Search

Competencies known variously as "soft" or "21st century skills" are increasingly linked to college students' academic and career success, and faculty with industry experience are hypothesized to be uniquely qualified to teach these skills. Yet little research exists on this topic. In this paper, we report findings from a mixed-methods study of the degree to which industry experience influences how faculty in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine teach teamwork, oral and written communication, problem-solving, and self-directed learning skills in 2- and 4-year postsecondary institutions. Using inductive thematic and hierarchical linear modeling techniques to analyze survey (n=1,140) and interview (n=89) data, we find that faculty place relatively low emphasis on these skills, but that industry experience is significantly associated with teaching oral communication, teamwork, and problem-solving skills. Other factors, including race and perceptions of departmental teaching norms, also influenced skills-focused instruction. Industry experience also informed problem-based learning activities, knowledge of desired workplace skills, and a focus on divergent thinking. Given that industry experience is an important, but not the only influence on skills-focused instruction, policies aimed solely at hiring faculty with industry experience will be of limited utility without a corresponding focus on training in teaching and instructional design.

In today's business world, change and disruption are the new normal. It's not uncommon for companies, industries, and even the world at large to be turned upside down seemingly overnight. With the fast pace of change, adaptable leadership is no longer just an asset, it's a necessity. Executives who display adaptable leadership seek new and innovative ways to solve problems, master new skills, and view disruption as a challenge rather than a threat -- skills needed to prevail through uncertain times. Adaptable leadership is a term that's used often without a concrete definition or understanding of what it is. In this white paper we'll clarify what it means to be adaptable, and the 3 behaviors that our research at CCL has identified as critical. As a result, you'll be able to approach adaptable leadership in a more practical way and establish a foundation for recognizing and developing the skill in yourself and others on your team.

Spatial visualization--the ability to mentally imagine and manipulate objects--has frequently been measured using the Paper Folding Test (PFT). In this task, participants view diagrams of a paper being folded and a hole being punched. They then identify the resulting punch pattern. Although task instructions promote mentally unfolding the paper, the extent to which people follow this spatial visualization strategy is unknown. The present work assesses hypothesized PFT solution strategies and their relation to problem attributes. Accuracy was impacted by the interaction between fold types, linear mixed models revealed greater use of simple heuristics compared to the suggested unfolding. Furthermore, most participants used a single strategy but simple heuristics were more often used than unfolding. Given this, we recommend redesigning the PFT to utilize the prevalence of strategy use to assess individual differences. [This is the in press version of an article published in "Personality and Individual Differences" (ISSN 0191-8869).]

Writing multiple-choice test items to measure student learning in higher education is a challenge. Based on extensive scholarly research and experience, the author describes various item formats, offers guidelines for creating these items, and provides many examples of both good and bad test items. He also suggests some shortcuts for developing test items. All of this advice is based on extensive scholarly research and experience. Creating valid multiple-choice items is a difficult task, but it contributes greatly to the teaching and learning process for undergraduate, graduate, and professional-school courses.

The narrative of the "skills gap," or the notion that the United States economy suffers because employers are not able to find job applicants with workplace-ready skills (e.g., American Society for Training and Development 2012), has become an influential rallying cry in higher education funding circles in recent years. It is with these gaps in mind that this paper uses a qualitative case study of STEM-related Wisconsin postsecondary institutions and businesses, based on interviews with employer and educator respondents, to explore the following questions: (1) What skills are most highly valued by employers and college educators?; and (2) According to respondents, what social, organizational, or other contextual factors, if any, influence the value and prevalence of these skills? The findings, which were conceptualized with a field theoretical framework from relational sociology (Bourdieu 1998; Martin 2003), suggest not only that employers value noncognitive competencies like work ethic and communication that students internalize through family, friends, education, and work experiences, but also that many postsecondary educators understand how such cultural currency can influence students' future success in a variety of social spheres. Furthermore, employers and educators often discussed these competencies not as singular, isolated "skills," but as multifaceted and situated "habits of mind," inextricably linked as dispositional practices and states of being.

Policymakers and educators alike increasing focus on faculty adoption of interactive teaching techniques as a way to improve undergraduate education. Yet, little empirical research exists that examines the processes whereby faculty make decisions about curriculum design and classroom teaching in real-world situations. In this study, I use the idea of the "problem space" from cognitive science to foreground the importance of actor-situation dynamics in shaping instructional decision making. Using data from a freelisting exercise and retrospective recall interviews, I describe the perceived affordances, planning strategies, and both the planned and enacted curricular artifacts for a group of 58 STEM faculty. Then, to examine these processes as they unfold in practice, I examine the cases of two physics instructors as they planned and taught specific classes. Results indicate the primacy of fixed affordances such as time, course content, and class size, and the influence of time constraints that lead to the dominant planning strategy of recycling and fine-tuning old lecture notes and PowerPoint slides. The paper also delves into the importance of these artifacts as cultural tools that mediate practice. The paper contributes a new approach to the study of instructional decision making while also providing actionable insights to improve practice. In particular, I recommend instituting departmental policies that require faculty to engage in brief, post-class and post-course reflection that results in minor updates to their curricular artifacts and will not require a significant time commitment.

