Serendipity35

A new book, There Is Life After College by Jeff Selingo, is out this month. It looks at stories of 20-somethings and their experiences in and out of school and how those experiences shaped their success in the job market.

He looks at factors such as the skills that proved most helpful, in an attempt to discover why some students prosper, while others fail.  (There is a free preview of the book's introduction.)

Jeff Selingo previously wrote College (Un)bound and there is some crossover, such as the need for students to understand the jobs (especially ones that did not exist a few years ago) available to them and the need to be lifelong learners. 

There Is Life After College is about after college and the concerns about that time come not only from students but from parents. Parent are anxious about their college-educated child to successfully landing a good job after graduation and their own or the student's significant debt which (especially in an uncertain job market) may leave that child financially dependent on their parents for years to come. Both parties may well ask, "What did I pay all that money for?"

While Selingo's earlier book may have answered that question with thoughts about alternatives to the degree, such as MOOCs or competency-based degrees, this new book looks a lot at that Return on Investment (ROI).

Does where you go to college matter? Most of the data says it does. The better schools get more students to graduation on time and their name recognition value is real. My one son is in finance and for many of the Wall Street banks and firms he interviewed with they only wanted to look at Ivy League graduates. There is a nice interactive visualization tool from Jon Boeckenstedt that shows graduation rates by the selectivity of the school. The ability of the nation's oldest and wealthiest colleges to graduate white men who end up wealthy is real. Not that less selective schools mean no chance of success, but it may come with more effort required. But the really surprising take on this kind of data to me was that it's not that you should choose a college because of its graduation rate, but that the college will select you based on your propensity to graduate.

For the book, Selingo conducted a survey of young adults who had at least some college experience and were born between 1988 and 1991, giving them some time to start a career in their mid-twenties. Based on that survey, they divided the transition from adolescence into adulthood by new college graduates into three groups: Sprinters, Wanderers, or Stragglers. This charts appears in his newsletter. 



The full results of the survey are in the book, but one result was that two-thirds of new college graduates fail to find meaningful employment in the years after they leave school. They either drift from job to job, live with their parents or work part-time gigs that don’t require a college degree. 

Of course, there IS life after college, but the book taps a trend we see of more difficult and longer transitions to post-college life and looks to suggest ways that graduates can market themselves. He suggests that process to plan for a young professional starts at the end of high school through college graduation. Seems like this book would make a good high school graduation gift.

 

Higher education leaders share how they define personalized learning.

Including: Randy Bass, Vice Provost for Education, Georgetown University; Tahnja Wilson, Sr. Mgr. of Strategic Design Initiatives, Arizona State University; David Wiley, Chief Academic Officer, Lumen Learning; Bryan Alexander, Founder, Bryan Alexander Consulting LLC; Shannon McCarty, Dean of Instruction & Academic Affairs, Rio Salado College; Michael Crow, President, Arizona State University;  Tristan Denley, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs ,Tennessee Board of Regents



via educause.edu

 

I had a conversation with a friend this past week about kids and handwriting. She was upset that her grandchild doesn't seem to be able to write or read cursive. She sees this as a big mistake. In fact, the dreaded Common Core standards call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, it is all about the keyboard. Even without those guidelines, handwriting has certainly been pushed out of the elementary curriculum.

I asked a few people I know who teach elementary school about teaching cursive. They said that though they spend less time on it than in the past, kids like to do it. They have been trying it n their own – practicing their signature is especially popular. Like keyboarding, they are doing it outside school anyway, so the earlier the school can address any “formal” training and correct bad habits, the better it seems to be. 

Some psychologists and neuroscientists have new evidence that suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development are deeper than suspected earlier.

Quick take: Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information.

Were you taught cursive handwriting in your early days of school?  I was unfortunately labeled as “gifted” when I was in second grade and so I was put in an experimental combined second/third grade class. Since the third graders were already writing in cursive, my group was given a fast version of penmanship. My handwriting has suffered ever since. I did become good at printing letters and I took “mechanical drawing” (drafting) classes where we actually practiced precise block lettering. I even took a course in calligraphy in the hopes of improving my handwriting.

