The more I ponder it, the more blatant good sense this post makes: a certain amount of organization and routine is essential for forward motion in life, but jumping the tracks and implementing some random actions now and then can have positive results as well. New experiences, people, thoughts, and ideas can move your life to a different sphere. New spheres have the potential to be positive, negative or (sometimes this happens) to have only a vaguely different sort of sameness about them. Regardless of the size of the sphere or the level of wonderfulness it brings, you will have at least opened yourself up to something new and that’s always beneficial to the instincts and the grey matter.

New images, unfamiliar terrain, and alternate perspectives are inspiring, frightening, and force your brain to work (neuroplasticity is not a word I made up). Plus, it reduces boredom and shifts you, at least temporarily, out of the comfort and safety of your ruts.

Way back, before the time of supermarkets, going out for groceries had a palpable kill-or-be-killed aspect. I think we’re still jonesing for that brain-chemical surge we get when faced with new and exciting things. The annual rearrangement of the aisles my grocery store screws me over with is nowhere near as unexpected or exciting as being an animal skin-wearing early manperson out hunting and gathering, rounding a corner and suddenly coming face-to-face with a large toothy animal.

There are varying degrees of panic-induced adrenaline surges: at the low end is having to choose the perfect kitchen paint color out of the magillion paint chips they have at Home Depot; mid-level panic is somewhere along the lines of giving an important presentation if public speaking isn’t your thing; high-level is probably something akin to being held at gunpoint in a bank robbery.

These days most of us don’t get a regular dose of the high-level stuff. That’s probably one of the top ten perks of being towards the top of the food chain and having opposable thumbs. If not for those we wouldn’t have come up with grocery stores and solid housing, and without grocery stores and housing we’d still be in the eat-or-be-eaten part of our evolutionary trajectory.

Putting yourself out there and exposing yourself to randomness for the sake of enrichment doesn’t need to involve jumping out of perfectly good airplanes or other acts of tempting fate for the sake of the adrenaline rush. That’s not quite what I’m saying. The comfort of routine and the control we have when our lives are ordered and on-time is safe and within what becomes a non-thinking bubble. Stepping out of that safe, well-known place for even an hour has to be good for us on some level, regardless of the ultimate result.

I’m not putting forward the idea that in order to achieve happiness, success and a fully-enriched life we all must strive for a daily near-death experience. I’m merely suggesting that striving for some rut-free time every so often will be conducive to the leading of a bigger life.

Rutless Reading:

Brain Plasticity: How Learning Changes Your Brain

Train Your Brain: The New Mania for Neuroplasticity

Scans of Monks’ Brains Show Meditation Alters Structure, Function

Brain Research: Implications for Second Language Learning

Posted by Alexa Harrington

There was an article in the NY Times a few weeks ago which I have tried (and have now officially failed) to ignore. Brain-enhancing drugs is the new hot ethical question in academia. The use of performance-enhancing drugs by athletes bothers me, but I didn’t react in quite the same way to hearing about the Tour de France and Major League Baseball and the Olympics as I did to reading about supposedly intelligent people enhancing their noggin function with chemicals.

The more I looked into it, the less intelligent I felt—this has been going on for quite a while in academic settings. Where the hell have I been? I do not enjoy the confusion of simultaneous opposing emotions: feeling cheated/lied to by the folks I thought were in possession of elevated intelligence, along with acute pissed-offedness at not even knowing this crap was available until it was too late for me. Seriously, I could have gotten so much more shit accomplished while I was in school. Probably an additional degree for one thing. Although, the side effects are extreme crankiness, intense focus, and generally just wanting people to go away so you can work, and I was already like that without any drugs in my system. So it’s probably for the best that I didn’t partake.

I can’t really come up with any solid argument against the use of brain-enhancing chemicals other than it just doesn’t seem right. People smoke cigarettes and drink caffeine so they can keep studying, and isn’t that basically the same thing? Possibly cheaper and more socially acceptable, but more or less the same idea. It sucks that humans are so obsessed with perfection that we will go to extreme measures to be the biggest and best athletes, the skinniest and most beautiful models, the smartest and greatest-thinking academics. Being great at a human level isn’t good enough anymore. We all have to find artificial ways to make ourselves super human.

