THE EFFECT OF SENIOR AUDITORS ON COLLEGE CLASSES: AN ASSESSMENT BY FACULTY MEMBERS

College and university programs that permit older persons to audit regularly scheduled classes free of charge through tuition waiver programs are open to those aged 60 and over or 65 and over in at least 44 states. A study of such a program at a medium‐sized state university included a survey of 135 faculty members teaching classes audited by elder students. Seventy‐four percent of faculty members surveyed returned a one‐page survey questionnaire that asked them to describe the behavior of older auditors and compare them to younger students. Findings indicate that senior auditors are conscientious, most attending classes regularly and some completing written assignments and taking tests. Faculty members indicated that older auditors make a positive difference in class, learn as quickly as younger students, and are more motivated than younger students. Ninety percent of faculty respondents felt that the free audit program offers older students something of value. No significant differences in responses were found when controlling for the teaching experience of faculty members, for their age, or for the number of older students who had audited their classes.     

Study or beach?: students’ motivations and attitudes regarding summer session

Summer Session is an innovative program implemented by some universities in order to improve utilization of their facilities and to enable students to accelerate progress towards their degrees. A quantitative study has been undertaken at the University of Wollongong with the objective of obtaining information regarding the background of the students undertaking Summer Session, their reasons for enroling and their opinions regarding this program. All students enroled in Summer Session in the Department of Management in the Faculty of Commerce were surveyed over a three-year period (1993/1994, 1994/1995 and 1995/1996). A total of 613 completed questionnaires were returned. In summary, students appear to consider Summer Session to be a success, with 82% of continuing students planning to undertake further Summer Session study. The Commerce Faculty has offered a relatively large number of Summer Session subjects over this period and as a result has attracted students from other Faculties, with almost 20% of the students undertaking Department of Management Summer Session subjects being from outside the Commerce Faculty. Students liked the smaller group size (53%), the faster pace (44%), the easier access to lecturers and tutors (33%) and the more casual nature of classes (31%). By far the most frequently cited dislike was the limited subject choice (63%), with the second most common dislike, faster pace, given by 30% of students. No other dislike was given by more than 4% of students. A wide range of reasons was given for undertaking Summer Session; however, 64% of students stated that their motivation was to finish their degree early. Other reasons included failure of this subject previously, to decrease next semester’s load and failure of another subject. Summer Session is in demand from students. They are satisfied with most aspects of the program, except the limited range of subjects offered. Consideration should therefore be given by the university to increase the number of subjects offered in Summer Session.     

Personal,career, and learning skills needs of first-year university students

This study investigates the personal, career and learning skills needs of first-year university students. Consenting first-year South African students completed structured questionnaires assessing these needs in 1993 (n=1,817) and 1994 (n=2,209). The need for assistance with personal, career and learning skills concerns was found to be much higher in the South African student samples than for North American students.     

RETIREES RETURN TO COLLEGE: AN EVALUATIVE STUDY AT ONE UNIVERSITY CAMPUS

There has been a pronounced increase in the number of older Americans attending colleges and universities under tuition waiver programs, but there have been few reported studies of their educational experiences. The present research evaluated the tuition waiver program for retirees enrolled at the University of Maryland College Park. Completed questionnaires were received from 160 of 340 retirees who had been admitted to the university under this tuition waiver program. Additional data in structured follow‐up interviews were obtained for 139 of the 160 persons who returned questionnaires. Students attending the university under this program were an active, healthy, mobile, geographically stable, well‐educated group of men and women in their early years of retirement. Their academic interests centered in the arts and humanities, especially art, music, and foreign languages. Older students in this study reported that younger students and instructors were friendly, accepting, and did not treat them as different or older. Difficulties cited by older students attending the university were parking, registration, and the academic demands of keeping up with the class and meeting course requirements. The findings of this study suggest that a tuition waiver program well serves the needs of retirees to remain intellectually active, to explore academic areas long‐postponed during their working years, and to develop new or improve existing skills and interests.     

