Understanding Undergraduates

Challenging our preconceptions of student success

Celia Popovic, David A. Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415667555
• eBook ISBN: 9781136725418
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Most university teachers have ideas about the typical good or not-so-good student in their classes, but rarely do they share these thoughts with others. By keeping quiet about the preconceptions – or stereotypes – they harbour, teachers put themselves at risk of missing key evidence to help them revise their beliefs; more importantly, they may fail to notice students in real need of their support and encouragement.

In this unique work, the authors explore UK and US university teachers' beliefs about their students' performance and reveal which beliefs are well-founded, which are mistaken, which mask other underlying factors, and what they can do about them. So is it true, for instance, that British Asian students find medicine more difficult than their white counterparts, or that American students with sports scholarships take their studies less seriously? Is it the case that students who sit at the front of the lecture hall get better grades than those who sit at the back?

By comparing students' demographic data and their actual performance with their teachers' expectations, the authors expose a complex picture of multiple factors affecting performance. They also contrast students' comments about their own study habits with their views on what makes a good learner. For each preconception, they offer clear advice on how university teachers can redesign their courses, introduce new activities and assignments and communicate effective learning strategies that students will be able to put into practice. Finally, the authors explore the ramifications of teachers' beliefs and suggest actions that can be taken at the level of the institution, department or programme and in educational development events, designed to level the playing field so that students have a more equitable chance of success.

Ideal for both educational developers and university teachers, this book:

• reveals general tendencies and findings that will inform developers' own work with university teachers,
• provides practical guidance and solutions for university teachers to be able to identify and address students' actual – rather than assumed – needs,
• explores means of addressing and challenging people's natural tendency to rely on preconceived ideas and stereotypes, and
• explains an action research method that educational developers can use on their own campuses to unravel some of the local preconceptions that may be hampering student success.

1

INTRODUCTION

Before you read on, jot down some brief responses to the following questions:

1. What makes a good student?

2. What makes a poor student?

3. What do you think your students believe makes a good student?

We aim to provide our own answers to these questions in the next seven chapters, along with responses to a fourth question:

4. How do we overcome our preconceptions about good and poor students so that they don’t get in the way of learning?

Many of us have beliefs about the really able and the most challenging students. Yet most of the time, we keep those thoughts to ourselves or only share them with a small group of trusted friends, in what Goffman (1959) would call ‘back stage conversations’ – ones that shouldn’t be heard in public. Some university teachers don’t feel they can air these views with anyone at all. Such experiences can leave us feeling isolated, concerned that we might act unfairly or that no one else shares these worries. A doubt nags us that we may be missing a part of the puzzle, that maybe we could have reached that group of disenchanted students last year if we’d somehow acted differently.

At other times, we’re not even conscious of the automated thought patterns we draw on, but they may well affect our expectations of our students. We notice the student whose phone keeps vibrating and the one at the front who looks terrified, but we may not realize how our brain tags and stores this information, creating neat packages tied to preconceived notions of who will or will not succeed in our courses.

This book is the fruit of an international research project that sought to unearth some broadly held preconceptions and test them out. Through interviews with 38 university teachers in 14 subject areas at four institutions in the UK and USA – followed by questionnaire responses and end-of-course grades from 1,241 students taking those teachers’ first-year courses – we’re able to present you with findings on the validity of the 37 frequently cited preconceptions. For each preconception, we also offer strategies you can employ to help students achieve their potential regardless of acknowledged or unacknowledged stereotypes.

Given the potentially discomfiting nature of the topic, we’re mostly writing as if to individual university teachers or to educational developers, like us, who work directly with those teachers. We hope, though, that you will want to share our findings, and your thoughts on them, within your ‘significant network’ (Roxå and Mårtensson 2009) of close, trusted colleagues, and also with your wider network of departmental and cross-university collaborators, since we believe learning and teaching practice is enhanced by working in groups (Bruner 1966; Lave and Wenger 1991; Vygotsky 1987).

To give you a flavour of what is to come, we’ll provide some responses to those initial questions from the teachers in our study:

[Good students are] very independently minded but very thoughtful, and seem to have really been exposed to interesting debate [ … ] and it often seems to be that their parents have pushed them in interesting ways.

(US-Constantia-8)

A career goal is very important, that sets out a long-term aim so they can work towards their dream.

