiate instruction--lecture and (MC) testing--is too frequently assailed because students don't become active participants in the learning process. Never-the-less, accounting students across the country do pick up on the rules of financial and tax accounting, and the logic of cost accounting and auditing. I've frequently wondered where the missing piece is, how a discredited approach to conducting college courses can produce any learning results at all.

My own thinking had begun to focus on the recitation/homework aspect built into so many of our courses, and the results of these two studies seems to it up.

I have made extensive use of homework assignments over the years, to the extent that I write my own problems. A HW set for a particular topic moves from very short "drills" to comprehensive problems that set the topic into a very realistic setting. What I do isn't unique. However, I have my own idea about what is realistic.

Anyway, I find this latest news to be a validation for a part of what we do, and welcome news indeed.

Access to the article below requires a subscription. The part of the article not quoted IS important, as it pertains to real world applications.

Dave Albrecht

******quotation begins******

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i34/34a00101.htm

From the issue dated May 1, 2009 Close the Book. Recall. Write It Down. That old study method still works, researchers say. So why don't professors preach it?

By DAVID GLENN

The scene: A rigorous intro-level survey course in biology, history, or economics. You're the instructor, and students are crowding the lectern, pleading for study advice for the midterm.

If you're like many professors, you'll tell them something like this: Read carefully. Write down unfamiliar terms and look up their meanings. Make an outline. Reread each chapter.

That's not terrible advice. But some scientists would say that you've left out the most important step: Put the book aside and hide your notes. Then recall everything you can. Write it down, or, if you're uninhibited, say it out loud.

Two psychology journals have recently published papers showing that this strategy works, the latest findings from a decades-old body of research. When students study on their own, "active recall" ¬ recitation, for instance, or flashcards and other self-quizzing ¬ is the most effective way to inscribe something in long-term memory.

Yet many college instructors are only dimly familiar with that research. And in March, when Mark A. McDaniel, a professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis and one author of the new studies, gave a talk at a conference of the National Center for Academic Transformation, people fretted that the approach was oriented toward robotic memorization, not true learning.

Don't Reread

A central idea of Mr. McDaniel's work, which appears in the April issue of Psychological Science and the January issue of Contemporary Educational Psychology, is that it is generally a mistake to read and reread a textbook passage. That strategy feels intuitively right to many students ¬ but it's much less effective than active recall, and it can give rise to a false sense of confidence.

"When you've got your chemis-try book in front of you, everything's right there on the page, it's all very familiar and fluent," says Jeffrey D. Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University and lead author of a paper in the May issue of Memory about students' faulty intuitions about effective study habits.

"So you could say to yourself, 'Yeah, I know this. Sure, this is all very familiar,'" Mr. Karpicke continues. "But of course, when you go in to take a classroom test, or in real life when you need to reconstruct your knowledge, the book's not there. In our experiments, when students repeatedly read something, it falsely inflates their sense of their own learning."

These findings about active recall are not new or faddish or parochial. The research has been deepened and systematized recently by scholars at the University of California at Los Angeles and Washington University in St. Louis (where Mr. Karpicke earned his doctorate in 2007). But the basic insight goes back decades. One of the new papers tips its hat to a recitation-based method known as "SQ3R," which was popularized in Effective Study, a 1946 book by Francis P. Robinson.

So if this wisdom is so well-established ¬ at least among psychologists ¬ should colleges explicitly try to coax students to use these study techniques? And if so, how? That is the question that the authors of these papers are now pondering.

"I think it's a mistake for us to think that just publishing this work in a few journals is going to have a huge impact in the classroom," says Mr. McDaniel.

After a decade of working in this area, Mr. McDaniel feels enough confidence in his findings that he is willing to proselytize about them. He and his colleagues have also been promoting the idea of frequent low-stakes classroom quizzes (The Chronicle, June 8, 2007).

Among other things, Mr. McDaniel has recently collaborated with a network of biology instructors who would like to improve the pass rates in their introductory courses.

One of those scholars is Kirk Bartholomew, an assistant professor of biology at Sacred Heart University. He first crossed paths with Mr. McDaniel at a conference sponsored by a textbook publisher.

"He basically confirmed my ideas ¬ that after you've read something once, you've gotten what you're going to get out of it, and then you need to go out and start applying the information," Mr. Bartholomew says.

The two scholars collaborated on a Web interface that encouraged students to try different study techniques. The first round of research did not turn up any dramatic patterns, Mr. Bartholomew says ¬ other than the unsurprising fact that his students did better if they spent more time studying. But he says that he looks forward to refining the system.

Rote learning?

In March, however, when Mr. McDaniel took his message to the National Center for Academic Transformation meeting, his talk was not entirely well received.

Several days after his appearance, he got a note from Carol A. Twigg, the center's chief executive. "She said, 'We really loved having you, but you created some controversy here,'" Mr. McDaniel says. According to Ms. Twigg's note, some people worried that Mr. McDaniel's techniques might generate rote memorization at the expense of deeper kinds of learning.

Michael R. Reder, director of Connecticut College's Center for Teaching and Learning, had a similar reaction to one of Mr. McDaniel's new papers on studying.

The paper seems perfectly valid on its own terms and might offer a "useful tool," Mr. Reder says. But in his view, the paper also "suggests an old model of learning. You know, I'm going to give information to the students, and the students then memorize that information and then spit it back."

Mr. McDaniel finds such reactions frustrating. One experiment in his new paper suggests that a week after reading a complex passage, people who recited the material after reading it did much better at solving problems that involved analyzing and drawing inferences from the material than did people who simply read the passage twice.

"I don't think these techniques will necessarily result in rote memorization," Mr. McDaniel says. "If you ask people to free-recall, you can generate a better mental model of a subject area, and in turn that can lead to better problem-solving."

And in some college courses, he continues, a certain amount of memorization is impossible to escape ¬ so it might as well be done effectively.

In Biology 101, for example, "you've got a heavily fact-laden course. When I talk to biology instructors at Big Ten universities, they're working really hard to create interesting, interactive courses where they've got 500 or 600 kids in a lecture class. But no matter how engaging you make the course, the students need to have the knowledge base to do the inquiry-based problem-solving activities that you've designed."

continued in article

******quotation ends*******

"Imagining College Without Grades," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, January 22, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/22/grades

Kathleen O’Brien, senior vice president for academic affairs at Alverno College, said she realized that it might seem like the panelists were “tilting at windmills” with their vision for moving past grades. But she said there may be an alignment of ideas taking place that could move people away from a sense that grades are inevitable. First, she noted that several of the nation’s most prestigious law schools have moved away from traditional letter grades, citing a sense that grades were squelching intellectual curiosity. This trend adds clout to the discussion and makes it more difficult for people to say that grades need to be maintained because professional schools value them. Second, she noted that the growing use of e-portfolios has dramatized the potential for tools other than grades to convey what students learn. Third, she noted that just about everyone views grade inflation as having destroyed the reliability of grades. Fourth, she said that with more students taking courses at multiple colleges — including colleges overseas — the idea of consistent and clear grading just doesn’t reflect the mobility of students. And fifth, she noted the reactions in the room, which are typical of academic groups in that most professors and students are much more likely to complain about grading than to praise its accuracy or value. This is a case of an academic practice, she noted, that is widespread even as many people doubt its utility.
At the same time, O’Brien said that one thing holding back colleges from moving was the sense of many people that doing away with grades meant going easy on students. In fact, she said, ending grades can mean much more work for both students and faculty members. Done right, she said, eliminating grades promotes rigor.

Continued in article

"Favorite Education Blogs of 2008," by Jay Mathews, The Washington Post, April 7, 2008 --- Click Here

Early last year, as an experiment, I published a list of what I and commentator Walt Gardner considered our favorite education blogs. Neither Gardner nor I had much experience with this most modern form of expression. We are WAY older than the Web surfing generation. But the list proved popular with readers, and I promised in that column to make this an annual event.

Bernstein: The name is obviously a takeoff on the foregoing. The author of this one occasionally posts elsewhere as well. This site often provides some incisive and clear explanations of the key aspects of educational policy.

Mathews: I agree, but have a bias here, too. This is an Education Week blog, and I am on the board of trustees of the nonprofit that publishes Ed Week.

My promise was actually more specific: "Next year, through bribery or trickery, I hope to persuade Ken Bernstein, teacher and blogger par excellence, to select his favorite blogs and then let me dump on his choices, or something like that." As I learned long ago, begging works even better than bribery or trickery, and Bernstein succumbed. Below are his choices, with some comments from me, and a few of my favorites.

They are in no particular order of quality or interest. Choosing blogs is a personal matter. Tastes differ widely and often are not in sync with personal views on how schools should be improved. I agree with all of Bernstein's choices, even though we disagree on many of the big issues.

Bernstein is a splendid classroom teacher and a fine writer, with a gift for making astute connections between ill-considered policies and what actually happens to kids in school. He is a social studies teacher at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Prince George's County and has been certified by the prestigious National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. He is also a book reviewer and peer reviewer for professional publications and ran panels on education at YearlyKos conventions. He blogs on education, among other topics, at too many sites to list. He describes his choices here as a few blogs he thinks "are worthwhile to visit."

