Touching Downl

Anumber of us who have been in college since we first enrolled (and that counts many faculty, both full- and part-time, as well as many administrators) can no longer recall when the land we currently inhabit seemed strange. But if we listen to the voices of students as they reflect on their first few weeks on campus, our initial feelings when we first encountered academe may begin to come back to us:

I’m worried that my classes may be too difficult and if I have a problem it might not be too easy to get in touch with the teachers. I am worried that teachers may have too many students to keep in contact with them all. I hope all our coursework will be explained effectively in class. (Stephanie)

In college, the course load is much greater and I get much more work. It is also easier to put things off in college. In high school, every class was five days a week so I had to do the homework for that class every day. But here there is a day between classes, so it’s hard not to put homework off until the night before it is due. I am worried that I may get overwhelmed with the work and not be able to handle it all at once. (Christine)

In chemistry, there’s only three exams and they’re spaced very far apart. That’s a lot of information you have to know and I don’t even know how to begin studying. Also, anatomy. There’s so much to memorize and I’m worried my study habits aren’t up to par. (Christina) I don’t know how I am going to do on tests, papers, and assignments. The workload is not out of control, but most of it is reading and I hate to read. I guess I better get used to it. I still haven’t had any tests in any of my classes so I have no idea what to expect or what to study. (Louis)

The conduct and pace of a typical college course is something with which we are intimately familiar, and so it is difficult for us to recall any longer how stark the contrast is between the routinized curriculum of the secondary school and the more idiosyncratic character of the college classroom. But students notice it right away. Their courses are larger and seem less personal; the structure is looser and the support less evident; expectations seem less clear and evaluation is less frequent. Given the abruptness of these changes—it is important to remember that there is no real transition from high school to college, only a stopping and a starting—it is not surprising that many first year students’ initial concerns revolve around the course load and the work it entails.

To some extent, of course, incoming students have been primed to shudder at the amount of work they are assigned. As we mentioned earlier, they have been barraged with the advice that college is different from high school, and most of those observations center around the amount and difficulty of course work. The Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE, 2004) quantifies that point, reporting that on average full-time faculty expect students to study six hours per week per course (the figure is slightly lower for part-time faculty). For a student enrolled in four or five courses, those faculty expectations come close to transforming studying into a full-time job.

As those expectations are communicated to students, in orientation or during the first few days of class, it is little wonder that college begins to seem like a place different from any they have ever experienced. Their last year in high school was indeed spent in another land. More than 80 percent of incoming college students report studying ten hours or fewer per week during that final high school year, and a mere 3 percent report studying more than twenty hours per week, a figure that would bring them in line with faculty expectations (Sax and others, 2004). The dramatic difference between students’ past practice and their future as they hear it portrayed would be enough to overwhelm most anyone’s sense of efficacy:

“I feel like I am totally overwhelmed already with all my schoolwork. It is only three weeks into the semester and I feel I am behind in every class. I just hope that I learn to manage my time better and get ahead of the game very quickly. I am just really worried I won’t do well. (Michaela)

The issue of time management looms large in any number of first year student comments, but the simple quantity of work expected is not the only thing that eats away at their confidence:

I have never studied any subjects as challenging as these. My courses are very in-depth and require a lot of careful reading and understanding of hard topics. Many times it is hard to grasp exactly the concepts without the help of the teacher. (Matthew)

The “hard topics” of college course work are often linked to assignments that require students to move beyond memorization or simple comprehension of a text to application of ideas to solve new problems or extension of ideas to new, yet to be discussed, areas. More than eight in ten faculty report that their course work emphasizes applying concepts to practical problems (NSSE, 2004)—something many, if not most, incoming students have little experience in doing, let alone studying for.

A good deal of the anxiety first-year students experience crystallizes around this issue. They enter college believing that they will need to do more work to succeed, and they indicate they are willing to do it. For example, nearly 50 percent say they anticipate studying sixteen or more hours per week during their first year in college (Kuh, 2005). Although this does not fully meet faculty expectations, it does indicate a significant change in attitude and willingness to try to engage the alien nature of academe on its own terms. Yet when confronted with a complex text and a series of questions that ask them to extend, extrapolate from, and respond to an author’s argument, their good intentions run headlong into a paucity of experience in doing what is expected:

When I went to college, everyone told me, “You’ll do fine.” However, my classes are so different at college. There are no cut-and-dried problems in most of my courses, and no neatly written notes on the board. I hope it will get easier as I go on. (Christopher)

These intellectual challenges are exacerbated by students’ perception of the effect of class size on their ability to seek and receive help from their instructors. For all the criticisms of American high schools as large, cold, impersonal places, many students entering college recall their relationships with high school teachers as both personal and helpful. More than 40 percent report talking with teachers outside of class between one and five hours a week, and a quarter of them indicated they spent time in a teacher’s home (Sax and others, 2004). The strange world of college seems to put such relationships and the assistance and support they offer beyond their reach:

