Education Commons^™

The Role Of Teaching And Teacher Training In The Hiring And Promotion Of Ph.D. Economists, Sam Allgood, Gail Hoyt, Kimmarie Mcgoldrick

Economics Faculty Publications

Surveys suggest that a majority of graduate students seek academic positions after completing their degree. We survey groups involved in the job market to determine the roles of teaching and research in hiring and the subsequent success of new faculty. We find that while characteristics that signal research potential are highly valued by both graduate directors and department chairs, there are significant discrepancies in the extent that teaching is valued in the hiring process across institution types. Furthermore, although new faculty devote half of their time to teaching, only half of them agree that graduate school prepared them to teach.

Measuring Faculty Teaching Effectiveness Using Conditional Fixed Effects, Maia K. Linask, James Monks

Economics Faculty Publications

Using a dataset of 48 faculty members and 88 courses over 26 semesters, the authors estimate Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) ratings that are conditional on a multitude of course, faculty, and student attributes. They find that ratings are lower for required courses and those where students report a lower prior level of interest. Controlling for these variables substantially alters the SET ratings for many instructors. The average absolute value of the difference between the faculty ratings controlling just for time effects and fully conditional ratings is nearly one-half of a standard deviation in the students’ rating of how much …

Teacher Training For Phd Students And New Faculty In Economics, Sam Allgood, Gail Hoyt, Kimmarie Mcgoldrick

Economics Faculty Publications

Past studies suggest that a majority of economics graduate students engage in teaching-related activities during graduate school and many go on to academic positions afterwards. However, not all graduate students are formally prepared to teach while in graduate school nor are they fully prepared to teach in their first academic position. The authors characterize current teaching experience and training of graduate students from the point of view of directors of graduate studies and of newly minted academic economists. The authors also query department chairs and new faculty about teacher training, support available for new faculty, and the degree to which …

The Gender Gap In Economics Degrees: An Investigation Of The Role Model And Quantitative Requirement Hypotheses, Tisha L. N. Emerson, Kimmarie Mcgoldrick, John J. Siegfried

Economics Faculty Publications

Using a panel of 159 institutions over 10 years, we investigate the role model effect of women faculty and quantitative requirements on the female proportion of undergraduate economics majors. We find no evidence that female faculty attract female students. Calculus, however, does matter. A one semester calculus requirement is associated with more female majors at institutions offering business degrees and liberal arts colleges. A second semester calculus requirement deters women from majoring in economics at Ph.D.–granting universities, but is associated with more female majors at liberal arts colleges. Econometrics requirements are unrelated to the gender gap in economics majors.

The High Costs Of Large Enrollment Classes: Can Cooperative Learning Help?, Tisha L. N. Emerson, Linda K. English, Kimmarie Mcgoldrick

Economics Faculty Publications

We examine the potential for cooperative learning activities to offset costs of large enrollment courses. We use a quasi-experimental research design to examine achievement and course perceptions in small and large enrollment sections of microeconomic principles. While large enrollment sections attain lower levels of achievement (measured by course score) than those with smaller enrollments, this effect is partially mitigated by use of cooperative learning. Furthermore, while students in large enrollment sections report lower levels of satisfaction and learning than students in smaller sized classes, the use of cooperative learning eliminates the negative effects of increased class size on student perceptions.

Making Visible The Invisible: Social Justice And Inclusion Through The Collaboration Of Museums And Spanish Community-Based Learning Projects, Karina Elizabeth Vázquez, Martha Wright

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Concerns about inclusion and social responsibility as conduit for social justice on university campuses offer a platform for interdisciplinary initiatives. Here we focus on one such initiative, which seeks to build community between University of Richmond students and local Latino and Hispanic populations using the University of Richmond Museum collection. Collaborations between museums and Spanish classes, including a community-based learning component (Spanish Community-Based Learning and Museums - SCBLM), provide outreach to the local community and might prompt dialogues about extant social injustices (however overt or subliminal). In these experiential learning projects, the museum serves as a communal resource to embody …

Black, Queer, And Beaten: On The Trauma Of Graduate School, Eric Anthony Grollman

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Two years after I graduated with a PhD in sociology from Indiana University, I started seeing a therapist again. At my in-take visit, my therapist invited me to return within a week. “Right now, you’re full,” he said, commenting on the numerous issues that I brought up in explaining why I was seeing a therapist. He did not mean “full of shit,” as in offering lies or irrelevant information; rather, he meant that I was “filled to the brim” of issues weighing on my heart, mind, and spirit. This was not news to me, but hearing him say “full” emphasized …

