The Kept-Up Academic Librarian

Children With High Attention Capacity More Likely To Graduate College

If you want your child to graduate from university and or college you may want to pay attention to your child’s ability to focus, stay on task and be persistent. According to a recently published online study in Early Childhood Research Quarterly,a child’s ability to pay attention, be persistent and remember instructions at age four is a strong predictor of his or her likelihood of completing university, as well as his or her reading and math skills at age 21. Attentiveness and persistence was a stronger predictor for college completion than a child’s reading or math scores at age 7 and age 21. Read more at:
http://www.thestar.com/living/article/1238793--kids-who-pay-attention-persist-at-age-4-more-likely-to-complete-university

Teachers' Colleges Will Need To Prepare Students For More Rigorous Licensing Exams

New York and up to 25 other states are moving toward changing the way they grant licenses to teachers, de-emphasizing tests and written essays in favor of a more demanding approach that requires aspiring teachers to prove themselves through lesson plans, homework assignments and videotaped instruction sessions. t is also a reaction to a criticism of some teachers’ colleges, which have been accused of minting diplomas but failing to prepare teachers for the kind of real-world experience where creativity and flexibility can be the keys to success. Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/nyregion/with-new-standards-going-beyond-paper-and-pencil-to-license-teachers.html?ref=education

Students See Cheating As The Path To Success

Cheating was, is and probably always will be a fact of life. Recently, technology has provided new ways to cheat, but advanced electronics can't be blamed for our increasing willingness to tolerate it. Compounding the problem is the fact that many students aren't fully aware of what constitutes cheating. While teaching at a university a few years ago, I was surprised when a student I had accused of plagiarizing by cutting and pasting text from a website denied having cheated. He indignantly argued that he would never cut and paste — he had retyped the entire thing. Read more at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-dorff-cheating-20120717,0,6524981.story

At-Risk Students Study Time Management To Prepare For College

While summer vacation is a time of rest or recreation for some high school graduates, this group was spending a week at a new boot camp run by the Opportunity Network. The students are focused less on academics than on life strategies, like how to manage busy schedules, financial aid and homesickness, and how to juggle it all. Hence the tossing of balls in the air. The boot camp was intended to give the students tools to find answers to their questions or concerns. Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/07/05/preparing-for-college-by-studying-time-management/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Community Colleges Needed To Fill The Skills Gap

It was when I posed that question to Chertavian that he started talking about community colleges. He is a fierce believer in their transformative potential. All the students in Year Up are also required to be enrolled in a local community college, but, more recently, Chertavian has begun to affiliate more formally with community colleges.  Community colleges are the great American invention in terms of education. Now with the skills gap such a pressing problem — and a high school education so clearly inadequate for the modern economy — the task of teaching those skills is falling to community colleges.  Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/opinion/nocera-filling-the-skills-gap.html?src=recg

Experts' Advice To High School Seniors Warns Them College Research Papers Require More Effort

College papers require analysis and research. In college, you may be asked to break down some issue into its parts and offer some evaluation of your own. You may be asked to consult original documents and scholarly sources and offer your assessment of them. This is in sharp contrast with what is expected of written assignments in high school, some of which require no more than a simple summary of what others have said on Wikipedia, and articles found on Google, newspapers, and magazines. Read more at:
http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/7-things-graduating-seniors-should-know-about-college/?ref=us

High School Seniors Who Slack Off May Get A Scary Letter From Their College

College-bound seniors beware: If you slept through your classes this semester and have the failing grades to prove it, your university may soon threaten to rescind your admission this fall. Of the 1,825 incoming freshmen at T.C.U., about 100 students — all of them ailing with senioritis — will soon receive a “F.O.G. letter” in July, Mr. Brown said. Large public universities may lack the manpower to check thousands of final transcripts, which may give students at large the false impression that they can get away with lackluster final performances. Read more at:
http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/18/university-sends-fear-of-god-letter-to-students-with-senioritis/

No Plans For College And No Job Prospects For These High Schoolers

For this generation of young people, the future looks bleak. Only one in six is working full time. Three out of five live with their parents or other relatives. A large majority — 73 percent — think they need more education to find a successful career, but only half of those say they will definitely enroll in the next few years. They are the youth of America, the world’s richest country, who do not have college degrees and aren’t getting them anytime soon. Whatever the sob stories about recent college graduates spinning their wheels as baristas or clerks, the situation for their less-educated peers is far worse. Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/business/more-young-americans-out-of-high-school-are-also-out-of-work.html?_r=1&ref=education 

 

Weighing The Value Of The Best College Education Against Financial Security

My daughters are 15 and 13, and my wife and I have been planning for their college expenses for a while. With just a few years to go, however, it’s starting to feel really serious. Part of these conversations includes the very interesting experience of working through the basic assumptions I’ve made about the value of a great college education compared with the reality of paying for it. On one side of the argument we’ve been taught that getting the best education money can buy is the best investment you can make. On the other side sits the fact that the skyrocketing cost of education can be a major hurdle to the thing that we say we value the most, financial security. Read more at:
http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/start-your-college-value-conversation-now/

Out-Of-State College Recruiters' Pitch Aimed At Worried California Students

Their pitches were simple and tailored to the audience. Come to my college, the out-of-state recruiters recently told high school students in Lakewood, and you will be taught in small classes and you'll graduate in four years. We'll even throw in a few thousand dollars just for being from California. Their attempt at wooing California high schoolers was a not-so-subtle move in a state whose public universities have been hit with severe budget cuts — $1.6 billion in 10 years — leading to tuition hikes, enrollment caps and fewer courses. Read more at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-out-of-state-20120604,0,4111457.story