· Bridging Differences. blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/

Bernstein: Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch in the past have had their differences on educational issues. They both serve at the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University, and this shared blog is as valuable as anything on the Web for the insights the two offer, and for the quality of their dialog.

Mathews: I have a personal bias about this blog. I know Meier and Ravitch well, consider them the best writers among education pundits today and frequently bounce ideas off them.

· Eduwonk. www.eduwonk.com/

Bernstein: I often disagree with Andrew J. Rotherham, but his has been an influential voice on education policy for some years, and even now, along with all else he does, he serves on the Virginia Board of Education.

Mathews: I often agree with Rotherham, and my editors sometimes complain that I quote him too much. But the guy is only 37 and is going to be an important influence on public school policy for the rest of my life and long after.

· Edwize. www.edwize.org/

Bernstein: The site is maintained by the United Federation of Teachers, the New York affiliate of American Federation of Teachers. They have a number of authors, many active in New York schools, but they occasionally have posts from others. Full disclosure: I have been invited to cross-post things I have written elsewhere.

Mathews: A nice mix of both comment on policy and inside-the-classroom stuff from teachers.

· Education Policy Blog. educationpolicyblog.blogspot.com/

Bernstein: The site describes itself as "a multiblog about the ways that educational foundations can inform educational policy and practice! The blog will be written by a group of people who are interested in the state of education today, and who bring to this interest a set of perspectives and tools developed in the disciplines known as the 'foundations' of education: philosophy, history, curriculum theory, sociology, economics and psychology." Most of the participants are university professors. I am a participant from time to time in this blog.

Eduwonkette. blogs.edweek.org/edweek/eduwonkette/

Continued in article

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

Learning Styles Sites

January 1, 2009 message from Pat Wyman [raisingsmarterchildren@gmail.com]

Hello Bob,

Happy New Year! Your name came up through a google alert, attached to my website and the complimentary learning styles inventory at http://www.howtolearn.com

It is on your page, from the community at http://www.elearninglearning.com/learning-styles/microsoft/&query=www.howtolearn.com

I want to thank you for this is and if there is any way I can contribute to your blog and yours to mine, articles, interviews, etc. I'd love to connect with you.

You're doing wonderful work!

Warmly,
Pat Wyman, M.A.

-- Pat Wyman Best selling author, Learning vs. Testing Co-Author,
Book Of The Year In the Medicine Category, The Official Autism 101 Manual
University Instructor of Continuing Education, California State University,
East Bay Founder, http://www.HowToLearn.com and http://wwwRaisingSmarterChildren.com
Winner, James Patterson PageTurner Award Get your copy of Learning vs. Testing with complimentary materials at http://www.learningvstesting4.html

Get Tips For Raising A Smarter Child at http://www.RaisingSmarterChildren.com

"There are two ways you can live your life - one as if nothing is a miracle, and the other as if everything is a miracle." Albert Einstein

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

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

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

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

April 4, 2008 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

ASSESSING EFFECTIVENESS OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES

"From the perspective of instructional designers and instructors, the decision to adopt a new technology can be exceedingly difficult. On the one hand, we all want to create the best possible learning environment for our students. On the other, there is the persistent fear that integrating a new technology will be onerous in terms of integration and only marginal in terms of impact, or worse, it may have a negative impact."

In "How Do We Assess the Effectiveness of New Technologies and Learning Environments?" (SLOAN-C VIEW, vol. 7, issue 2, February 2008), Philip Ice suggests using the Community of Inquiry Framework (CoI): "a theoretical model that seeks to explain the online learning experience in terms of three overlapping presences: teaching, social and cognitive." He cites two studies that support the application of CoI for exploring the impact of new technologies in education. The article, including links to the cited studies, is available at http://www.aln.org/publications/view/v7n2/viewv7n2.htm

(Please note: registration is required to view some articles; registration is free.)

Sloan-C View: Perspectives in Quality Online Education [ISSN:

1541-2806] is published by the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C). Current and back issues are available at http://www.aln.org/publications/view/ For more information, contact: The Sloan Center at Olin and Babson Colleges, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, Olin Way, Needham MA 02492-1200 USA; tel: 781-292-2523; fax: 781-292-2505;
email: info@sloan-c.org ;
Web: http://www.sloan-c.org/

Sloan-C is a consortium of institutions and organizations committed "to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

DO STUDENTS PREFER INTENSIVE COURSES?

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin conducted a study to determine which was preferred by students: "regular" courses (typical for traditional, residential institutions) or "intensive" courses -- "those taught on a tighter than normal schedule, with more class time each week, but fewer weeks" (typical of online courses taught at for-profit institutions). Students rated the intensive courses significantly higher, causing the researchers to suggest that residential colleges may want to consider offering more courses of this type.

Results of the study were presented at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. An article about the research (along with reader comments) is available:

"Students Prefer Intensive Courses"

INSIDE HIGHER ED, March 28, 2008, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/28/intensive

Using Field Lab Write-ups to Develop Observational and Critical Thinking Skills ---
http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/structure04/activities/3856.html

Does technology have no discernable impact on learning?
I've never been a disciple of technology. For me cell phones are multifunctional, multicolor devices that empower millions of us with little worth saying to interrupt other millions of us who ought to have something better to do. I don't want my car to talk to me, I don't want General Motors to know my latitude and longitude, and I don't need a pocket-size liquid crystal New York Times or instant access to thirty-second videos of skateboarding dogs , , , Many American students aren't doing all that well academically, and almost as many experts are peddling cures. Many prescribe computers as the miracle that will rescue our kids from scholastic mediocrity. That's why states like Michigan and Pennsylvania distributed laptops to thousands of students. Maine led the parade by handing out laptops to every seventh and eighth grader. Sponsors of the giveaways promised "higher student performance." Unfortunately, the results have been disappointing. When the test results of Maine students showed no improvement, boosters explained that it would "take more time for the impact of laptops to show up." Inconveniently, Maine's lackluster outcome only confirmed a rigorous international study of student computer use in thirty-one countries, which found that students who use computers at school "perform sizably and statistically worse" than students who don't. Analysts warned that when computer use replaces "traditional learning methods," it "actually harms the student." A review of California schools determined that Internet access had "no measurable impact on student achievement." A 2007 federal study concluded that classroom use of reading and math software likewise yielded "no significant differences" in student performance.
Peter Berger, "Stuck on the Cutting Edge," The Irascible Professor, December 19, 2007 --- http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-12-19-07.htm

Jensen Comment
Anecdotally technology can favorably impact learning. In my own case, it's had an enormous positive impact on my scholarship, my research, and my publishing. Number 1 are the communications and knowledge sharing (especially from listservs and blogs) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm

Number 2 is the access to enormous databases and knowledge portals --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

Number 3 is the tremendous increase in access provided by the campus libraries for scholars who take the time and effort to determine what is really there.

Number 4 is open courseware. The open courseware (especially shared lecture materials and videos) from some of the best professors in our leading universities such as 1,500 courses served up by MIT and 177 science courses served up on YouTube by UC Berkeley are truly amazing. Critics of technology have probably never utilized these materials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

I think Peter Berger overlooks some of the positive outcomes of technology on learning --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#WhatWorks
More importantly look at the SCALE experiments at the University of Illinois --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois

Although I always like Peter Berger's essays, this time he also overlooks much of the dark side of technology are learning --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm

Technology and learning have much more complicated interactions that are superficially glossed over in this particular essay --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

"Beyond Tests and Quizzes," Inside Higher Ed, December 5, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/05/mezeske

With federal and state officials, accreditors and others all talking about the importance of assessment, what’s going on in classrooms? Assessment, after all, takes place every time a professor gives a test. A new volume of essays, Beyond Tests and Quizzes: Creative Assessments in the College Classroom (Jossey-Bass) argues that assessments in the classroom could be more creative and more useful to the educational process. The editors of the volume are Richard Mezeske, chair of education at Hope College, and Barbara A. Mezeske, an associate professor of English at Hope. In an e-mail interview, they discussed the themes of their new book
. . .

Q: Could you share your definition of “creative assessment” and some of your favorite examples?
A: Creative assessment is flexible, timely, and interesting to both the instructor and to the student. When teachers shift instruction based on student feedback, then they are being flexible and creative. We do not mean that teachers should design ever more imaginative and bizarre assessment tools, or that they should ignore mandated curricular content. Rather, creative assessment, as we use the term, implies focused attention to student learning, reading the signs, engaging students, and listening to their feedback. Creative assessment often gives students opportunities to apply and deepen their superficial knowledge in their discipline.

For example, in the chapter in our book about teaching grammar, Rhoda Janzen describes an assessment that requires students to devise and play grammar games: They cannot do that without a deep mastery of the principles they are learning. In another chapter, Tom Smith describes how he grades individuals’ tests during private office appointments: He affirms correct responses, asks students to explain incomplete or erroneous answers, and both gives and gets immediate, personal feedback on a student’s ability to recall and apply concepts. In a third chapter, David Schock writes about taking media-production skills into the community, allowing students to demonstrate their knowledge and skills by creating public service announcements and other media products for an audience outside the classroom.