Seeing Is Believing: Peer Video Coaching As Professional Development Done With Me And For Me, Kate M. Cassada, Laura Kassner

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

As part of their graduate education, in-service teachers identified an area of instructional focus, video recorded their classroom instruction at two intervals in a semester-long course, formed peer groups, and shared their videos for the purpose of obtaining feedback for professional growth. After the conclusion of the course, participants were contacted and presented with a summary of four benefits of the peer video review process, as identified in a recent professional article. Through online survey, participants were asked to share their perceptions of the peer video review experiences in the course and address any evidence related to the benefits raised …

Improving Teacher Job Satisfaction: The Roles Of Social Capital, Teacher Efficacy, And Support, Suzanne K. Edinger, Matthew J. Edinger

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

In this study, we examine how social capital, teacher efficacy, and organizational support increase teacher job satisfaction. Research suggests that teachers worldwide are exceedingly dissatisfied with their jobs and have significantly higher levels of turnover than their counterparts in other professions. We investigate this phenomenon using a sample of 122 elementary school teachers. We found that teachers’ centrality position, or each teacher’s relationship with every other teacher, in their school’s trust network and the density of a teacher’s academic advice ego-network predicted the development of teacher job satisfaction. Additionally, we found that teacher efficacy mediated the relationship between teacher’s trust …

Confronting School And Housing Segregation In The Richmond Region: Can We Learn And Live Together?, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Brian Koziol, John V. Moeser, Taylor Holden, Thomas J. Shields

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

White children now account for less than half of all births. At the same time, we are seeing stagnation in the earnings of the middle class and a widening gap between the poor and the rich. These changes matter, and they are impacting K-12 schools in our region. This report examines the changing nature of segregation in the metro-Richmond area, which is now far more multiracial than it was in the past. It seeks to:

• Pay central attention to segregation in housing and K-12 education
• Understand the mechanisms of educational inequality by examining data on the segregation of …

An Analysis Of Science Instruction And Environmental Education In Virginia And Oklahoma, Megan Wing

Environmental Studies Senior Seminar Projects

Through this project, I hoped to understand how scientists, politicians, and educational experts view climate change education for elementary students, organize current learning standards that relate to climate change education in Virginia and Oklahoma, highlight specific ways to incorporate climate change education in the classroom, and provide resources for teachers to use in the future.

Poster prepared for the Environmental Studies Senior Seminar.

An Analysis Of Science Instruction And Environmental Education In Virginia And Oklahoma, Megan Wing

Environmental Studies Senior Seminar Projects

In order to understand how science instruction, and specifically instruction targeting environmental and climate change science, in K-5 classrooms can help form students into responsible and conscientious global citizens, I looked specifically at science education in K-5 curriculum. I explored how the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOLs) currently include environmental education and climate change education and how the SOLs provide the potential for future climate change education. For comparison, and to understand how states other than Virginia value environmental science education in the elementary grades, I considered the current Oklahoma Academic Standards (OASs) for K-5 students. In this paper, I …

"Dear Colleague", Matthew Oware

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Research demonstrates that faculty of color in historically white institutions experience higher levels of discrimination, cultural taxation, and emotional labor than their white colleagues. Despite efforts to recruit minority faculty, all of these factors undermine their scholarship, pedagogy, social experiences, promotion and retention.

Pervasive Pedagogy: Collaborative Cloud-Based Composing Using Google Drive, Maury Elizabeth Brown, Daniel L. Hocutt

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

Cloud-based services designed for educational use, like Google Apps for Education (GAFE), afford deeply collaborative activities across multiple applications. Through primary research, the authors discovered that cloud-based technologies such as GAFE and Google Drive afford new opportunities for collaborative cross-platform composing and student engagement. These affordances require new pedagogies to transform these potentialities into practice, as well as a reexamination of contemporary theory of computers and composition. The authors’ journey implementing Google Drive as a composing and communication environment required continually remediating content, relationships, practices, and their own identities as they interacted with students in the cloud. This chapter addresses …

Chat It Up: Backchanneling To Promote Reflective Practice Among In-Service Teachers, Laura Kassner, Kate M. Cassada

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

In a graduate education course geared toward developing reflective teaching practice in in-service teachers, backchannels, in the form of chat rooms, were employed in small groups to facilitate peer feedback during viewings of video recorded instruction. This study examined the nature and quality of peer feedback exchanged in the digital medium and gauged graduate students’ impressions of the technology, with potential for carryover into their professional practices in P-12 instruction. Results revealed that the backchannel was perceived as an easy-to-use tool that promoted rich, real-time, high-quality feedback and a space to collaborate and exchange ideas, while improving engagement. Backchannel comments …