Surgical Clinical Correlates in Anatomy: Design and implementation of a first‐year medical school program

Medical students state the need for a clinically oriented anatomy class so to maximize their learning experience. We hypothesize that the first‐year medical students, who take the Surgical Clinical Correlates in Anatomy program, will perform better than their peers in their anatomy course, their surgical clerkships and ultimately choose surgical residencies. We designed and recently implemented this program for first‐year medical students. It consisted of General Surgical Knowledge, Orthopedic Surgery, Plastic Surgery, Urology, Cardiothoracic Surgery, General Surgery, Vascular Surgery, and Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) sessions. Each session had defined learning objectives and interactive cadaveric operations performed by faculty members and students. The program was elective and had 25 participants randomly chosen. An evaluative questionnaire was completed before and after the program. Comparative analysis of the questionnaires, first‐year anatomy examination results, clinical surgical rotation scores, and residency match results will be completed. The positive opinions of surgeons increased for all medical students from the pre‐evaluation to the post‐evaluation, and there was a greater increase in positive opinions for our participants. Our participants also had the highest average overall for all combined anatomy examinations. A need exists among medical students to develop a clinically correlated anatomy program that will maximize their learning experience, improve their performance and allow them to make moreinformed career choices. The recent implementation of this Surgical Clinical Correlates in Anatomy program fulfills this need. Anat Sci Educ 2: 265?272, 2009. © 2009 American Association of Anatomists.     

Assessing Beliefs of Preservice Early Childhood Education Teachers Using Q-Sort Methodology

The purpose of this study was to assess the beliefs of students and faculty in a 4-year birth–kindergarten teacher preparation program using the Teacher Belief Q-Sort (TBQ). Data were collected over one academic year from a total of 63 students, 35 students at the beginning of their coursework and 28 students at the end of their program, completing their student teaching experience. The faculty (n = 8) in the program completed the TBQ to provide a criterion sort as well as to assess the consistency in philosophy across faculty members who teach preservice teachers. Compilations of rankings are presented to describe beliefs related to children, discipline, and teaching practices held by students who are at different points in their education program. Criterion comparison results indicate that student teachers at the end of their education program report beliefs more similar to faculty beliefs than students at the beginning of their education program. However, findings suggest that the student teaching experience does not appear to significantly alter beliefs about children, discipline and teaching practices. These results are discussed in terms of child-directed versus teacher-directed styles of preservice teachers and implications of assessing beliefs for teacher preparation programs.     

Management priorities of college presidents

All U.S. college and university presidents were recently surveyed to determine their priorities among potential planning and management improvements at their institutions. Based on 900 returned questionnaires, the highest priority areas were: (1) communicating institutional strengths to potential students, their parents, and the general public; (2) communicating institutional strengths to the state legislature and state budget officials (for public institutions); (3) integrating program-review results in program-planning and budget processes; (4) resource allocation and reallocation; (5) faculty vitality and renewal; (6) implementing institutional goals and objectives through the planning and budgeting process; and (7) forecasting institutional revenue needs more accurately. Most of these high priority areas were interpreted as reflecting the current invironment of retrenchment and the need to prepare for a noor slow-growth era.     

Improving instruction of veteran physics professors

In spite of the abundance of publications describing university faculty development programs and activities, little is known about the effectiveness of such programs on specific disciplines or subject areas. The fact that differences have been identified in the dimensions on which students of different university departments rate their teachers suggests that instructors of different departments need different types of programs for teaching improvement. This article describes a study that has looked into methods for improving instruction of university physics full professors with many years of teaching experience. Two methods for this aim were examined for effectiveness: a workshop and individualized consultation, both augmenting students' midterm ratings of their instructors. Analysis of pre- and postworkshop questionnaires reveals impressive improvement on the majority of items, particularly those of specific teaching techniques discussed in the workshop, but not on the global ratings of the teacher. The special consultation procedure has been shown to bring about substantial increase on overall teaching performance. We conclude that veteran teachers are often unable to improve significantly their overall teaching performance when provided with midterm feedback from students' questionnaires or when participating in a workshop for teaching improvement. Improving their instruction requires substantial and continuous expert consultation as well as investing substantial time and efforts of their own.     

University faculty members’ and students perceptions of university academic systems

There are no provisions for routine evaluations or rankings of the universities in the Federal Republic of Germany. Consequently, it has become a matter of magazines to carry out inquiries into the opinions of students and faculty members in order to assess the quality of education at German universities. One of the first studies of this type was carried out by one of Germany's most respected magazines, Der Spiegel. The results of this study, particularly the questionnaires and validity of the given response categories, were subject to vehement criticism. In this context the exploratory study described in this chapter was conceived. Students and faculty were asked to give their personal and individual views about the academic system at their given universities. In order to guarantee the subjectivity of each individual's frame of reference, the responses of students and faculty were recorded, analyzed, and compared by means of computer-assisted content analysis. The results will be used to validate quantitative instruments of inquiry and to formulate proposals for their improvement.     

Overcoming a Learning Bottleneck: Inquiry Professional Development for Secondary Science Teachers

This paper examines the summer component of a year-long professional development program. The program was developed based on recent models of effective professional development that indicate that teachers should guide the direction and focus of the professional development program. Specific activities in the summer program were adapted from a long-running, successful program for university faculty development. In this study we explore the conceptions of inquiry teachers developed during the program, as well as the products teachers created. The discrepancies between program goals and the teachers’ products and conceptions are described and reasons for these differences explored. The results suggest that engaging teachers in identifying key issues in their own professional development is an effective strategy.     