Q: How is technology (the Web, etc.) changing the potential of testing and assessment?

A: Technology is expanding the possibilities for assessment while at the same time complicating assessment. For example, checking understanding of a group and individuals during instruction is now relatively simple with electronic tools which allow students to press a button and report what they believe about concept X. The results are instantaneously displayed for an entire class to see and the instructor can adjust instruction based on that feedback. However, technology can complicate, too. How is a teacher able to guarantee student X working at a remote computer station on an assessment is actually student X, and not student Y covering for student X? Does the technology merely make the assessment tool slick without adding substance to the assessment? In other words, merely using technology does not automatically make the assessment clever, substantive, correct, or even interesting, but it can do all of those things.

Continued in article

"The Great Debate: Effectiveness of Technology in Education," by Patricia Deubel, T.H.E. Journal, November 2007 ---
http://www.thejournal.com/articles/21544

According to Robert Kuhn (2000), an expert in brain research, few people understand the complexity of that change. Technology is creating new thinking that is "at once creative and innovative, volatile and turbulent" and "nothing less than a shift in worldview." The change in mental process has been brought about because "(1) information is freely available, and therefore interdisciplinary ideas and cross-cultural communication are widely accessible; (2) time is compressed, and therefore reflection is condensed and decision-making is compacted; (3) individuals are empowered, and therefore private choice and reach are strengthened and one person can have the presence of an institution" (sec: Concluding Remarks).

If we consider thinking as both individual (internal) and social (external), as Rupert Wegerif (2000) suggests, then "[t]echnology, in various forms from language to the internet, carries the external form of thinking. Technology therefore has a role to play through supporting improved social thinking (e.g. providing systems to mediate decision making and collective reasoning) and also through providing tools to help individuals externalize their thinking and so to shape their own social worlds" (p. 15).

The new tools for communication that have become part of the 21st century no doubt contribute to thinking. Thus, in a debate on effectiveness or on implementation of a particular tool, we must also consider the potential for creativity, innovation, volatility, and turbulence that Kuhn (2000) indicates.

Continued in article

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

Questioning the Admissions Assumptions

And further, the study finds that all of the information admissions officers currently have (high school grades, SAT/ACT scores, essays, everything) is of limited value, and accounts for only 30 percent of the grade variance in colleges — leaving 70 percent of the variance unexplained.
Scott Jaschik, "Questioning the Admissions Assumptions," Inside Higher Ed, June 19, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/19/admit

The report is available at http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/docs/ROPS.GEISER._SAT_6.12.07.pdf

Roland G. Fryer, who was hired by Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein to advise him on how to narrow the racial gap in achievement in the city’s schools, made his professional name in economics by applying complex algorithms to document how black students fall behind their white peers. But his life story challenges his own calculations. . . . His first job, though, he said, will be to mine data — from graduation rates to test scores to demographic information — to find out why there are wide gulfs between schools. Why, for example, does one school in Bedford-Stuyvesant do so much better than a school just down the block? And he will monitor the pilot program to pay fourth- and seventh-grade students as much as $500 for doing well on a series of standardized tests. That program will begin in 40 schools this fall. He hopes to find other ways to motivate students.
Jennifer Medina, "His Charge: Find a Key to Students’ Success," The New York Times, June 21, 2007 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/nyregion/21fryer.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Jensen Comment
I suspect that SAT scores are more predictive for some college graduates than others. For example. SAT math performance may be a better predictor of grades in mathematics and science courses than SAT verbal performance is a predictor of grades in literature and language courses. The study mentioned above does not delve into this level of detail. Top universities that have dropped SAT requirements (e.g., under the Texas Top Ten Percent Law) are not especially happy about losing so many top SAT performers --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#10PercentLaw

SAT/ACT testing falls down because it does not examine motivation vary well. High school grades fail because of rampant grade inflation and lowered academic standards in high schools. College grades are not a good criterion because of grade inflation in colleges --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation

Question
Is homework credit sometimes dysfunctional to learning?
If the instructor allows face-to-face study groups, extra-help tutorials, and chat rooms, what is so terrible about this Facebook study group?

Answer
Apparently its the fact that ten percent course credit was given for homework that was discussed in the study group. It seems unfair, however, to single out this one student running the Facebook study group. If the students were "cheating" by sharing tips on homework, they were probably also doing it face-to-face. All students who violate the code of conduct should be sanctioned or forgiven based on the honor code of the institution.

Ryerson U. Student Faces Expulsion for Running a Facebook Study Group
A student at Ryerson University, in Toronto, is facing expulsion for running a Facebook study group, the Toronto Star reports. Chris Avenir, a first-year engineering student, is facing expulsion from the school on 147 counts of academic charges — one for himself, and one for every student who used the Facebook group “Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions” to get homework help. University officials say that running such a group is in violation of the school’s academic policy, which says no student can undertake activity to gain academic advantage. Students argue, however, that the group was analogous to any in-person study group. Of course, this wouldn’t be the first Facebook-related expulsion hearing. The expulsion hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.
Hurley Goodall, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 7, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2801&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Jensen Comment
My approach was to assign homework for no credit and then administer online quizzes. Students were assigned different partners each week who attested to observing no cheating while an assigned "partner" took the online quiz. You can read the following at --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5342/acct5342.htm

Most every week beginning in Week 2, you will be required to take an online quiz for a chapter from the online textbook by Murthy and Groomer. This book is not in the bookstore. Students should immediately obtain a password and print the first three chapters of the book entitled Accounting Information Systems: A Database Approach. You can purchase a password at
http://www.cybertext.com/forms/accountform.shtml
You will then be able to access the book and the online quizzes at any time using the book list at http://www.cybertext.com/
Each week students are to take an online quiz in the presence of an assigned student partner who then signs the attest form at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5342/attest.htm
The online quizzes are relatively easy if you take notes while reading the assigned chapter. You may use your notes for each quiz. However, you may not view a copy of the entire chapter will taking a quiz.

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

Lawyers Don't Like Being Ranked
It's a sunny day in Seattle when two lawyers can bring a class action suit on their own behalf -- and then see it rejected on First Amendment grounds. That's what happened last week in the Emerald City, when Federal District Judge Robert S. Lasnik ruled that there was no basis for cracking down on a lawyer-rating Web site merely because some of its ratees didn't like how they were portrayed. The site, called Avvo, does for lawyers what any number of magazines and Web sites have been doing for other professions for years. Magazines regularly publish stories that rank an area's doctors and dentists. There are rating sites and blogs for the "best" hairstylists, manicurists, restaurants and movie theaters. Almost any consumer product or service these days is sorted and ranked.
"Judging Lawyers," The Wall Street Journal, December 24, 2007; Page A10 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119846335960848261.html
Avvo Lawyer Ratings --- http://www.avvo.com/
Jensen Comment
In fairness most of these ranking systems are misleading. For example, physicians and lawyers who lose more often may also be willing to take on the tougher cases having low probabilities of success. Especially note "Challenging Measures of Success" at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings

And some professionals that win a lot may do so because they do so in unethical ways. And lawyers, like physicians, have different specialties such that in the realm of a particular specialty, maybe one that rarely call out, from over 100 specialties, they may be outstanding.

Bob Jensen threads on college ranking controversies are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings

"Mixed Grades for Grads and Assessment," Inside Higher Ed, January 23, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/23/employers

Those conclusions come from a national survey of employers with at least 25 employees and significant hiring of recent college graduates, released Tuesday by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Over all, 65 percent of those surveyed believe that new graduates of four-year colleges have most or all of the skills to succeed in entry-level positions, but only 40 percent believe that they have the skills to advance.

. . .

In terms of specific skills, the employers didn’t give many A’s or fail many either. The employers were asked to rank new graduates on 12 key areas, and the grads did best in teamwork, ethical judgments and intercultural work, and worst in global knowledge, self-direction and writing.

Employers Ratings of College Graduates Preparedness on 1-10 Scale

Category Mean Rating % giving high (8-10) rating % giving low (1-5) rating

Teamwork 7.0 39% 17%

Ethical judgment 6.9 38% 19%

Intercultural skills 6.9 38% 19%

Social responsibility 6.7 35% 21%

Quantitative reasoning 6.7 32% 23%

Oral communication 6.6 30% 23%

Self-knowledge 6.5 28% 26%

Adaptability 6.3 24% 30%

Critical thinking 6.3 22% 31%

Writing 6.1 26% 37%

Self-direction 5.9 23% 42%

Global knowledge 5.7 18% 46%

To the extent that employers give graduates mixed grades, that raises the question of how they determine who is really prepared. Many of the existing tools appear to be insufficient, the poll found.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
This study is misleading in the sense that large employers generally hire above-average graduates. This skews the results upward with respect to the entire population of college graduates. Colleges have a long way to go in modern times.

