unprepared students

Teaching at an “open admissions” campus, many of my students are woefully unprepared for college courses. I thought it was just our local school district that was doing a poor job of preparing these students. According to this article, that seems to be the norm across high schools. Something needs to be done, although I’m not sure what the solution to this problem is.

Trish, and I thought it was just MY students! at Miami University-Hamilton, at 7:00 am EDT on May 16, 2007

Missing AP and IB?

The ACT report neglects to factor in Advanced Placement and IB courses, as well as any dual enrollment courses that high school students are now flocking to in droves to better their chances for college admission.

I can only guess that these are included in the 4th year HS classes, but as policy makers and anxious parents continue to batter down the wall separating secondary from postsecondary education, they are becoming available for sophomores and juniors as well.

Congrats to my old high school, that made the ACT list.

Glen S. McGhee, FHEAP, at 8:40 am EDT on May 16, 2007

Changing the marquee on the theater

. . .and leaving the show inside the same was a hallmark of high school curriculum “reform” following “A Nation at Risk.” My favorite story from the task of building the transcript data bases of the Education Department’s longitudinal study of 1988 8th graders followed through 2000 (both high school and college transcripts were used) involves students whose highest high school math was labeled “pre-calculus” and who were found in developmental Algebra on their college transcripts. Evidently, some high schools labeled all math below Calculus as “pre-calculus.” The answer is not an ACT score matched to a grade in College Algebra (often a dubious label, too, since some of those courses are really pre-collegiate) rather making the 2nd test or assignment in the college course the last test or assignment in the matching high school course. Now that’s the fulcrum of alignment!

Clifford Adelman, Senior Associate at Institute for Higher Education Policy, at 9:45 am EDT on May 16, 2007

Grades are not reliable! So aren’t number of years!

“when students enter algebra I unprepared, the teacher may adjust the instruction to a lower level accordingly.” — We are all human and it likely you will adjust your course level accordingly and I don’t think there is anything wrong. However, this is part of the reason of the grade inflation, it’s may not be intentional, but effects are real.

Now the question is what if the dominant school culture is not to take academic seriously? — I am sorry to say that’s exactly what I felt while working with my kids and their friends.

I will say the solution is to set objective goals and let the truth speak the reality.

If people in the world with less resources can do better in these objective tests, shame on us.

Duncan, at 10:20 am EDT on May 16, 2007

Another struggle we have with some of our new students is an apparently lack of all “executive skills". These skills include basic classroom behavior, respect to professors, etc...while I am not going to begin a diatribe about where the academic failings may be, I am most concerned about the attitude, one of smug indifference, and how this will pan out in higher education.

Eric, Registrar at Bluffton University, at 10:20 am EDT on May 16, 2007

Too many colleges

“For too many people, college is a false promise .. if students aren’t prepared for a college education.”

From Vedder (Ohio U) and Geo. Leek:

Too many marginal colleges, propped up by the “easy money” of taxpayer-subsidized federal loans, over-selling themselves to a finite number of 18-year-olds.

Students with 875 SATs? Remediate — “we need the tuition,” to paraphrase the Delta frat in “Animal House.” So what if the student is burdened with debt — it was co-signed by the taxpayers.

A college degree, by itself, is insufficient to finding decent-paying, meaningful work (ask Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Michael Dell).

There are a lot of options in life — including AP, community colleges, online, and OJT. A year, heavily drinking with peers, is hardly preparation for life, IMHO.

L.L., at 11:10 am EDT on May 16, 2007

More on society

I just posted about my physics teacher, but the computer belched and the comment was submitted before I was done!

