Lumina Looks to
Expand Use of Framework to Track Student Learning
More than three years ago, the Lumina Foundation unveiled a
framework for defining what a college degree means and what graduates
should be expected to know and be able to do. Now, as the foundation
makes the case for wider adoption of its rubric, some educators have asked:
How do you push for a national set of standards without seeming to impose
it from the top down? The framework, known as the Degree
Qualifications Profile, or DQP, was introduced by Lumina as a way to define
the range of skills and knowledge students should gain in earning
associate, bachelor’s, and master’s degree across five key areas: “broad,
integrative knowledge,” “specialized knowledge,” ”intellectual skills,”
“applied learning,” and “civic learning.”
The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 9, 2014
Borrowing Rates
for Wealthy Soar
All college graduates are more likely than they were two decades ago to
have financed their education with loans. But the likelihood of borrowing
increased the most among students from the nation’s wealthiest families,
according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data.
Inside Higher Ed, October 8, 2014
New App
Measures Students’ Moods and Mental Health
A computer-science professor at Dartmouth College is building a smartphone
application that can detect users’ levels of happiness, stress, and
loneliness, he says, with the hope of helping students monitor their mental
health. The app, called StudentLife, draws on sensor data from
smartphones to “infer human behaviors,” says the professor, Andrew
Campbell. It was inspired partly by the mental-health struggles that Mr.
Campbell’s brother experienced while in college. The professor also wants
to test his hypothesis, based on classroom observations, that students’
fluctuating stress levels correspond to their behaviors.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 7, 2014
Where the jobs
are: The new blue collar
Joseph Poole will make more than $100,000 in wages and overtime by the end
of the year. The 21-year-old works in what looks like NASA's mission
control, monitoring the manufacturing process at Chevron Phillips
petrochemical plant in Houston. Poole didn't get the job with the
engineering degree he originally considered. Instead, Poole landed it with
a two-year course at a local community college. ... By 2017, an
estimated 2.5 million new, middle-skill jobs like Poole's are expected to
be added to the workforce, accounting for nearly 40% of all job growth,
according to a USA TODAY analysis of local data from Economic Modeling
Specialists Intl. and CareerBuilder.
USA Today, September 30, 2014
|
|