Child behavior problems are a concern for parents and teachers alike and are associated with later academic and behavioral difficulties. Parents' participation in their children's schooling has been shown to help reduce problem behaviors over time. Research indicates that parents are more likely to participate in their children's schooling when parents have high quality relationships with teachers. One intervention aimed at improving children's behavior through enhancing both parents' participation in school and their relationships with teachers is Conjoint Behavioral Consultation (CBC; Sheridan & Kratochwill, 2008). CBC is a strength-based, structured, indirect model of service delivery wherein parents and teachers collaboratively participate in a problem-solving process to promote positive and consistent behavioral outcomes for children. Although it is clear that CBC improves the quality of parent-teacher relationships, the manner in which such relationships shape both "why" and "when" parents participate in children's schooling remains unexplored. The primary goal of this research was to investigate how the quality of parent-teacher relationships may exert an influence on the effect of CBC on parents' participation in problem solving by examining two possible pathways: mediation and moderation. The results of this study revealed that the quality of parent-teacher relationships acted both as a mediator and a moderator of the effects of CBC on parents' participation in problem solving. (Contains 2 figures and 2 tables.) [This paper was presented originally by the authors at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Psychological Association.]

For developmental education students, rates of developmental math course completion and persistence into required college-level math courses are particularly low. This literature review examines the evidence base on one potential means for improving the course completion and learning outcomes of developmental mathematics students: reforming mathematics classroom pedagogy. Each study examined for this review was classified into one of six sets according to the main instructional approach focused on in the study. The six sets are: "student collaboration", "metacognition", "problem representation", "application", "understanding student thinking", and "computer-based learning". Because most of the studies across the sets did not employ rigorous methods, the evidence regarding the impact of these instructional practices on student outcomes is inconclusive. An analysis of the studies that did employ rigorous designs suggests that structured forms of student collaboration and instructional approaches that focus on problem representation may improve math learning and understanding. This paper concludes by making a number of methodological recommendations, proposing several needed areas of research related to developmental math pedagogy, and suggesting instructional practices that may improve the outcomes of developmental math students. A tabular review of math pedagogy studies is appended. (Contains 10 footnotes and 1 table.)

This paper was developed in the interest of extending the reach and benefits of national and community service programs to larger numbers of persons from disadvantaged populations. In particular, this paper is intended to increase understanding of both challenges and opportunities that may accompany efforts to increase the participation by disadvantaged groups. The report explores the research on the impact of education, race and gender on civic engagement; generates hypotheses about what that research suggests by way of strategies for increasing participation; and offers proposals for strategies that might enhance the diversity and equity of participation, including: (1) Designing service programs that are opportunities for collective problem-solving; (2) Defining areas of service that will appeal to community needs that reflect the priority concerns of disadvantaged neighborhoods; and (3) Using service programs to support mediating organizations. The authors also advocate that early exposure to an "ethic of service" should be the cornerstone of national service strategies for increasing participation generally but particularly within poor minority neighborhoods. (Contains 36 footnotes.)

As numerous research studies suggest, teachers who desire increased student learning should adopt active learning. This article explores the research, defines active learning, discusses its value, offers suggestions for implementing it, and provides six concrete examples of active learning approaches: Thinking-Aloud Pair Problem-Solving; Three-Step Interview; Think-Pair-Share; Visible Quiz; Value Line; and Send/Pass-a-Problem.

Governments and other stakeholders have become increasingly interested in assessing the skills of their adult populations in order to monitor how well prepared they are to meet the challenges of the new information world. The current paper provides an overview of the conceptual framework for the assessment of numeracy developed for the OECD's Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). This builds on the numeracy framework developed for the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (ALL). Numeracy is broadly defined and complemented with a definition of "numerate behaviour". Four facets of numerate behaviour are identified and described to guide the development of assessment tasks. An annex presents: Factors Affecting Complexity of Numeracy Items.(Contains 3 tables, 1 figure and 3 footnotes.)

Governments and other stakeholders have become increasingly interested in assessing the skills of their adult populations for the purposes of monitoring how well prepared they are for the challenges of the new information world. The current paper provides an overview of the conceptual framework developed for the assessment of problem solving in technology-rich environments for the OECD's Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). This covers the specific class of problems that people encounter when using information and communication technologies. These include problems where the existence of the problem is a consequence of the availability of new technologies, where the solution requires the use of computer-based applications or where the problem relates to the management or use of information technologies. (Contains 1 figure and 5 tables.)

