In case you haven’t been reading the headlines, workforce shortages are an increasing challenge impacting numerous American business sectors. Baby boomers are leaving the workforce and younger populations following them are fewer in number. The education sector is no exception.
Many schools and districts are struggling to find qualified teacher candidates. This issue is particularly problematic when considering career and technical education. In August 2022, 74% of public schools with at least one vacancy in CTE reported it was somewhat or very difficult to fill these positions with certified teachers.
There are several reasons why CTE has been hit particularly hard by teacher shortages. For one, salaries are usually lower than in other fields outside of education. Consider, that while some CTE educators follow a traditional four-year college pathway into education like language arts, mathematics, and science educators, many others arrive differently after serving careers in business and industry sectors. These individuals often enter the field because they want to “give back” and see an opportunity in a field of study that mirrors their industry knowledge and experience, but many face a salary differential.
For example, nurses often enter the field of health science education because they know a lot about the health care field. CTE students benefit from this wealth of industry knowledge and “real world” experience, but transitions from the medical profession into CTE can be sobering when it comes to salaries. U.S. News and World Report shares that the median Registered Nurse salary in 2021 was $77,600, and metropolitan areas are often well above the $100,000 mark.
While our community grapples with the issues impacting the nontraditional path into CTE education, we also have challenges related to the four-year route, which has traditionally served fields of study such as Family and Consumer Sciences and Agriculture Education.
Four-year college teacher educator programs have suffered staffing reductions and a good number have been eliminated altogether over the years. Some states have no collegiate institution within their borders providing a traditional four-year degree in a CTE teaching field. While that has an immediate impact related to preparing and graduating CTE teachers, it also reduces capacity related to CTE research and other foundational activities that support the CTE profession.
These are but a few issues impacting the CTE profession; there are others. Similar to colleagues in other fields of study, the CTE community is coalescing to build the CTE educator workforce through actions such as promoting the field to students, exploring innovative preparation models, raising salaries and establishing “grow your own” programs at the local level.
The Association for Career and Technical Education has been working to identify solutions to CTE teacher recruitment and retention challenges, both at the secondary and postsecondary levels. A Teach CTE Repository of research and promising programs and practices has been developed, ACTE’s federal advocacy team is promoting legislation to address the teacher pipeline, and a new toolkit for attracting students to the field is planned for release this spring.
In June, the Association will be hosting its second Teach CTE Summit to identify additional promising practices and policies and to discuss the research and data needed to address recruitment and retention issues within the CTE field, both at the secondary and postsecondary level.
Visit ACTE’s website for additional information and to register for the Teach CTE Summit.
Pearson is proud to continue our ongoing partnership with ACTE to provide CTE educators with resources and best practices to create educator-employer connections, leading to college and career success for all students. Learn more here.
The University of Maryland Global Campus made a major decision several years ago. Instead of investing in curriculum from various publishers, the school opted to try Open Education Resources or OER back in 2014. It was a way to ease the financial burden for students.
Years later in 2018 the school, which today has a worldwide enrollment of 305,000, reduced and in some cases eliminated developmental math as a pre-requisite. It proved to be a disaster. Unfortunately, OER didn’t provide nearly enough critical support for students who were ill-prepared for college level courses.
A perfect fit for success!
Given the nature of the challenge, UMGC Math and Statistics Program Director John Beyers partnered with Tiffany DePriter, Statistics Coordinator/Instructor, to explore possible solutions. They decided to use an adaptive resource and elected to pilot Pearson’s MyLab and compare it to ALEKS from McGraw Hill. After extensive testing and evaluations, MyLab was selected primarily because of its continuous assessment approach to support each student’s individual pace along the way. In addition, it was an ideal way to customize the learning and fully engage with students using the remarkable array of tools that MyLab provides.
The Role of the Affective Domain and ‘Soft Skills’ in Collegiate Math
Although students are reaching college-level math classes sooner due to many of the recent acceleration projects, they often arrive without developing many of the student skills that would improve their chances for success. One way we can help our students to develop those skills is through the use of prompts and assignments that focus on the affective domain.