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

Question
What factors most heavily influence student performance and desire to take more courses in a given discipline?

Answer
These outcomes are too complex to be predicted very well. Sex and age of instructors have almost no impact. Teaching evaluations have a very slight impact, but there are just too many complexities to find dominant factors cutting across a majority of students.

Oreopoulos said the findings bolster a conclusion he came to in a previous academic paper that subjective qualities, such as how a professor fares on student evaluations, tell you more about how well students will perform and how likely they are to stay in a given course than do observable traits such as age or gender. (He points out, though, that even the subjective qualities aren’t strong indicators of student success.) “If I were concerned about improving teaching, I would focus on hiring teachers who perform well on evaluations rather than focus on age or gender,” he said.
Elia Powers, "Faculty Gender and Student Performance," Inside Higher Ed, June 21, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/21/gender

Jensen Comment
A problem with increased reliance on teaching evaluations to measure performance of instructors is that this, in turn, tends to grade inflation --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation

Question
What parts of a high school curriculum are the best predictors of success as a science major in college?

New research by professors at Harvard University and the University of Virginia has found that no single high school science course has an impact beyond that type of science, when it comes to predicting success in college science. However, the researchers found that a rigorous mathematics curriculum in high school has a significant impact on performance in college science courses. The research, which will be published in Science, runs counter to the “physics first” movement in which some educators have been advocating that physics come before biology and chemistry in the high school curriculum. The study was based on analysis of a broad pool of college students, their high school course patterns, and their performance in college science.
Inside Higher Ed, July 27, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/07/27/qt

Jensen Comment
Now we have this when some colleges are trying to promote applications and admissions by dropping the SAT testing requirements for admission. In Texas, the Top 10% of any state high school class do not have to even take the SAT for admission to any state university in Texas. Of course high schools may still have a rigorous mathematics curriculum, but what high school student aiming for the 10% rule is going to take any rigorous course that is not required for high school graduation? The problem is that rigorous elective courses carry a higher risk of lowering the all-important grade point average.

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

Grades are even worse than tests as predictors of success

"The Wrong Traditions in Admissions," by William E. Sedlacek, Inside Higher Ed, July 27, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/07/27/sedlacek

Grades and test scores have worked well as the prime criteria to evaluate applicants for admission, haven’t they? No! You’ve probably heard people say that over and over again, and figured that if the admissions experts believe it, you shouldn’t question them. But that long held conventional wisdom just isn’t true. Whatever value tests and grades have had in the past has been severely diminished. There are many reasons for this conclusion, including greater diversity among applicants by race, gender, sexual orientation and other dimensions that interact with career interests. Predicting success with so much variety among applicants with grades and test scores asks too much of those previous stalwarts of selection. They were never intended to carry such a heavy expectation and they just can’t do the job anymore, even if they once did. Another reason is purely statistical. We have had about 100 years to figure out how to measure verbal and quantitative skills better but we just can’t do it.

Grades are even worse than tests as predictors of success. The major reason is grade inflation. Everyone is getting higher grades these days, including those in high school, college, graduate, and professional school. Students are bunching up at the top of the grade distribution and we can’t distinguish among them in selecting who would make the best student at the next level.

We need a fresh approach. It is not good enough to feel constrained by the limitations of our current ways of conceiving of tests and grades. Instead of asking; “How can we make the SAT and other such tests better?” or “How can we adjust grades to make them better predictors of success?” we need to ask; “What kinds of measures will meet our needs now and in the future?” We do not need to ignore our current tests and grades, we need to add some new measures that expand the potential we can derive from assessment.
We appear to have forgotten why tests were created in the first place. While they were always considered to be useful in evaluating candidates, they were also considered to be more equitable than using prior grades because of the variation in quality among high schools.

Test results should be useful to educators — whether involved in academics or student services — by providing the basis to help students learn better and to analyze their needs. As currently designed, tests do not accomplish these objectives. How many of you have ever heard a colleague say “I can better educate my students because I know their SAT scores”? We need some things from our tests that currently we are not getting. We need tests that are fair to all and provide a good assessment of the developmental and learning needs of students, while being useful in selecting outstanding applicants. Our current tests don’t do that.

The rallying cry of “all for one and one for all” is one that is used often in developing what are thought of as fair and equitable measures. Commonly, the interpretation of how to handle diversity is to hone and fine-tune tests so they are work equally well for everyone (or at least to try to do that). However, if different groups have different experiences and varied ways of presenting their attributes and abilities, it is unlikely that one could develop a single measure, scale, test item etc. that could yield equally valid scores for all. If we concentrate on results rather than intentions, we could conclude that it is important to do an equally good job of selection for each group, not that we need to use the same measures for all to accomplish that goal. Equality of results, not process is most important.

Therefore, we should seek to retain the variance due to culture, race, gender, and other aspects of non-traditionality that may exist across diverse groups in our measures, rather than attempt to eliminate it. I define non-traditional persons as those with cultural experiences different from those of white middle-class males of European descent; those with less power to control their lives; and those who experience discrimination in the United States.

While the term “noncognitive” appears to be precise and “scientific” sounding, it has been used to describe a wide variety of attributes. Mostly it has been defined as something other than grades and test scores, including activities, school honors, personal statements, student involvement etc. In many cases those espousing noncognitive variables have confused a method (e.g. letters of recommendation) with what variable is being measured. One can look for many different things in a letter. Robert Sternberg’s system of viewing intelligence provides a model, but is important to know what sorts of abilities are being assessed and that those attributes are not just proxies for verbal and quantitative test scores. Noncognitive variables appear to be in Sternberg’s experiential and contextual domains, while standardized tests tend to reflect the componential domain. Noncognitive variables are useful for all students, they are particularly critical for non-traditional students, since standardized tests and prior grades may provide only a limited view of their potential.

I and my colleagues and students have developed a system of noncognitive variables that has worked well in many situations. The eight variables in the system are self-concept, realistic self-appraisal, handling the system (racism), long range goals, strong support person, community, leadership, and nontraditional knowledge. Measures of these dimensions are available at no cost in a variety of articles and in a book, Beyond the Big Test.

This Web site has previously featured how Oregon State University has used a version of this system very successfully in increasing their diversity and student success. Aside from increased retention of students, better referrals for student services have been experienced at Oregon State. The system has also been employed in selecting Gates Millennium Scholars. This program, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, provides full scholarships to undergraduate and graduate students of color from low-income families. The SAT scores of those not selected for scholarships were somewhat higher than those selected. To date this program has provided scholarships to more than 10,000 students attending more than 1,300 different colleges and universities. Their college GPAs are about 3.25, with five year retention rates of 87.5 percent and five year graduation rates of 77.5 percent, while attending some of the most selective colleges in the country. About two thirds are majoring in science and engineering.

The Washington State Achievers program has also employed the noncognitive variable system discussed above in identifying students from certain high schools that have received assistance from an intensive school reform program also funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. More than 40 percent of the students in this program are white, and overall the students in the program are enrolling in colleges and universities in the state and are doing well. The program provides high school and college mentors for students. The College Success Foundation is introducing a similar program in Washington, D.C., using the noncognitive variables my colleagues and I have developed.

Recent articles in this publication have discussed programs at the Educational Testing Service for graduate students and Tufts University for undergraduates that have incorporated noncognitive variables. While I applaud the efforts for reasons I have discussed here, there are questions I would ask of each program. What variables are you assessing in the program? Do the variables reflect diversity conceptually? What evidence do you have that the variables assessed correlate with student success? Are the evaluators of the applications trained to understand how individuals from varied backgrounds may present their attributes differently? Have the programs used the research available on noncognitive variables in developing their systems? How well are the individuals selected doing in school compared to those rejected or those selected using another system? What are the costs to the applicants? If there are increased costs to applicants, why are they not covered by ETS or Tufts?

Until these and related questions are answered these two programs seem like interesting ideas worth watching. In the meantime we can learn from the programs described above that have been successful in employing noncognitive variables. It is important for educators to resist half measures and to confront fully the many flaws of the traditional ways higher education has evaluated applicants.

William E. Sedlacek is professor emeritus at the University of Maryland at College Park. His latest book is Beyond the Big Test: Noncognitive Assessment in Higher Education

A different way to think about assessment

January 26, 2007 message from Carnegie President [carnegiepresident@carnegiefoundation.org]

A different way to think about ... assessment In the most recent issue of Change magazine, I join several other authors to examine higher education's ongoing responsibility to tell the story of student learning with care and precision. Fulfilling this responsibility at the institutional level requires ongoing deliberations among colleagues and stakeholders about the specific learning goals we seek and the broad educational purposes we espouse. What will motivate such discussions?

In this month's Carnegie Perspectives, Lloyd Bond makes a strong case for the use of common examinations as a powerful form of assessment as well as a fruitful context for faculty deliberations about their goals for students. Using an institutional example from the Carnegie/Hewlett project on strengthening teaching and learning at community colleges, Lloyd describes a particular example of this principle and how it supports faculty communication and student learning.

