First-Gen Does Not Mean One Size Fits All

Undergraduate retention and graduation are issues requiring critical attention from public universities across the nation. Degree attainment for first-generation college students (FGCS) in the United States is especially important to meeting future workforce demands, goals for national economic prosperity, and global competitiveness. Cynthia Demetriou, Judith Meece, Deborah Eaker-Rich, and Candice Powell in their research study The Activities, Roles, and Relationships of Successful First-Generation College Students examined the lived experience of students to explore how developmental situations in college are experienced by the people who participate in them. Their report supports previous research that indicates that students who are engaged in various opportunities, especially if they are first-generation, are highly likely to be successful. The report also suggests a number of opportunities that should be offered by colleges.

Understanding what your students expect from you and the course they are taking may be as simple as asking them. However, research has shown that many students enter college with misconceptions about what they will be expected to do. This can happen more in first-generation students but some of the tendencies are exhibited by all students. In the College Success Skills course we offer at BRCC, one of the first classroom discussions we have is about the similarities and differences between high school and college. It is very often an eye opening discussion. If you are looking to share some of the differences, Dr. Sarah Forbes has written a nice post about this subject. She writes, "At our institution, we have noticed that many students have been given false expectations from their high school teachers and counselors regarding the level of effort they will need to expend. Students are often told that college will be easy, giving the impression that effort will not be necessary. Further, our students often have insufficient prior experience from which to guide their behaviors. College courses are more rigorous and conducted at a faster pace with a higher workload than they are used to in high school. Give students the benefit of the doubt because they initially have no idea they are not prepared for college. For example, if students fail to turn in an assignment, don’t assume they are apathetic about their education. If students fail to respond to your emails, don’t assume they are ignoring your information. Use these situations as teachable moments for the whole class, sharing both the rationale behind the assignment/email/etc., as well as your expectations for them." Read the entire article here.

We have all heard of helicopter parents but have you heard about helicopter instructors? That is how Kristie McAllum describes instructors that she says "[have] replaced helicopter parents with helicopter professors. Through our constant availability to clarify criteria, explain instructions, provide micro-level feedback, and offer words of encouragement, we nourish millennials’ craving for continuous external affirmations of success and reduce their resilience in the face of challenges or failure.” I am not sure I totally agree with her argument but I do feel that we let our students off the hook when we assign reading and then lecture on everything they were supposed to read. It sends a clear message to our students that we will cover all of the material so why read the textbook. That is why I have encouraged all of us to ask questions at the beginning of class that allows the instructor to gauge the level of reading the students completed and the knowledge they retained from the reading. Dr. Maryellen Weimer offers the following suggestions as well. "Are there other benchmarks we could use to determine if we’re doing too much or too little? Could we look at individual policies and practices? Does extra credit coddle students? What about dropping the lowest score? What if teacher feedback is only provided on the final version of the term paper? Should we call on students who very obviously don’t want to participate? Or, must individual policies and practices be considered in light of course content and who’s enrolled in the course? Do students need more support when the content is especially challenging or requires sophisticated skills they have yet to develop? Does it matter whether the course is one taken by beginning students, majors, students fulfilling a general education requirement, first-generation students, or seniors in a capstone? Are there good reasons to do more for beginning students and less for seniors?" You can read the full article here.

The beginning of a new semester is always an exciting time. Instructors are excited about new learning experiences they want to try. Students are excited about moving one step closer to graduating but many of them are anxious about what the semester will bring. I like to start the first class by sharing the journey ahead with my students. It puts them at ease, excites them about the possibilities, and motivates them to learn. It also takes care of the number one expectation of current students, "How is this going to be relevant to my life?" Another topic I spend some time on is the typical misconceptions new students have about college. Dr. Stephen Chew has a classic article about this very topic. He notes there are four things that students typically are misinformed about. He writes, "Students think that learning can happen a lot faster than it does. Take, for example, the way many students handle assigned readings. They think they can get what they need out of a chapter with one quick read through (electronic devices at the ready, snacks in hand, and ears flooded with music). Or, they don’t think it’s a problem to wait until the night before the exam and do all the assigned readings at once. 'Students must learn that there are no shortcuts to reading comprehension.' Teachers need to design activities that regularly require students to interact with course text materials." You can read the rest of his short and concise article here.

What skills did you possess as an undergraduate that made you successful? Who taught you about the methods you used to navigate college? Were you lucky enough to have a mentor? A recent discussion about our undergraduate experience made me take a new look at the current research about student mentoring. As expected, having a mentor increases a students chance to persist and graduate under the right circumstances. In Buffy Smith's Mentoring At-risk Students through the Hidden Curriculum of Higher Education, she notes three actions that mentors should do in order to help students including: (1) telling students what they should do (advising), (2) advocacy, defined as motivating and connecting students with individuals on campus, and (3) showing and empowering students how to acquire the highest degree of capital from the mentoring relationship (academic apprenticeship). Many institutions include mentoring as part of their first-generation programs. Joya Misra and Jennifer Lundquist provide a really nice overview of mentoring in their article for Inside Higher Ed. The article focuses on what faculty can do in the form of mentoring to help students succeed. One of the points they make is about the relationship itself as they note, "Individual faculty mentors also should recognize the backgrounds, resources and needs of their students, rather than assuming that students are all the same and have all of the resources they need. Students benefit from faculty mentors who see them as whole people. By recognizing who a student is beyond their role as a student, faculty members can develop trusting relationships with them."

