Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums College Which colleges have good teaching?

With my oldest child a high school senior and two other children in middle and high school, colleges are often discussed in our home. When a child asks "is X a good school?", I don't know how to answer that question other than to say how prestigious the school is, but prestige is largely a measure of selectivity (inputs) rather than value added.

So how do you try to answer the question of which colleges have good teaching? We have been on some college tours. Student guides talk about the student-faculty ratio and average class size and about opportunities for research. A few have shared stories of professors who provided individual assistance when they reached out. I wonder how you get aggregate information about teaching quality, given that it will vary within a school and department.

This was important to us as well. I am not sure about sources of “aggregate information” other than the usual; in other words, many of the ranking systems do have rankings for undergraduate teaching, though much of this is probably quite general and I would assume, based on student surveys.

Some places do have strong reputations for undergrad teaching, either generally or in specific departments, but I guess some of that we just absorbed via osmosis during the long slog of researching places, kind of a “people say...”. However, one can ask about who specifically teaches, particularly the undergrad intro or required classes, how many classes/profs use TAs and in what capacity, etc. Also whether research and job opportunities are reserved for undergrads. Overall size, and specifically class sizes might help tease some of this out as well. DD was very lucky to have several classes with under 20 students her first year, which certainly fostered good teaching and strong relationships. (This was true even in an intro science class where she was accepted into a small (18 student) honors section that had more in-depth labwork, all taught directly by the prof).

Teaching strength was certainly a factor in my DDs choices- she is at a school that focuses on undergrads and undergraduate teaching; TAs have minimal roles in teaching, being mainly used for grading help or running small sections of a class where more problem-solving help or lab help is required. All of her classes are taught by the professors (exceptions being TA help for labs, both in sciences and in language drill sessions, hands-on humanities things like music theory practicals, etc). There are grad students and several grad schools at her college, so students can take grad classes at these schools, but they don’t compete with grad students for research experiences- something else you can ask about, though finding hard data will probably not be possible.

There are other informal measures of how undergrad teaching and the interaction between students and faculty is valued. DDs school has a program where a student (or group of students) can take one prof out to lunch each term, to a nice restaurant, paid for by the college, Some schools have musical groups that are comprised of mixed student/community members/faculty, so kids might play alongside their teacher(s). Housing systems can facilitate student/faculty engagement, with professors assigned to housing communities, living within or near the student housing, hosting dinners, lectures and outings for their assigned “house”.

So, my advice is to ask lots of specifics, on the tour, in the information session, in departmental visits, ask students you see around campus. Other than general rankings, I don’t think this is something one can find online.

The Peregrine Inbound/Outbound assessments were said to be developed to measure "value added" by a college or university... but I do not know whether this has been broadly implemented.
It could be that the concept is still in its infancy, and is currently onboarding smaller schools, or it could be that the assessment products will only used to measure basic level of skill in limited number of degree areas, for accreditation purposes, for smaller schools.

I was never taught by a TA. Only the professor. TAs ran tutorials and helped in the labs. Even the professor was in the lab, in my memory. But it was a long time ago. Maybe they were only in the labs sometimes.

I remember that in my school, the profs had to publish in order to stay. Doesn't guarantee a good teacher. But was suppose to establish a certain level of knowledge, I think, if they were publishing.

https://www.timeshighereducation.co...-worlds-top-30-universities-for-teaching

did you see this?

Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, MIT, Cambridge top 5 according to the rankings

I guess I should choose words more carefully- I used TA rather loosely, though I know they do teach in some places, particularly labs; I meant to include grad students in the group of teachers that might be less-than-desirable (though certainly not all).

That is an interesting list, but it is for world-ranked universities, so doesn’t include colleges or smaller universities- as Portia mentioned, often the focus in smaller places is on teaching.

Digressing from the specific question on good teaching to consider the wider topic of comparing how colleges and universities "add value" (rather than, as for most college rankings, focusing on the selectivity of their student inputs), I'll mention "The Alumni Factor", a website/set of college reports/book compilation of such reports.

Because they're trying to make money off their alumni survey research, "The Alumni Factor" information is less transparent than I'd prefer. In particular, I can't evaluate how truly representative their alumni samples are (nor how up-to-date).

But they seem to be asking interesting sorts of questions.

This forum is so much about finding great education options for our kids as they progress through school. also, that they find like minded peers to challenge them, interact etc.

Isn't that part of the college education experience? Not to just take a course and listen to some professor, but hear an exchange of ideas, have challenging discourse?

And also have the labs and equipment? I don't think it is just about teaching the curriculum.

I keep thinking college is the same as our university. You go after high school and for the same reason. Then I read these threads and realise that they are not the same. No help really.