I can understand why; I totally empathize with the level of intense focus you can achieve when everything in your life tunnel-visions down to one goal and all the rest just falls to the wayside. But I’m also a pretty black-and-white girl: I tend to categorize my world as right or wrong and there isn’t a lot of grey. I know I sound like I’m eight years old, but it just doesn’t seem fair. And, seriously, how pathetic if we have one more human endeavor category with an extra section for the asterisks: Fastest Athlete* (performance-enhancing drugs); Hottest Movie Star* (plastic surgery); Skinniest Model* (diet pills and eating disorder); Most Brilliant Scholar* (brain-enhancing drugs).

And, to further my confusion, let me ask this: is all medical assistance and/or enhancement bad? I adore penicillin and vaccinations and vitamins and all the life-saving and –advancing techniques that medical research has come up with. And I can almost guarantee that there was at least one old guy back in the day who saw doctors and their pills as the epitome of modern evil and would have none of it. That guy probably only considered old men who lived past the age of forty to be in the non-pussy category if they had lived that long without medical intervention or enhancement of any kind. Which would mean that by his lights, if I live to a ripe old age, I should have an asterisk on my headstone: Super-Old Lady* (went to the doctor, big fan of Western medicine).

Maybe all the enhancement stuff is just the way things are heading and we should assume everyone is doing it, that we’re all advancing a level of superness thanks to modern science, and we should just get used to it. It can’t be all bad to have a bunch of enhanced brainiacs running amok in the academic world, thinking a real lot and coming up with lots of new, exciting, and profoundly creative and advanced ideas. If they use their powers for good it should all work out great. (This is me being optimistic).

Knowledge Enhancement:

‘Era of Doping’ on the Horizon in Academia?
Is Your Professor Juicing?
Would You Boost Your Brain Power?
Pumping Up Your Brain With Legal Drugs
A Possible Target For Memory-Enhancing Drugs
The Doping Dilemma
Performance Enhancing Drugs in the Boardroom?
A Timeline of Performance-Enhancing Drugs in Sports
Fallout From BALCO Probe Could Taint Olympics, Pro Sports
CBC Sports: 10 Drug Scandals
Are They All Dirty?

Posted by Alexa Harrington

ScienceDaily has an article up about a new Northwestern University study researching the effects of class size on academic achievement in elementary school students. Decreasing class size is beneficial overall, but a new study found that not only does the achievement gap between the higher academic achievers and the lower academic achievers still exists, but it’s more pronounced when class size is decreased.

While decreasing class size may increase achievement on average for all types of students, it does not appear to reduce the achievement gap within a class,” said Spyros Konstantopoulos, assistant professor at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy.

Konstantopoulos’ study, which appears in the March issue of Elementary School Journal, questions commonly held assumptions about class size and the academic achievement gap — one of the most debated and perplexing issues in education today.

The Northwestern professor worked with data from Project STAR, a landmark longitudinal study launched in 1985 by the State of Tennessee to determine whether small classes positively impacted the academic achievement of students.

Considered one of the most important investigations in education, STAR made it abundantly clear that on average small classes had a positive impact on the academic performance of all students.

“Given that class size reduction is an intervention that benefits all students, it’s tempting to expect that it also will reduce the achievement gap,” he added. Previous research, however, has provided weak or no evidence that class reduction benefited lower-achieving students more than others. The Northwestern study underscores that research.

Smaller class size should always be a priority, that much is obvious. It’s better for all parties involved—the minds and the psyches of the students, the sanity of the teachers, and it certainly helps to tone down the spazziness of hyper parents. As Konstantopoulos suggests, the next step is to research how to improve academic achievement for lower-achieving students.

“It is unfortunate that data about classroom practices that could be useful in identifying ways of improving academic success for lower achieving students were not available in Project STAR,” Konstantopoulos said. “A new randomized experiment with the objective of collecting high-quality observational data in the classrooms would provide invaluable information about the effects of small classes.”

