If you do a search on the Internet, we are willing to bet that the word retention would rank fairly high in the higher education sector. Figuring out ways to stem the attrition rate has become an obsession at most institutions of higher education. The good news is that it has sparked an increase in empirical research and what we are learning is very applicable. There is still time to attend the workshop on student retention that is set for today at 1:30 PM in the CT+LE Commons area. Come and learn about successful intervention strategies that you can use in your classroom or online environment. Registration is appreciated but not required. Classroom design has also become a hot topic for researchers who are looking to create the best environment for student learning. A number of faculty who teach educational technology courses in the Department of Educational Leadership will be showcasing student-centered learning spaces. The event, An Overview of Technology-Enabled 21st Century Learning Spaces, will be held at 1:30 PM on Thursday, April 26 in Landes Auditorium. David Jaffee has written a terrific op-ed piece on the detrimental effect that telling your students to study for the exam can have on their academic progress. He writes, "If there is one student attitude that most all faculty bemoan, it is instrumentalism. This is the view that you go to college to get a degree to get a job to make money to be happy. Similarly, you take this course to meet this requirement, and you do coursework and read the material to pass the course to graduate to get the degree. Everything is a means to an end. Nothing is an end in itself. There is no higher purpose. When we tell students to study for the exam or, more to the point, to study so that they can do well on the exam, we powerfully reinforce that way of thinking. While faculty consistently complain about instrumentalism, our behavior and the entire system encourages and facilitates it." Steven J. Corbett encourages us to shake up our lecture in his op-ed piece. "As a teacher of writing, and as a proponent of active learning, I have always disdained the traditional lecture. Yet, each term, for each course that I teach — from freshman "basic writing" courses, to graduate courses in teaching (and learning) college writing — I have always included a somewhat traditional introductory lecture on rhetoric. Sure, I give it all I’ve got in order to not only provide students the information I want them to use in their analytical work (content), but also to enact a living model of delivery (form) — what the greatest of the Greek orators, Demosthenes, declared the most important part of any speech. But this term I decided to shake things up a bit. I wondered what would happen if I turned over the reins of my prized rhetoric-lecture thoroughbred over to the hands and minds of the students to ride (deliver)," writes Corbett.

"An institution's capacity to retain students is directly related to its ability to reach out and make contact with students and integrate them into the social and intellectual fabric of institutional life. It hinges on the establishment of a healthy, caring educational environment which enables all individuals, not just some, to find a niche in one or more of the many social and intellectual communities of the institution." That is one of the conclusions shared by Dr. Vincent Tinto in his book Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition. It is also the topic of this week's faculty development workshop to be held on April 25 at 1:30 PM in the CT+LE Commons. Dr. Sherri Shoefstall will lead this solutions-packed workshop that is part of the Center for Teaching+Learning Enhancement's ongoing faculty development programming. Helping your students to succeed involves learning the proper skills necessary to identify patterns and trigger-events that can lead to student attrition. Faculty will receive participation credit towards the Faculty Development Program. Registration is encouraged but not required. Barry Leshowitz, Kristen Eignor DiCerbo, and Scott Symington in their article Effective Thinking: An Active-Learning Course in Critical Thinking write, "One explanation for the poor performance of students in reasoning and other higher-order thinking skills is the nature of the educational experience typically encountered in our classrooms. Educational researchers have long observed that instruction at all levels does not emphasize information-processing skills. Instead of making the development of reasoning a priority, most instruction forces a large fraction of students into blind memorization." They outline many active learning methods they were able to utilize in their class that focused on developing critical thinking skills as the course outcome. "In classroom exercises and real-world-based investigations, the students discover that knowledge of causal relations allows one to predict and control future events. This knowledge is fundamental to making the informed decisions that underlie effective problem solving," they conclude. Technological developments and financial forces have led to the increasing prominence of online education, which challenges the value of a physical campus for delivering a college education. William H. Weitzer asks in an op-ed piece, "What are the risks for higher education if institutions do not adapt quickly or significantly enough to this dramatic environmental change?" Clearly the demand exists for the current product that these elite institutions deliver, but for how long and for how many institutions? In The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out (LA 227.4 C525), Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring argue that educational technology and other factors place American institutions of higher education at great risk. They state that even as our traditional universities continue to perform critical functions, they also face disruptive innovations that are changing the educational landscape and they must respond. Their concern is: “If they cannot find innovative, less costly ways of performing their uniquely valuable functions, they are doomed to decline, high global and national rankings notwithstanding. University communities that focus their activities and measure success in terms of absolute performance rather that relative rank can enjoy a bright future. They can be the best in the eyes of their own students, faculty members, and public and private supporters. They can serve more of their chosen students at higher levels of quality.” Weitzer's comments echo those of Dr. George Mehaffy who visited LU last week. While Lamar University has been a pioneer in online education, there is much to be said about engaging in the community that exists on college campuses around the world. LU has been working to enhance both environments and is firmly committed to delivering teaching in multiple forms. Stay tuned as this conversation continues to evolve. As you being to administer the ACES survey to your students, we encourage you to take the time to explain the significance of the data being collected. Research shows that respondents are much more likely to take the time and give thoughtful answers if the results are tied to their personal concerns. Since we use the data gathered to improve teaching and learning, it is important that we increase the rate of completion in order to capture a true picture of what is happening in our classrooms and online.

