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The Transform your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Join Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles as they seek to inspire higher education faculty to adopt innovative teaching and learning practices.
Hello, Transform Your Teaching listeners. It's Jared. Whether you are new to the podcast or have been around since day one, we want to hear from you. Please take a minute and fill out our quick survey and help us make the podcast even better. Click the link in our description.
Jared:We'd be very grateful if you did. And for participating, you'll be put into a drawing for a handcrafted transform your teaching mug. And we're doing a drawing in the month of October, November, and December. So be sure to participate and help us out. We'd be grateful if you did.
Jared:And as always, thanks for listening.
Narrator:This is the Transform Your Teaching podcast. The Transform Your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio.
Jared:Welcome back to the Transform Your Teaching podcast here on the campus of Cedarville University. My name is Jared Piles, and with me is doctor Rob McDole
Rob:Good afternoon.
Jared:Good afternoon, doctor McDowell. How are you?
Rob:I'm doing well. Good. Doing well. We've come to the beginning of the semester here at Cedarville.
Jared:Yeah. You are officially two days into teaching.
Rob:Two days into teaching.
Jared:Before we get into the nitty gritty of this episode, tell me how you feel about teaching.
Rob:I enjoy it a lot. I really do. I didn't realize how much I missed it because I've been just doing CTL things, administration things
Jared:Podcast things.
Rob:Podcast things, which I do enjoy and I do love. Sure. But interacting with students, it's just it's a joy. We don't wanna get into a big huge conversation about my class. But
Jared:Right. But I think we should do quick hits like this Yeah. In these episodes. Yeah. Give you a chance to kind of reflect and as you're coming back into this because, you know, it is important to know our students and know, like, how they're reacting to because you're also teaching, and we may even talk about this more in-depth another time, but you're not you're not doing slides.
Jared:You're not doing PowerPoint No. I Google Slides.
Rob:I do put things on on the screen, like content, specific content. But not the
Jared:notes they're gonna be taking? No. No. There's something they're probably not used to.
Rob:No. I don't think so, but many of them, to their credit, are sitting there just typing away furiously.
Jared:Right. Right. So I I witnessed that firsthand. It was insane. Rob Rob would go, philosophy is this, and you hear It was awesome.
Rob:Yeah. So I I don't mind them. We're in the the computer lab, and I'll take a stroll back. Right? Sure.
Rob:I'll go with the back of the room while I'm teaching, and I'll turn around and I'll look and see what's on their screens.
Jared:Yeah. I do that too.
Rob:And and I've done that twice for each section that I have, and nobody is surfing the web. They're all either on the course website looking at the content because I ask them questions Mhmm. Based on the content, and they have to discuss that in their groups and then give me definitions or give me responses. So I keep it timed. So I think that maybe also part of the pressure is that I I ask them for more than I know they're capable of doing.
Rob:Mhmm. Because I am trying to push them. Yeah. You know? Sure.
Rob:And I tell them that even afterwards. I'm like, there's no way you could have given me a sentence definition for this thing in two minutes in your group. Right. I realize that. But I'm trying to push them because I feel like if I can get them to move beyond that point, then I can get them back to where they feel very comfortable in doing the aspects in the activities of philosophy.
Jared:Right.
Rob:Diving deeper into their own personal beliefs as they connect it back to Scripture and then start applying it in terms of their given major. Yeah. Accounting, finance, management.
Jared:Yeah. I'm intrigued to see how it goes as we keep going along. But let's talk about why we're really here. Yes. We're continuing our series on the understanding of the college student and creating a student profile is the goal today.
Jared:Now, our main goal is to create a profile of the current college student based by looking at where they came from.
Rob:Yes. So we're just looking from in terms of where they came from in terms of geography?
Jared:Yes. Right? Sort of. A couple notes. A couple Okay.
Jared:You know, this data is from Ohio. Okay. Schools in Ohio. So that's the first caution or whatever. Don't think of this as nationwide.
Rob:Well, please don't leave if you're not in Ohio.
Jared:Yes, please. Please, you can say apply. I think it's I think it's general enough that you can make the same assumptions, but I could be wrong. But I but I wanna say, hey, this podcast said that my kids in Idaho are this way. So Yeah.
Jared:But they're not. How dare that podcast ruin their their credibility. Aspirations. Yeah. Ridiculous.