Posted by Alexa Harrington

The American Diploma Project people have surveyed and polled all pertinent groups (high school students, educators and administrators, high school dropouts, new college students, college professors, parents, the general public, recent graduates in the workforce, employers, and some other people, too) regarding how adequately public high schools in America prepare graduates for college. All questioned parties agree that unless high school grads have taken AP classes, honors courses, etc., they will not be prepared for college-level coursework.

Thus far, I concur. The average public high school in America does not require of its students what the average American college or university will when those students graduate and begin their matriculation. Huge news this is not.

The newsy part is that the American Diploma Project and some politician-types have decided that the way to fix the problem is to create a whole new side project whereby high school students can be extra challenged and receive a College and Career Ready Diploma, also known as a “super diploma”.

Obviously, a super diploma is way cooler than a standard-issue diploma. There are some additional credits involved as well as more math, science and language requirements, etc. Theoretically, the graduates with the super diploma will be super-ready to kick ass in college or in the workforce.

That is a lovely plan. Really. The American Diploma Project folks put a huge amount of research into this. And where’s the bad in trying to increase high school grad preparedness for college? I agree (mostly) with what they’ve found lacking in the current system, and with the the list of coursework and skills graduates will need before entering college or the workforce.

But I’m not on board with the idea of it being an extra component of the current system. Why can’t the entire system just be made stronger and better and more ass-kicking? The public education system in America is like a road with some distressingly large, car-sized potholes. It could use a little work before someone gets hurt. So the Diploma guys and the politicians gathered around some of the more sizeable potholes and had a meeting, did some surveys, took some polls. Then they talked a lot and there were more meetings, plans were made, pages were written, money was invested.

And they decided to build a Special Shiny Golden Bridge of Wonderfulness over the Potholey Road of Public Education. Of course! Build a bridge over the problem! (Then we don’t have to deal with it). There are “opt-in” and “opt-out” loopholes built-in, so any student who doesn’t feel like being Super in this lifetime can avoid the bridge and stick with the potholes. Whew! Problem solved. Our work here is done.

I’m neither an educator nor a politician, but here’s my subtle suggestion: spend the time, energy, money and politician-backing on fixing the public education system. Improve the whole system so all graduates are prepared for college or career. Don’t make a special side project that increases the red tape and the confusion. I’ll be optimistic (and a little less sarcastic) and hope that their ultimate goal is that the Special Shiny Golden Bridge of Wonderfulness will eventually replace the Potholey Road. Maybe they’re just trying to move in slowly so the kinks can be worked out.

Further Reading:

Diploma Project Raises Bar for State
American Diploma Project Aims to ‘Guarantee’ College/Career
Ready or Not: Mathematics Benchmarks from the American Diploma Project
Study Says U.S. Should Set High-School Standards
Maryland Schools Will Participate in American Diploma Project
Virginia Secretary of Education: American Diploma Project Network
Oregon Dept. of Education: High School as a Key Transition
High School Diploma is No Longer Key to Success
Back to the Future in Mathematics Education

Posted by Alexa Harrington

A college degree is one of the better bullet points to have on your résumé. And going to college is the best way to obtain said degree. Not everyone heads straight from high school to a four-year college or university—about half of the undergraduates in the U.S. are currently matriculating through community colleges. Financial, academic, or resident status red tape being the main reasons to attend a two-year vs. a four-year institution. But less than half of them actually accomplish their higher educational goals. Um, why? The theory is that while the community colleges are very accessible to a larger percentage of the population than are four-year institutions, the community colleges don’t do much in the way of support once the students are in and trying to do the actual learning and achieving of goals.

The state funding the community colleges receive is frequently based on enrollment, not on student success. There’s now a new plan afoot to base state funding on several measurable achieved goals.

Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count is a multiyear national initiative to help more community college students succeed. The initiative is particularly concerned about student groups that traditionally have faced significant barriers to success, including students of color and low-income students. Achieving the Dream works on multiple fronts, including efforts at community colleges and in research, public engagement and public policy. It emphasizes the use of data to drive change.

Fifteen states have colleges participating in the Achieving the Dream initiative. Inside Higher Ed’s recent article explained in detail how the schools in Washington State could benefit from the program.