Engaging The Power Of Peer Observation, Kate M. Cassada, Julie Harris, Bobby Herting, Tara Warren, Damia Brown-Kidd

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

As a college professor, I have taught hundreds of graduate students in instructional leadership and reflective teaching courses. The overwhelmingly consistent report I hear from these active and engaged educators is that they rarely, if ever, have time to see each other teach. Teaching remains an isolated event - protected time for teachers to share their craft through thoughtful peer discussion and observation rarely. exists. When time is devoted to these activities, it usually is prescribed by building or division-led professional development initiatives, experiences teachers say do not feel genuine, safe, and focused on true reflection and growth. As Daniels, …

Rural Cambodian Women’S Perspectives: An Exploratory Study On Community Ailments, Migration And Opportunity, Robert W. Spires

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

Life in rural Cambodia is difficult, and rural women face issues such as gender-based violence, limited educational opportunities, and pressure to work while maintaining domestic roles. The current exploratory study examines the attitudes of rural Cambodian women (n = 48), framed within in context of migration to Thailand, with particular focus on the areas of community ailments, migration, and educational opportunities. Descriptive statistics indicates the persistence of an unhealthy community, with participants acknowledging the problems of domestic violence, crime, drug use, alcohol use, and depression. The data suggest some improvement in Cambodia, though participants nonetheless recognized working in Thailand as …

Online Teacher Professional Development For Gifted Education: Examining The Impact Of A New Pedagogical Model, Matthew J. Edinger

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

This paper theoretically develops and examines the outcomes of a pilot study that evaluates the PACKaGE Model of online Teacher Professional Development (the Model). The Model was created to facilitate positive pedagogical change within gifted education teachers’ practice, attitude, collaboration, content knowledge, and goal effectiveness. Kirkpatrick and Kirkpatrick’s (2006) model of training evaluation suggests that trainees should evaluate the training for satisfaction at the time the training is completed, as well as six months after, to evaluate for behavior change. Applying Kirkpatrick and Kirkpatrick’s (2006) model, findings indicate that teachers were immediately satisfied with the Model’s effectiveness, adequacy and overall …

Hong Kong’S Post-Colonial Education Reform: Liberal Studies As A Lens, Robert W. Spires

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

The Hong Kong education system is at a crucial point in its trajectory, and changes to public education also reflect broader social, economic and political changes within Hong Kong and globally. Since the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from British control to China, Hong Kong has struggled to develop its own identity under the One Country, Two Systems premise. One of the compulsory courses in the Hong Kong curriculum known as liberal studies, introduced in 2009, provided a useful departure point for exploring many social tensions occurring in Hong Kong. Exploring education reform through liberal studies explains how these social …

Things Learned - Or Affirmed - As A Middle School Mom, Kate M. Cassada

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

As a life-long middle school advocate, I have always known and valued my students as their teacher and school leader, but recently I became a middle school mom. As a parent, many of my beliefs about doing what is right for middle school children have been affirmed, and I have gained wisdom by seeing the situation from a parent's perspectives. Here are some of the lessons learned or affirmed by a middle school mom.

[Introduction To] Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms And Curriculum Studies, Nathan Snaza, Debbie Sonu, Sarah E. Truman, Zofia Zaliwska

Bookshelf

This edited collection takes up the wild and sudden surge of new materialisms in the field of curriculum studies. New materialisms shift away from the strong focus on discourse associated with the linguistic or cultural turn in theory and toward recent work in the physical and biological sciences; in doing so, they posit ontologies of becoming that re-configure our sense of what a human person is and how that person relates to the more-than-human ecologies in which it is nested. Ignited by an urgency to disrupt the dangers of anthropocentrism and systems of domination in the work of curriculum and …

Solidifying Segregation Or Promoting Diversity? School Closure And Rezoning In An Urban District, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Kimberly Bridges, Thomas J. Shields

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

Purpose: Layered with myriad considerations, school closure and rezoning processes in urban school systems are politically fraught with the potential for damaging consequences. This article explores the politics and impacts of a closure and rezoning process in Richmond, Virginia, through the lens of themes applicable to urban school systems and students across the nation. These include the intersection of closure and rezoning with growing White reinvestment in urban school systems, as well as the importance of focusing on diversity and equity during a time of intense pressure to close schools.

