Reviews for 10 Strategies for Doubling Student Performance

The average rating for 10 Strategies for Doubling Student Performance based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-07-25 00:00:00 Sam Rosas I used to work at the archives at RPI, my alma mater. I remember being surprised to discover that the only documents that were kept in a fireproof, waterproof safe were copies of minutes of the Board of Trustees meetings going back to 1824. Everything else was stored either above or below-ground in Folsom library with no extra protection than a few locks on the doors. Campus, Inc. sheds a lot of light on the importance of these Trustees and how their corporate connections (and those of university presidents) has helped lead to a corporatization of academia. It covers everything from presidents who simultaneously sit on boards of large banks while raising tuition fees to university patent ownership and corporations giving huge sums of money to research institutes. I felt a lot of light bulbs going off in my head as I read this. I recalled reading a memo about Shirley Ann Jackson, president of RPI, becoming a board member of IBM. Then I thought about the laptop requirement program at RPI and how all freshman are encouraged to purchase the institute-offered IBM ThinkPads (and most of them do). The essays were hit or miss, and ultimately I enjoyed the afterward interview with Noam Chomsky more than anything else in the book. One essay left me very disappointed. It was about RPI and a few other schools, so naturally I was interested in a radical critique of the school I spent quite a bit of time and money at. Unfortunately, I have no idea what the author of the essay was referring to, and the whole thing left me confused. That's okay, I have plenty of my own critique of RPI without having to read someone else's. I feel a connection with all of these issues, as an engineer in a PhD program and as a prior undergraduate in engineering. I'm helping to perpetuate the interweaving of capitalism and academia, as I read about subverting it. That left me with a decent amount of cognitive dissonance, but a lot to think about. I would recommend this book to anybody in academia, especially if you're in a research department.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-10-06 00:00:00 Oksana Kuzik Let me start by saying I am a professional who works in Higher Education and I genuinely enjoy reading about Higher Ed for fun. However, this book was absolutely brutal to get through. There was no new or unexpected research in this work. The entirety could simply be summed up like this: as a whole, Yale students generally come from higher SES and more privileged backgrounds than other non-Ivy college students. Another gripe I had were the quotes from the students at both Yale and Southern. Did Mullen purposefully only include the most mindless, grammatically incorrect quotes from these students?! All of the "like" and "ya know" talk really distracted the reader. These students are Ivy League! There must be better quotes to feature in all of her interview recordings than the quotes she chose!