Well, I think ‘good teaching’ can probably be defined somewhat differently by everyone. We certainly experienced that in discussions regarding high school teaching as well. Regardless, I don’t think anyone on this thread, at least, was defining good teaching as the delivery of curriculum. But again, the variability in how one defines it makes it pretty hard to measure or rank, IMHO.

Me too! I am now thoroughly confused having read this thread.

The article is dated 1990... nearly 30 years ago.
The article states that by changing date criteria, 2013-2014 ratings are available... that is still 5 years ago.
2019 rankings here. 2019 rankings by "teaching," top five[/color][/b], top ten:
[b][color:#003300]1. CalTech (USA)
2. Stanford (USA)
3. University of Cambridge (UK)
4. MIT (USA)
5. University of Oxford (UK)
6. Yale (USA)
7. U of Chicago (USA)
8. Harvard (USA)
9. Princeton (USA)
10.Peking University (China)

Clicking through the article's links to view the methodology shows the following: If there is a more recent webpage describing their methodology, I have not found it yet.

Why differences have you detected? I have no idea! They still sounded like the same things to me.

For those of us in other countries that believed that your "college" = our "university" (which I have always believed), this comment suggests that you have both colleges and universities and that leaves me wondering what IS college? An extra 4 years of boarding school after highschool but before university?

There was another post with a particular emphasis that also seemed to suggest college was not equal to university... but now that I am replying I can't see the thread to find it.

[/quote] The article is dated 1990... nearly 30 years ago.
The article states that by changing date criteria, 2013-2014 ratings are available... that is still 5 years ago.
2019 rankings [url=https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2019/world-ranking#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/st[/quote]

My apologie on the faux pas. I did not check the date.

But the composite of criteria is part of what we look for. And, as a CDN, who lived in the US for 30 years, my view is that Americans tend to say college when they mean a post secondary institution, whether it is a small liberal arts college or a large university. It appeared to me that it used to refer to a degree granting institution, but the lines have blurred and even community colleges are referred to as going to college. In Canada, they say university. College means community college. Here, there is no difference anymore.

I think the rankings are interesting in 2 things: input and output.

A third kind of input data used by USNWR concerns student selectivity. Some of these measures indicate how capable or prepared the students are when they enter a college or university: entering student scores on SAT or ACT tests and the percentage of students graduating in the top 10 percent of their high school class. Perhaps these measures are useful for a student choosing a college; high achievement students may want to keep company with other high achievement students. But such measures are a backwards approach to assessing the quality of learning at a college: Colleges are ranked higher insofar as they start with students who have already learned more.

Outcomes. The USNWR annual rankings do make use of one kind of outcome measure: graduation and graduation rates. They measure what percentage of an institution's first year students return for a second year, and what percentage of students graduate within six years. I believe these measures are the best aspect of the USNWR rankings. But, I also believe retention and graduation rates are a very primitive outcome measure: They beg the question of whether, and what, students have actually learned.

Also, NSSE, is from a student perspective

http://nsse.indiana.edu/html/annual_results.cfm

Quick caveat- this is my opinion only, based upon our experiences- if others have more knowledge, please share- we had specific goals in our DDs college search (we did not explore extremely large universities, for example).

The quick/simplistic answer, as far as I understand it, is that colleges don’t have graduate students or programs. So by definition, one of, if not the main goal, is the education of undergraduate students. Many, but not all, have as a secondary goal more of a broad view of education and therefore may have core classes or distribution requirements, theoretically ensuring that their graduates are more well-roundedly educated while still requiring a major area of concentration.

This can get really murky, however, in that many (?most) universities have colleges within them, some of which have separate admissions, some of which do not, some allow students to take classes enrolled in one college to take classes in all the colleges and to transfer if their major/plans change, some are more restrictive. Even within specific disciplines, we found there to be a lot of variability in this structure.

Because our DD still has several areas of interest and hasn’t decided on a definitive direction yet, we avoided those schools which required admission to very specific programs or schools, as they didn’t have the flexibility she wanted.

This webpage from CollegRank.Net may help explain the differences between college and university:
What Is The Difference Between College and University?

I'm aware of colleges becoming universities... with much press, fanfare, and celebratory events... usually after faculty reaching a RESEARCH milestone.

For undergrad work, conventional wisdom was: attend a college which is focused on developing and investing in its students, rather than a research university which is focused on developing and investing in itself. Depending upon what one is studying, I can see either approach/strategy as helpful.

Fresh new press release -
UCLA is No. 1 public college in 2020 Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education ranking
Rebecca Kendall
UCLA Newsroom
September 4, 2019


key area. . . . . . . . . . . UCLA ranking
(learning) environment(s) . . . 5
(student) engagement . . . . . 11
(educational) outcomes . . . . 16
student resources . . . . . . . . .?
overall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Another system for rating/ranking:
Carnegie Classification of Higher Education Institutions classifies universities into Tiers based on their research potential.