Becoming and being a talented undergraduate student

This article reports on a case study of one New Zealand university faculty involved in the second phase of a three-phase study investigating the experiences of talented undergraduate students. Talented undergraduate students are a largely forgotten group in research. The current study sought to investigate who the talented students were, and then what their lived experiences as talented undergraduate students were. The study involved 128 undergraduate students who provided information about their experiences as high achieving students in an undergraduate degree program. Approximately 10% of all students enrolled across five different undergraduate degree programs in the faculty were defined as talented undergraduate students. These students were ethnically diverse and largely older than we had anticipated. The majority had not previously been identified as talented and many had been largely unsuccessful educationally, prior to embarking on their undergraduate studies. Several students experienced challenging personal circumstances, such as financial hardship and extensive family responsibilities. The grit or resilience demonstrated by these students seemed to explain the essence of the phenomenon of being a talented undergraduate student in this faculty.     

Learning Difficulties of Part‐Time Mature Students

Abstract

The parents of university students are one of the major stakeholders in Higher Education, yet there appears to be little investigation of their views. A postal questionnaire was distributed to a sample of some 640 parents or parent substitutes having at least one child currently taking a first degree at a British university. 335 completed questionnaires were returned. These give a very consistent and homogeneous picture, with no important variations related to university, subject studied, or level of parents’ education, and almost none related to sex of parent. In general, parents take a clearly traditional view of Higher Education, with research as the most important activity of universities followed by teaching students. The latter should gain personal maturity and a useful qualification from their studies. There is a very strong preference for students to live away from home. These views are highly consistent with those of students themselves, both at university and before; but less so with trends in Higher Education seen by many experts.     

Where have all the students gone? Participation of doctoral students in authentic mathematical activity as a necessary condition for persistence toward the PH.D.

The mathematics community in the U.S. has become concerned about the state of doctoral education, including concerns about high attrition rates and the small numbers of women and students from some racial and ethnic groups. This paper proposes a model of doctoral student persistence and attrition, in which student participation in the life of the department and discipline lead to increased student integration, which is crucial for students' success. Ten faculty members and eighteen graduate students were interviewed about their interests,conceptions, and experiences within mathematics, in a case study of one mathematics department. In this department, students experienced four types of obstacles to their participation: obstacles stemming from the program structure, obstacles to participation in class, obstacles to participating with faculty outside of class, and obstacles stemming from faculty beliefs about teaching and learning. Implications for the retention of mathematics doctoral students are discussed. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Cultivating Curiosity: Integrating Hybrid Teaching in Courses in Human Behavior in the Social Environment

This study illustrates an experience of implementing a hybrid model for teaching human behavior in the social environment in an urban university setting. Developing a hybrid model in a BSW program arose out of a desire to reach students in a different way. Designed to promote curiosity and active learning, this particular hybrid model has students engage in weekly online activities between their weekly on-ground classes. This article reviews key pedagogical concerns and presents preliminary findings, including student feedback, instructor observations, and strategies for faculty interested in developing such courses.     

Mathematics readiness of first-year college students and missing necessary skills: perspectives of mathematics faculty

College readiness of students and the effectiveness of remedial mathematics courses have been under consideration for the last two decades. There is a considerable misalignment between the expectations of students regarding secondary education and those regarding higher education. Information about current expectations and perspectives of college mathematics faculty who have to deal with this gap is missing in the literature. This study explores college readiness of first-year students and topics that they need to have mastered before entering college. A survey was disseminated to college/university mathematics faculty throughout the US (48 states) whose email addresses were shown on their institutional webpages, and data were gathered from 737 faculty. The survey instrument includes scaled items reflecting the Common Core State Standards and free response items. The scaled items are divided into six subscales: Basics, Algebra, Functions, Geometry, Statistics and Probability, and Reasoning and Generalisation. Faculty responses are categorised and statistically analysed with respect to types of institution, position titles of the participants and types of course offered by those institutions. Findings indicate that faculty view first-year students as having poor mathematical ability in terms of what they consider to be important topics for college preparation. Faculty also agree that students need remediation, which, in its current state, is not sufficient. Implications of these results for further research and practice are discussed.     