Washington State’s Student Achievement Initiative rewards its colleges for helping students continue moving forward regardless of where they start or how far they may be from attaining their educational goals.

Washington’s community and technical colleges will receive extra money for students who earn their first 15 and first 30 college credits, earn their first 5 credits of college-level math, pass a pre-college writing or math course, make significant gains in certain basic skills tests, earn a degree or complete a certificate. Colleges also will be rewarded for students who earn a GED through their programs. All of these benchmarks are important accomplishments that help propel students forward on the road of higher education.

To base funding solely on enrollment numbers is lame and doesn’t help students once they’re attending the school. Which means I support the basic idea of student success-based funding. Teach your students well, have excellent advisors and tutoring centers and there will be more money for you. However, there is a slight disconnect for me regarding how this program will affect not only the traditional students this new program is geared for, but all the non-traditional community college students as well.

Community colleges have several student categories: transfer, transitional, high school concurrent, adult, international, professional/technical, and personal interest. How do they fit into the assessment program? Do they affect funding positively or negatively? Will they end up skewing the funding numbers? Or will they end up with little or no support because they don’t fit the traditional student criteria?

Obviously a student trying to earn their GED needs more support than the retirees taking Tai Chi. It’s not that I feel it’s supremely important that the underwater basket-weaving students receive as much guidance, advising and tutoring as the international transfer students, it’s that I don’t want this incentive program to cause the dissolution of all non-traditional courses at community colleges. I’ll be optimistic and hope the initiative positively affects the traditional students who need additional support and has no adverse effects on the non-traditional community college student population.

Further Reading:

Excellent explanation of how the Lumina Foundation selected colleges for the Achieving the Dream initiative.

American Association of Community Colleges Student Enrollment and Characteristics.

Profiles of colleges taking part in the Achieving the Dream initiative and their individual goals.

Press release regarding Texas schools.

Press release regarding Michigan schools.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I’m re-posting this as it goes along nicely with my previous article regarding moms and career decisions.

Examining the Trend of College-Educated Women Leaving the Workforce

I love research done by people who’ve heard a general, society-wide rumor and just have to know whether or not it’s based in fact. Sylvia Ann Hewlett (author of the 2002 book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children) recently researched just how many college-educated women are ditching their careers to be at-home moms for a while. I’m a science girl at heart, so I’m always down with anyone who backs their thoughts up with cold, hard numbers.

Off-Ramping and On-Ramping
Hewlett refers to the leaving and the subsequent return to their careers as “off-ramping” and “on-ramping.” The main issues it brought up in my mind were the still-around, can’t-get-away-from-them discrepancies between what’s expected from a working mom vs. what’s expected from a working dad. Working moms are expected to make money and be stellar in their careers, then come home and be perfect, nurturing mommies with lots of time and energy left at the end of the day for their little ones. Working dads are expected to go to work and make money. Done.

The new trend seemed to be a mass exodus of college-educated, successful women ditching their careers, so they could be home and do the family thing for a while. It’s interesting that not as many women are “off-ramping” as everyone (society in general) had previously thought. (As a funny side note: it’s also hilarious that the career women who were staying in the rat race were irate at the bad rep these off-ramping bi***es were giving career women everywhere.)

Hewlett’s data showed that only 37% of career women are bailing out of the rat race, and then only for a short period of time. The bailing out isn’t ‘cause these ladies can’t hack it. The reasons listed include having kids, caring for aging parents, and “taking care of other life needs.” (Do you think potentially life-threatening illnesses fall into that category? I was just wondering.)

I’m guessing that these women were doing fine and kicking some corporate booty in their fields, obviously able to handle all of the thinking and the work load, the deadlines and the pressure of career plus normal life on top of that. Add in something life-altering, like, say, giving birth or having a new kid to care for 24/7 or perhaps an aging parent around who needs your help, or even maybe battling cancer, might throw a wrench in the ass-kicking works and could conceivably throw the perfectly balanced career / life juggling act off. Something has to give, and apparently 37% of those career gals are willing to give up the careers you know they busted their asses to succeed in. (more…)

UCLA does an annual survey of incoming American undergrads.