I like to use a series of prompts in my classes, because they are powerful and flexible. They can be used for writing assignments, discussion board prompts, or to start face-to-face classroom discussions. The in-person discussions can start with student volunteers sharing their responses, or they could use a think-pair-share format. They fit well in corequisite support classes, as well as the main credit bearing course. Finally, the instructor could devote as little as 5-10 minutes of class time to these prompts or use an entire class session.
I focus on topics that I feel are most beneficial to my students, helping them to be more successful in my class as well as becoming a better learner in general. I like to start with prompts related to developing a growth mindset, because I believe that helping students reset their mindset regarding mathematics is an important first step on the path to success.
I then follow up with prompts related to time management. Our students are over committed, yet lack skills for scheduling, organizing, or prioritizing tasks. Many students struggle with procrastination as well. These prompts lead to discussion and the discovery of strategies to improve time management.
After growth mindset and time management, I like to add prompts for goal setting using S.M.A.R.T. goals, reflection, and other study skills. You can tailor your choice of subjects to the skills you feel are most important, or to build up skills that your students need the most help with.
Lastly, I have assembled a set of 30 prompts that are included in the new third edition of Interactive Statistics, including notes for using them in class. Please reach out to me if you have any questions on using affective domain prompts in your classes, or if you are looking for feedback on strategies that you are using to help your students.
There are many best practices which can be associated with Community Oriented Career & Technical Education (CTE) programs. Three main practices which can apply no matter the demographics of the community have been identified. They are: Advising; Succession Plan; and Community Partnership.
Advising
There is a wealth of academic research which suggests academic advising should serve as fundamental support for students. If implemented correctly, the advisement process allows advisors to extend support to students through academic and career planning. That includes addressing socioeconomic factors (Cueso, 2019) which may influence diploma (K-12) or certificate or degree completion. The advising process should always be tailored to the individual student’s likes, dislikes, abilities, and desires as it relates to the program and course offerings. That is as opposed to a “one size fits all” approach. Doing so encourages a positive, organic relationship between the student and the advisor which will contribute to overall success.
Succession Plan
Unexpected events occur. It is inevitable. Planning for such unexpected events should be an integral part of the best practices conversation. Dual credit courses should feed into both a student’s college credit and certificate or degree program requirements. That is in addition to their knowledge base for their career. Ensuring a transition which is as seamless as possible for the student will impact their outcomes in both short and long term. Developing a thoughtful succession plan allows program administrators and instructors to identify and plan for unexpected events (i.e., change of instructor, change of location, etc.).
Community Partnership
Most successful CTE programs thrive because of their community partnerships. Successful CTE programs carefully identify local partners to assist with the implementation of their programs in various ways.
Think about YOUR Community….
Consider the industries in the local community versus those in other communities with successful CTE programs.
Pay attention to the demographics of the program’s student body and consider those factors when making program improvements.
Naturally, always remember education is not one size fits all!
Preventing cheating is a challenge we all face today given not only students’ ingenuity, but also the available student tools on the internet that publish tests and answers from many, many courses. And now there is . . .ChatGPT!!!
Although it may be difficult to prevent cheating entirely, there are steps that can be implemented, reducing the impact of cheating for the student learning assessment process for online courses.
I’d like to share with you the practical tips I found from Northern Illinois’s Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. These tips may help reduce cheating for the two most common uses of online learning assessments, which are testing and homework assignments.
Tips for testing – using learning management systems
Purposefully select assessment methods
Use online objective tests like multiple choice, multiple answer, true/false are best implemented for lower stakes assessing student learning. In fact, these types of quizzes are often best used as student self-checks in preparation for higher stakes assessments.
When assessing student mastery of course goals and objectives, objective tests may not be the best option considered among a range of methods. While an objective test can measure a student’s ability to recall or organize information, other methods are far preferable for assessing the higher order/critical thinking skills including understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.
