From Bumbling Students to Brilliant

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For this blog I would like to take off on what Mark Shelley was discussing last week: Are we enabling or empowering the students in our classes? As Mary Verbout likes to say, all instructors who teach 100-level courses or below are dealing with at-risk students. In other words, most students who come to community college do not know how to be college students.  Perhaps, neither of their parents attended college, or their high schools did not prepare them for college. One of my current students who has not been in school for over 30 years remembers, "I didn't have to do a stitch of work in high school because I was a football player. My teachers just kept passing me on. Everything you are teaching us is brand new to me." Other students assume that they can successfully juggle family and work obligations with 12-15 credits. Another one of my students is a full-time manager and a mother of a two-year-old who does her studying between the hours of 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. The underlying causes for being at risk may vary, but the results are the same--lack of persistence and completion.

We instructors can choose to complain about our students in the back hallways and continue to be frustrated in our classes, or we can do something about the problem.  And, no, we do not need to resort to dumbing down our courses.  An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education states: "Effective strategies start with a clear vision of who today's students are. The majority are nontraditional in some way—they work and go to school; they don't live on campus; they take longer than expected to graduate. Equally important, the fastest-growing populations are those historically most underrepresented and underserved—first-generation students, low-income students, and students of color." As community college instructors, we need to have a "clear vision" of the students sitting in our classrooms. They are indeed inexperienced college students. We cannot assume that when they enroll in our courses they already know how to meet our expectations for performance.

One of the "odd" behaviors I have to address every semester is a misconstrued belief about the insignificance of homework. This semester I have two students who have come to every class eager to participate...but not prepared. They have incorrectly assumed that if they show up they will at least get a C, even though they have not done any of the assignments.  I can't wait around for them to figure out the consequences, failure at the end of the semester. Thus, if my students have not done an assignment within the first week, they receive an email from me reminding them of the importance of completing the assignments to their ultimate success in the class. Then I reinforce this with a quick conversation before or after class. I also email 4-week progress reports.  Is this babying them as students? I don't think so. The responsibility remains with them to decide whether or not they will respond to the correction. Some do and some don't, but at least those who don't know why they have failed the course. Those who do respond have learned a valuable lesson for the rest of their college careers.

A second misconception I encounter is the student assumption that they can zip off an assignment the night before--or even the half hour before--class.  In my lower level reading course, the reading assignment may be only 4-8 pages long, but the written response requires critical thinking and analysis. Usually, one quick read of the essay will not be enough to provide them with a sufficient understanding for answering the prompts. I can recognize these hasty completions by the short answers and lack of proofreading. If I allow the students to continue to do this, they will fail the course and will not have learned what they need to learn. They will also become frustrated and give up without realizing how they could have done better, when doing better may simply be a matter of slowing down and spending more time on each assignment.

Karin Kirk in "Motivating Students" recommends: "Students perform best when the level of difficulty is slightly above their current ability level. If the task is to easy, it promotes boredom and may communicate a message of low expectations or a sense that the teacher believes the student is not capable of better work. A task that is too difficult may be seen as unattainable, may undermine self-efficacy, and may create anxiety. Scaffolding is one instructional technique where the challenge level is gradually raised as students are capable of more complex tasks." Because of my students' poor performance this semester, I have had to devise a new method of scaffolding. For example, one of my assignments requires that students explain the significance of various quotes in the assigned short story. The students must explain how these quotes either help to develop the plot, reveal information about characters, or contribute to the story's meaning. For our first two stories, the majority of the students (over 90%) simply rephrased each quote, obviously in a matter of minutes. I had to figure out how to empower my students while maintaining high standards for their performance. Many of their first attempts at the assignments were receiving 5 out of 10 points. This was discouraging both for me and for my students, so I decided to allow students to resubmit any assignment with corrections for the first half of the semester. Once I announced this in class, we then went over my expectations for each assignment, and I reemphasized the amount of time required to achieve those expectations.

This brings up a third issue: the amount of time students devote to learning outside of the classroom. This often reflects their prior educational experience. If students have been able to graduate from high school without doing very much homework, what will they assume about college? Early in the semester in our FYE 103 student success class, we have our students track how they spend their time for an entire week. Here are the statistics from my two sections:

™ 18 students are taking 15 credits:

– The highest number of hours studying was 18.

– The lowest number of hours studying was 0.

– The average number of hours studying was 14.

™ 10 students are taking 9-12 credits:

– The highest number of hours studying was 21.

– The lowest number of hours studying was 3.

– The average number of hours studying was 13.

™ 3 people have 6-9 credits with an average of 7.8 hours studying.

(11 students either turned in the assignment late or did not turn it in at all.)

What were students doing with their time as recorded in these diaries?  Many hours of Netflix, video games, and socializing. Based upon these results, we can see that our students do not know or understand what they should be doing outside of class in order to be successful in college. Thus, in our FYE 103 courses, we are continually reminding students of the 2:1 ratio of homework to credit hour. It doesn't take long for them to realize that this ratio really does work. They also discover that when they organize their time they actually can do better on their assignments.

What do we need to do as community college instructors to promote student success? First, we cannot assume that our students already know how to be good college students. We need to educate them about the college culture and expectations. This must be done across the campus in all our classes. Second, within our classrooms, we need to make our expectations clear and demonstrate how students can meet those expectations. It is up to the students to take responsibility for their own learning, but we are doing them a disservice if we do not teach them what this responsibility looks like in college.