Doctoral dilemma
http://www.thanhniennews.com/features/?catid=10&newsid=41815
Vietnam aims to produce 20,000 doctorates in 2020, but lack of research support and exchange opportunities encumber the nation’s brightest minds.
When Vietnam released its seventh draft outlining the national strategies to develop the country’s education from the period of 2008-2020 at an August conference in Hanoi, some experts said the plan was simply a wishful laundry list.
Among the 11 solution packages to boost the education system in the next decade, two goals aimed to make Vietnam’s higher education more internationally competitive: to produce 20,000 doctorates and have at least 30 percent of university faculty members as Ph.D. graduates in 2020.
The two goals have been fiercely debated for years among the nation’s leading scholars, professors, students and businesspeople – both through online discussions and print publications – as to whether these figure-based goals would solve the country’s shortage of skilled workers.
“I think it shouldn’t be a problem for the nation’s leading universities to achieve this number, but the goal may not be feasible for universities that have been just recently established,” said Nguyen Kim Hong, deputy principal of Ho Chi Minh University of Education, in a recent interview with Thanh Nien Daily.
Hong, who is in charge of the university’s scientific research activities and higher education, said currently 24.2 percent of the university’s faculty members are Ph.D. graduates. However, he stressed that the focus on improving education shouldn’t be about one simple number.
Deputy Minister of Education and Training (MoET) Banh Tien Long said recently at a conference held in Ho Chi Minh City that the plan to produce 20,000 doctorates by 2020 is being finalized prior to being submitted for the government’s approval.
According to the plan, about half of the candidates would be trained in foreign universities, with between 800 to 1,000 sent abroad annually and 10 percent of those to American universities.
During the academic year 2006-2007, MoET estimates the number of university faculty members who hold master’s degrees or doctorates only increased by 11.9 percent among the 3,500 newly-hired teaching staff.
According to Hong, by 2020 with Vietnam having at least 4.5 million college students and 250,000 university teaching staff, the country must produce around 60,000 doctorates to achieve the 30 percent target, given that there are currently 16,000 Ph.D. instructors.
“We have to take into account the faculty members who may retire during the next 12 years,” Hong explained.
“But that’s still a huge number.”
Urgent matter
Ho Tan Nhat, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at California State University-Northridge, said it’s crucial for Vietnam to increase the number of people who achieve doctorate degrees.
“It would enable us to produce a ‘critical mass’ and a viable force to buttress this country’s scientific research,” said Nhat, who received both of his master’s and doctorate degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Nhat was recently in Vietnam to advise the Vietnam National University-HCMC (VNU-HCMC) on building a credit-based system for university courses – an initiative that would allow students more freedom in choosing their curricula.
Dau Hong Ngoc, a former Vietnam Education Foundation fellow, said the country’s education officials must pinpoint the real purpose for producing master’s or doctorate degree holders.
“In the states, the majority who decide to pursue higher degrees aim to conduct research,” said Ngoc, who received a master’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“The requirement of research isn’t so prioritized for master’s or doctoral candidates in Vietnamese universities.”
A World Bank report released in 2006 showed that the number of scientific publications produced by Vietnam National University numbered only 34, a tiny number when compared to the 3,600 publications of the National University of Singapore.
Speaking at a recent seminar in HCMC on how to conduct research and get published in international journals, Tung Bui, director of the doctoral program in International Management from the University of Hawaii, said research papers originating from Vietnamese universities are often rejected due to the authors’ poor English and analysis of topics that are not new in the scientific world.
Tung emphasized that Vietnamese researchers have few opportunities to attend international seminars abroad and thus lack the latest information that may lead to new scientific discoveries.
“They often stay inside the country, read topics already published and then start to do research,” he said.
“By the time the research is completed, the topic is already four or five years dated.”
Hoang Dung, head of VNUHCMC’s Department of Science and Technology, said the university realizes the importance of assisting those in the master’s and doctoral programs to get their research papers published.
According to Dung, the university has established a fund to support the school’s faculty members and students in conducting scientific research and attending international seminars.
Reported by Huong Le - Van Khoa
Sunday, September 21, 2008
A different way to think about ... student assessment
A different way to think about ... student assessment
Lee S. Shulman
Source:
This is surely the age of accountability, both in higher education and in K-12. As the stakes associated with test performance rise, both for the students and for their institutions, the dilemmas of coaching for test performance have risen as well. Many of the newer forms of assessment make the distinctions between teaching and assessment less and less clear.
When the test takes the form of a dissertation, a portfolio or an architectural design, can we tell how much was done by the coach and how much by the candidate? What if one's peers have collaborated in producing the artifact, whether as co-designers or as editors or critics? And if we insist on tests that reduce dramatically the role of mentors or coaches, might we also be using tests that are more highly artificial and unrepresentative?
Here are some ruminations about the dilemmas of coaching in the contexts of high-stakes testing. They are drawn from an essay titled "Send me in, Coach!" that I've written for the September 2008 issue of The New Educator, a journal published by the City University of New York.
