From the blog

  • Guest Post: Leadership Matters, So what’s the Matter with our Leadership Today?

    I was recently having coffee with my friend and colleague Dean and Professor Steve Gavazzi to discuss the National Council on Family Relation‘s Future of Family Science task force [more on that in a future post] and I mentioned my series of blog posts on self-regulated learning and graduate education. Steve asked me – did…

  • Self-regulated Learning and Graduate Education: What Graduate Programs Should do Part 2

    Well, it is time for my final post in my series on self-regulated learning and graduate education. This series resulted in the following posts: Motivation, Self-Regulated Learning, and Graduate Education Information to Promote Grad Student Success Tools to Promote Grad Student Success: Writing Skills Tools to Promote Grad Student Success: Research Skills Tools to Promote…

  • Self-regulated Learning and Graduate Education: What Graduate Programs Should do Part 1

    Today I want to wrap up my series on self-regulated learning and graduate education. I want to revisit my original question: “What information, tools, tasks, and activities could we provide to promote our graduate students’ learning, intellectual development, and achievement of their post-graduate school goals?”. Over a series of posts, I reviewed information and tools…

  • Tools to Promote Grad Student Success: Presentation/Teaching/Media Skills

    The final tool that graduate students need for success is presentation/teaching skills. This topic is often ignored in graduate programs – grad students are rarely taught how to teach before they are thrust in the classroom, and likewise, grad students are rarely taught how to make a good presentation, or practice presentations in front of…

  • Tools to Promote Grad Student Success: Research Skills

    I am still on the topic of self-regulated learning and graduate education. Today I want to discuss another tool that graduate students need for success: research skills. The art of conducting research has many components. First, students need to formulate research questions, preferably research questions that are going to be incremental, if not significant, additions…

  • Information to Promote Grad Student Success

    Last week I posed the question “What information, tools, tasks, and activities could we provide to promote our graduate students’ learning, intellectual development, and achievement of their post-graduate school goals?” So, let’s start with the first part of that question – what information could we provide to promote our graduate students’ learning, intellectual development, and…

  • Motivation, Self-Regulated Learning, and Graduate Education

    I have been working on revising our grad handbook, and leading some revisions to our graduate curriculum this year in my role as grad studies chair. One process I looked at was the end of the year report. We have grad students submit annual evaluations. These annual evaluations were used to give students a rating…

  • Designing an (Interdisciplinary) Graduate Seminar: The Crowd-Sourced Syllabus

    Designing syllabi for graduate courses is a lot of work, particularly when they are seminars, and particularly when you are in an interdisciplinary program.  In an interdisciplinary program, you might want to teach a seminar on a topic, say intimate relationships, but may only know the research in the discipline (e.g. clinical psychology) you were…

  • Don’t take my word for it: Crowdsourced Advice for Students Applying to Graduate School

    I did a presentation a few years ago for prospective graduate students at the National Council on Family Relations annual conference. In preparation, I gathered advice for students applying to graduate school.  You can see the contributors below.  Do you agree with the advice? What is missing? Contributors: Elizabeth Adkins-Regan, Paul Amato, Mitchell Bartholomew, Alan Booth,…

  • Should I go to graduate school?

    As part of my job as grad studies chair, I have received several inquiries into our graduate program. Individuals emailing me are interested in graduate school for a variety of reasons: they love Ohio State and want to teach at OSU, they love teaching and want to teach college students, they love Human Development and…