02/01/2017 | Baltimore, MD | The Hechinger Report
Most colleges enroll many students who aren’t prepared for higher education
Sarah Butrymowitcz | The Hechinger Report
Baltime: The vast majority of public two- and four-year colleges report enrolling students – more than half a million of them–who are not ready for college-level work, a Hechinger Report investigation of 44 states has found.
The numbers reveal a glaring gap in the nation’s education system: A high school diploma, no matter how recently earned, doesn’t guarantee that students are prepared for college courses. Higher education institutions across the country are forced to spend time, money and energy to solve this disconnect. They must determine who’s not ready for college and attempt to get those students up to speed as quickly as possible, or risk losing them altogether.
To read more visit The Hechinger Report
Improving the Targeting of Treatment: Evidence from College Remediation
Judith Scott-Clayton, Peter M. Crosta, Clive R. Belfield | The National Bureau of Economic Research
At an annual cost of roughly $7 billion nationally, remedial coursework is one of the single largest interventions intended to improve outcomes for underprepared college students. But like a costly medical treatment with non-trivial side effects, the value of remediation overall depends upon whether those most likely to benefit can be identified in advance. Our analysis uses administrative data and a rich predictive model to examine the accuracy of remedial screening tests, either instead of or in addition to using high school transcript data to determine remedial assignment.
We find that roughly one in four test-takers in math and one in three test-takers in English are severely mis-assigned under current test-based policies, with mis-assignments to remediation much more common than mis-assignments to college-level coursework. We find that using high school transcript information–either instead of or in addition to test scores–could significantly reduce the prevalence of assignment errors.
Further, we find that the choice of screening device has significant implications for the racial and gender composition of both remedial and college-level courses. Finally, we find that if institutions took account of students’ high school performance, they could remediate substantially fewer students without lowering success rates in college-level courses.
To view the full report visit The National Bureau of Economic Research
After School: Where Art Meets Technology
Al Jazeera
Armenia became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991, but the country is still influenced by its Soviet past.
“Armenia has been changing quite fast, but you can still feel the legacy and the luggage that came from the Soviet Union and its past … When I moved to Armenia, I realised that the Armenian educational system … was lacking the creativity, the flexibility, the problem-solving part, and there is a big need to link education with technology to be able to develop a new generation of competitive Armenians,” says Marie Lou Papazian, who is on a mission to offer an alternative to the traditional education model.
She is the CEO of TUMO, a free, creative after-school activities centre in Yerevan, Armenia, teaching “maker” skills, such as 3D printing, web design, film and animation.
To read more visit Al Jazeera
TUMO Army: 21st Century Learning with a Buzz Cut
The Armenian Weekly
A world of technology and creativity is awaiting the young men serving in Armenia’s military.
A new partnership between the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies and the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Armenia will allow draftees to take advantage of the TUMO educational program while serving in the Army. By attending TUMO centers twice a week over the course of eight months, soldiers stationed at Army bases will gain skills in fields such as computer programming, robotics, digital graphics, and digital music composition.
To read more visit The Armenian Weekly
Fidelity Charitable® Surpasses Grant-Making Goal of $25 Billion to Charities in 25 Years
Business Wire
Fidelity Charitable, an independent public charity, today announced it made a record $3.5 billion in grants on behalf of its donors in 2016, a 15% increase over 2015. To commemorate its 25th anniversary, Fidelity Charitable challenged donors to recommend a cumulative $25 billion in grants by the end of 2016. With the record grant-making, the organization’s donors met the challenge and surpassed the goal on December 16th.
When breaking down the donations that Fidelity Charitable donors recommend, the numbers can be overwhelming—well over three-quarters of a million individual grants made to over 110,000 charities with $3.5 billion in total grants, all in 12 months. In the spirit of the work of Fidelity Charitable to democratize giving, working to empower more Americans to give more to the causes they care about, the organization recognizes that there is a story behind each and every grant.
To read more visit Business Wire
- The New York Times – Beyond ‘Hidden Figures’: Nurturing New Black and Latino Math Whizzes
- The Washington Post – An alternative to remedial college classes gets results
- edCircuit – Teacher Perspective: In Sync with EdTech