Are Adult Students on Your Campus Really Satisfied

By Julie Bryant

I was interested in the recent blog about new government projections forecasting dramatic growth in college students 25 years of age and older.  While just under 40 percent of college students currently fall in the nontraditional definition of 25 years of age and older, the proportion of students in this category is expected to skew higher as the decade progresses.

These statistics are interesting to note as we review the 2011 National Adult Student Satisfaction and Priorities Report, which reflects that adult students are generally satisfied with their experiences at four-year public and private institutions. As noted in the chart below, 64 percent of adult students are satisfied or very satisfied with their current college experience. This percentage is slightly lower for undergraduate adults and slightly higher for graduate-level adult students. All three categories are higher than the satisfaction percentage we see for traditional students at four-year private (57 percent) and four-year public (54 percent) institutions.

Continued at: http://blog.noellevitz.com/2011/11/16/adult-students-satisfied-but/?utm_source=Strategies12012011%20Ad%20High&utm_campaign=optin&utm_medium=email

Read the report: https://www.noellevitz.com/papers-research-higher-education/2011/2011-national-student-satisfaction-and-priorities-report

Teaching Critical Thinking: Are We Clear?

By Maryellen Weimer

I’ve been thinking about critical thinking. I just finished reading Stephen Brookfield’s new book on the topic, Teaching for Critical Thinking. (Side note: Stephen is a prolific author, writing on a variety of teaching-learning topics and his work has generated a number of classics including The Skillful Teacher, Discussion as a Way of Teaching, co-authored with Stephen Preskill, and Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. If you don’t know his work, by all means add it to your reading list). My recent journal reading contained a couple of interesting articles on critical thinking as well.

Critical thinking seems like such an abstract, even elusive, concept to me. I know, there are all sorts of concrete definitions for it, but the way it influences our pedagogical thinking and classroom practice is not very precise. Part of the problem may be all those different definitions. As the authors of one of the articles note, “critical thinking can include the thinker’s dispositions and orientations; a range of specific analytical, evaluative, and problem-solving skills, contextual influences; use of multiple perspectives; awareness of one’s own assumptions, capacities for metacognition; or a specific set of thinking processes or tasks.” (Stassen, Herrington, and Henderson, p. 127)

Continued at: http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/teaching-critical-thinking-are-we-clear/