Former Cardinal Dr. George Mehaffy returns to Beaumont on Friday, April 20 to talk about the future of higher education. He will be speaking at 10:30 AM and 1:30 PM in the Landes Auditorium of the Galloway Building. His talk, Transformation in Perilous Times: Navigating our Way through the 21st Century, is timely given the current state of higher education. Mehaffy currently serves as the Vice President for Academic Leadership and Change for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. One of his most high profile projects was coordination of the Red Balloon Project that set out to re-envision higher education. He reflects on the project in a terrific article in Change magazine and notes "we have been struck by the challenge of change in higher education, especially at the institutional level. Substantive forces are at work to maintain the status quo, including extra-institutional expectations of states and accreditation agencies; institutional aspirations to achieve a different status; intransigent concepts of faculty work, especially regarding the nature of scholarship and service; frequently changing leadership; entrenched policies and procedures; and the array of issues competing for institutional attention." Registration for Mehaffy's two sessions, which be identical in content, continues for all LU faculty, staff, and students. As we draw near the close of another semester, you will be contacted by the Office of Assessment about completing the annual ACES survey. This instrument allows us to capture data related to our SACS accreditation and Quality Enhancement Plan or QEP. If you would like to discuss your results or would like to implement more active learning experiences in your course, do not hesitate to contact a member of the CT+LE staff. Tom Bartlett has an interesting article in CHE about the Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate every study from three journals in 2008 including Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. He writes, "For decades, literally, there has been talk about whether what makes it into the pages of psychology journals—or the journals of other disciplines, for that matter—is actually, you know, true. Researchers anxious for novel, significant, career-making findings have an incentive to publish their successes while neglecting to mention their failures. It’s what the psychologist Robert Rosenthal named “the file drawer effect.” So if an experiment is run ten times but pans out only once you trumpet the exception rather than the rule. Or perhaps a researcher is unconsciously biasing a study somehow. Or maybe he or she is flat-out faking results, which is not unheard of." CT+LE has recently donated three terrific books to the Mary and John Gray Library, or MJGL, that can help you improve student learning and they include Enhancing Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning by Maryellen Weimer, Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before by Jean M. Twenge, and Assessing General Education Programs by Mary J. Allen. All three are available to circulate and can be found on the recommended reading bookshelves at the CT+LE suite on the 6th floor of MJGL.