Mix objective and subjective questions
Online testing using multiple choice, multiple answer, true/false, fill in the blank might be a part of a summative assessment of mastery that also includes short answer or essay questions.
These types of questions are more subjective in nature and demand a deeper understanding of the subject matter. Consider questions that allow students to demonstrate higher order thinking skills with the application of principles learned for unique situations. While mixing objective and subjective questions does not stop information sharing, it can limit the impact on the student’s final grade.
Create your own question pools
Rather than using a fixed number of items that remain unchanged for each administration of the test, consider creating a question pool using any institution’s learning management tools.
Group questions by any number of criteria including topic, subject matter, question type or difficulty of the question. I would also suggest grouping questions according to the learning outcome associated with the question.
A pool will generate an assessment with randomized questions selected by the faculty member. Pools can be created from new questions or those in existing tests or pools. Pools are most effective when there are large numbers of questions in one particular group. For example, one might have a pool of true/false questions, another of multiple choice and a third for fill in the blank.
You might create an assessment drawing a specific number of questions from each of those pool categories. Faculty can also add new questions to pools each time the course is taught to expand the variability of questions. Conversely, older questions can be removed.
Randomize questions
When creating a test using a learning management system, you are often given the option to randomize the selection of test questions as well as the order in which they appear. The benefit is that students are unlikely to get the same questions in the same sequence when taking a test.
This strategy addresses the issue of students who take a test at the same time in order to share answers. This is also relevant if faculty allows students to repeat the test. Each time this occurs, a test will be made up of questions that are randomly selected and ordered.
Limit feedback
When possible, you should limit what types of feedback are displayed to students upon completion of a test. Providing test scores is important feedback that indicates how well students have performed and should be made available. However, through a process of elimination, students may be able to determine the correct answer for each test question if their submitted answers are identified as incorrect. Or if the correct answer is provided.
Students could lose the incentive to both prepare for testing or to seek correct answers by reviewing lecture notes, assigned readings, or through a group discussion after completing tests. Thus, faculty might reconsider whether to include ‘Submitted Answers’ as an option to be displayed to students.
This is especially relevant if faculty have allowed students to repeat tests. Each time a test was taken, students could attempt a different answer for a test question that was previously graded as incorrect. Correct answers to all test questions could eventually be accumulated and passed on to other students, or to students of future classes. Or answers could be posted to some online site where students can access exams from a vast number of courses and subjects.
Set timer
We have to recognize that students taking an unproctored exam are free to use open book/notes. So you might decide to use time limits if allowed in the learning management system. Students who adequately prepared for a test may well be less likely to rely on open book/notes compared with students unprepared for testing. By setting a test with an expected completion time, unprepared students could have the most to lose as they spend time going over material, and risk not having sufficient time to respond to all the test questions.
Display questions one-at-a-time
If a test has more than 5 questions, do not choose the ‘All at Once’ option for displaying all the questions on the same screen. It is quite easy for students to take a screen capture of the displayed questions and share them with other students. While students can still screen capture pages with single questions, or even type them into a document, it is more time consuming and unwieldy.
Tips for homework assignments: assessing student progress and mastery
Create application assignments
Create assignments that require students to apply essential course concepts to a relevant problem. This encourages students to seek relevant information beyond the assigned readings and lectures and conduct independent research by identifying credible sources to support the development of their assignments.
Students can be required to report their progress on a regular basis through email, or through the journaling assignments offered in any Revel titles. This documentation makes it easier for faculty to see the development of a student’s work from inception to completion. In addition, it may possibly identify unexplained gaps that could occur if students used the work of others and claimed it as their own.
Faculty can add input at any point in this process to provide guidance, and perhaps suggest new directions for students. Both documentation of progress through regular status reporting and occasional faculty input can add a greater level of scrutiny to students. This can make it more difficult to pass off the work of others as their own. I use this method in my psychology courses by using my learning management system’s Discussion Forums. I require responses that use proper APA and documentation as well as student to student comments.