Carnegie has created a forum—Carnegie Conversations—where you can engage publicly with Lloyd and read and respond to what others have to say about this article at http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/perspectives/january2007

Or you may respond to the author privately through CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org

We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Lee S. Shulman
President The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning --- http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl/

Just-In-Time Teaching --- http://134.68.135.1/jitt/

What is Just-in-Time Teaching?
G. Novak, gnovak@iupui.edu

Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT for short) is a teaching and learning strategy based on the interaction between web-based study assignments and an active learner classroom. Students respond electronically to carefully constructed web-based assignments which are due shortly before class, and the instructor reads the student submissions "just-in-time" to adjust the classroom lesson to suit the students' needs. Thus, the heart of JiTT is the "feedback loop" formed by the students' outside-of-class preparation that fundamentally affects what happens during the subsequent in-class time together.
What is Just-in-Time Teaching designed to accomplish?
JiTT is aimed at many of the challenges facing students and instructors in today's classrooms. Student populations are diversifying. In addition to the traditional nineteen-year-old recent high school graduates, we now have a kaleidoscope of "non-traditional" students: older students, working part time students, commuting students, and, at the service academies, military cadets. They come to our courses with a broad spectrum of educational backgrounds, interests, perspectives, and capabilities that compel individualized, tailored instruction. They need motivation and encouragement to persevere. Consistent, friendly support can make the difference between a successful experience and a fruitless effort. It can even mean the difference between graduating and dropping out. Education research has made us more aware of learning style differences and of the importance of passing some control of the learning process over to the students. Active learner environments yield better results but they are harder to manage than lecture oriented approaches. Three of the "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education" encourage student-faculty contact, increased time for student study, and cooperative learning between students.
To confront these challenges, the Just-in-Time Teaching strategy pursues three major goals:

1. To maximize the efficacy of the classroom session, where human instructors are present.

2. To structure the out-of-class time for maximum learning benefit.

3. To create and sustain team spirit. Students and instructors work as a team toward the same objective, to help all students pass the course with the maximum amount of retainable knowledge.

What JiTT is Not
Although Just-in-Time Teaching makes heavy use of the web, it is not to be confused with either distance learning (DL) or with computer-aided instruction (CAI). Virtually all JiTT instruction occurs in a classroom with human instructors. The web materials, added as a pedagogical resource, act primarily as a communication tool and secondarily as content provider and organizer. JiTT is also not an attempt to 'process' large numbers of students by employing computers to do massive grading jobs.
The JiTT Feedback Loop

The Web Component
JiTT web pages fall into three major categories:

1. Student assignments in preparation for the classroom activity: WarmUps and Puzzles.

2. Enrichment pages. Short essays on practical, everyday applications of the course subject matter, peppered with URLs to interesting material on the web. These essays have proven themselves to be an important motivating factor in introductory service courses, where students often doubt the current relevance the subject.

3. Stand alone instructional material, such as simulation programs and spreadsheet exercises.
For detailed examples of the JiTT web resources, please see the JiTT resources page.

WarmUps and Puzzles are the heart of the JiTT web component. These are short, web-based assignments, prompting the student to think about the upcoming lesson and answer a few simple questions prior to class. These questions, when fully discussed, often have complex answers. The students are expected to develop the answer as far as they can on their own. We finish the job in the classroom. These assignments are due just a few hours before class time. The responses are delivered to the instructor electronically to form the framework for the classroom activities that follow. Typically, the instructors duplicates sample responses on transparencies and takes them to class. The interactive classroom session, built around these responses, replaces the traditional lecture/recitation format.
Students complete the WarmUp assignments before they receive any formal instruction on a particular topic. They earn credit for answering a question, substantiated by prior knowledge and whatever they managed to glean from the textbook. The answers do not have to be complete, or even correct. In fact, partially correct responses are particularly useful as classroom discussion fodder. In contrast to WarmUps, Puzzle exercises are assigned to students after they have received formal instruction on a particular topic. The Puzzles serve as the framework for a wrap-up session on a particular topic.
The WarmUps, and to some extent the Puzzles, are undergirded by education research and target a variety of specific issues. The list of targeted issues might contain: developing concepts and vocabulary, modeling -- connecting concepts and equations, estimation- getting a feel for magnitudes, relating technical scientific statements to "common sense", understanding the scope of applicability of equations, etc. The targeted issues are highly content specific. They may involve the characteristics of a particular class (e.g. the background skills of a particular student body).
In preparing WarmUp assignments for an upcoming class meeting, we first create a conceptual outline of the lesson content. This task is similar to the preparation of a traditional passive lecture. As we work on the outline, we pay attention to the pedagogical issues that we need to focus on when in the classroom. Are we introducing new concepts and/or new notation? Are we building on a previous lesson, and if so, what bears repeating? What are the important points we wish the students to remember from the session? What are the common difficulties typical students will face when exposed to this material? (Previous classroom experience and teaching and learning literature can be immensely helpful here). Once this outline has been created, we create broadly based questions that will force students to grapple with as many of the issues as possible. We are hoping to receive, in the student responses, the framework on which we build the in-class experience.

The Active Learner Classroom

The JiTT classroom session is intimately linked to the electronic preparatory assignments the students complete outside of class. Exactly how the classroom time is spent depends on a variety of issues such as class size, classroom facilities, and student and instructor personalities. Mini-lectures (10 min max) are often interspersed with demos, classroom discussion, worksheet exercises, and even hands-on mini-labs. Regardless, the common key is that the classroom component, whether interactive lecture or student activities, is informed by an analysis of various student responses.
In a JiTT classroom students construct the same content as in a passive lecture with two important added benefits. First, having completed the web assignment very recently, they enter the classroom ready to actively engage in the activities. Secondly, they have a feeling of ownership since the interactive lesson is based on their own wording and understanding of the relevant issues.
The give and take in the classroom suggests future WarmUp questions that will reflect the mood and the level of expertise in the class at hand. In this way the feedback loop is closed with the students having played a major part in the endeavor.
From the instructor's point of view, the lesson content remains pretty much the same from semester to semester with only minor shifts in emphasis. From the students' perspective, however, the lessons are always fresh and interesting, with a lot of input from the class.
We designed JiTT to improve student learning in our own classrooms and have been encouraged by the results, both attitudinal and cognitive. We attribute this success to three factors that enhance student learning, identified by Alexander Astin^* in his thirty year study of college student success:

increased amounts and quality of student-student interaction

student-faculty interaction

student study outside of class.

By fostering these, JiTT promotes student learning and satisfaction.
^*Astin, Alexander: What matters in college? Four critical years revisited (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1993).

Bob Jensen's threads on tools and tricks of the trade are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

What works in education?

Perhaps Colleges Should Think About This

"School Ups Grade by Going Online," by Cyrus Farivar, Wired News, October 12, 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65266,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_html

Until last year, Walt Whitman Middle School 246 in Brooklyn was considered a failing school by the state of New York.

But with the help of a program called HIPSchools that uses rapid communication between parents and teachers through e-mail and voice mail, M.S. 246 has had a dramatic turnaround. The premise behind "HIP" comes from Keys Technology Group's mission of "helping involve parents."

The school has seen distinct improvement in the performance of its 1300 students, as well as regular attendance, which has risen to 98 percent (an increase of over 10 percent) in the last two years according to Georgine Brown-Thompson, academic intervention services coordinator at M.S. 246.

Continued in the article

September 2, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

"CONSUMER REPORTS" FOR RESEARCH IN EDUCATION

The What Works Clearinghouse was established in 2002 by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences with $18.5 million in funding to "provide educators, policymakers, researchers, and the public with a central and trusted source of scientific evidence of what works in education." The Clearinghouse reviews, according to relevance and validity, the "effectiveness of replicable educational interventions (programs, products, practices, and policies) that intend to improve student outcomes." This summer, the Clearinghouse released two of its planned reports: peer-assisted learning interventions and middle school math curricula. For more information about the What Works Clearinghouse and descriptions of all topics to be evaluated, go to http://www.w-w-c.org/

See also:

"'What Works' Research Site Unveiled" by Debra Viadero EDUCATION WEEK, vol. 23, no. 42, pp. 1, 33, July 14, 2004 http://www.edweek.org/ew/ew_printstory.cfm?slug=42Whatworks.h23

"'What Works' Site Opens Dialogue on Research" Letter to Editor from Talbot Bielefeldt, Center for Applied Research in Educational Technology, International Society for Technology in Education EDUCATION WEEK, vol. 23, no. 44, p. 44, August 11, 2004 http://www.edweek.org/ew/ew_printstory.cfm?slug=44Letter.h23

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

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/

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

May 5, 2005 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

TEACHING, TEACHING TECHNOLOGIES, AND VIEWS OF KNOWLEDGE

In "Teaching as Performance in the Electronic Classroom" (FIRST MONDAY, vol. 10, no. 4, April 2005), Doug Brent, professor in the Faculty of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary, presents two views of teaching: teaching as a "performance" and teaching as a transfer of knowledge through text, a "thing." He discusses the social groups that have stakes in each view and how teaching will be affected by the view and group that gains primacy. "If the group that values teaching as performance has the most influence, we will put more energy into developing flexible courseware that promotes social engagement and interaction. . . . If the group that sees teaching as textual [i.e., a thing] has the most influence, we will develop more elaborate technologies for delivering courses as online texts, emphasising the role of the student as audience rather than as participant." Brent's paper is available online at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_4/brent/index.html .

