Dual Enrollment or AP English?

I have been pondering the impact of dual enrollment for years and have heard all of the arguments for and against.  I know the dividing line. It seems that those who express concern or suggest alternatives are not heard over the roar of the dual enrollment train as it speeds ahead at breakneck speed. Many see it as the only train on the only track available for linking lower and higher educational systems. 

The Department of Education declared in its report "Other attempts to help students enter and succeed in college are based on a body of research demonstrating that postsecondary success is predicated on both rigorous academic preparation and a clear understanding of the expectations in college (cf. Venezia, Kirst, and Antonio, 2003). This approach suggests that high schools and colleges should work together, and that blurring the distinction between the two education sectors may help students to be more successful. As such, policymakers should seek to promote programs and policies that help link secondary and postsecondary education.  Dual enrollment is one type of program that does just this, and which appears to have grown rapidly at the program level." ("State Dual Enrollment Policies: Addressing Access and Quality," 2004) (italics added for emphasis)

Here at Yavapai College, it is full speed ahead with our dual enrollment classes, with more and more disciplines being asked, or forced, to get on board. Our website says that dual enrollment allows "college ready students to participate in accelerated college level coursework." But is that true? Are our offerings on high school campuses truly "accelerated"?  Our website says we offer the "same challenging college curriculum." What I see in ENG 101 and ENG 102 offerings is more of what the Department of Education calls "blurring the distinction between the two education sectors," rather than promoting "a clear understanding of the expectations of college."

I am not opposed to allowing high school students to attempt college credit courses, but is that what we are offering?  I did some basic math. The students on our college campus receive 37.5 hours of seat time in ENG 101 classes to achieve our learning outcomes. Students on the high school campuses are receiving more like 72 hours of seat time (18 weeks x 4 hours/week, plus or minus), nearly double the amount of time to achieve the same outcomes. Yes, these high school students assess at the same level as on-campus students. Of course they do! They have twice the amount of time to learn what they need to learn. Would those students be as successful in 15 weeks on our campus? I wonder. Would our on-campus students be more successful with twice the amount of class time? Surely they would.

Are we are giving these high school students "college experience" in the true sense of the word? No. We need to be honest about what we are doing: we are giving them an AP writing course that receives college credit. Even the atmosphere speaks to a high school class.  The students are sitting in high school rooms, with high school instructors, taking ENG 101 during regular high school hours. And ENG 101 is linked to senior English. If the students don't pass ENG 101, they have lost high school credit as well. How much pressure does this put on those high school English instructors? Are they able to maintain the rigor, or do they find themselves trying to help students pass at all cost in order to meet graduation requirements?

How many high school seniors are actually ready for college?  According to my estimates based upon the numbers of seniors in our high schools and the number of ENG 101 sections we are offering (18 throughout the county), about 1/4 of our high school seniors are ready to take college-level writing classes. That is 25% of all the students who have completed their junior year. Perhaps, if so many are ready for college courses, we should let them graduate after their junior year and come on over to Yavapai. This would be the "accelerated" approach we promise on our website. 

As the Department of Education says, "Dual enrollment, particularly when it is located at the high school, is often criticized for not offering students a true postsecondary experience. Policymakers must find ways to address this criticism and ensure that dual enrollment courses are more than watered-down college courses. Although some states seek to do this by regulating course offerings, requiring dual enrollment teachers to undergo professional development or by requiring that high school students attend class with matriculated college students, such regulations are not common. Ensuring the quality of students’ dual enrollment experiences is important not only for the students themselves, but because it serves to maintain the integrity of postsecondary education throughout the state system. Dilution of quality may reflect poorly on postsecondary credit generally." (italics added for emphasis) This is our dilemma here at Yavapai College. If the high school students have twice the time to achieve the same outcomes, is that not "watered down"? Is that truly as rigorous as a regular college class? We seem to be promoting the old "Yavapai High" reputation in these classes. 

One of the past arguments for promoting dual enrollment was that our college needed to offer this valuable service to our taxpayers. I never sensed an angry mob outside our doors demanding dual enrollment, but somehow the state legislature decided that the outcry was so strong it mandated it. Even so, every college gets to decide what will be offered and how, and yet, the college faculty concerns go unheard or ignored. For example, we in the English department have argued for having the high school students who take ENG 101 on their own campus come to our campuses to take ENG 102 to ensure a real college experience. This has been met with resistance year after year as being inconvenient for the students. What is a little inconvenience in comparison with maintaining the "integrity of postsecondary education"? This argument borders on a entitlement mentality.  They want it their way, so we have to accommodate, even at the risk of our own reputation. And we have lost a valuable opportunity to "link secondary and postsecondary education" in a way that students get accustomed to the "rigors" of higher education.