Create group assignments
Create group assignments that require students to interact with group members regularly. Groups can be made responsible for determining the functional roles for each member, establishing a mechanism for accountability (i.e., submitting weekly progress reports), and sharing drafts of individual progress on a group project. For a project to be truly collaborative, each group member should be familiar with everyone else’s work, and be able to describe how every group members’ contribution supports the whole group assignment.
Students who are using the work of others may not be able to adequately describe the significance of their ‘own’ work, or how it contributes to the group’s overall project. Group projects for me have been improved with online students using the Revel tool, Shared Media. I’m able to group students and have them submit a shared document or recording for evaluation.
Create assignments that require presentations
Conduct asynchronous online assignments for class presentations. This is easily accomplished with the same Shared Media tool in Revel. I have been using this video upload tool for over 13 years with my public speaking students.
Students may be asked to submit a progress report or use a Journal to reflect on what they have learned in the past week that supports work toward the presentation. You might consider using a discussion forum for these progress reports where classmates can contribute to one another.
To further scrutinize work on the presentation, students may be asked to include time for questions and answers. Students who have developed the presentation should be comfortable answering a range of topic-related questions from an arranged audience. I required my speech students to have an audience of 7 adults and include a Q&A that is captured on video as well as their speech presentation.
Check for plagiarism using SafeAssign
SafeAssign is a remarkable plagiarism prevention tool that detects matches between students’ submitted assignments and existing works by others. These works are found on a number of databases including ProQuest ABI/Inform, Institutional document archives, the Global Reference Database, as well as a comprehensive index of documents available for public access on the internet.
SafeAssign can also be used to help students identify how to attribute sources properly rather than paraphrase without citing the original source. Thus, the SafeAssign feature is impressive and effective as both a deterrent and an educational tool.
Using any of the Writing Assignments in the Revel tool can have this Safe Assign evaluate any submission for plagiarism.
Use discussion assignments
Creating Discussion Board assignments require students to demonstrate critical thinking skills by responding to a relevant forum topic.
You may also design a rubric that is specific to the Discussion Board assignment and develop questions that require students to respond to every rubric category.
Having assignments that are very specific makes it more difficult for students to use portions of a previous term paper or other sources.
Include academic integrity policy statement in the course syllabus
As faculty we need to include a policy statement regarding academic integrity in the course syllabus.
In addition, reiterate academic policies for students taking an online course and clarifying guidelines for completing tests and assignments so that students are not confused about what they can and cannot do.
While this, in and of itself, may not be sufficient to change behavior, its acknowledged presence in the syllabus acknowledges a commitment to honesty in the academic arena. It also establishes the clear expectation that academic integrity is an important principle to live by.
Faculty may also choose to mention this policy using the ‘Announcements’ feature in any of your learning management systems, or while conducting a live web conference session.
Learn More
Preserving academic integrity is an ongoing challenge for traditional face-to-face, blended, and courses that are entirely online. While a number of expensive technology solutions, such as retinal eye scanners and live video monitoring have been developed to prevent cheating in online courses, the practical recommendations above can reduce the impact of cheating on assessing student performance online.
Many virtual resources exist in MyLab and elsewhere to help students see concepts of calculus. For example, we have embedded almost 800 interactive figures in our Calculus eTextbook (Briggs, Cochran, Gillett, and Schulz) in MyLab. The figures available in our interactive eTextbook have been used successfully by tens of thousands of teachers and students to master calculus concepts, such as finding the volume for a solid of revolution. However, an interactive figure on a device screen is not helpful for every calculus student and is likely useless for a visually impaired calculus student.
The challenge of helping every student learn mathematics has weighed on me throughout my teaching career; that is one reason I have been passionate, obsessed perhaps, about creating interactive visualizations. However, I have had students for whom the interaction of a figure on screen has not been sufficient for them to understand the concept being visualized in the figure. For these students, a physical 3D object to feel and manipulate would have been helpful. Furthermore, 3D objects have great potential to help us teach calculus to students with significant visual impairments.