There are many reasons for incorporating real-life situations into instruction. Foremost are that applications of theoretical material in real-life situations make content easier to understand and that the relevance of content is demonstrated by real-life examples. If we are trying to connect content to real-life situations, our assessments must demonstrate face validity. That is, they have to model the situations in which the new knowledge and skills will be used. If we only test for knowledge the opportunity to demonstrate that learning is relevant is missed. The preceding comments are from Dr. Michael Theall's paper Related Course Material to Real Life Situations. Theall will be at LU on Thursday and Friday to deliver two thought provoking sessions. The Thursday workshop begins at 2:00 PM in the auditorium of the Dishman Art Museum. He will take the research on teaching and learning from the past six decades and distill it for you in an action-packed hour and a half. Theall continues the distinguished speaker series on Friday at 8:30 AM in the Landis Auditorium of the Galloway Building. Theall will address why he thinks that increased workloads, external pressures, a focus on disciplinary productivity, and new demands placed on faculty have weakened community and resulted in feelings of isolation and the loss of collegiality. Not content to merely comment, Theall will offer his ideas on how this recent trend can be reversed for the good of the institution and individuals. Registration is requested but not required. Adam and Jaye Fenderson have released their new documentary chronicling the lives of several first-generation college students. The makers of the film are a married couple who said that they found it difficult not to help the students they were covering. “We actually made a decision when we started thinking about the film that we were not going to intervene in the students’ lives,” Mr. Fenderson said. “It was very difficult to sit there and listen to them talk about what their counselor told them when we knew that it was wrong. It was difficult to even sit in some of the counselor meetings and hear the counselors be so brief and quick with these students and these students not get answers that they really needed.” An absence of college graduates in a family can result not only in a lack of financial support — many economic studies have suggested that college graduates make more money over time than high school graduates — but also a shortage of knowledge about the college admissions process. In the film First Generation, one of the student’s mothers is depicted as having no idea how to pay for college, and not knowing whether the cost is required to be paid in full upfront. The students, themselves floundering through the process, make misinformed financial decisions that limit their college choices and may even stifle their academic potential. The members of the LU Faculty Learning Community High School to College Transition is exploring many of the issues described in the documentary. Be sure to join us at the inaugural FLC Showcase on Monday, May 14 from 2:30-4:30 PM in the Setzer Student Center Ballroom. You will learn about the efforts over the last academic year of all four FLC. Lamar University has honored three faculty members with 2012 University Merit Awards in recognition of outstanding performance in the classroom. Award recipients are assistant professors John Zhanhu Guo, chemical engineering; Qin Qian, civil engineering; and Melissa Rusher, deaf studies and deaf education. While scholarship and service to the university and community are an important consideration in granting the Merit Awards, the most important criteria for selection are classroom performance and interaction with students, said Stephen Doblin, provost and vice president for academic affairs. CT+LE congratulates these teachers who focus their efforts on student learning. Look for an announcement in the future concerning this year's recipients and a collaboration with CT+LE.

Today’s Academic Minute features McGill University's Dr. Julio Martinez-Trujillo who shares his thoughts on how our brains allow us to focus on more than one thing at a time. His findings are very interesting as we have also been working on research geared towards helping students to learn how to focus their attention, especially as it relates to test-taking. His focus on multitasking brings to mind the recent conversations we had with Dr. Christy Price, who visited LU in March. She noted that many psychologists are now using the term switch tasking to refer to our ability to handle more than one task at the same time. In Texas, which has the country’s second-largest Latino population, experts say that closing the gap in college graduation rates between Latinos and Anglos will be critical to ensuring that the state has an educated workforce in the next 20 years. A report recently released by Excelencia in Education, a national nonprofit that promotes policies aimed at improving Latino achievement in higher education, shows that approximately 17 percent of Latino adults in Texas have an associate's degree or higher, compared with 34 percent of all Texas adults. The report notes that the graduation rate for Latino college students in Texas is about 10 percentage points lower than that of white students. The report also contains examples of what the authors feel will help Latinos to graduate. Florida's colleges are on high alert in the battle against what they fear is a growing number of tech-savvy cheaters. Smartphones and social networking have made cheating easier and more widespread than ever, some say. And experts add that if schools don't crack down on the dishonesty now, there could be long-term consequences for society. "Do you want to drive over a bridge designed by an engineer who cheated his way through school?" asked Jen Day Shaw, dean of students at the University of Florida. "Do you want to be operated on by a surgeon who cheats? If the students don't learn honesty and good values here, what are they going to do in the real world?" TurnItIn recently presented a webinar on this very topic. As we approach our final exam period, you might want to take half an hour to listen to the presentation. They are also offering a webinar on Thursday, April 12 at noon on the topic of Teaching Critical Thinking with Student Engagement. For those interested in teaching the University Success Seminar, or LMAR 1101, there will be three informational meetings during the month of April. The dates and times include April 13 at 2:00 PM, April 23 at 12:30 PM, and April 27 at 2:00 PM. All of the sessions will take place in 622 MJGL and no registration is required.