One thing that has me worried is class size. I am used to a class size that does not exceed twenty-five, and here I do not have a class smaller than fifty. Up till this year all students have been exposed to a teacher one on one for their entire academic careers. I have always had great relationships with my teachers, and now I don’t feel that sense of comfort that I have been used to for the last twelve years. I understand that every professor has office hours, but my worry is more in the sense that they won’t even know my name when I get there. (Marissa)

The manner in which many college courses are conducted offers little solace to first-year students eager to do well but anxious because of the newness and the difficulty of the challenges they confront. Lecturing remains the predominant method of instruction in college classrooms, particularly those with sizable enrollments, and the rate at which material is presented can quickly outpace the note taking skills developed in a smaller, more leisurely setting. The accumulation of lecture after lecture in course after course often leaves students at a loss to understand how class time contributes anything to their learning except more notes to master before the next exam:

In my chemistry class I just write the notes and do not understand anything. My professor does not help much. (Jerelyn)

In large measure then, first-year students experience their initial weeks in the classroom separated from the support structures that sustained them throughout high school. Reading assignments asking only that chapter two in the text be read for Monday or merely announcing pages 23–157 will be covered on the exam have replaced the frequent homework that, annoying as it sometimes seemed, at least gave clear direction. Classes no longer meet daily but are a scattered patchwork, gathering sometimes two or three times a week, with nothing in particular to do between one session and the next. Instructors seem distant and a bit forbidding as they fill notebook pages with the four causes of this, the three parts of that, and the formula for calculating something or other.

It is little wonder that many first-year students share a similar lament:

Some of my teachers expect you to teach yourself. (Kiera)

A Backward Glancel

Why do students who have succeeded in high school and who seem well prepared for college life struggle and sometimes fail when they arrive on campus? Perhaps the most common explanation casts the American high school as the culprit. Students are not challenged. They do not write. They do not read. They take their senior year off. All of these observations (and more) have been used, alone or in combination, to account for why the student who never got lower than a B and who did well on the SAT is not succeeding in philosophy or physics or psychology. Although the criticism of the American high school (or more properly, the institution of the American high school) on which these explanations turn cannot be easily dismissed, we think the finger-pointing many of us in higher education engage in is both counterproductive and just this side of smug.

The high school in the United States faces an array of challenges that make those confronted by higher education (particularly at fouryear institutions) seem significantly less daunting. Moreover, new national standards that require all students to be prepared for postsecondary education without remediation (Reich, 2003) have dramatically raised the stakes, adding political pressure to the already complex educational tasks assigned to American secondary schools. Some may see the movement to impose new standards and new means of assessment—exit exams, portfolios, certificates of mastery, senior projects, and the like—on high schools and their graduates as proof that the difficulties first-year students encounter stem primarily from lack of preparation.

The American Diploma Project (2004), for example, argues bluntly that “the preparation students receive in high school is the greatest predictor of bachelor’s degree attainment” (p. 2). The merit of the argument cannot be dismissed out of hand: better-prepared students do succeed more often. But at the same time, we need to remind ourselves that one of the strongest arguments that successful students are better prepared is that they do succeed. If preparation predicts student success, student success acts as the sign and seal of preparation.

All of this tends to deflect attention from what happens in the classrooms and laboratories at colleges and universities. If students succeed, they were, against the odds, well prepared. If they fail, well, perhaps when the high schools get straightened out that will not happen so often. Such a passive stance is neither accurate—what happens in college instruction does matter—nor viable in the long run. After all, the same forces that have begun to demand more accountability and more assessment from secondary schools are also arrayed around the wall of academe. In the words of the American Diploma Project (2004), the states backed by the clout of the federal Higher Education Act should “hold postsecondary institutions accountable for the academic success of the students they admit–—including learning, persistence and degree completion–—rather than allowing them to continue to place ill-prepared students in remedial, noncredit- bearing courses and then replace dropouts with new students the following year”.

Our point here is not that the preparation of students is of no concern to faculty teaching first-year students. Nor is it that American high schools are functioning adequately or that they are beyond our capacity to improve or even transform. Rather, what we think makes most sense is for those who teach first-year students to try to devise some means to meet them where they are, academically, intellectually, and emotionally, without abandoning reasonable rigor and appropriately high standards. This is a difficult task. To accomplish it, we first need to acknowledge more clearly than most of us have just how “foreign” the land we inhabit is. If we can get a sense of how alien things must seem to first-year students, we can perhaps begin to see their preparation (or lack of it) in a different and perhaps more illuminating light.

Why They Come

There is plenty of evidence to support the idea that these qualities can be extrapolated across the more than one million full-time, first-year students enrolling in institutions across the country. The American Freshman Project, a long-term study of first-year students, has consistently reported that an overwhelming majority of incoming students decide to go to college for what most of us would regard as good reasons: to learn more about things that interest them (77 percent), to get training for a specific career (75 percent), to gain a general education and appreciation of ideas (65 percent), or to prepare for graduate or professional school (57 percent; Sax and others, 2004). Similarly, at least by their own estimation, first-year students possess the requisite character and ability to succeed. Asignificant majority of them (60 percent or more in each case) rate themselves to be above average in their drive to succeed, academic ability, persistence, and intellectual self-confidence (Sax and others, 2004). Although they don’t necessarily confirm these self-assessments, recent standardized testing results are at least consistent with them. Math and verbal SAT averages have inched upward over the last decade, with the math average currently at its highest point since 1967 (all scores recentered). These changes are not dramatic, but they do (within the limits of standardized testing) fly in the face of the grousing that students are now less prepared for college than they once were.

