Ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge?

http://eres.olin.wesleyan.edu/eres/docs/12989/dunnwhy.pdf

I really liked this link from Brent Swearingen (via Dick Ellis). Here’s an example from the longer piece on “competency theory.”

"The skills needed to produce logically sound arguments, for instance, are the same skills that are necessary to recognize when a logically sound argument has been made. Thus, if people lack the skills to produce correct answers, they are also cursed with an inability to know when their answers, or anyone else’s, are right or wrong. They cannot recognize their responses as mistaken, or other people’s responses as superior to their own."

So perhaps this is why you often can’t explain to the “B” student what an “A” paper looks like or to a faculty member who gets low evaluations why others get so much higher evaluations. This isn’t to say that all “developmental efforts” (for students or for faculty) are useless (the paper makes the opposite case), but it does help explain why so many Honors students have “the imposter syndrome” and why so many poor students can’t understand why they’re not getting higher grades. There’s also an interesting point at the end about how to get more women into fields such as Science and Engineering.

Kuh on Student Success Literature

Kuh’s one of the “big dogs” in the student success field. Here’s a summary of some of his key conclusions.

First, almost all of the key student success information is available for free, so why would you pay a consultant to help you with admissions and retention as many institutions are doing?

Second, there are some pretty specific “high impact educational practices” that all institutions should be working on.

"High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter," published this year by the American Association of Colleges and Universities — include learning communities, writing-intensive courses, study abroad, student-faculty research, and culminating experiences like capstone courses, comprehensive exams, and theses. Equally important, participating in some of those activities seems to have compensatory effects, in that they also improve the performance of students of color and first-generation students.

See also this report - http://nces.ed.gov/IPEDS/research/papers.asp.

Third, if institutions really want to demonstrate support for student success, they should talk less and do more on the topic.

To encourage movement in that direction, such reporting templates as the Voluntary System of Accountability, designed for public universities, and the U-CAN college Web site, for private colleges, could feature a high-impact-practices index: the ratio of the number of students who annually participate in activities with a positive influence on student success to the total number of undergraduates at an institution.

This sounds somewhat like what JBU is doing with its student data warehouse, but we've got a long ways to go before we get to what Kuh would like to see institutions like ours really do.

What makes good teachers?

A New York story from Malcolm Gladwell. The short version is that “presence” (“withiness”) matters more than book knowledge.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=1

"A group of researchers—Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard’s school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress—have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications—as much as they appear related to teaching prowess—turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans."

Why do women outnumber men in study abroad?

The short answer is that no one really knows. The long answer appears to emphasize the curriculum typically studied (which tends to be in more "female" fields), the growing numbers of women in higher education more generally, the fact that parents are more concerned about safety for their daughters than sons (so less "independent" travel for women), and that many women are worried that if they don't travel in college, they won't get another chance until after their children are out of the house.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/12/04/genderabroad