Laura McKenna has written a very interesting opinion piece for The Atlantic. She notes, among other things that, "After finishing their dissertations, PhDs are hired by a college, based on publication records, the reputations of their references, and the name of their graduate programs. If they happen to have picked up a little classroom experience through a temporary position, it is rarely considered by hiring committees. Unlike other educators, college professors receive no formal instruction on how to teach. Newly minted PhDs are expected to teach Introduction to Political Science or Macroeconomics to 35-200 students without training in classroom management, pedagogy, and assessment. They have had no mentorships or student teacher training. Would you go to a dentist who never learned how to drill teeth? In addition, their graduate education forced them specialize to such an extent that many find it difficult to convey the wide breadth of knowledge that is required in lower level, undergraduate classes, the very meat of a college education." Have you heard of course networking. A faculty member at Indiana University has created a social networking site that allows student to connect based on common courses. CourseNetworking, or The CN as it is described by the creator, "is a new social network dedicated to improved learning by connecting educators and students within a classroom and from around the world based on shared interests and class subjects. A free online platform open to anyone worldwide, The CN is a simple, easy-to-use system that lets students and teachers post and share classroom information and materials, collaborate on homework and socialize with their worldwide connections. The CN's mission is to change the way the world learns." The Quality Enhancement Plan, or QEP, at LU is focused on course redesign for the core curriculum. The initial thrust for implementation has taken place through the Active and Collaborative Engagement for Students (ACES) program. Three cohorts of faculty have been involved in the year-long process of creating courses based on the use of active learning. The faculty have redesigned their courses using learning outcomes that are focused on what they expect their students to be able to do once they have completed their course. The learning experiences used by the ACES Fellows are significant and innovative. Once the Center for Teaching+Learning Enhancement was established in 2010, a second resource was added to the QEP. Faculty development programming over the last two academic years has focused on providing specific active learning methods that faculty can implement in their classes immediately. In addition, through the faculty development expert speaker series, our faculty have been exposed to national leaders who are actively conducting research on the effectiveness of active learning methods adoption and much has been revealed that documents the impact of course redesign focused on these methods. Recently the CT+LE has contacted a number of past participants of the various faculty development workshops and seminars. We are interested in hearing from more of you about your experiences with active learning in your classroom. If you implemented new methods, we would like to know what you experienced in your class in terms of student learning and teaching effectiveness. If you would like to share your experience, please contact a member of the CT+LE staff at your convenience. The programming continues with the upcoming visit of Dr. Micheal Theall of Youngstown State University. You can register now to attend both of his fascinating workshops to be held on April 19 and 20. In addition, you should mark your calendar to attend a Provost Special Topics Seminar: Transformation in Perilous Times: Navigating our Way through the 21st Century to be delivered by Dr. George Mehaffy, Vice President of American Association of State Colleges and University and a LU alum. He will be visiting LU on Friday, April 20, 2012 and will give his talk at two times: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM and 1:30 – 3:00 PM in the Landes Auditorium of Galloway Hall.

Being involved in an internship opportunity has proven to enhance the educational experience for LU students. Experiential learning also provides the skills that employers are looking for from our graduates. If you are looking for quality opportunities for your students or want to learn more about the current program, register to attend the Student Internships: Present and Future of Experiential Learning faculty development workshop this Wednesday (April 4). In this session, Deidra Mayer will facilitate a discussion about best practices, current legal issues surrounding internships, as well as the support offered through Career Services. Join us for what promises to be an enlightening workshop about this terrific opportunity. The session begins at 1:30 PM and will be held in the CT+LE Commons located on the 6th floor of the Mary & John Gray Library (MJGL) behind the CT+LE suite. The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education has released its debut report which is focused on the “completion agenda” and its heavy emphasis on workforce development, a fixation that the report said threatens academic quality and student access, as well as social mobility. The report, dubbed "Closing the Door, Increasing the Gap: Who's not going to (community) college?" focused on California, where a state task force has successfully pushed for the system to prioritize students who appear most likely to earn a credential. “Policy makers are narrowing the focus of community colleges to fulfilling a short-term work-force development role that prepares workers for relatively low-wage jobs rather than bachelor degree programs into which students could transfer,” according to the center. “This rebooting and narrowing of the community college mission to the lower rungs of that economy works against expansion of the middle class and building a strong economy.” The report said the reason community colleges are being forced to turn away students is simple: They don’t have enough money because of state and federal disinvestment. The 2012 U.S. Professors of the Year Awards Program—sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education—is accepting nominations for outstanding undergraduate teachers. The program, now in its 32nd year, is the only national initiative that focuses solely on excellent undergraduate teaching and mentoring. The program is open to educators in all types of undergraduate settings nationwide—public and private, two- and four-year institutions. Four national winners will each receive $5,000 and an all-expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C., including an invitation to speak at the 2012 awards luncheon in November. State winners will receive complimentary attendance for two at the luncheon, along with recognition at the event and in the media. National and state award winners will also be honored at an early-evening congressional reception. Entries are due by Friday, April 16, 2012.