If incoming students enroll in colleges or universities to get a general education and prepare for graduate school, their reflections of first-year experience suggest that in general they haven’t been disappointed. The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) indicates that more than 80 percent of first-year students report a “substantial” gain in their ability to think critically and analytically and in acquiring a broad general education. Additionally, more than half of them said they had made similar gains in acquiring job- or work-related skills (NSSE, 2004).

Yet something seems not quite right about this. The confident, well-prepared, intellectually curious students who are interested in general education seem much less common in the first-year classroom than in tables of survey data and the publicity of admissions and advancement offices. For every Margaret, there seem to be others (and many of them) who are less engaged, less enthusiastic, and less willing to ask questions, seek help, or even attend the “services” we schedule for them. For all the confidence first-year students express in their abilities, the faculty teaching them are more likely to hear the worry and self-doubt expressed by another student: “No matter how much I study, I still feel like I’m not prepared. . . . Some people are good with writing and know a lot of big words, but I don’t.” Somehow, the promise implicit in Margaret’s e-mail fades in light of the less buoyant reality we confront reading our first set of essays, recording midterm grades, and meeting with students who “just don’t understand anything.”

In a sense, both impressions of first-year students are right. They are enthusiastic, intellectually curious, and reasonably well prepared for academic life. Yet at the same time they are easily discouraged, unnerved, and overwhelmed. George D. Kuh puts the matter this way: “For many new students . . . the initial weeks of the first academic term are like being in a foreign land. With only intermittent feedback and classes meeting but two or three times a week, students who think they are doing well are sometimes surprised to discover after their first midterm exam reports that their academic performance is subpar. After six or eight weeks, some have dug a hole so deep that getting back to ground level seems almost impossible” (2005, p. 86). Kuh (2005) goes on to argue that the strangeness of college and university life to the uninitiated causes first-year students to underestimate the challenges they will confront, both in and out of the classroom, and to overestimate their capacity to bring plans and practices in line with the new environment they confront.

There is nothing novel in the observation that the move from high school to college is a difficult one. Students have been told this repeatedly by teachers, counselors, parents, and even those of us at universities in various Welcome Day and orientation presentations.

In spite of the prosaic nature of the observation, it is worth our while to spend some time reflecting on just why the transition is so difficult, and on how the challenges inherent in the “foreign land” of the college campus affect the teaching and learning of first-year students.

First-Year Students in Perspective

On a warm September morning, Professor O’Keefe’s computer chimes as an e-mail message arrives. O’Keefe’s first class of the day concluded just over an hour ago, and he is reflecting on what went well and what he needs to do in preparation for the next session. The e-mail chimes again, and O’Keefe begins scrolling through the unread and newly arrived messages. After deleting a couple that apparently slipped past the university’s spam filter, he stops at a message tagged with a university address and a subject heading that reads “Wow What an Intense Read!”

Intrigued, O’Keefe double-clicks to open the message. Abemused smile spreads across his face as the text of the message fills his screen:

Wow what an intense read, Taylor is. What does that guy do for fun geez. I have become fond of the dictionary through this book. Yet I still have a few questions: 2nd paragraph on page 17 huh wha? Also bottom of page 19 to pg 20 paragraph. Woah, that’s a little to deep for me. Could you shed some light on these paragraphs please? and the key phrases “Soft relativism and Soft despotism.” i have been outlining and noting each paragraph so i think i am on track, i will be attending thursday nite services.
Over and Out for now.
Even though it’s a class of 500 you really do well, I like it even though
i’m from a small town. (my entire high school could fit in your class)
WOW.
Margaret (I always sit in front)

Although “Professor O’Keefe” is our creation, the message embedded in the vignette is verbatim, a text drafted and sent by a first-year student during the first two weeks of classes. The message is charming in its enthusiasm, typical in its inattention to the strictures of standard English, amusing in its word choice (“thursday nite services” refers to a scheduled help session), and challenging in its implicit acknowledgment of the difficulty of college-level work and the subsequent requests for assistance.

The message is emblematic of the first-year students who populate American college and university campuses each fall. The claim may be surprising. We have all heard descriptions (and perhaps even made them ourselves) of first-year students that are a less-thanflattering assessment of their intellectual skills, their motivation, and their general ability to negotiate the complexities of an academic landscape. For all its informality, Margaret’s e-mail belies a grumbling account of the first-year student. If motivation can be judged by enthusiasm, it is certainly present, and if getting acquainted with the dictionary reflects willingness to engage in intellectual labor, there is evidence of that as well. Indeed, the entire message, with its questions and its promise to attend the “services,” shows at least the beginning of a sense of what is necessary to succeed in an academic community.