ADDING RELEVANCE TO INSTRUCTION INCREASES RETENTION
There are many reasons for incorporating real-life situations into instruction. Foremost are that applications of theoretical material in real-life situations make content easier to understand and that the relevance of content is demonstrated by real-life examples. If we are trying to connect content to real-life situations, our assessments must demonstrate face validity. That is, they have to model the situations in which the new knowledge and skills will be used. If we only test for knowledge the opportunity to demonstrate that learning is relevant is missed. The preceding comments are from Dr. Michael Theall's paper Related Course Material to Real Life Situations.

FIRST GENERATION STUDENTS FACE MANY CHALLENGES
Adam and Jaye Fenderson have released their new documentary chronicling the lives of several first-generation college students. The makers of the film are a married couple who said that they found it difficult not to help the students they were covering. “We actually made a decision when we started thinking about the film that we were not going to intervene in the students’ lives,” Mr. Fenderson said. “It was very difficult to sit there and listen to them talk about what their counselor told them when we knew that it was wrong. It was difficult to even sit in some of the counselor meetings and hear the counselors be so brief and quick with these students and these students not get answers that they really needed.” An absence of college graduates in a family can  result not only in a lack of financial support — many economic studies have suggested that college graduates make more money over time than high school graduates — but also a shortage of knowledge about the college admissions process. In the film First Generation, one of the student’s mothers is depicted as having no idea how to pay for college, and not knowing whether the cost is required to be paid in full upfront. The students, themselves floundering through the process, make misinformed financial decisions that limit their college choices and may even stifle their academic potential.

USING QUIZZES TO MEASURE LEARNING
One of our most valuable resources, Dr. Maryellen Weimer has a new post about quizzes and the many ways you can use them in your classes. She writes, "I’ve been rethinking my views on quizzing. I’m still not in favor of quizzes that rely on low-level questions where the right answer is a memorized detail or a quizzing strategy where the primary motivation is punitive, such as to force students to keep up with the reading. That kind of quizzing doesn’t motivate reading for the right reasons and it doesn’t promote deep, lasting learning. But I keep discovering innovative ways faculty are using quizzes, and these practices rest on different premises." Read the entire post.

HELP IS ON THE WAY

The Title III Program and Teaching+Learning Center are co-sponsoring a faculty development webinar on Thursday, November 14. Promoting the Development, Achievement and Persistence of Students from Diverse Backgrounds webinar will occur from noon until 1:30 PM in the T+LC (311 Magnolia Bldg.).  This intensive workshop will share effective theory-based programmatic and individual interventions that have resulted in campus environments of support that increase persistence for students of color. In addition to being provided with a wide range of information regarding demographic, educational attainments and other issues related to multicultural/students of color, participants will be provided with strategies that will allow them to improve student success. Upon completion, participants will be able to assist students employing the 0-100% Teaching and Advising Method as a means for promoting greater student responsibility for learning. Registration is now open.

RESEARCH WE CAN USE NOW
A new report on first-generation students could provide us with some valuable information as we continue to implement interventions to improve student retention at BRCC. The report notes that about a quarter of high-school graduates who took the ACT in 2013 met all four of its college-readiness benchmarks, in English, reading, mathematics, and science. But students whose parents did not go to college fared quite a bit worse: Only 9 percent of them met all four benchmarks. We know that many of our students are the first in their family to attempt to earn a college degree. One of the highlights from the report says, “Recent research demonstrates that academically prepared students, as measured by the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks, have greater chances for success in their future educational endeavors. However, academic readiness is just one of several factors that contribute to educational success. The academic behaviors of students and the interest levels in their specific major or career are other key factors. Together, these elements define a clear picture of student readiness for post-secondary education. To encourage progress, the educational system needs to monitor and sustain all key factors of success.”

TESTING IS A LEARNING OPPORTUNITY
Dr. Maryellen Weimer offers us an interesting reminder about testing in a post on The Teaching Professor blog. Her thoughts are consistent with what we discussed in our testing workshop on October 17 but bear repeating. She writes, “We give exams to assess mastery of material—are students learning the course content? With so much emphasis on scores and grades, it’s easy to forget that the process of preparing for, taking, and getting feedback about an exam can also be a learning experience. The learning that results from these processes can be tacit, or teachers can design activities associated with exam events that can result in better content learning and heightened student awareness of the learning skills associated with demonstrating knowledge.” Read more…

LIMITING CHOICES MAY HELP COMPLETION
Have you heard of Kay McClenney? You may know her as part of the team that developed the nine principles of good practice for assessing student learning published by the American Association for Higher Education. She is a well known community college researcher who believes that the work she has done reveals that "options do not work for first-generation students." Dr. McClenney argues that limiting the structured pathways to graduation can produce positive results for students who choose to attend a community college.

FACULTY DEVELOPMENT FOR YOU
The popular faculty development Blackboard Series continues this Thursday, October 24 as presenters Susan Nealy and Lenora White focus on rubrics. Upon completion of the workshop, participants will be able to apply a rubric to a new or existing Grade Center column, generate a Rubric Evaluation Report, grade using a rubric, and efficiently navigate between Grade Details pages. Providing your students with great feedback is all part of helping them to make informed choices about their academic career. You can register now for the beginner (3PM) or advanced class (4PM).

STUDENT SUCCESS ON DISPLAY
Criminal justice instructor Paul Guidry has been recognized previously for his excellent student engagement skills and is a current holder of one of the coveted Keep Calm and Be Engaged green shirts.  He recently took the time to contact us about the success his students are experienced in a number of his classes. As part of our ongoing celebrating learning initiative, we wanted to share his good news. The students pictured with Mr. Guidry all earned an A on their most recent test. If you have a student success story that you would like to share, please contact me. 

Denzel Williams

Crawford Wheeler & Clay George

Melanie Hogan, Hannah Keowen, Joshua Williams, Stuart Wells, & Jonathan Howard

Lisa Marino