Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Over the last couple of weeks I've been thinking about the students we have here at my local two-year college and some of the patterns I see. This is a difficult time of the year because there's a lot of stress due to unmet expectations. Pretty soon we'll be telling about 30% of our freshman class that they'll not be coming back due to their grades. Other students are finding out that certain attitudes and habits that once were successful are not working so well any more. The cognitive dissonance this causes can create a pretty negative vibe. I thought I might share of few of the observations I have with my readers. If you have any thoughts on these topics, I'd love to read them. Send me an email or, better yet, leave a comment for others to interact with.

Completing vs. Understanding

One of the biggest attitude differences I see is how a student approaches assigned work and what they are responsible for with respect to it. In my classes I see a large number of students who see assigned work as something that merely needs to be completed in order to earn a good grade. I see a lot of this because I do a lot of activity based learning and guided inquiry in my classes. Many of the students approach the activities I give them not as vehicles through which to learn the material but as something to complete and check off the "to-do" list. This leads them to spend as little time as possible and to do as little work as possible in order to get through the activity and then get a grade. Since these activities are the foundational tool I use to help them obtain an understanding of the physical concepts and ideas in the course, the student who takes the completion approach usually misses the learning that is supposed to take place. In a sense, they become technicians who know or complete a set of procedures in order to accomplish an end. What I want is for them to become scientists who understand the underlying principles needed to master the topic.

The reason this is an issue is that I think that many of the educational models now in practice in the secondary system allow the student to be successful even if they are only a technician. They learn that they can succeed if they complete a given task regardless of whether or not they really understand it. This certainly works well if the goal of the K-12 system is to produce either assembly line workers or technicians (which was its original intent) but it doesn't work well if they want to be successful in the university model which is focused on scholarship. When they get to us, the completion paradigm may work for a semester or two but once they get to their sophomore/junior level courses, the wheels come off the train. To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what to do about this problem when it comes to my classes. Obviously, there needs to be a lot of thought put into curriculum design so that students are forced to work towards understanding in order to complete their activities but that takes time and testing.

Responsibility

Another big issue is the idea of who is responsible for the student's success. I maintain that the university model of education holds that the student is primarily responsible for their own success with the institution and its resources being in a strong support role. This is different from the historically different K-12 system which was established specifically to take responsibility for a student's learning (thanks to Michael Drake for that insight). When a student gets here, they think that it's still my job to tell them exactly what they have to do and to hound and remind them to do it. Of course, that's not how I see it. I lay out my expectations in the syllabus and then go over that syllabus in great detail early in the class. After that, I think it's the student's job to make sure they keep things straight from there. I need to be fair but I don't need to be their mother.

Again, I see this sort of thing crop up in a hundred different places here from students not having any idea of what they need to do to graduate to not knowing deadlines to not keeping track of what assignments are due and when. Again, I think that this is rooted in the K-12 system where schools can't afford to allow high school students to make mistakes because of the duel factors that students have to take so much stuff all at the right time and the penalty to making Adequate Yearly Progress is so steep. What this leads to is a large percentage of students who are absolute aliens and strangers to the level of responsibility we expect here at the university level.

Anyways, I'd love to hear what my readers (all three of you) think.

Thanks for Reading.

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