(UK-Baskerville-5)

Students who expect it to be just like the high school course, who come with the idea of ‘this is how they would need to prepare’, that’s definitely a negative [ … ]. Students are often trained in high school to study in a particular way: you memorize terms. Students who are prepared to say ‘I have to go beyond memorization’ are in general set for success.

(US-Delphin-6)

While it may be no surprise that university teachers describe good learners as ‘Punctual, hard-working, devoted, organized and independent’, would it surprise you to know that these are the views of students, too? And why do they choose the courses they take? Perhaps these views resonate with comments you have heard from your own students:

Because I want to do well in life and feel that this course will help. Also I enjoy what I am studying.

(UK-Arial)

I came to the campus a couple of times and really liked the atmosphere.

(UK-Baskerville)

To piss my dad off.

(US-Delphin)

I love this city. Strong [degree] program coupled with a liberal arts education that emphasized philosophy and spirituality.

(US-Constantia)

It’s close to home

(US-Delphin)

Because I left education a long time ago and wanted to have a complete change of career.

(UK-Arial)

As you discover students’ motivations in this way, perhaps you find that your expectations of their performance shift.

Background to the research

This research had its genesis in a doctoral thesis by one of the authors (Popovic 2007). She investigated differences in performance by medical students at a UK university. This revealed that teachers had beliefs about the types of student they expected to perform well or poorly. In discussing the issue with teachers, Celia realized that many teachers shared common beliefs about some students – beliefs that turned out to be unfounded. Her analysis of exam results revealed that student performance was not linked to the factors identified by the teachers. Teachers, in contrast, had constructed rationales to account for links that Celia’s study revealed as untrue. Because these unspoken beliefs had not been tested, the teachers believed underperformance was beyond, and therefore not, their responsibility. Once it was shown that there was no link between certain characteristics and performance, it was possible to open the dialogue to investigate the implications of these beliefs. We explore teacher beliefs from all four institutions in this study – both well-founded and not – in Chapters 4, 5 and 6, and some of it has been published elsewhere (Popovic 2010).

The most significant challenge presented by this project was the one attributed to George Bernard Shaw – ‘America and Britain are two countries divided by a common language’. Not only were we confronted with two different educational cultures but also our shared language is not universal. Seemingly obvious words (term, evaluation, assessment, course, module, staff, faculty, lecturer) can have quite different meanings in the two countries. This linguistic conundrum has permeated the writing of this book as we have tried to ensure accessibility to all speakers of English, not just the countries in the study. You have already seen us use the phrase ‘university teacher’ to describe what in the UK would be called a ‘lecturer’ and in the USA ‘faculty’ – neither of those terms translates meaningfully. Occasionally, you will see us include an American–British translation in parentheses where it aids clarity. Throughout, we have tried to minimize the potential for confusion and ask you to bear with us if our wording seems unwieldy.

Why do we care?

In discussing the question of teacher expectations, we found we were both personally invested in researching further and disseminating our findings to help inform university teachers and educational developers (‘faculty developers’). To explain that interest a little better, we interviewed each other and report our comments here. We hope it’s helpful for you to see where we’re coming from in writing this book.

Celia Popovic is an Educational Developer at York University in Toronto, Canada. Before this appointment, and for most of the time the research was conducted, she was Head of Educational Staff Development at Birmingham City University in the UK.

1. Which of your experiences relate to the topic of preconceptions?

Not only do teachers make assumptions about students but the reverse can also be true. I clearly remember a tutorial where I hesitatingly suggested that some people might question the existence of God. My previous, sheltered experience at boarding school – with compulsory church attendance on Sunday and an underlying adherence to Church of England beliefs and values – suggested that all figures of authority were in agreement. I was completely shocked when the tutor revealed she was an atheist, and was amazed that the walls of the tutorial room did not collapse. That recollection reminds me that students can make false assumptions about teachers, too: that stereotyping is not always one-way traffic.