First Monday [ISSN 1396-0466] is an online, peer-reviewed journal whose aim is to publish original articles about the Internet and the global information infrastructure. It is published in cooperation with the University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago. For more information, contact: First Monday, c/o Edward Valauskas, Chief Editor, PO Box 87636, Chicago IL 60680-0636 USA; email: ejv@uic.edu; Web: http://firstmonday.dk/.

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LAPTOPS IN THE CLASSROOM

The theme for the latest issue of NEW DIRECTIONS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING (vol. 2005, issue 101, Spring 2005) is "Enhancing Learning with Laptops in the Classroom." Centered on the faculty development program at Clemson University, the issue's purpose is "to show that university instructors can and do make pedagogically productive and novel use of laptops in the classroom" and "to advise institutional leaders on how to make a laptop mandate successful at their university." The publication is available online http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jhome/86011233 .

New Directions for Teaching and Learning [ISSN: 0271-0633], a quarterly journal published by Wiley InterScience, offers a "comprehensive range of ideas and techniques for improving college teaching based on the experience of seasoned instructors and on the latest findings of educational and psychological researchers." The journal is available both in print and online formats.

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NEW E-JOURNAL ON LEARNING AND EVALUATION

STUDIES IN LEARNING, EVALUATION, INNOVATION AND DEVELOPMENT is a new peer-reviewed electronic journal that "supports emerging scholars and the development of evidence-based practice and that publishes research and scholarship about teaching and learning in formal, semi-formal and informal educational settings and sites." Papers in the current issue include:

"Can Students Improve Performance by Clicking More? Engaging Students Through Online Delivery" by Jenny Kofoed

"Managing Learner Interactivity: A Precursor to Knowledge Exchange" by Ken Purnell, Jim Callan, Greg Whymark and Anna Gralton

"Online Learning Predicates Teamwork: Collaboration Underscores Student Engagement" by Greg Whymark, Jim Callan and Ken Purnell

Studies in Learning, Evaluation, Innovation and Development [ISSN 1832-2050] will be published at least once a year by the LEID (Learning, Evaluation, Innovation and Development) Centre, Division of Teaching and Learning Services, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton, Queensland 4702 Australia. For more information contact: Patrick Danaher, tel: +61-7-49306417; email: p.danaher@cqu.edu.au. Current and back issues are available at http://www.sleid.cqu.edu.au/index.php .

Bob Jensen's threads on education resources are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm#Resources

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

September 2, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

SURVEY ON QUALITY AND EXTENT OF ONLINE EDUCATION

The Sloan Consortium's 2003 Survey of Online Learning wanted to know would students, faculty, and institutions embrace online education as a delivery method and would the quality of online education match that of face-to-face instruction. The survey found strong evidence that students are willing to sign up for online courses and that institutions consider online courses part of a "critical long-term strategy for their institution." It is less clear that faculty have embraced online teaching with the same degree of enthusiasm. The survey's findings are available in "Sizing the Opportunity: The Quality & Extent of Online Education in the U.S., 2002 and 2003" by I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman, Sloan Center for Online Education at Olin and Babson Colleges. The complete report is online at http://www.sloan-c.org/resources/sizing_opportunity.pdf

The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is a consortium of institutions and organizations committed "to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For more information, see http://www.sloan-c.org/

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

Computer-Based Assessment

Free Book on Assessment in Europe (with particular focus in computer-based assessment) --- http://crell.jrc.it/RP/reporttransition.pdf
The Transition to Computer-Based Assessment; New Approaches to Skills Assessment and Implications for Large-scale Testing
by Friedrich Scheuermann & Julius Björnsson (Eds.)
European Commission Joint Research Centre
Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen Contact information
Address: Unit G09, CRELL TP-361, Via Enrico Fermi, 2749; 21027 Ispra (VA), Italy
E-mail: friedrich.scheuermann@jrc.it
Tel.: +39-0332-78.6111
Fax: +39-0332-78.5733
Web http://ipsc.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ http://www.jrc.ec.europa.eu/

Table of Contents --- http://crell.jrc.it/RP/reporttransition.pdf

Introduction 6

PART I: ASSESSMENT NEEDS AND EUROPEAN APPROACHES

Assessing and Teaching 21st Century Skills Assessment Call to Action 13
Robert Kozma

The European Coherent Framework of Indicators and Benchmarks and Implications for Computer-based Assessment 24
Oyvind Bjerkestrand

Computer-based Assessment and the Measurement of Creativity in Education 29
Ernesto Villalba

PART II: GENERAL ISSUES OF COMPUTER-BASED TESTING

Experiences from Large-Scale Computer-Based Testing in the USA 39
Brent Bridgeman

National Tests in Denmark – CAT as a Pedagogic Tool 45
Jakob Wandall

Introducing Large-scale Computerized Assessment – Lessons Learned and Future Challenges 51
Eli Moe

Large-scale Computer-based Testing of Foreign Language Competences across Europe: Technical Requirements and Implementation 57
Jostein Ryssevik

Delivery Platforms for National and International Computer-based Surveys 63
Sam Haldane eInclusion, eAccessibility and Design-for-All Issues in the Context of European Computer-based Assessment 68 Klaus Reich & Christian Petter Gender differences in cognitive tests: a consequence of gender dependent preferences for specific information presentation formats? 75 Romain Martin & Marilyn Binkley

PART III: TRANSITION FROM PAPER-AND-PENCIL TO COMPUTER-BASED TESTING

Risks and Benefits of CBT versus PBT in High-Stakes Testing 83
Gerben van Lent Transformational Computer-based Testing 92 Martin Ripley 5

Reflections on Paper-and-Pencil Tests to eAssessments: Narrow and Broadband Paths to 21st Century Challenges 99
Katherina Kikis

Transition to Computer-based Assessment: Motivations and Considerations 104
René Meijer

Transitioning to Computer-Based Assessments: A Question of Costs 108
Matthieu Farcot & Thibaud Latour

Shifting from Paper-and-Pencil to Computer-based Testing: Requisites, Challenges and Consequences for Testing Outcomes - A Croatian Perspective 117
Vesna Busko

Comparing Paper-and-Pencil and Online Assessment of Reasoning Skills: A Pilot Study for Introducing TAO in Large-scale Assessment in Hungary 120
Benő Csapó, Gyöngyvér Molnár & Krisztina R. Tóth

PART IV: METHODOLOGIES OF COMPUTER-BASED TESTING

Computerized and Adaptive Testing in Educational Assessment 127
Nathan A. Thompson & David J. Weiss

Computerized Adaptive Testing of Arithmetic at the Entrance of Primary School Training College (WISCAT-pabo) 134
Theo J.H.M. Eggen & Gerard J.J.M. Straetmans

Issues in Computerized Ability Measurement: Getting out of the Jingle and Jangle Jungle 145
Oliver Wilhelm

New Constructs, Methods, & Directions for Computer-Based Assessment 151
Patrick C. Kyllonen

Measuring Complex Problem Solving: The MicroDYN Approach 157
Samuel Greiff & Joachim Funke

Testing for Equivalence of Test Data across Media 164
Ulrich Schroeders

PART V: THE PISA 2006 COMPUTER-BASED ASSESSMENT OF SCIENCE (CBAS)

Utilising the Potential of Computer Delivered Surveys in Assessing Scientific Literacy 172
Ron Martin

Are Icelandic Boys really better on Computerized Tests than Conventional ones? Interaction between Gender, Test Modality and Test Performance 178
Almar M. Halldórsson, Pippa McKelvie & Júlíus K. Björnsson

CBAS in Korea: Experiences, Results and Challenges 194
Mee-Kyeong Lee

How did Danish Students solve the PISA CBAS items? Right and Wrong Answers from a Gender Perspective 201
Helene Sørensen & Annemarie Møller Andersen

Computer Grading of Essays

Sociology professor designs SAGrader software for grading student essays
Student essays always seem to be riddled with the same sorts of flaws. So sociology professor Ed Brent decided to hand the work off to a computer. Students in Brent's Introduction to Sociology course at the University of Missouri-Columbia now submit drafts through the SAGrader software he designed. It counts the number of points he wanted his students to include and analyzes how well concepts are explained. And within seconds, students have a score. It used to be the students who looked for shortcuts, shopping for papers online or pilfering parts of an assignment with a simple Google search. Now, teachers and professors are realizing that they, too, can tap technology for a facet of academia long reserved for a teacher alone with a red pen. Software now scores everything from routine assignments in high school English classes to an essay on the GMAT, the standardized test for business school admission. (The essay section just added to the Scholastic Aptitude Test for the college-bound is graded by humans). Though Brent and his two teaching assistants still handle final papers and grades students are encouraged to use SAGrader for a better shot at an "A."
"Computers Now Grading Students' Writing," ABC News, May 8, 2005 ---
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=737451
Jensen Comment: Aside from some of the obvious advantages such as grammar checking, students should have a more difficult time protesting that the grading is subjective and unfair in terms of the teacher's alleged favored versus less-favored students. Actually computers have been used for some time in grading essays, including the GMAT graduate admission test --- http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=723

