Barbara E. Lovitts

Abstract Students are typically admitted into doctoral programmes because they have been good course‐takers. Yet, the PhD is awarded for doing independent research and making an ‘original contribution’ to knowledge. Graduate faculty acknowledge that the transition to independent research is hard for many students, and that they cannot predict who will successfully make the transition and complete the doctorate based only on students’ undergraduate records or even their performance in their first year of graduate school. Similarly, many graduate students feel unprepared to make the transition. Drawing on recent work on creativity, this paper provides a theoretical perspective on the factors that facilitate and impede doctoral students’ transition to independent research. Notes * 500 Fifh Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20001, USA. Email: blovitts@nae.edu Additional informationNotes on contributorsBarbara E. Lovitts Footnote* * 500 Fifh Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20001, USA. Email: blovitts@nae.edu

Chapter 1 Preface Chapter 2 Acknowledgments Chapter 3 The Invisible Problem Chapter 4 Explaining the High and Persistent Rate of Attrition Chapter 5 Explaining Departure Chapter 6 The Lack of Information Chapter 7 The Absence of Community Chapter 8 Disappointment with the Learning Experience Chapter 9 The Quality of the Advisor/Advisee Relationship Chapter 10 The Decision to Leave Chapter 11 Personal Consequences of Departure Chapter 12 Labor Market Consequences of Departure Chapter 13 Conclusions and Recommendations Chapter 14 Appendix Chapter 15 Bibliography Chapter 16 Index

A critical question in doctoral education is why students who succeed in the coursework (dependent) phase of their graduate education have different fates in the independent research phase of their education. In this focus group–based study, faculty were asked to talk about students who had difficulty making the transition to independent research or who did not make it at all. They were also asked to talk about students who made the transition to independent research with relative ease. The focus group discussions were analyzed using a theoretical perspective derived from theory and research on creativity and degree completion. The descriptions of students who made the transition with relative success matched closely with characterizations of highly creative people.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsBarbara E. LovittsBarbara E. Lovitts is a Senior Associate in the Division of Social and Economic Policy at Abt Associates in Bethesda, MD. She is the author of Leaving the Ivory Tower: The Causes and Consequences of Departure from Doctoral Study and Making the Implicit Explicit: Creating Performance Expectations for the Dissertation.

Despite their and other stakeholders consistent demand for excellence, doctoral programs have rarely, if ever, been assessed in terms of the quality of the dissertations departments produce. Yet dissertations provide the most powerful, objective measure of the success of a department s doctoral program. Indeed, assessment, when done properly, can help departments achieve excellence by providing insight into a program s strengths and weaknesses.This book and the groundbreaking study on which it is based is about making explicit to doctoral students the tacit rules for the assessment of the final of all final educational products the dissertation. The purpose of defining performance expectations is to make them more transparent to graduate students while they are in the researching and writing phases, and thus to help them achieve to higher levels of accomplishment. Lovitts proposes the use of rubrics to clarify performance expectations not to rate dissertations or individual components of dissertations to provide a summary score, but to facilitate formative assessment to support, not substitute for, the advising process. She provides the results of a study in which over 270 faculty from ten major disciplines spanning the sciences, social sciences, and humanities were asked to make explicit their implicit standards or criteria for evaluating dissertations. The book concludes with a summary of the practical and research implications for different stakeholders: faculty, departments, universities, disciplinary associations, accrediting organizations, and doctoral students themselves.The methods described can easily be adapted for the formative assessment of capstone courses, senior and master s theses, comprehensive exams, papers, and journal articles.

This paper presents public media’s national–local model for providing high-quality educational transmedia to America’s children as part of the US Department of Education’s Ready to Learn (RTL) program. Using connected, multiplatform content as an innovative way to help narrow the academic achievement gap for underserved children, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and local public media stations coordinated efforts to overcome access issues and better reach children from low-income families. This required strong local partnerships and new approaches to implementing content in diverse learning settings. Topics explored in this paper include: (1) RTL’s mission to serve all children, (2) narrowing the achievement gap through transmedia, (3) highlights of new PBS KIDS math content funded by RTL, (4) making digital content accessible to low-income families, (5) public media’s national-local service model, and (6) community engagement examples from Ohio and Washington.

In perceiving shape-at-a-slant it is assumed that a sequence of operations is executed. The aim of these experiments was to determine the extent to which execution of these operations requires allocation of attention. Three hypotheses were considered: zero automaticity--that all of the operations require attention; partial automaticity--that the operations culminating in a representation of projective shape and slant-in-depth are automatic while the combinatorial operations culminating in a distally correlated shape require attention; full automaticity--that the entire sequence of operations is automatic, proceeding without allocation of attention. To decide among these hypotheses, subjects performed forced-choice shape recognition tests under two conditions: In the shape-directed condition subjects were motivated to process shape. In the numerosity-directed condition subjects were motivated to direct attention to discrimination of numerosity, thereby causing attention to be diverted from processing of shape. Examination of the pattern of choices on the recognition test showed results that conformed best to the hypothesis of partial automaticity.

The PR <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> OVE-IT (peer reviewed research offering validation of effective and innovative teaching) website (www.pr2ove-it.org) is a database that summarizes the available research on educational interventions designed to enhance student learning, retention, and professional success. It is intended to be a tool for translating education research on interventions into practical classroom use by engineering faculty who are not engaged in educational research. The website is divided into two major categories for searching and viewing information about articles: interventions (instructional practices) and outcomes (the main result(s) of the study). The website provides three additional major categories for more refined searching: subject/content area (content or context of the learning environment), study characteristics (basic information about each study), and evaluation (method by which the intervention was assessed). This paper presents the results of an analysis of the 367 articles that were in the database on March 17, 2006

This is one of three short booklets designed to be given to graduate students as they begin their studies. These booklets explain the purposes of the dissertation and the criteria by which it will be assessed. They help students understand the context of their course work; the need to take an active role in shaping their studies; and the importance of thinking ahead about the components of the dissertation and the quality of scholarship they will need to demonstrate.These booklets are intended to support the dissertation research and writing process by providing faculty and advisors with guidelines for setting clear expectations for student performance, and with a model for helping students produce the desired quality of work. They encourage dialogue between faculty and students about the quality of the components of their dissertation project. They include rubrics that students can use to self-assess their work and that can aid faculty in providing focused feedback.Setting explicit targets and benchmarks of excellence of the sort advocated in these booklets will enable departments and universities to respond to demands for accountability with clear criteria for, and evidence of, success; and will raise the overall quality of student performance.

The Center