Research Methods/Approach: Drawing on the case of Richmond, …

Examination Of Access And Equity By Gender, Race And Ethnicity In A Non-Traditional Leadership Development Program In The United States, Thomas J. Shields, Kate M. Cassada

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

In developing the next generation of school leadership, school districts across the United States and internationally must consider who is being promoted, the training they are able to access beyond traditional university degree work, the schools in which these emerging leaders enter their first principalships, and how prepared these new leaders are to succeed and remain in the role.

This study explores international literature regarding school leader, particularly new leader, development and placement. The study discusses what is happening internationally in terms of the gender distribution of school leaders and the literature of non-traditional leadership development. To explore gender, race, …

Addressing Social Capital For Disadvantaged Youth: Youth And Teacher Perceptions Of A Youth Development Program In Hong Kong, Robert W. Spires, Jt Cox

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

In this qualitative case study, the perceived impacts of workshops and internships provided by a Hong Kong-based non-governmental organization (NGO) working to improve the lives of disadvantaged youth were explored and descriptively presented. Data were derived from a combination of individual youth and teacher interviews, coupled with a youth focus group. Themes within the findings were developed by exploring individual perceptions of the influence that participation in workshops and internships had on reducing social barriers and addressing social issues for the youth.

Strengths Hidden In Plain Sight, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

I knew from teaching that the lifeblood of education travels through capillaries, small vessels that reach into small classrooms, quiet conversations, silent reading. But when I became dean, I saw that those capillaries flow only because of the arteries and veins of admissions, finance, student affairs, and advancement. People far removed from the classroom make it possible for other people to be teachers and students.

Higher Ed's Carbon Addiction, Mary Finley-Brook, Alex Krass

Geography and the Environment Faculty Publications

Each year higher education produces millions of metric tons of greenhouse gases (GHG). As research and study abroad programs span the globe, faculty and staff travel regularly to professional meetings. Colleges compete for prospective students and offer state-of-the-art technology, entertainment, food services, and other high-impact facilities. Universities that market a comfortable, stimulating campus in order to attract and retain talent may resist carbon budgeting, as combustion of dirty fossil fuels currently remains vital to the operation of most campus buildings, sport fields, and labs.

Universities are integral to climate science knowledge production. Nevertheless, policymakers in many academic institutions appear unaware …

Opinion: Education For Professional Leadership And The Humanities: Exhortations And Demonstrations, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

The complaint: pre-professional, para-professional, and professional programs occupy large slabs of the undergraduate curricula in colleges and universities in the United States. Core courses in which the arts and humanities were introduced to first- and second-year students are extinct in places, replaced by distribution requirements or specialized seminars that occasionally--but not often--expose students to a broad range of studies from classics to cultural anthropology, history, philosophy, music, literature, political theory, and other precincts in the liberal arts. Undergraduates wishing to enter the professional programs in journalism, business (finance, accounting, and marketing), education, energy, environmental sciences, health care, and health sciences …

Cultural Capital In The Classroom: The Significance Of Debriefing As A Pedagogical Tool In Simulation-Based Learning, Bedelia N. Richards, Lauren Camuso

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Although social inequality is critical to the study of sociology, it is particularly challenging to teach about race, class and gender inequality to students who belong to privileged social groups. Simulation games are often used successfully to address this pedagogical challenge. While debriefing is a critical component of simulation exercises that focus on teaching about social inequality, empirical assessments of the significance and effectiveness of this tool is virtually nonexistent in sociology and other social sciences. This paper analyzes the significance of debriefing in a simulation game called “Cultural Capital in the Classroom” in order to address this lacunae in …

[Introduction To] Preventing Human Trafficking; Education And Ngos In Thailand, Robert W. Spires

Bookshelf

This book explores human trafficking, examining the work of grass-roots, non-profit organizations who educate and rehabilitate human trafficking victims and at-risk youth. Through interviews with staff and children, the author compares the work of two NGOs on-the-ground in Thailand with the work of similar organizations overseas, shedding light on the ways in which they combine educational work with shelter settings to prevent human trafficking, protect young people and attempt to provide a future free of exploitation. Concentrating less on the details of exploitation itself than the work that is being done to prevent exploitation and protect those who have experienced …

The More Things Change: Reflections On The State Of Marketing In Continuing Higher Education, James D. Campbell, James L. Narduzzi

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

All of us can readily identify the major changes that have occurred in society over the past several decades and, more important, the manner in which these changes have affected the way we conduct the business of continuing higher education. For example, the telephone has been replaced by e-mail, which is now the most prevalent way we communicate with each other in the workplace. Social media and the web now dominate how we market our programs and communicate with our various constituencies. Instruction, once delivered primarily face-to-face in a classroom setting, is now routinely delivered utilizing various digitally mediated formats, …