Jared:And the other one is, you know, this these are this is data, but it's could be a bit of a generalization too. There are exceptions to every single rule. Yes. So just because we say that the student from this school has this score and does this and has these aspirations or whatever, it doesn't mean it's true.
Rob:They are generalizations.
Jared:Very general.
Rob:Just for comment perspective.
Jared:Yes, just for us to have a podcast episode. Alright, we're gonna break it down by district typology and we're also going to talk about school type.
Rob:Okay.
Jared:So let's start with district typology. This takes me back to my education courses because you typically have three different types of districts, at least in Ohio, and probably nationwide. Don't know if there's any other but these three. The urban, suburban, and rural districts. The main differences between urban, suburban, and rural areas are population density, distance from cities, and development.
Jared:But let's talk about each one individually. We have some, statistics, again, generalized statistics and characteristics of these types of districts. The first one is urban. Urban, usually lower college going rates of the students.
Rob:So in other words, they're not when they finish high school, if they finish high school, they're not going to college.
Jared:They're going to a trade or going to work. High poverty, lower access to AP or college readiness courses or materials of any fashion, and then we are going to finish with the ACT score for each of these. The ACT score of urban is 18 to 19.
Rob:So this comes directly from the longitudinal ACT scores,
Jared:right? I believe so, yes. We'll put links to where all this comes from. Shout out to Evan Groff, who is our excellent student researcher who found this data for us. That's also a way for me to say, hey, if you don't if you disagree with these, just give him an email.
Rob:Yeah. We'll give you we'll give you his email.
Jared:But Evan comes from a small one traffic light town, but shout out to him. But, yes, I believe it's longitudinal ACT scores.
Rob:And we're talking kids coming from the urban area, they are coming to college. The average ACT score is between eighteen and nineteen.
Jared:That's correct.
Rob:Okay. So on the suburban.
Jared:Now let's go, we could say the other end of the spectrum, suburban. So suburban, usually known for high college enrollment, better funded schools, more extracurriculars, there's a high level of parental involvement and as a former teacher I taught, I did my student teaching in a suburban district that has good things and bad qualities to it. All the K-twelve teachers listening are nodding their heads in And the average suburban ACT score for a student coming out of a district like that is 24. Ohio average is 20.8 and like I said earlier, national average is 21. Basically there's more available to a kid in a suburban district because of the funding.
Rob:So just to be clear, Ohio suburban ACT score average Yes. Is 24.
Jared:That is correct.
Rob:Whereas the Ohio average overall is 20.8.
Jared:Is correct.
Rob:Which is below the national average, but not by much. It's you're only two tenths of a point. Yeah. 21. Right?
Rob:So it's not No. I mean, it's not terrible, is it?
Jared:No, it's not. But again, when we talk about this is there are exceptions of the rules. Like I said, I student taught in a suburban district. I later taught at a private school. But there are exceptions.
Jared:You see all this and you would assume that every single kid from a suburban school goes to college or is involved in lots of extracurriculars. But the fact is that's not always the truth. I mean, taught, I assume when I went in, because I did something like this in my master's program before I taught, that I assumed all these students were this way. And I go into the classroom, it's drastically different you know, than I expected. So while all these things are overall true, you have to keep in mind that again, are generalizations.
Rob:It depends on where you're at.
Jared:It depends on where you're at. You can have a suburban district that, like I'm thinking of a couple in Columbus right now. Our district that I'm in is sort of suburban, but then you have a definitely suburban district in Upper Arlington who has so much money you can throw at them.
Rob:Well, New Albany.
Jared:New Albany as well.
Rob:Would that be considered a suburban district?
Jared:Oh, Definitely. Yeah. New Albany and Upper Arlington are ones I think of. Upper Arlington just built a new school with a gigantic aquatic facility and stuff like Then you have my daughters who are in Southwestern City School District and the school they go to is still from the seventies and you can tell when you walk in.
Rob:Yeah.
Jared:So, you know, a suburban district within that, see, there's even some differences.
Rob:Yeah. The campus at New Albany looks like a high end Ivy League college campus.
Jared:I know. I mean It's
Rob:nice. The buildings, the architecture, I thought at first it was a college when I first went through there
Jared:Mhmm.
Rob:And realized, oh, no. It's not. It's the local high school.
Jared:Right. Right.