References to computer grading of essays --- http://coeweb.fiu.edu/webassessment/references.htm

You can read about PEG at http://snipurl.com/PEGgrade

MEDICAL- AND BUSINESS-SCHOOL ADMISSION TESTS WILL BE GIVEN BY COMPUTER
Applicants to medical and business schools will soon be able to leave their No. 2 pencils at home. Both the Medical College Admission Test and the Graduate Management Admission Test are ditching their paper versions in favor of computer formats. The Association of American Medical Colleges has signed a contract with Thomson Prometric, part of the Thomson Corporation, to offer the computer-based version of the MCAT beginning in 2007. The computerized version is being offered on a trial basis in a few locations until then.The GMAT, which has been offered both on paper and by computer since 1997, will be offered only by computer starting in January, officials of the Graduate Management Admission Council said. The test will be developed by ACT Inc. and delivered by Pearson VUE, a part of Pearson Education Inc.The Law School Admission Council has no immediate plans to change its test, which will continue to be given on paper.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 5, 2005, Page A13

Jensen Comment: Candidates for the CPA are now allowed to only take this examination via computer testing centers. The GMAT has been an optional computer test since 1997. For years the GMAT has used computerized grading of essay questions and was a pioneer in this regard.

Assessment in General

Assessment/Learning Issues:
Measurement and the No-Significant Differences

Assessment of new technology in learning is impossible to formally evaluate with both rigor and practicality. The main problem is the constantly changing technology. By the time assessment research is made available, the underlying technologies may have been improved to a point where the findings are no longer relevant under the technologies existing at the time of the research. What can be done for students after my university installed a campus-wide network is vastly different than the before-network days. A classroom failure using last year's technology may not be appropriate to compare with a similar effort using newer technology. For example, early LCD panel projections from computers in classrooms were awful in the early 1990s. In the beginning, LCD panels had no color and had to be used in virtually dark classrooms. This was a bad experience for most students and instructors (including me). Then new technology in active matrix LCD panels led to color but the classrooms still had to be dark. Shortly thereafter, new technologies in overhead projection brightness allowed for more lighting in classrooms while using LCD panels. However, many classrooms are not yet equipped with light varying controls to optimally set lighting levels. Newer trends with even better three-beam projectors and LCD data projectors changed everything for electronic classrooms, because now classrooms can have normal lighting as long as lights are not aimed directly at the screen. The point here is that early experiences with the first LCD panel technology are no longer relevant in situations where the latest projection technology, especially in fully equipped electronic classrooms, is available. Unfortunately, there is a tendency among some faculty to be so discouraged by one or two failed attempts that they abandon future efforts using newer technologies.

One of the most creative attempts to evaluate effectiveness from a Total Quality Management (TQM) perspective is reported by Prabhu and Ramarapu (1994). This is an attempt to measure learning using a TQM database that can be used to compare alternative teaching methods or entire programs. [Prabhu, S.S. and N.K. Ramarapu (1994). “A prototype database to monitor course effectiveness: A TQM approach,” T H E Technological Horizons in Education, October, 99-103.]

It is easy to become discouraged with first efforts using older technologies. Many faculty and students became highly frustrated with the early complexities of using the Internet and/or campus networks that were not user friendly. Unless they took the time and trouble to become well versed in UNIX programming and became experienced hackers, the Internet turned into a totally discouraging nightmare. Now with the WWW and many other user-friendly innovations in campus and international networking, the need to become an experienced hacker is vastly reduced.

"When Coaching and Testing Collide," by Lee S. Shulman, Carnegie Perspectives," May 2008 ---
http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/perspectives/sub.asp?key=245&subkey=2598

It's a scene we have watched dozens of times in the movies. A young man or woman of modest talent tries out for the baseball or football or basketball team under the tutelage of a gruff, demanding coach who expresses initial doubts about the likelihood that the kid will prove himself or herself worthy of a spot on the team. The coach is tough and persistent, setting high standards and then mercilessly driving all his charges to meet them. In the climactic scene at the season's end, the good guys or gals are losing by several baskets, or runs, or a touchdown—depending on the sport. "Send me in, coach," pleads our young hero/ine, which coach reluctantly does. The kid scores the winning points, and the team wins. The coach turns out to have a heart of gold, and the reasons for his seeming cruelty become apparent.

What exactly is it that the coach provides the aspirant? Let me propose five processes associated with both the coach and mentor roles: 1) technique, learned through endless drill; 2) strategy, that allows the person who is coached to become capable of a conception of the work that will turn out to be pivotal in their eventual victory; 3) motivation, which produces a "Rocky-like" level of commitment that will help them exceed their own and others' expectations; 4) vision, where players come together in a new vision of the process and their capabilities for success; and 5) identity, whereby the protagonist not only wins, but is transformed, with an internalized new sense of self.

In sports there is always a clear line between the coaching situation and the performance context. When the final jump shot is made from the three-point line by the basketball player, the coach can't jump onto the court and give the ball the extra momentum or spin it might need. I prefer to call such typical relationships between a coach/mentor and player/protégé examples of unmediated mentoring. No separate product comes in the middle between the coaching and the performing that renders the relative contributions of the coach and the coached inherently ambiguous because the entire performance is visible and is itself the basis for evaluating success or failure.

There is, however, an entire genre of mediated mentoring. The performance is not directly observed and has yielded a product which is the focal point of competition and evaluation. Thus in the case of mediated performances, the respective roles of coach and performer are inherently invisible. Although the five processes are in place and just as transformative, there is inherently no way to discern how much of the work was done independently by the candidate, by peers or by advisors.

Whenever mentoring is mediated by a product whose actual authoring processes are not directly observable, as is the case with literature, objects of architectural or mechanical design, scholarly publications, doctoral dissertations, and even paintings, assessment of individual competence is problematic. But are these problems of educational measurement or a new set of realities regarding the conditions of expert performance? Stanford education professor Sam Wineburg and others point out that the crux of the problem may not be measurement error but rather the inherently social and interactive character of the performances whose competence is assessed. Writing is and should be critiqued and edited, as should painting, the designs for buildings and the research performed in scientific laboratories. To avoid mentoring merely to ensure the legitimacy of individual test scores might even be judged a form of malpractice! So we are faced with an essential tension between the inherently social character of most forms of complex human performance and the psychometric imperative to estimate a "true score" for ability or any other personal trait using the individual as the unit of analysis.

In an education setting, the distinction between the scores that a student earns on any test-like event—multiple choice test, essay exam, portfolio or senior sermon in a seminary—and their underlying "true" capability is a reflection of the distinction, borrowed perhaps from the field of linguistics, between competence and performance. Psychometrics rests on the claim that the observed performance is a valid indicator if it tracks the underlying competence faithfully. But what if mentored or coached performances actually track underlying competence more validly than measurement of students working alone? What if the composition written by a student in the presence of his editing team is a better indicator of his future writing competence than having him write alone?

That is what sits at the heart of the puzzle.

My proposal for "getting over" this essential tension is three-fold: making changes in the processes of assessment, making explicit the parameters of mentoring, and developing a clear code of ethical principles for both assessment and mentoring. At the heart of these proposals is the principle of transparency. Everything possible must be done to ensure that the roles of mentors, peers and students be transparently clear in any mediated mentoring activity. There should be ways of reporting on the character of coaching for test performance that make the efforts of the coach entirely transparent to assessment.

I have often written that collaboration is a marriage of insufficiencies; that students can work together in ways that scaffold and support each others' learning, and in ways that support each others' knowledge. Now I call for a marriage of sufficiencies to overcome the essential tensions between individual work and collaborative performance, coaching support and independent assessment, the mentor as an agent of zealous advocacy and the mentor as a steward of the commons.

As Dewey observed, we will not solve this problem, we will get over it. It is built in to the psychometric paradox: Our measurement models are psychometric but our assessment needs are often sociometric, requiring the measurement of socially scaffolded and joint productions.

Carnegie Perspectives --- http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/perspectives/

From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on November 17, 2006

TITLE: Colleges, Accreditors Seek Better Ways to Measure Learning
REPORTER: Daniel Golden
DATE: Nov 13, 2006 PAGE: B1
LINK: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116338508743121260.html?mod=djem_jiewr_ac
TOPICS: Accounting

SUMMARY: The article discusses college- or university-wide accreditation by regional accreditation bodies and reaction to the Spellings Commission report. Questions extend the accreditation discussion to AACSB accreditation.

QUESTIONS:
1.) What is accreditation? The article describes university-wide accreditation by regional accrediting bodies. Why is this step necessary?

2.) Does your business school have accreditation by Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB)? How does this accreditation differ from university-wide accreditation?