Lee S. Shulman
May 2008
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Coaching and Testing Collide
It's a scene we have watched dozens of times in the movies. A young man or woman of modest talent tries out for the baseball or football or basketball team under the tutelage of a gruff, demanding coach who expresses initial doubts about the likelihood that the kid will prove himself or herself worthy of a spot on the team. The coach is tough and persistent, setting high standards and then mercilessly driving all his charges to meet them. In the climactic scene at the season's end, the good guys or gals are losing by several baskets, or runs, or a touchdown—depending on the sport. "Send me in, coach," pleads our young hero/ine, which coach reluctantly does. The kid scores the winning points, and the team wins. The coach turns out to have a heart of gold, and the reasons for his seeming cruelty become apparent.
What exactly is it that the coach provides the aspirant? Let me propose five processes associated with both the coach and mentor roles: 1) technique, learned through endless drill; 2) strategy, that allows the person who is coached to become capable of a conception of the work that will turn out to be pivotal in their eventual victory; 3) motivation, which produces a "Rocky-like" level of commitment that will help them exceed their own and others' expectations; 4) vision, where players come together in a new vision of the process and their capabilities for success; and 5) identity, whereby the protagonist not only wins, but is transformed, with an internalized new sense of self.
In sports there is always a clear line between the coaching situation and the performance context. When the final jump shot is made from the three-point line by the basketball player, the coach can't jump onto the court and give the ball the extra momentum or spin it might need. I prefer to call such typical relationships between a coach/mentor and player/protégé examples of unmediated mentoring. No separate product comes in the middle between the coaching and the performing that renders the relative contributions of the coach and the coached inherently ambiguous because the entire performance is visible and is itself the basis for evaluating success or failure.
There is, however, an entire genre of mediated mentoring. The performance is not directly observed and has yielded a product which is the focal point of competition and evaluation. Thus in the case of mediated performances, the respective roles of coach and performer are inherently invisible. Although the five processes are in place and just as transformative, there is inherently no way to discern how much of the work was done independently by the candidate, by peers or by advisors.
Whenever mentoring is mediated by a product whose actual authoring processes are not directly observable, as is the case with literature, objects of architectural or mechanical design, scholarly publications, doctoral dissertations, and even paintings, assessment of individual competence is problematic. But are these problems of educational measurement or a new set of realities regarding the conditions of expert performance? Stanford education professor Sam Wineburg and others point out that the crux of the problem may not be measurement error but rather the inherently social and interactive character of the performances whose competence is assessed. Writing is and should be critiqued and edited, as should painting, the designs for buildings and the research performed in scientific laboratories. To avoid mentoring merely to ensure the legitimacy of individual test scores might even be judged a form of malpractice! So we are faced with an essential tension between the inherently social character of most forms of complex human performance and the psychometric imperative to estimate a "true score" for ability or any other personal trait using the individual as the unit of analysis.
In an education setting, the distinction between the scores that a student earns on any test-like event—multiple choice test, essay exam, portfolio or senior sermon in a seminary—and their underlying "true" capability is a reflection of the distinction, borrowed perhaps from the field of linguistics, between competence and performance. Psychometrics rests on the claim that the observed performance is a valid indicator if it tracks the underlying competence faithfully. But what if mentored or coached performances actually track underlying competence more validly than measurement of students working alone? What if the composition written by a student in the presence of his editing team is a better indicator of his future writing competence than having him write alone?
That is what sits at the heart of the puzzle.
My proposal for "getting over" this essential tension is three-fold: making changes in the processes of assessment, making explicit the parameters of mentoring, and developing a clear code of ethical principles for both assessment and mentoring. At the heart of these proposals is the principle of transparency. Everything possible must be done to ensure that the roles of mentors, peers and students be transparently clear in any mediated mentoring activity. There should be ways of reporting on the character of coaching for test performance that make the efforts of the coach entirely transparent to assessment.
I have often written that collaboration is a marriage of insufficiencies; that students can work together in ways that scaffold and support each others' learning, and in ways that support each others' knowledge. Now I call for a marriage of sufficiencies to overcome the essential tensions between individual work and collaborative performance, coaching support and independent assessment, the mentor as an agent of zealous advocacy and the mentor as a steward of the commons.
As Dewey observed, we will not solve this problem, we will get over it. It is built in to the psychometric paradox: Our measurement models are psychometric but our assessment needs are often sociometric, requiring the measurement of socially scaffolded and joint productions.
Lee S. Shulman
Source:
This is surely the age of accountability, both in higher education and in K-12. As the stakes associated with test performance rise, both for the students and for their institutions, the dilemmas of coaching for test performance have risen as well. Many of the newer forms of assessment make the distinctions between teaching and assessment less and less clear.
