Newman’s “The Idea of a University”
Have you heard of John Henry Newman’s 1854 classic “The Idea of a University?” Here is a link to the Newman Reader where you can find the full-text document. A controversial religious figure of the 19th century, Newman authored several influential books, both before and after joining the Catholic church.
Newman shares his view of liberal education when he advocates a “general culture of mind” as the “best aid to professional and scientific study.” He goes on to argue that the man “who has learned to and reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze, who has refined his taste, and formed his judgment, and sharpened his mental vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer, or a pleader, or an orator, or a statesman, or a physician, or a good landlord, or a man of business, or a soldier, or an engineer, or a chemist, or a geologist, or an antiquarian, but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he can take up any one of the sciences or callings I have referred to, or any other for which he has a special taste or talent, with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success, to which another is a stranger.” (pp. 165-166).
Here is a link to the abbreviated text and a link to the result on Google Books.
Lumina Foundation Report, February 2009
“In most states it is difficult or impossible to calculate accurate graduation rates, track student flows from K-12 education into higher education or from higher education into the workforce, determine the relationship between spending and results, or say anything at all about what students are learning in postsecondary education.” (Lumina Foundation, 2009, p. 5)
Click here to read the full report
Lumina Foundation (2009). A stronger nation through higher education: How and why Americans must meet a ‘big goal’ for college attainment. Retrieved from http://www.luminafoundation.org/publications/A_stronger_nation_through_higher_education.pdf
Can Critical Thinking be Taught?
I came across an interesting article authored by Daniel Willingham entitled “Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?”
This was published in the Summer 2007 edition of American Educator. Here is an excerpt: “Following the release of A Nation at Risk, programs designed to teach students to think critically across the curriculum became extremely popular. By 1990, most states had initiatives designed to encourage educators to teach critical thinking, and one of the most widely used programs, Tactics for Thinking, sold 70,000 teacher guides. But for reasons I’ll explain, the programs were not very effective – and today we still lament students’ lack of critical thinking. After more than 20 years of lamentation, exhortation, and little improvement, maybe it’s time to ask a fundamental question: Can critical thinking actually be taught?”
Indiana University Teaching Experiment
A Teaching Experiment Shows Students How to Grasp Big Concepts
See the 11.15.09 Chronicle of Higher Education article by David Glenn.
Here’s an excerpt:
Several years ago, a small group of faculty members at Indiana University at Bloomington decided to do something about the problem. The key, they concluded, was to construct every history course around two core skills of their discipline: assembling evidence and interpreting it.
Their course reinventions are now drawing attention from scholars around the world, and from disciplines far afield from history. Every area of study, the Indiana scholars say, has its own distinctive bottleneck—concepts or tasks that many students never quite grasp. Biology students, for example, have trouble developing accurate mental images of molecules. Many professors are so familiar with these bottleneck concepts that they find them difficult to explain.
Employability Skills in College Grads
For the past five years, I’ve been advising college students in the areas of career management and employability. Sometimes my role is as a counselor – to establish a connection with a student and an atmosphere of trust, and to listen not only to the presenting issue but to the underlying concerns. My style is very person-centered and I try to let my students (my clients) generate their own solutions and “next-steps” to achieve their goals, while also giving them a reality-check on the current job market. In all of my meetings with clients, I emphasize the ways they will be evaluated as they embark on their job search. In every session, I try to incorporate a discussion of employability skills – those skills needed for getting, keeping, and doing well on a job. Dr. Randall Hansen has outlined these skills nicely on his website, Quintessential Careers.
Employability skills, by my definition, are distinct from occupational or technical skills. They are not job-specific or industry-specific, and can generally be divided into three categories: (1) basic academic skills, (2) higher-order thinking skills, and (3) personal qualities. It is these higher-order thinking skills which intrigue me the most. How do our college graduates learn? How do they reason and make decisions? Are they critical thinkers with an ability to solve problems using logic?
I frequently conduct practice interviews with students, using behavior-based questions such as “Tell me about a time when you used your analytical ability to solve a problem.” Too many of my students struggle to come up with an answer, and it is a cause for concern. My sentiments are shared by many corporate recruiters I have come to know over the past several years, as was emphasized during a recent focus group my team held with Fortune 500 recruiters.
How are colleges measuring students’ ability to think critically and reason effectively? More to come….
CIRP Freshman Survey
How ready are students for college? How do they choose colleges? What are students’ expectations about college? If you are curious about these areas, get to know CIRP, The Cooperative Institutional Research Program at UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. Since 1966, CIRP has collected comprehensive data on over 13 million incoming first-year students at over 1900 institutions. It can be used alone or in conjunction with the Your First College Year Survey (YFCY) and the College Senior Survey (CSS) for longitudinal assessment.
In 2009, approximately 700 institutions of higher learning participated in a survey conducted from March through October. Over 400,000 students answer questions related to parental income and education, ethnicity, secondary school achievement and activities, educational and career plans, values, attitudes, beliefs, and self-concept.
Key sections include:
- Established behaviors in high school
- Academic preparedness
- Admissions decisions
- Expectations of college
- Interactions with peers and faculty
- Student values and goals
- Student demographic characteristics
- Concerns about financing college
Participating institutions receive a comprehensive report on their incoming class and national normative data for their type of institution. Information can be used in a variety of areas, including: admissions and recruitment, academic program development, retention, public relations, development, academic program development, and longitudinal research.
About the Author
Katie Read enjoys research and writing in the field of Higher Education. A native of the Commonwealth of Virginia, she holds a Master of Education from The College of William and Mary in Educational Policy, Planning, and Leadership. Additionally, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Hollins University. You may view her LinkedIn profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/katherineread