But cursive handwriting seems to be a rather obsolete skill, like using a slide rule. (I also learned how to use a slide rule in chemistry and physics class. Yes, I am old.)

What was the last significant document you wrote by hand?

New research seems to indicate that beyond what we write how we write matters. If children had drawn a letter freehand, they showed increased activity when their brain was scanned in three areas of the brain that are activated in adults when they read and write. In order to be able to read, you need to be able recognize each possible iteration of a letter no matter how we see it written - on a book's page, on a screen in different fonts or written by hand on a piece of paper. 

In one study comparing children who physically form letters with those who only watch others doing it, the result seems to be that only the actual effort of writing the letters engages the brain’s motor pathways.

It's not just about letter recognition. Young children (grades 2-5) studied showed that printing, cursive writing, and typing on a keyboard are all associated with distinct and separate brain patterns. Those patterns result in different end products. For example, composing by hand, they not only consistently produced more words more quickly than they did on a keyboard, but expressed more ideas.

The result that most intrigues me was from research on the older children. When they were asked to come up with ideas for a composition, the ones with better handwriting exhibited greater neural activation in areas associated with working memory, and increased overall activation in the reading and writing networks.

I know that for myself and for others I have talked about this subject, we believe that the act of putting thoughts down on paper forces us to focus on what’s important. I still prefer to take notes at meeting and conferences by hand.

Do you remember those charts of how to make the letters that was in almost every elementary classroom? I can’t even remember how to make some letters in cursive – Z and Q are blanks. When did the decline of cursive begin? Some history - 

Our Colonial writers had a very elaborate cursive style. 

In the 1800s, the popular style was a loopy, “Spencerian” script. 

In the 1920s, educators thought that since children learn to read by looking at books printed in manuscript rather than cursive, they should learn to write the same way.

In the 1940s, manuscript (print writing) was the standard taught in  kindergarten and cursive was taught in second or third grade. The standardized practical style came from the Palmer Guide to Business Writing from back in 1894. Business practice enters school.

Why has handwriting fallen out of favor? Ask 10 people and I bet at least nine will blame technology? Between computers and smartphones, there’s not much need to write. Hmmmm…

According to the Journal of Educational Psychology, only 9% of American high school students use an in-class computer more than once a week. Just looking at the students around me at the college, most of their note taking and in-class writing is handwriting. And most of their tests still are handwritten. No doubt, email has killed letter writing which was once a formal use of cursive. But in an age of machine-scored standardized tests, handwriting just doesn’t count much in the evaluation of students.

You have heard of pedagogy. You may have heard of andragogy.

Pedagogy is the art or science of teaching and really has always focused on children. Andragogy is the theory and practice of teaching adults, and it comes directly out of pedagogy that did not address the specific needs in the education of adults.

Pedagogy is very old but andragogy only appeared as a field in the mid-1800s and in a more recent approach in the 1960s with the work of Malcolm Knowles.  

Some of the basic principles of andragogy are that, compared to children: Adults will learn only what they feel they need to learn. They are practical in their approach to learning. They will more easily accept learning a theory before that theory is applied to a situation than a child. They bring more experience to learning and that will both aid their learning and bring biases that hinder new learning. Even more than children, they learn by doing. Adult learning focuses on problems and the problems must be realistic. They do not need as much sequential learning or formal curriculum.

With children and adult learning covered, what is heutagogy? 

Heutagogy is not age-based. It is the study of self-determined learning. It challenges some of the ideas about teaching and learning that are rooted in the teacher-centered learning that most of us experienced.

There has been some natural movement from andragogy to heutagogy that has been generated by technology (media, Internet, online learning, MOOC) and by changes to formal education. This is especially evident in higher education where discussions of alternative degrees and ways of measuring mastery of learning and the patch to a degree are being discussed seriously.

Hase and Kenyon (2000) coined the term heutagogy as self-determined learning which essentially means that a learner (rather than a teacher or institution) should be at the center of the learning. This learner-centric approach is very much a 21st century approach and is particularly popular in e-learning environments.