The evaluation of faculty development programs

This article reviews literature pertinent to the evaluation of faculty development programs and presents data from several studies conducted at two institutions. These data were consistent with those previously reported in that faculty participants consistently expressed satisfaction with development services. In addition, one study found that most faculty members voluntarily took some action to improve their instructional effectiveness, though only a minority pursued these efforts in depth. Volunteers who worked intensively with a faculty development consultant improved more on objective measures of effectiveness than did those who were only superficially involved in improvement efforts; those who received no consultative assistance failed to improve significantly. Evidence from a final study provided a control for faculty motivation and led to the conclusion that improvement was contingent both on faculty desire to improve and on the availability of professional assistance.     

Faculty collective bargaining in Canada: Background,development and impact

Conclusion The Kemerer-Baldridge study acknowledges that in the U.S. faculty unions have negotiated procedural protection in tenure and promotions, less arbitrariness in administrative decisions, more job security, and greater economic security in general. The authors also point out that these negotiated advantages accrue to non-unit faculty as well. In my view those conclusions apply with equal force in Canada.As noted in the introduction to this section, we still lack sufficient data to do more than generalize from impressionistic accounts. Nevertheless I feel safe in saying that, in a very short period of time, collective bargaining has enhanced true professionalism and real collegiality on Canadian campuses by moving Canadian academics from their knees (suitable no doubt for supplication) to their feet; by giving them legally enforceable job security without which the notion of academic freedom had too hollow a ring; by giving them a real and not a mythical voice in university governance; and by doing all of this and more without creating excessive bureaucracies, industrial models, unconscionable power blocks, or strangulation by legalistic formality. In the course of doing so, Canadian faculty engaged in collective bargaining have developed innovative approaches in a number of key areas, approaches which may yet have significant impact in both public and private sector bargaining. Certainly, faculty collective bargaining has gone a long way in developing a model for professional unionism in Canada.     

Generalization of serial learning in the pigeon

Sequence learning in pigeons was studied in asimultaneous chaining paradigm: all stimuli and the opportunity to respond to each stimulus were available simultaneously. In contrast to the traditionalsuccessive chaining paradigm, a simultaneous chaining paradigm provides no differential feedback following each response (except the last). Subjects were first trained to perform on sequences of two (AB), then three (ABC), and then four colors (ABCD). Performance greatly exceeded that predicted by models of random choice. Generalization to novel arrays of three and four colors was complete. After training with a four-color sequence, the subjects were tested with subsequences consisting of all possible combinations of two and three of the four training colors (e.g., BD, AD, BC, ACD, BCD, etc.). The successful completion of these subsequences showed that the organization of the original sequence did not entail overt pecks to successive elements of that sequence. That subjects can respond accurately on nonadjacent subsets is not readily explained by a chaining theory, or by any theory that assumes that responding to element n provides a cue for responding to element n+1.     

The Psychometric Characteristics of Choice Items

This study investigated the psychometric characteristics of constructed-response (CR) items referring to choice and non-choice passages administered to students in Grades 3, 5, and 8. The items were scaled using item response theory (IRT) methodology. The results indicated no consistent differences in the difficulty and discrimination of the items referring to the two types of passages. On the average, students' scale scores on the choice and non-choice passages were comparable. Finally, the choice passages differed in terms of overall popularity and in their attractiveness to different gender and ethnic groups