The CIRP Freshman Survey is part of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) and is administered by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. The 2007 freshman norms are based on the responses of 272,036 first-time, full-time students at 356 of the nation’s baccalaureate colleges and universities. The data have been statistically adjusted to reflect the responses of the 1.4 million first-time, full-time students entering four-year colleges and universities as freshmen in 2007.

The 2007 results came out recently and the info on helicopter parenting has me concerned. Either we’ve all been wrong about helicopter parents and their over-involvement in their kids’ education, or the young’uns in question like being helicoptered. Here’s what the survey found out about

Parental Involvement:

While college officials nationwide say they have seen an increase in parents who are heavily involved in the college experiences of their children, a strong majority of today’s college freshmen believe their parents are involved the “right amount,” according to UCLA’s annual survey of the nation’s entering undergraduates.

The report suggests freshmen show a dependency on parents when making college-related decisions.

“When parents intervene in their children’s college life and decision-making, students may not necessarily develop their own problem-solving skills, which may limit developmental gains in their learning experiences,” said John H. Pryor, a co-author of the report and director of CIRP.

A majority of freshmen considered their parents’ participation in their college careers to be the “right amount,” with 84 percent reporting the “right amount” of parental involvement in their decision to go to college, 80.5 percent in their decision to attend the college at which they enrolled and 77.5 percent in dealing with college officials.

Conversely, nearly one in four freshmen (24 percent) report that their parents displayed “too little” involvement in helping them select college courses, and 22.5 percent say their parents were not involved enough in helping choose college activities.

Along with parental involvement, the survey also covered:

“Habits of Mind” for Learning:

The report identifies a troubling pattern in students’ study habits for lifelong learning. While a large majority of freshmen report that they use the Internet on a daily basis to seek information, only a few within the classroom are cultivating the essential “habit of mind” of checking the accuracy and reliability of the information they receive.

“Students’ frequent use of the Internet shows a preference for information that is easily accessible, but that information is not necessarily reliable and accurate,” Hurtado said. “Learning how to evaluate knowledge claims is an essential part of a liberal education, and we expect that colleges will have to be more intentional about integrating information literacy in the education of college students today.”

Impact of Social Networking Sites:

While the popularity of social networking Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace runs high — 86.3 percent of incoming freshmen report that during the last year of high school they spent at least some time on such sites each week — students still spend relatively more time in an average week studying, working and “live” socializing.

Time spent on social networking sites appears, however, to be related not to less “live” socializing but to more time spent in other social activities. Students who used social networking Web sites more often were also more likely to socialize with friends and attend parties. This did not seem to have any significant impact on the number of hours a week students spent studying.

Diversity-Related Issues:

Attitudes about diversity continue to change among incoming first-year students: 36.7 percent of students expressed the personal goal of helping to promote racial understanding, a 2.7 percentage-point increase from 2006 and the highest this figure has been since 1994. Not surprisingly, the figure escalates among students at black colleges and universities, where 64 percent see this as an essential or very important personal goal.

Interest in the global community is advancing as well. When this item was first placed on the questionnaire in 2002, following the attacks of Sept. 11, 43.2 percent of students reported that they had an interest in improving their understanding of other countries and cultures; in 2007 that proportion became a majority, at 52.3 percent.

Freshman support for same-sex marriages has expanded steadily, from 50.9 percent 1997 to 63.5 percent in 2007. The issue, however, reveals a wide gender gap: 55.3 percent of male freshmen report that same-sex couples should have the right to legal marital status, compared with 70.3 percent of female students. Gender differences appear on other issues, as well: More than half of all males (53.7 percent) agree with the statement that undocumented immigrants should be denied access to public education, compared with 43.5 percent of all female students; 43.3 percent of males and 39.2 percent of females at black colleges agreed.

Reasons to Attend College:

Academic quality remained the top reason for choosing a college, cited by 63 percent of students — a 5.6 percentage-point jump from 2006 and the highest this figure has been in 35 years. And college affordability is now more than ever a priority for students, with the importance of being awarded financial assistance increasing 5.1 percentage points from 2006 to 39.4 percent in 2007, also the highest this figure has been in 35 years.

Posted by Alexa Harrington