Rob:Like, you gotta be kidding me.
Jared:Yeah.
Rob:So that it was it was one of those things where maybe those those schools, their averages are much, much higher, and I think pushing potentially pushing, you know, those numbers, those ACT numbers
Jared:up. Right. And then our last one is the rural district, which is where I grew up, and I can tell you that most of this is true. Limited resources in a rural district, fewer college going opportunities, college enrollment is low, and then most attend community colleges or technical schools, and the ACT score is actually tied with urban at 18 to 19.
Rob:So one thing that our data is missing is something that our president here at Cedarville, Doctor. White, talked about in academic day.
Jared:Also a guest of the podcast, by the way.
Rob:Yes. Was he's been a guest of the podcast. And he had mentioned what folks would be paid by the time they're no college versus, you know, college. Mhmm. College is still a much better option for long term pay, but there are some areas, it seemed like, in the blue collar sector where, you know, by the time they are 40, the pay gap closes and they, you know, they come level with their peers who had college degrees.
Jared:Yeah.
Rob:So that's not in everything, but that's in a lot. And I know one of those for the rural side is gonna be farming. Oh, yes. You know, farmers, you know, if they make it and they keep going and they can wisely husband their farms
Jared:Mhmm.
Rob:They will be sitting in a pretty good financial position, you know, by the time they're 40.
Jared:Right.
Rob:They'll probably some of them would be able to retire early if they wanted to.
Jared:Right. So like I said, there's exceptions, there's generalizations that we're making, but overall, this is the kind of the picture we want to paint of a student where they're coming from.
Rob:So the the ACT for rural, and I just got to point out the ACT for rural and urban is the same. 18 to 19.
Jared:Mhmm.
Rob:Kinda crazy.
Jared:It is. We're gonna switch gears a bit and talk about school type. So we've looked at the districts. Now we're gonna look at the school typology. We're gonna go through public, private, homeschool, and STEM.
Jared:Let's start with public. Alright? Because I think that's the, obviously, the biggest one.
Rob:Yeah. It's gonna be where the majority of students probably are coming from, even for Cedarville, think.
Jared:I can tell you that public schools are make up 88.6% of the student population in Ohio. That's as of October 2022, and 80% of them go to college. Wow. And when we talk about public schools, we're talking about the traditional schools, charter and joint vocational schools as well. So, I mean, there's no surprises there.
Jared:I mean, seems
Rob:For Ohio, it must
Jared:be For Ohio, yeah. Then we have our private schools which make up 8.8% of the K-twelve population. What's interesting is that also about private schools is that 46% attended a private school because of the Ed Choice scholarship, which is I don't wanna say it's exclusive to Ohio because I don't know what other states are doing, but an Ed Choice scholarship is basically if you are under a certain income bracket, you are given money to attend a private school that comes from state.
Rob:I think the other part of that too is I think you have to be in under at least when we moved here almost eight years ago, the school had to be an underperforming school of some sort.
Jared:Has that changed? Has changed. Now it's by income bracket. Oh. So, and this was as of 2021, 46%.
Jared:And I'm fairly certain it's grown by then because I know that the school I used to teach at, their enrollment is booming because of this, because people are now able to afford to Instead a private of going to a public school. Yeah. Alright. And another thing about private schools is that they're mainly located in more populous counties.
Rob:Well, makes sense. Most private schools, even if they're not Christians, still are gonna have to be dependent on a middle to upper middle class to be able to afford it because everybody's already paying, you know, they're already paying taxes to send their kids to whatever school district they live in. Mhmm. So, yeah, that that kinda makes sense.
Jared:A growing school type that we're gonna talk about here briefly is the homeschool population. It's Oh growing exponentially.
Rob:Especially for Cedarville, we've got a lot of homeschooling.
Jared:Yeah, there's also a higher than average college enrollment compared to the national average. And then I was shocked by how small this number is but apparently only 2.7% of students who go to college are from a homeschool. That's shocking to me because of the growth of
Rob:You thought it would be higher?
Jared:I think it's because what where our little bubble of Cedarville, I assume I see so many homeschool kids that are attending, which has grown exponentially since I was here twenty years ago.
Rob:Well, overall, it I mean, again, we're talking about Ohio. We don't know what the national picture looks
Jared:like. That's correct. Yes.