Web-Based Social Work Courses: Guidelines for Developing and Implementing an Online Environment

Nationwide, the percentage of faculty who are tenured (or in tenure-earning positions) is declining, with proportionate increases in the amount of instruction provided by adjunct and other part-time instructors, including doctoral students. These trends are mirrored within academic social work and have given rise to some concerns about the potentially adverse effects this could have on the quality of instruction provided to MSW and BSW students. A review of the social work literature, however, failed to locate any systematic investigations published on the topic of evaluating the quality of teaching provided by adjuncts or doctoral students. The authors undertook a comprehensive analysis of the course evaluations obtained from a large urban school of social work in the Southeast over a 3-year period, covering 294 courses (61% BSW, 39% MSW). Of these, 181 classes were taught by regular faculty, 63 classes were taught by community-based adjuncts, and 50 classes by social work PhD students. Inferential tests found no statistically significant differences in the global course evaluations earned by regular faculty or adjuncts. However, there were statistically significant differences in the course evaluations earned by regular faculty and doctoral students, favoring the former, but the effect size was small and of little practical import. In general, the authors found no strong evidence that adjuncts or doctoral students provided less positively evaluated teaching than did regular faculty. The authors' results are limited to one university setting but their research design can be readily adopted by other programs, given the widespread use of quantified student-completed course evaluations generally maintained on university databases. More serious attention needs to be given to determining whether the course evaluations commonly used by universities are truly valid.     

Cultivating a Culture of Undergraduate Research at a Public Comprehensive University

Abstract

Winthrop University is a public comprehensive university of about 6000 students, 5000 of whom are undergraduates. The Department of Mathematics offers a baccalaureate degree in mathematics, but has no graduate degree programs. As late as 2009, there was essentially no undergraduate research in the department. At this time, faculty made efforts to cultivate a research program that would motivate faculty to pursue more scholarly opportunities and include undergraduates in their scholarship. These efforts began with in-house-sponsored summer programs that lasted a few weeks and grew over the subsequent 5 year period to several externally funded undergraduate research programs, including a National Science Foundation-sponsored Research Experience for Undergraduates program. In this paper, we discuss some lessons we learned in developing a culture of undergraduate research. We focus on the advantages and challenges of undergraduate research at primarily undergraduate universities, offer advice for starting or growing a research program, and provide resources for funding undergraduate research.     

Do Formalized Gatekeeping Procedures Increase Programs' Follow‐Up With Deficient Trainees?

The authors investigated whether formalized gatekeeping procedures and program‐level characteristics influence the rates at which deficient trainees are graduated from counseling programs. One hundred eighteen faculty members reported that counselor educators face diverse pressures to avoid investigating potentially deficient students, including concerns about being sued and concerns about receiving compromised teaching evaluations. However, faculty members in programs accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs and faculty members in programs with more formalized gatekeeping procedures seemed to more effectively follow through with concerns they had about specific students. These findings support the implementation of both broad, program‐wide training standards and specific, formalized procedures to more effectively screen deficient trainees.     

Dissonant study orchestrations of high-achieving university students

This study focuses on the dissonant study orchestrations of high-achieving university students. Advanced psychology students’ dissonant study orchestrations were compared with previous findings of advanced medical students orchestrations. Further, the relation of study orchestrations to study success was examined. The subjects were 28 advanced psychology students at the University of Helsinki, Department of Psychology who returned a task booklet of learning; of these, 24 students completed a questionnaire concentrating on the students’ interests, expectations and evaluation of the curriculum. All students were high achievers who had gone through a demanding selection process. The subjects completed three questionnaires concentrating on their study practices, conceptions of knowledge, expectations, and evaluation of the instruction in the Department of Psychology. The results showed that seven out of 28 students expressed a dissonant study orchestration. The results further showed that students’ individual study orchestrations were not related to study success. A comparison between advanced medical and psychology students showed that although the profiles of dissonant study orchestrations were technically similar among medical and psychology students, content analyses revealed that reasons for the development of dissonant study orchestrations were different.     

Teachers' concerns about inclusive education in Ahmedabad,India

This study was undertaken to determine the concerns of primary school teachers about the inclusion of students with disabilities in Ahmedabad, India. A total of 560 teachers, working in government‐run schools, returned the completed survey. A two‐part questionnaire was used in this study. Part 1 gathered information relating to personal and professional characteristics of the teachers. Part 2 was a 21‐item Likert scale titled Concerns about Inclusive Education – Gujarati. The major finding of the study was that the teachers in Ahmedabad were moderately concerned about including students with disabilities in their classrooms. The teachers were most concerned about lack of infrastructural resources and least concerned about lack of social acceptance of students with disabilities in inclusive education classrooms. Significant differences existed in teacher concerns based on the following background variables: gender, qualifications in special education, teaching experience and number of students with disabilities in class. A number of implications are discussed to address teacher concerns for inclusive education in India.