Links for information on Carnegie Classifications:

1) Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education
Center for Postsecondary Research
Indiana University
School Of Education

2) wikipedia - Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education

that seems like a good resource indigo. 800 schools should cover all the schools one would want to go to, I am assuming.

And I like how it breaks it down. Environment, outputs, engagement.

This is what I understand the specific definition to be, but fwiw when used by many folks in the US the word college takes on a broader meaning. For instance, the institution where I received my higher ed (in the US... many years ago) has both undergrad and graduate programs, and has a reputation as a highly regarded research institution. It is also referred to by both staff, alumni and current students as a "college" - I can't think of one time I've ever heard of it referred to as a university. We also tend to ask people "Where did you go to college?" rather than "Where did you go to University?" (eta - this might be a regional thing?)

Re the question of which colleges (or universities) have great teaching - access to the teacher is in many ways as important as the quality of teaching. For my kids, it's more inspiring to be in a small class rather than a large lecture hall, and the peers in the classroom play a role in the teaching as they often take in as much or more from the discussion that takes place as they do from what's prepared for the lecture of the day. Being able to meet with a professor during office hours without having to wait in line or having to meet as a group for help is a huge plus. Are the teachers so bogged down with a large number of classes, large number of students, or research that they are not able to spend time with individual students? Lastly, teacher style is a factor that can't be quantified - two of my kids have gone to the same high school and taken classes from the same teachers and had polar opposite learning experiences simply because of the teacher's style and the way they relate to the teacher as individuals.

The good news is, (just my opinion from having been through one child's college search and in the process of another)... there are a *lot* of good options out there, especially if you attempt to go beyond the mindset of feeling it's necessary to attend one of the elite universities who prides itself on extremely low admissions rates. (please note that I'm not knocking those universities - they're amazing institutions but are often simply out of reach for even many qualified students based on the large number of applications)

Best wishes,

polarbear

I would agree that class size and access to faculty are huge factors, especially now, when so many standard first- and second-year courses use the same small pool of textbooks, with many of the publisher-provided electronic resources (e.g., teaching videos, interactive demonstrations, online problem sets, text-aligned assessments). As students move into upper-division, more-specialized coursework, I think research opportunities become more important.

Helpful link, thank you! That is more complex than our system. We have only universities and TAFE (formalized further education not at university level, apprenticeships often involve formal course work at TAFE). Our children rarely "go away" to university unless the course they want is not available locally, or they have another specific reason.

There are private boarding facilities situated near universities which are used by interstate, overseas and rural students and they generally have "college" in their names but I don't know that much about them as I have never known anyone who used one. Actually I had one semi-rural friend when I was at uni who stayed in one during the week. It's possible they provide tutors and emotional support but I think mostly it's room and meals. They don't offer courses, just somewhere to live near a university.

Many of our universities hold a percentage of their post graduate places, particularly in popular courses, for their own undergraduate students as an incentive to start out your study with them. Entry is purely on a nationally standardized high school score (with exceptions for certain courses which may also have an audition or interview). Sometimes popular postgraduate courses will be offered as a guaranteed pathway from the undergraduate degree if your high school entrance mark is high enough (ie at the universities which don't offer undergraduate medicine they may offer a guaranteed place in graduate entry medicine, or guaranteed psychology honors year, one uni offers a guaranteed post grad degree of your choice for the highest .05% of students)

First year classes at universities are 200 students plus. You are not taught, the lecturer stands at the front and lectures you for 50 minutes then leaves. Every lab I ever took was run by a post grad student (one paper may not have been totally). As long as you complete labs no-one knows or cares whether you go to lectures. There are optional tutorial sessions for some papers and a lot of lecturers have office hours but mostly you help and get help from your fellow students. You take only those subjects that relate to your degree so it is unusual for a science student to take an English paper for example. Except for post grad you don't go on to further study. You don't to university then medicine or law university is the medicine and law (this seems to vary in the US).

College sounds more like an extension of High School. But then many of our high schools are called xyz college.

At college presentations, it is often said that "our courses are taught by professors" (rather than graduate students), but according to a study at a Dutch business school, it makes little difference. The difference in pay between tenure-track professors and graduate students and adjuncts is vast, and substituting cheaper labor is good for students only if some of the cost savings is passed on, which does not seem to happen.