I have embarked on a new project this year to create a large number, say 100 or so, of 3D printable objects for calculus, beginning with solids of revolution and continuing through multivariable and vector calculus. For example, the following image is a 3D solid used for approximating the volume of the solid of revolution created by revolving the area in Quadrant I beneath the curve around the -axis using cylindrical shells, with .
For each 3D object, an image of the solid, an STL file, and the Mathematica source code used to create the STL file will be accessible from within any course in MyLab using our current calculus materials. The 3D objects can be sliced and printed on your own 3D printer or easily sent to an online 3D printing service.
Admit it, group projects can be a drag--not only for your students, but also for you as the instructor. So why do we do them? To quote one of my class alums, “Life is one big group project.” Working with others in an academic, professional, and personal settings is unavoidable. We as instructors know there is inherent value for students in doing group work, but too often a poorly designed project allows for the negatives to overshadow the benefits.
Let’s first acknowledge the most common complaints we hear from students about group projects.
“Why are we doing this?”
“I do all the work.”
“I don’t have time for this.”
“My partners ghosted me.”
“Why does he also get an A when I contributed more?”
“I just want to do my own thing in my own way.”
“This topic is not what I want to do nor the group I want work with.”
Frankly, given the design of many group projects, these are often valid complaints. No student wants to feel burdened by a seemingly pointless and time-consuming project that has unfair grading. How can we design group projects that will be a positive experience for students (and for us), show them the benefits of collaboration, and give them to tools needed to deal with challenges that may arise? I’ve included a data analysis group project in my Quantitative Literacy course for 20 years. Having redesigned, revised, modified tweaked, adjusted, and adapted it many times over those years, let me share with you what I’ve learned.
How To Make Group Projects More Valuable (and Less Terrible!):
Transparency. Take the time to explain the intention, purpose, and objectives of the project, specifically the benefits of collaboration as well as the potential challenges and how you will deal with them. Have a clear grading rubric for each part of the project.
Incorporate low stakes group work throughout semester. Smaller, “one off” group experiences, even just “compare your answer with your neighbor” or “think, pair, share,” prepare students for the larger project to come. Once the larger project begins, they will have built rapport with their fellow students and seen some of the benefits of collaboration.
Give students some choice in topic and/or group members. In my course, I give students a few topics to choose from. The students who choose the same topic constitute the group. By choosing the same topic, group members start with something in common.
Start with individual work. Start the project early in the term with a few building block assignments that students complete on their own first. Give a grade, feedback, and the opportunity to revise that work before the group portion begins. This guarantees each student has something to contribute to the final product.
Provide time for group work during class. Scheduling time to meet with other students outside of class can be a big challenge, especially for students with heavy class loads, jobs, and/or family responsibilities. Schedule some time during class for the group, even it is just time to assign tasks to be done by individuals between class meetings or time to check in on progress. This can keep members on task and on schedule. Also, it gives you the opportunity to monitor participation and progress among the group members. When all work is done outside of class, you have no idea who has done what and how much each member contributed.
Use technology. Utilize Google docs, messenger apps, or Groups on your learning management system. These are great ways for students to communicate, share work, give and receive feedback, and edit work between in person meetings.
Follow up with individual reflection. After submission, ask students to reflect on the experience—what went well, what was challenging, how well did they work with others, what did they contribute to the final product, what did they learn, what will they take to their next group project experience, any suggested changes to the project.
Not same grade for all group members. For example, 25% of final project grade is based on the individual assignments, 10% based on participation in group portion, 10% on individual reflection, and 55% of grade based on final product produced by the group.
A well-designed project can mitigate the common complaints about group work and enhance the benefits. By giving students a choice and a voice, opportunities to help and be helped, flexibility and agency, and support and freedom, you just might find out how to make group projects more valuable.
Share your thoughts and ideas on group projects in the comments.