We were also told in the beginning that dual enrollment would encourage more students to continue their education at Yavapai College. The Verde Independent reporter Yvonne Gonzalez reported, "The college donates more than $100,000 yearly in foregone tuition to dual enrollment high school students,...Dual enrollment on both the east and west sides of the county have increased by 40 and 27 percent respectively, according to Hughes' numbers." (7/1/2014) This must be a huge benefit to our taxpayers but at what cost to us and to our reputation? Will these students continue their education at Yavapai College? The article went on to say, "Hughes said these kids are 'a little more likely,' by about a handful of percentage points, to attend Yavapai College as students....'There are probably greater numbers from those schools too that are going on and choosing other institutions.'" Basically, we are offering tuition-free courses to students who are already planning to go to college and who will most likely choose a four-year institution.

Isn't this like giving tax advantages to the rich? We have not furthered the cause of higher education; we have not encouraged the underprivileged to experience college. Instead, we have subsidized students who are already planning to go to college. And if this is truly a service to our taxpayers, then shouldn't we be offering free tuition to all local high school graduates who pass the Compass test? That would be true equality of access.

While we focus all these resources on high school students who are already planning to go to college, who is focusing on the lower 25% of Arizona high school students, the ones who drop out? Yes, we are offering the top 25% of the senior class free tuition while the lower 25% are shuffled out the back door. Wouldn't our resources go a lot further in helping these students to obtain a better education leading to better careers? That was the original vision for community colleges.

Humans Don't Do Optional....

Our Faculty Association President Vikki Bentz sent out a recent email that ended: "If you have time, come, listen, and learn how our college operates at the governing board-level.  I will be there to represent you, but a strong faculty presence lets Board Members and the Administration know that we care about what happens at all levels of the college." At the last campus update forum a couple of weeks ago, very few faculty attended even though someone obviously tried to schedule it at a convenient time for faculty participation.

The mantra among people working with first semester college students is "students don't do optional." We have seen this at Yavapai College. Even though research across the nation has shown that new student orientation, visiting advisers every semester, and student success courses contribute to student completion rates,  most students will not voluntarily participate in programs design to help them succeed. Thus, each institution has to decide what, if anything, is worth requiring of students. What will benefit the students the most? What combination of programs will increase retention and persistence the most?

I have observed that students aren't the only ones who don't do optional; very few faculty do optional either. It must be a common human condition.  Someone said 20% of the workers do 80% of the work. If we look around campus, this same ratio seems to apply. We faculty all participate in one committee, maybe two, but beyond that only a few take up the torch of any given issue. Thus, 20% of the faculty seem to be doing 80% of the faculty representation, including promoting and supporting faculty issues. Although we don't want anyone mandating more participation from us, we don't volunteer for much either.

Trust me, I am not accusing anyone without looking in my own mirror. I think this lack of participation reflects our common humanity, rather than any personal lack of commitment to our job. We all have plenty of work to do within our own classrooms if we want to provide the best learning experience for our students. Going beyond that can be difficult depending upon the amount of preparation and grading required in our disciplines. But I find it interesting that those who have the most to do tend to be the ones who are willing to do more and who are asked to do more because of their diligence and commitment. The same faces are seen at most meetings, and year after year the same people are participating in the Institutes. Meanwhile, almost every semester we have trouble getting a quorum at our Faculty Association meetings, and we scramble to get enough representation on our standing committees.

There will always be the few who rise to the occasion, or the crisis, to contribute personal time and effort. In history, they are the names we admire, such as Martin Luther King or Mother Teresa. The few, even if they remain nameless, are the ones who make an impact, who provide the impetus for change.

But I wonder. What would happen if more of us did just a bit more for the common good of our institution, whether that be toward faculty, instructional, or student issues? Would it make a difference?

"Please Excuse Any Miss Spellings."

Yep! That is a sentence I read at the end of a student's email. I have never met Miss Spelling, but I have seen a lot of misspelled words in my days as an English instructor.