In my personal life, when my middle daughter, at the age of four, expressed relief that the family was not moving house, I discovered she thought people relocated because someone else put a ‘For Sale’ sign on the front lawn. To a four-year-old child, this was a rational explanation. To her mother, it suggested a deeply insecure little girl for whom existence was a totally random experience. Having reassured my daughter, I thought about how much we take for granted about shared knowledge, and the understanding of rules and consequences. On another occasion my son, then aged five, casually mentioned his disclosure at school circle time that Daddy had to wear an ankle bracelet ‘so that the police know where he is’. Appalled, I said, as calmly as I could: ‘but George that simply isn’t true is it?’ To which George replied, ‘No, but everyone was very interested.’ As far as George was concerned, he had been asked to tell the class something about his family that was interesting; the minor detail that this should also be true, had escaped his attention, or perhaps was never articulated. These personal anecdotes might seem irrelevant in a book concerned with higher education, but for me they encapsulate the essence of this study – What is it that we take for granted, both as teachers and students, what do we assume, what do we articulate, and how accurate are we in our assumptions? Could the student who frustrates their teacher by apparently missing the point in an assignment, or the one who plagiarizes others, be examples of the same responses as my children: guilty of not applying the rules, but innocent of deliberately breaking ‘the law’?

2. How do these issues relate to your own work with students and university teachers?

I have worked with students at every level, and now work mainly with academic colleagues. I also work with MA and PhD students investigating pedagogic issues, some of whom are also university teachers. I try to ensure that assumptions are fully examined, that expectations are clearly expressed, and that motivations and prior knowledge are explored, in an attempt to avoid the house-moving or the ankle-tag experience with my students.

With my colleagues, I like to explore preconceptions and generalizations. I am surprised by how frequently teachers say that students no longer want to learn for the love of the subject. Often this view is based on two assumptions: the first is that students are different from the teachers’ peers; the second is that current students’ motivation has no bearing on the choice of subject. In some cases both of these assumptions may be correct. However, it is not always so. Certainly in my own case, I studied English and American Literature because I loved reading. I completed the essays every time they were due, not because of this love of the subject: I did it in order to meet the requirements of the course. If I didn’t ask repeatedly about the criteria for a First, or what was needed to pass, it wasn’t because I didn’t want to know, but because the climate at that university at that time did not encourage such questions. Was I so very different from the average literature student today?

I am interested in the subtext – What is really going on? Are our assumptions correct? This is what led me to embark on the research that has culminated in this book.

David A. Green is Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Seattle University, Washington, USA.

1. Which of your experiences relate to the topic of preconceptions?

From my undergraduate days, I recall some outrageous comments from my teachers, particularly statements that were sexist (in a subject where 80 per cent of students were women) or latently homophobic – an uncomfortable experience for me as a recently out gay man (though my teachers at the time didn’t know this). The sense of being an invisible minority has stuck with me.

In the last 15 years, I’ve worked with students from a far broader range of backgrounds than I could have imagined during my horrendous first teaching position as a postgraduate. And I’ve discovered, often through a painful process of trial and error, that it’s best to presume nothing but good intentions from students. One student would be on the verge of falling asleep during group work; it’s only once I asked what was going on that I learned that he and his girlfriend (also a student at the same university) had a new baby, no family support and were juggling full-time studying with full-time parenting in shifts. Another would ask questions five minutes out of sync with the rest of the group, to the point where I put her in touch with the counselling service; it turned out she was experiencing the start of her first psychotic incident and had to interrupt her studies for a year. Then in my first use of online discussions in the late 1990s, two first-generation university students anonymously posted strongly worded messages because they felt unable to tell their best friend face-to-face that her homophobia was unacceptable and damaging their friendship. Each year, my students continue to surprise me.

2. How do these issues relate to your own work with students and university teachers?

Issues of identity led me to develop an activity for the first class in my course on Cultural Taboo and Transgression at Seattle University, and people might like to borrow and adapt it. Ten minutes into the first session, after students have briefly introduced themselves (name, major, year of study, reason for taking the course), I ask them to write down everything they think they know about me. (I tell them that I can’t be offended because I realize they don’t know me. It turns out that I can be offended, but it’s important for me not to show it and to remain open-minded!) After two or three minutes, they get into threes to pool their ideas for five minutes before volunteering the items they have noted. Typical examples include: male, British, wears a suit, married (they always check for rings), punctual – and I type them up, projecting them on screen. I then ask them to tell me which catego...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• 1. INTRODUCTION
• 2. UNDERSTANDING THE RESEARCH CONTEXT
• 3. HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE UK AND USA
• 4. UNDERSTANDING BELIEFS SHARED BY TEACHERS IN THE UK AND USA
• 5. UNDERSTANDING UK TEACHERS’ BELIEFS
• 6. UNDERSTANDING US TEACHERS’ BELIEFS
• 7. UNDERSTANDING STUDENTS’ BELIEFS
• 8. CHALLENGING OUR PRECONCEPTIONS
• APPENDICES
• References
• Index