Serendipity35

In an article from The Chronicle by Stacey Patton, she asks "The dissertation is broken, many scholars agree. So now what?" 

The article covers an issue that is not new. In the big mix of things that are changing in higher education, rethinking graduate education, particularly  Ph.D. programs, is in that mix.

The short list of sub-issues includes reducing the amount of time it takes to complete degrees and reducing attrition - the two are certainly connected. 

For doctoral candidates, another push is to better prepare them for nonacademic careers. With debt for students increasing, there is also increased competition for academic jobs. Jobs are not increasing; they are decreasing.

Is it time to move away from the traditional, book-length dissertation that more and more students and faculty a relic of the past? 

What would a University 2.0, 21st-Century dissertation look like? If you look at the rise of the digital humanities, there are digital possibilities for digital dissertations with video, 3D animation, audio, interactive mapping and more. It is a scenario that probably scares many academics.

 

Ask professors what kind of students they want in their classes and you might hear attributes like initiative, persistence and leadership. How well are those attributes measured by admissions tests? Yeah, not so well.

But can we create a way to make non-cognitive assessments that help colleges measure the attributes that we value? An article in The Chronicle is what got me thinking about it.

We know the history. It's actually similar to what we find in trying to measure writing ability. Portfolios, self-evaluations and short essays are a better measure, but very time-consuming to assess. And it is even harder to get people to agree on what is good writing. That's why for admissions purposes  cognitive measurement has been the way.

SATs and other college-entrance tests have been and still are the established measures of knowledge and ability.  Non-cognitive attributes are all the ones that are "not grounded in or directly derived from rational thought" according to David T. Conley and the researchers and psychometricians who study the tests.

There have been articles and research for years telling us that standardized-test scores don't do a very good job at predicting a student's long-term potential to succeed. What about grade-point average? Also not very good at predicting merit or potential.

That's why alternative indicators of student potential have interested colleges. Probably all of us submitted a personal statement and letters of recommendation. Most admissions people believe those are useful, but like all writing assignments, difficult to assess.

The two big players in admissions testing, The College Board and Educational Testing Service, have experimented with ways to measure non-cognitive qualities. Those qualities include artistic and cultural appreciation, integrity, communication skills and teamwork.

Remedial courses are supposed to get under-prepared students ready for college-level work. Unfortunately, all the numbers indicate that too often these students hit a dead end and often never move into college-level work and drop out. Leaders of four national higher-education groups said last month that there need to be sweeping changes in how such students are remediated.

The report, "Core Principles for Transforming Remedial Education: A Joint Statement" comes from Complete College America, the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Education Commission of the States, and Jobs for the Future and is based on studies by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University's Teachers College.

One of their recommendations is that more developmental students should be placed directly into full-credit college courses that are accompanied by services such as mandatory tutoring and facilitated computer labs.

They also report that there is skepticism from faculty members who would have to integrate the extra support into their classes. Their concern is that bypassing developmental courses will set up students for failure in courses that they are not prepared to take.

Another concern identified in the report is how students end up being placed in remedial courses. Very often the placement is based on a single standardized test. Having administered that test at a community college for several years, I know that students do no preparation for the test and often don't take it seriously. Though we know it is a "high-stakes" test, these new students don't understand what it will mean to their first year at a college.

Five of their core recommendations are:
1. Colleges shouldn't rely on a single test to place students in the appropriate classes.
2. Students who are significantly underprepared need accelerated paths to college-level work.
3. Enrollment in gateway college-level courses, with additional
academic support, should be the default placement for many more students.
4. The content of those courses should align with a broad category of majors, such as social sciences or human services, that students choose when they enroll in college.
5. Helping students complete gateway courses, the report says, is key to college completion.

The report says that less than 10% of students that take three or more semesters of remedial math end up completing the first-year college-level math course for which they were preparing. When it comes to English, the numbers are better but still poor with fewer than one in three of the students in three remedial courses will complete the college-level course that they were preparing to take.

The average scores on the SAT fell two points this year. On average it dropped a point each in critical reading and in writing. It stayed level in mathematics. The drops are smaller than the six-point decrease last year. Scores were pretty flat for a few year before that.

What does it mean? Does it mean anything?

The average scores on the ACT were flat this year. The ACT overtook the SAT this year in the number of test-takers by by about 2,000 students. Both exams had more than 1.66 million test-takers.

The College Board's own report says that most students aren't taking the courses that would prepare them to do well in college.

More disturbing is the data that shows that gaps in the average scores and levels of preparation for college in different racial, ethnic groups and different socioeconomic backgrounds.

• 80 percent of white students who took the SAT completed the core curriculum, as did 73 percent of Asian students, but only 69 percent of Latino and 65 percent of black students did.


• 84 percent of those who took the SAT from families with at least $200,000 in family income completed the core curriculum, but only 65 percent of those with family income under $20,000 did so.


• In mathematics, where there is the largest gap between Asian Americans and other groups in SAT scores, 47 percent of Asian Americans who took the SAT reported taking Advanced Placement and/or honors mathematics, compared to 40 percent of white students, 31 percent of Latino students and 25 percent of black students.