I consider most misspelled words symptomatic of a deeper cultural problem: the lack of reading in our society. Most students who choose to come to a community college rather than a four-year institution have not been reading on a regular basis. Chances are the misspelling traditional students have not had a good prior educational experience, whether it was from their own lack of performance or the fault of the school they attended. Many of our older students find themselves with the same issues because they have not been in school for quite a while and have also not been reading.

What is the result? A lack of exposure to our most common words, and a lack of exposure to seeing words in print. For example, when Spell Checker gives students options for an erroneous version of "definite," many students will choose the option "defiant" without sounding out the word to recognize the error of their decision. This also leads to the humorous error of writing about their "collage" experience here at Yavapai College.

Then there is the issue of open, hyphenated, and closed compound words. Students are not used to seeing the printed forms of compounds. Nowadays becomes "now a days"; somewhere becomes "some where"; and anyone becomes "any one." I have seen high school as "High School," "highschool," and "high School." Air-conditioned becomes "airconditioned" or "air conditioned." I have even seen "with out" used in papers.

When in doubt, sound it out, right? Based upon this premise, students will write "would of" instead of "would have." They actually don't know this is an error because they are not used to seeing these words on a page.

Accompanying the spelling errors is a use of the vernacular or cultural dialect in writing. Here is where I must confess to my own grammatical prejudices as I teach my students about what will and won't be allowed in their essays. "To where" drives me nuts!  "He studied to where he fell asleep at his desk." And then there is the infamous "He asked where Suzie was at." Definitely a cause for red ink! This also leads to "try and see" instead of "try to see." All of these expressions have become a common part of our student's oral communication, but they are not an accepted part of academic communication...yet.

These trends lead me to an ongoing discussion with my students about the importance of reading for pleasure. The errors I have used as examples in this blog will probably not go away no matter how often the errors are corrected by instructors. They won't go away until our students begin to read on a regular basis, and this won't happen until they discover the joy of reading. As an institution, we could return to using the same kinds of spelling drills and grammar practice sheets in ENG 101 that so many teachers used during elementary school, but we are dealing with a different issue. Those drills exposed students to the norms of our written language that were reinforced as they read. Somewhere around the time of junior high or middle school, most students stop reading. When they reach an age filled with more choices for using their time (sports, TV, video games), most reading assignments become an avoided chore, a boring requirement, something to be avoided. This is when all that earlier learning begins to disappear because the students are no long immersed in our written language in the form of engaging stories. Many of the students we see in our classes made it through high school without ever reading a book. Ah, the blessings of electronic Spark Notes!

There is hope. Yes, many of our students arrive at college with poor spelling skills and a misunderstanding of when vernacular is appropriate. However, the more they read for our classes, the more they will relearn what they have lost from misuse. To encourage students to do the reading assignments, we need to help them get the most out of their books, and we need to make those reading assignments count. I have heard some say that their instructor doesn't require the textbook: I have heard others complain about the difficulty of the textbooks they are trying to read. I would challenge us all to teach our students how to read our textbooks. Our students don't know that scientists and historians don't approach reading in the same way. They assume that every textbook gets read the same way, in the same amount of time, and in the same night before the due date with the same skills that got them through high school. All of us need to take a few minutes out of class to explain how we would read our textbooks. What reading techniques work best with your texts?

We can even speed up the process of relearning spelling and removing the oral dialect if we can get our students to enjoy reading. We should be sharing our favorite books in our classes. The students are inundated with trailers for upcoming movies, teasers to get them to buy a ticket and a bag of popcorn. We should be creating quick, one-minute teasers about books in our fields that might be interesting to our students. This summer I read The Origin of Feces by David Waltner-Toews (not exactly in my field of study). I have shared the book with every one of my classes this semester. The title alone is the best trailer for the book, and when the students hear that there is an entire chapter devoted to the discussion of the most appropriate word to use when talking about this "taboo" subject, I have them hooked (You will have to read the book to find out what he concludes.). The author approaches an ignored part of every ecosystem that is now affecting us globally in such a humorous way that I think every student could enjoy it and learn from it. I may not have a single students take me up on the recommendation, but all of them will have heard about my delight in reading this book. If they are hearing the same message from all of their instructors...who know what might happen? A revolution of reading?

The situation is not hopeless, but it does require patience. Rather than dumbing down and giving up on reading assignments, we need to support our students in their efforts to learn how to take full advantage of this unfamiliar college culture based so much upon the written word. And we need to inspire the joy of reading.


Image from (www. cafepress.com)

From Bumbling Students to Brilliant

(http://zitscomics.com/)

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.