When the test takes the form of a dissertation, a portfolio or an architectural design, can we tell how much was done by the coach and how much by the candidate? What if one's peers have collaborated in producing the artifact, whether as co-designers or as editors or critics? And if we insist on tests that reduce dramatically the role of mentors or coaches, might we also be using tests that are more highly artificial and unrepresentative?
Here are some ruminations about the dilemmas of coaching in the contexts of high-stakes testing. They are drawn from an essay titled "Send me in, Coach!" that I've written for the September 2008 issue of The New Educator, a journal published by the City University of New York.
Lee S. Shulman
May 2008
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Coaching and Testing Collide
It's a scene we have watched dozens of times in the movies. A young man or woman of modest talent tries out for the baseball or football or basketball team under the tutelage of a gruff, demanding coach who expresses initial doubts about the likelihood that the kid will prove himself or herself worthy of a spot on the team. The coach is tough and persistent, setting high standards and then mercilessly driving all his charges to meet them. In the climactic scene at the season's end, the good guys or gals are losing by several baskets, or runs, or a touchdown—depending on the sport. "Send me in, coach," pleads our young hero/ine, which coach reluctantly does. The kid scores the winning points, and the team wins. The coach turns out to have a heart of gold, and the reasons for his seeming cruelty become apparent.
What exactly is it that the coach provides the aspirant? Let me propose five processes associated with both the coach and mentor roles: 1) technique, learned through endless drill; 2) strategy, that allows the person who is coached to become capable of a conception of the work that will turn out to be pivotal in their eventual victory; 3) motivation, which produces a "Rocky-like" level of commitment that will help them exceed their own and others' expectations; 4) vision, where players come together in a new vision of the process and their capabilities for success; and 5) identity, whereby the protagonist not only wins, but is transformed, with an internalized new sense of self.
In sports there is always a clear line between the coaching situation and the performance context. When the final jump shot is made from the three-point line by the basketball player, the coach can't jump onto the court and give the ball the extra momentum or spin it might need. I prefer to call such typical relationships between a coach/mentor and player/protégé examples of unmediated mentoring. No separate product comes in the middle between the coaching and the performing that renders the relative contributions of the coach and the coached inherently ambiguous because the entire performance is visible and is itself the basis for evaluating success or failure.
There is, however, an entire genre of mediated mentoring. The performance is not directly observed and has yielded a product which is the focal point of competition and evaluation. Thus in the case of mediated performances, the respective roles of coach and performer are inherently invisible. Although the five processes are in place and just as transformative, there is inherently no way to discern how much of the work was done independently by the candidate, by peers or by advisors.
Whenever mentoring is mediated by a product whose actual authoring processes are not directly observable, as is the case with literature, objects of architectural or mechanical design, scholarly publications, doctoral dissertations, and even paintings, assessment of individual competence is problematic. But are these problems of educational measurement or a new set of realities regarding the conditions of expert performance? Stanford education professor Sam Wineburg and others point out that the crux of the problem may not be measurement error but rather the inherently social and interactive character of the performances whose competence is assessed. Writing is and should be critiqued and edited, as should painting, the designs for buildings and the research performed in scientific laboratories. To avoid mentoring merely to ensure the legitimacy of individual test scores might even be judged a form of malpractice! So we are faced with an essential tension between the inherently social character of most forms of complex human performance and the psychometric imperative to estimate a "true score" for ability or any other personal trait using the individual as the unit of analysis.
In an education setting, the distinction between the scores that a student earns on any test-like event—multiple choice test, essay exam, portfolio or senior sermon in a seminary—and their underlying "true" capability is a reflection of the distinction, borrowed perhaps from the field of linguistics, between competence and performance. Psychometrics rests on the claim that the observed performance is a valid indicator if it tracks the underlying competence faithfully. But what if mentored or coached performances actually track underlying competence more validly than measurement of students working alone? What if the composition written by a student in the presence of his editing team is a better indicator of his future writing competence than having him write alone?
That is what sits at the heart of the puzzle.
My proposal for "getting over" this essential tension is three-fold: making changes in the processes of assessment, making explicit the parameters of mentoring, and developing a clear code of ethical principles for both assessment and mentoring. At the heart of these proposals is the principle of transparency. Everything possible must be done to ensure that the roles of mentors, peers and students be transparently clear in any mediated mentoring activity. There should be ways of reporting on the character of coaching for test performance that make the efforts of the coach entirely transparent to assessment.
I have often written that collaboration is a marriage of insufficiencies; that students can work together in ways that scaffold and support each others' learning, and in ways that support each others' knowledge. Now I call for a marriage of sufficiencies to overcome the essential tensions between individual work and collaborative performance, coaching support and independent assessment, the mentor as an agent of zealous advocacy and the mentor as a steward of the commons.
As Dewey observed, we will not solve this problem, we will get over it. It is built in to the psychometric paradox: Our measurement models are psychometric but our assessment needs are often sociometric, requiring the measurement of socially scaffolded and joint productions.
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