This study investigated middle school students' conceptual understanding of algebraic equations. Participants in the study--257 sixth- and seventh-grade students--were asked to solve one set of algebraic equations and to generate story problems corresponding with another set of equations. Structural aspects of the equations, including the number of operations and the position of the unknown, influenced students' performance on both tasks. On the story-writing task, students' performance on two-operator equations was poorer than would be expected based on their performance on one-operator equations. Students made a wide variety of errors on the story-writing task, including (a) providing story contexts that reflected operations different from those in the given equations, (b) failing to provide a story context for some component of the given equations, (c) failing to include mathematical content from the given equations in their stories, and (d) including mathematical content in their stories that was not present in the given equations. The nature of students' story-writing errors suggests two main gaps in students' conceptual understanding. First, students lacked a robust understanding of the operation of multiplication. Second, students demonstrated difficulty combining multiple mathematical relationships into coherent stories. (Contains 4 tables and 2 figures.) [The research reported in this paper was supported by the McDonnell Foundation (Grant No.JSMF 97-56), the Interagency Education Research Initiative (Grant No. REC 0115661), and the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, School of Education, University of Wisconsin--Madison.]

In this paper the authors identified the size of America's home market as a crucial component of its historical comparative advantage. The authors showed that over the last four decades nearly 60 percent of per capita U.S. growth has been dependent upon growth in the domestic consumption. Thus, a comprehensive demand side strategy also must target the domestic consumers U.S. businesses know best. On the supply side, they asked themselves what education and skills matter for individual and national economic success in the global economy? The authors' research demonstrated that education matters for growth and college matters the most. Boosting college completion rates by just 10 percent would inject $125 billion into the economy over the long run. Education credentials often serve as a signaling devise that employers use to gauge what potential hires might know and be able to do on the job. Employers are really interested in the knowledge, skills and abilities people bring to the workplace, not just their education credentials. The authors examined a new data set to test this hypothesis and found preliminary evidence to support it. The authors showed that the greater the level of skill required of occupations, the higher the education levels of job incumbents. Secondly, they found that the greater the level of skill required of occupations, the greater the average earnings for workers in those occupations, after holding constant the level of education. Consequently, not only is there a clear payoff to education, there also is an independent payoff to higher skills. And that appears true not only for competencies like innovation, critical thinking, and complex problem solving, but also for basic skills and social skills that are important in interacting with colleagues and customers. They also found that these competencies were useful in estimating which jobs are most vulnerable to being offshored overseas. In conclusion, they recognize that globalization is neither automatically beneficial nor universally destructive. Neither their analysis nor history offer assurances, though their work does suggest some ways forward. Therefore, they should identify strategies that will enable America to seize opportunities presented by globalization while minimizing its negative effects on communities, workers, and their families. Average Earnings by Education of Workers and the Competency Level Occupations Require are appended. (Contains 14 figures, 8 tables and 57 endnotes.) [This paper was written with Zamira Simkins.]

The term "numeracy" is used in the adult education community to include an array of mathematically related proficiencies that are evident in adults' lives and worthy of attention in adult education settings. This occasional paper attempts to describe the complex nature of numeracy as it exists today. All stakeholders--including policymakers, program directors, educators, professional developers and curriculum designers--need a full understanding of numeracy to know how to provide adults with effective numeracy instruction. While there are large-scale assessments, standards documents, and position papers, there has not been a field- and research-based synthesis of the components required for adults to be numerate, to act numerately, and to acquire numeracy skills. This paper attempts to identify and clarify the nature of these components with the hope that such identification and clarification will guide instruction, contribute to the design of assessments, frame research, and inform policy. Appended are: (1) Reviewed Frameworks and Standards Documents; (2) Context in Adult-Focused Documents; (3) Mathematical Content Strands in Selected Frameworks; and (4) Cognitive and Affective References in Selected Frameworks. (Contains 4 figures.)

Theories of learning in social settings, no matter their philosophical orientation, must address issues of intersubjectivity (IS). This paper starts with the premise that IS is a fundamental and unavoidable aspect of social interaction, and that understanding its nature is necessary for developing reliable theories of socially mediated learning and for designing the next generation of effective learning environments. The authors' central hypothesis is that IS acts as more than a point of convergence toward a common idea or solution, but that the dynamics toward and away from convergent ideas appears to be instrumental in fostering sustained and engaging discourse and influencing the representations that students propose during problem solving. They use discourse analysis techniques to show how IS is manifest in the classroom and explore its role in structuring and perpetuating participants' intellectual interactions. (Contains 4 tables and 7 figures.) [Production of this paper was funded by: the Interagency Educational Research Initiative, an alliance of the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development within the National Institutes of Health; and the University of Haifa.]