3.) Why are regional accrediting agencies planning to meet with Secretary Spellings?

4.) Did you consider accreditation in deciding where to go to college or university? Why or why not?

5.) Do you think improvements in assessing student learning are important, as the Spellings Commission argues and accreditors are now touting? Support your answer.

SMALL GROUP ASSIGNMENT: Find out about your college or university's accreditation. When was the last accreditation review? Were there any concerns expressed by the accreditors? How has the university responded to any concerns expressed?

Once these data are gathered, discuss in class in groups:

Has this information been easy or difficult to find? Do you agree with the assessment of concerns about the institution and/or the university's responses?

Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island

TITLE: Colleges, Accreditors Seek Better Ways to Measure Learning
REPORTER: Daniel Golden
DATE: Nov 13, 2006 PAGE: B1
LINK: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116338508743121260.html?mod=djem_jiewr_ac

At the University of the South, a highly regarded liberal-arts college in Sewanee, Tenn., the dozen professors who teach the required freshman Shakespeare course design their classes differently, assigning their favorite plays and writing and grading their own exams.

But starting next fall, one question on the final exam will be the same across all of the classes, and instructors won't grade their own students' answers to that question. Instead, to assure more objective evaluation, the professors will trade exams and grade each other's students.

The English department adopted this change -- despite faculty grumbling about losing some classroom independence -- under pressure from the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges. The association, one of the six regional groups that accredit nearly 3,000 U.S. colleges, told the University of the South that, to have its accreditation renewed, it would have to do a better job of measuring student learning. Without such accreditation, the school's students wouldn't qualify for federal financial aid.

The shift "does cut into the individual faculty member's autonomy, and that's disturbing," says Jennifer Michael, an associate professor. "On the other hand, it's making us think about how do we figure out what students are actually learning. Maybe having them take and pass a course doesn't mean they've learned everything we think they have."

Regional accreditors used to limit their examinations to colleges' financial solvency and educational resources, with the result that well-established schools enjoyed rubber-stamp approval. But now they are increasingly holding colleges, prestigious or not, responsible for undergraduates' grasp of such skills as writing and critical thinking. And prodded by regional accreditors, colleges are adopting various means of assessing learning in addition to classroom grades, from electronic portfolios that collect a student's work from different courses to standardized testing and special projects for graduating seniors.

The accreditors aren't moving fast enough for the Bush administration, though. In the wake of a federally sponsored study published in 2005 that showed declining literacy among college-educated Americans, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and a commission she appointed on the future of higher education want colleges to be more accountable for -- and candid about -- student performance, and they have criticized accreditors as barriers to reform.

Congress sets the standards for accreditors, and the Education Department periodically reviews compliance with those standards. Congress identified "success with respect to student achievement" as a requirement for accreditation in 1992, and then in 1998 made it the top priority. That imperative, along with the advent of online education, has spurred accreditors to rethink their longtime emphasis on such criteria as the number of faculty members with doctorates. Since 2000, several regional accreditors have revamped their rules to emphasize student learning.

"Accreditors have moved the ball forward," says Kati Haycock, a member of the Spellings commission and the director of the nonprofit Education Trust in Washington, D.C., which seeks better schooling for disadvantaged students. "Not far enough, not fast enough, but they have moved the ball forward."

An issue paper written for the commission by Robert Dickeson, a former president of the University of Northern Colorado, complained that accreditation "currently settles for meeting minimum standards," and it called for replacing regional accreditors with a new national foundation. "Technology has rendered the quaint jurisdictional approach to accreditation obsolete," Mr. Dickeson wrote.

The commission didn't endorse that recommendation, but its final report last month cited "significant shortcomings" in accreditation and called for "transformation" of the process. In a Sept. 22 speech marking the release of the report, Secretary Spellings said that accreditors are "largely focused on inputs, more on how many books are in a college library than whether students can actually understand them....That must change."

David Ward, a commission member and the president of the American Council on Education, a higher education advocacy group, declined to sign the report, in part because he objected to its criticism of accreditors as overly simplistic.

Russell Edgerton, president emeritus of the American Association for Higher Education, says "there's no question that American colleges are underachieving," but he argues that accreditors are rising to the challenge. "Ten years ago, I would have said that regional accreditors are dead in the water and asleep at the wheel," he says. But "there's been a kind of renaissance within accreditation agencies in the past five to six years. They're helping institutions create a culture of evidence about student learning."

Mr. Edgerton also thinks the federal government's emphasis on new accountability measures is flawed because it bypasses the judgment of traditional arbiters like faculty and accreditors. "The danger is that the standardized testing approach in K-12 would slop over into higher education," he says. "Higher ed is different."

Jerome Walker, associate provost and accreditation liaison officer for the University of Southern California, agrees that the administration's attacks on accreditors are unfair. The Western Association of Schools and Colleges, which accredits USC, "has been extremely sensitive" to student learning, he says.

According to the Western Association's executive director, Ralph Wolff, the group revamped its standards in 2001 to require colleges to identify preparation needed by entering freshmen and the expectations for student progress in critical thinking, quantitative reasoning and other skills. Its accreditation process now takes four years, up from 1½, and it features a detailed, peer-reviewed proposal for improvement and two site visits, including one devoted to "educational effectiveness."

Historically, research universities like USC "used to blow off" accreditation, Mr. Wolff says. "Now this has become a real challenge for them in a good way."

Encouraged by Mr. Wolff, USC last year assigned the same two essay questions -- one about conformity, another based on a quotation from ethicist Robert Bellah -- to freshmen in a beginning writing course and juniors and seniors in an advanced course. A group of faculty then evaluated the essays without knowing the students' names or which course they were taking. The reassuring outcome, according to Richard Fliegel, assistant dean for academic programs, was that juniors and seniors "demonstrated significantly more critical thinking skills" than freshmen, and that advanced students who had taken the first-year course outperformed transfer students who hadn't taken beginning writing at USC.

Because the writing initiative is tailored to USC's curriculum, the results -- while helpful to administrators and accreditors -- wouldn't necessarily help the public compare USC to other schools. That is a big drawback as far as the Bush administration is concerned. "I have two kids in college now," says Vickie Schray, deputy director of the Spellings commission. "It's a huge expense. Yet there's very little information on return of investment or ability to shop around for the greatest value."

She adds, though, that it is a "misconception" to think that the administration wants to have "one standardized test for all institutions" or to extend the testing requirements of the "No Child Left Behind" law for K-12 schools to higher education.

Even so, one standardized test of critical thinking, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, is becoming popular. It adjusts for students' scores on the SAT and ACT college-entrance exams, potentially allowing more meaningful comparisons of the value added by colleges. The number of schools using the assessment has soared from 54 two years ago to 170 this year. Among those using the test this fall: the University of Texas at Austin, Duke University, Arizona State University and Washington and Lee University.

Roger Benjamin, president of the nonprofit Council for Aid to Education, which sponsors the test, says state officials and university administrators have been the principal forces behind its increasing use. "Accreditors are coming to the party, but a bit late," Mr. Benjamin says.

Meanwhile, Secretary Spellings plans to meet with accreditors in late November to discuss how to "accelerate the focus on student achievement," Ms. Schray says. Accreditors say they welcome the opportunity to tout their progress. "We have made a lot of reforms," says the Western Association's Mr. Wolff. "We'd like to bring the secretary up-to-date on the significance of these reforms and the impact they're already having on institutions."

The consensus report, which was approved by the group’s international board of directors, asserts that it is vital when accrediting institutions to assess the “impact” of faculty members’ research on actual practices in the business world.

"Measuring ‘Impact’ of B-School Research," by Andy Guess, Inside Higher Ed, February 21, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/22/impact

Category	Mean Rating	% giving high (8-10) rating	% giving low (1-5) rating
Teamwork	7.0	39%	17%
Ethical judgment	6.9	38%	19%
Intercultural skills	6.9	38%	19%
Social responsibility	6.7	35%	21%
Quantitative reasoning	6.7	32%	23%
Oral communication	6.6	30%	23%
Self-knowledge	6.5	28%	26%
Adaptability	6.3	24%	30%
Critical thinking	6.3	22%	31%
Writing	6.1	26%	37%
Self-direction	5.9	23%	42%
Global knowledge	5.7	18%	46%

"Ohio State Gets Jump on Doctoral Evaluations," by David Glenn, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 7, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i11/11a00104.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

Question Is homework credit sometimes dysfunctional to learning? If the instructor allows face-to-face study groups, extra-help tutorials, and chat rooms, what is so terrible about this Facebook study group?

"Mixed Grades for Grads and Assessment," Inside Higher Ed, January 23, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/23/employers

What is Just-in-Time Teaching?

What is Just-in-Time Teaching designed to accomplish?

What JiTT is Not

The JiTT Feedback Loop

The Web Component

The Active Learner Classroom

Question
Is homework credit sometimes dysfunctional to learning?
If the instructor allows face-to-face study groups, extra-help tutorials, and chat rooms, what is so terrible about this Facebook study group?