Rob:So that takes us to the last one.
Jared:STEM. STEM schools are growing. They're very popular in urban areas. We have one here in Xenia, just around the corner from Cedarville. And there is a strong college readiness in math and science for those types of students.
Jared:If you've got a kid from a STEM school in your class, if you're an English teacher like me, you don't really care. But if you're a math or science instructor, then those kids are ready to ready to talk college
Rob:It's math and really interesting to me though. The STEM schools are they're an odd duck.
Jared:They are. They're so cool.
Rob:Yeah. But but they definitely are There's been a resurgence here in Ohio, at least in our area of the college and technical preparedness programs. I remember the public school systems back in the, what, eighties and nineties really started shunting those down, just cutting them back. You didn't have now all of a sudden, there's been a resurgence in them, and they've been they've been doing really well. The one in Springfield does really well.
Rob:The kids they put out, the things that they do, it's really excellent. I know Xenia's got a really big one. Greene County does. And the other thing that was interesting to me is on the STEM side, when you start thinking of actual STEM schools, there's a school in Springfield, right, as you're going into the downtown area, it's there on the right, And John Legend helped fund refurbishing that and all, you know, so they've got money because he's from Springfield. I didn't know that.
Rob:Yeah. Yeah. And they got his likeness and image on sides of buildings Wow. In Springfield. Anyway, this STEM school, they actually do biotech engineering.
Rob:Wow. Yeah. They got a little greenhouse, and they've got patents. And they've sold those patents to companies.
Jared:That's awesome.
Rob:Yeah. So it's like really strange. That's usually the area, the domain of research universities.
Jared:Yeah.
Rob:You know, where patents are coming out of the research universities in bio and, you know, molecular biology and, you know, all these different material sciences and engineering, these kinds of things, biotech. But this is more towards like, a seed. I think they developed some sort of of Super seed? Super seed of some sort. Yeah.
Rob:And then they sold that.
Jared:That's cool.
Rob:Yeah. These kids did it. They were the ones that helped develop it.
Jared:It was weird. I have a weird path into STEM. My sister works very closely with STEM schools here in Ohio and she tells me some of the stories that she hears about what schools are doing and then I've attended the Ohio STEM conference here and I'm just blown away with what what kids are doing. It's awesome. Alright.
Jared:So takeaways from all this, Rob McDowell, what do you think?
Rob:Overall, I think Ohio if we're just talking about Ohio, I'd have to go back and look at the numbers, but I think overall the ACT and I would argue probably the SAT. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I do recall some of the ACT numbers longitudinally over the past twenty, twenty five years have definitely had a up and down, but we're definitely in a trough
Jared:Yeah. We are.
Rob:Of low in terms of ACT scores, which leads to that whole idea of the lack of math scores and the thing that we'll be talking about.
Jared:The dreaded math shark.
Rob:In a few future episode of of the math shark.
Jared:Yeah. I'm excited.
Rob:Where essentially the development of students in terms of math has, you know, declined in terms of some of these standardized tests and whatnot that they've been that they've been going through.
Jared:Right.
Rob:Whether that stays that way, I don't know.
Jared:I don't know.
Rob:But it does have implications.
Jared:It's important to know all these things when we're talking about the students in their classrooms.
Rob:Yes. In
Jared:higher ed, you know, where this I mean, whole purpose of doing this is just say, hey, consider these things when you are teaching your students that are in your classroom right now and the ones we'll talk about Mathshark, but this is to prepare us for what's coming as well. Yes. And the purpose of this series is to prepare us for, you know, who's in our classroom now and then who is coming up.
Rob:Yeah. Because we really have to think about our strategies. Yeah. Not just now, but in the future, we've gotta start thinking about those now and making small small changes and having conversations now. If we wait until they get here, I think it's gonna be too late.
Jared:Yeah. As my dad has said my whole life and has said even more now with me in my dissertation, plan your work.
Rob:Work your plan.
Jared:Work your plan. Mhmm. So that's what we're doing. I can't believe that my dad's quote that I've heard since I was nine is coming on the podcast, but it's out there now. So that's gonna do it for us on this episode of the Transform Your Teaching Podcast.
Jared:Be sure to email us at ctlpodcast@cedarville.edu. Check out our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog and connect with us on LinkedIn. Info on how to do that is in the description. Thanks for listening.