The Better Teacher: A Professor or Another Student?
by Shannon Watkins
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
SEP 6, 2019

Having studied engineering, which is at a university, the freshman classes were always huge with a lecturer standing in front. Some classes are smaller, like math and as you specialize -- I was civil, so geology and soil mechanics etc. But early lectures were just a professor up there teaching the class, even my hated "heat, mass and momentum" where you really had to follow the diagrams and math. But professors were available for help. And they were professors. That was so long ago, I cannot stand by that now. I have no idea what goes on schools now.

Lessons in learning
Study shows students in ‘active learning’ classrooms learn more than they think
by Peter Reuell
Harvard Gazette
September 4, 2019

For decades, there has been evidence that classroom techniques designed to get students to participate in the learning process produces better educational outcomes at virtually all levels.

And a new Harvard study suggests it may be important to let students know it.

The study, published Sept. 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that, though students felt as if they learned more through traditional lectures, they actually learned more when taking part in classrooms that employed so-called active-learning strategies.

Lead author Louis Deslauriers, the director of science teaching and learning and senior physics preceptor, knew that students would learn more from active learning. He published a key study in Science in 2011 that showed just that. But many students and faculty remained hesitant to switch to it.

“Often, students seemed genuinely to prefer smooth-as-silk traditional lectures,” Deslauriers said. “We wanted to take them at their word. Perhaps they actually felt like they learned more from lectures than they did from active learning.”

...

But what is active learning across subjects? Math, you learn the rules and do problems. You can do active learning in sciences because you do labs. You apply principles in labs and understand how it works.

Hasn't active learning been applied in languages since the beginning of time, writing and doing plays, doing research and presentations? What is active learning that is new?

A blog post about the study:
Active Learning Works But Student’s Don’t Like It
by Alex Tabarrok
Marginal Revolution
September 9, 2019 at 7:25 am in Education
A carefully done study that held students and teachers constant shows that students learn more in active learning classes but they dislike this style of class and think they learn less. It’s no big surprise–active learning is hard and makes the students feel stupid. It’s much easier to sit back and be entertained by a great lecturer who makes everything seem simple.

Despite active learning being recognized as a superior method of instruction in the classroom, a major recent survey found that most college STEM instructors still choose traditional teaching methods. This article addresses the long-standing question of why students and faculty remain resistant to active learning. Comparing passive lectures with active learning using a randomized experimental approach and identical course materials, we find that students in the active classroom learn more, but they feel like they learn less. We show that this negative correlation is caused in part by the increased cognitive effort required during active learning. Faculty who adopt active learning are encouraged to intervene and address this misperception, and we describe a successful example of such an intervention.

The authors say that it can help to tell students in advance that they should expect to feel flustered but it will all work out in the end.

The success of active learning will be greatly enhanced if students accept that it leads to deeper learning—and acknowledge that it may sometimes feel like exactly the opposite is true.

I am dubious that this will bring students around. An alternative that might help is to discount student evaluations so that teachers don’t feel that they must entertain in order to do well on evaluations. As Brennan and Magness point out in their excellent Cracks in the Ivory Tower:

Using student evaluations to hire, promote, tenure, or determine raises for faculty is roughly on a par with reading entrails or tea leaves to make such decisions. (Actually, reading tea leaves would be better; it’s equally bullshit but faster and cheaper.)… the most comprehensive research shows that whatever student evaluations (SETs) measure, it isn’t learning caused by the professor.

Indeed, the correlation between student evaluations and student learning is at best close to zero and at worst negative. Student evaluations measure how well liked the teacher is. Students like to be entertained. Thus, to the extent that they rely on student evaluations, universities are incentivizing teachers to teach in ways that the students like rather than in ways that promote learning.

It’s remarkable that student evaluations haven’t already been lawsuited into oblivion given that student evaluations are both useless and biased.

As for active learning and quality of teaching, as I've mentioned previously, I've found it unacceptable that other than the school of education, very few college or university professors are required to have one credit hour of classes in education. I have yet to meet a college student who hasn't told me that they had many, if not most of their professors, who knew their field of study well but really struggled to communicate it well, teach it well, and differentiate well. Simply because one has vast amounts of knowledge in a field doesn't mean they can teach it and that's too often the case at colleges and universities in the U.S.

I see the stirrings of realization that our U.S. colleges and universities are losing the confidence of the people. I see serious changes in post K-12 education coming. Teachers and libraries are no longer the key holders to education, colleges and universities need to update their methods to keep up.

As for the original post of the thread, perhaps the wrong question is being asked, instead I would encourage the question, "What is the best fit for your child and how will I know it?"

By post high school age the onus is on the student to learn irrespective of whether the lecturer can teach.

I would agree....and I hope that's a problem in everyone's eyes. Teachers, whether they're teaching preschool, K-12, under grads, or post graduate, should be well versed in teaching methods, learning styles, and other variables that make one better able to help students achieve their goals. That should be the whole point of teaching.