We also need to look at the dumbing down problem. My cousin teaches 3rd grade but can’t spell. She says it’s not a problem because they don’t like to tell kids they’re “wrong"! They instead tell them that there are “alternative spellings” for words, and one particular version is the most common. We’re so worried about our kids feeling bad about themselves that we don’t correct them, even when we’re teaching them. How is that going to work? My son will have to earn his praise—I don’t praise him for every little thing, but I certainly do praise him when he spells his name correctly, or something similar. He’ll be 3 in July and he’s already spelling his name, Mommy, Daddy, and Grammy. We take the time to play spelling and number games with him, and we encourage him with “good try” or something similar when he’s not quite right. We DON’T tell him he’s right when he’s not, and our society needs to get back to having real standards for grades.

E.S., Ed.D. aspirant at university of Kansas, at 12:00 pm EDT on May 16, 2007

simplify and solve

Folks, it’s troubleshooting 101! Go back to a condition when education was working and adjust… If adjustments aren’t working, change them back, but don’t compound the problems. Today we in education are inundated with slicked down, planned to the Nth degree curriculum, which is inflexible. We have a ridiculous amount of tests and assessments that are designed to make legislatures feel good about the dollars they spend and to make parents feel like the school is on top of their children’s education. High schools teach to these tests because it is a head count/paper trail issue revolving around funding. Mandates and over the top assessments simply aren’t working. We, the college/high school groups can point fingers and wait for the other to flinch, but all the debate about the preparation of students today isn’t getting it done. How we are preparing students is part of the problem. Parent’s lack of control and participation in their children’s lives is another.

Generally, most HS students today are unmotivated. They live in a busy world. They have led controlled lives where everything is organized and designed so that they can not hurt themselves. As parents, we worry of their safety and generally give them all we can. Young people have come to expect someone will always be there to hold their hands and show them what button to push, because that’s how their lives have been structured.

I disagree with the statement that… students who work or participate in sports takes too much of their time. These select few are learning about a multi-faceted world and they aren’t sitting in front of a TV or texting everyone, about nothing. In short they have a constructive motivation going. Earning, responsibility, work ethic, applying what they have learned in school to real world tasks… what a learning experience!

The sooner we educators pick up the interest level by allowing students to be independent thinkers and move past teaching our entire curriculum based on concepts only, the more successful our students and our results will be. We are preparing students for the rest of their lives. We are preparing them for work, careers, and to be functional adults. Teachers and administrators, more often than not, have never been out of school and lack real world working experience themselves. We teach curriculum, in many cases we have never put to the acid test. Is it possible that we have been to close to the problem and can’t see it?

Placing applications to math, science, reading writing skills is a great method to pick up motivation. High School students today live in a very technical world and know little about it and generally don’t correlate the concepts in the classroom to the real world. They can use and abuse computers and many of the technical marvels, but they know nothing of them. It’s the eggs and milk come from Safeway syndrome! It’s simple — If you want to show a student why they need Trig. & Geometry, Set up a survey transit and teach a little surveying. If you wish to motivate a student in physics, teach them a little refrigeration or electricity. Teaching concepts by application certainly helps to motivate students and in turn reinforces concepts.

We have choices. We can just keep dumbing down courses, or we can be motivational. People will seek out and learn anything that interests them. Sitting in a boring physics class and learning about thermodynamics? Boring! Maybe an alternative; learning refrigeration… thermodynamics, specific gravity, Latent heat, entropy, enthalpy, relative humidity, acceleration, velocity, mass and energy. Concepts all reinforced by the question… “Where does the cold come from?”

High School simply isn’t that interesting and students have learned that they can do minimal work and opt out of anything they want. Parents don’t get involved until Johnny fails, then “it’s the schools fault” or so say’th their lawyer!!!

The problems may be many, but solutions have to come one at a time. They are generally simple, and one size doesn’t always fit all. Trouble shooting rules are simple. Refer to paragraph 1

billa, at 1:50 pm EDT on May 16, 2007

Options

As long as fairly good athletes and wealthy boors can use family political connections to arrange “social passes” for themselves, most students will see hypocracy at work in public schools, school boards, etc.

It doesn’t matter how well-educated are new college graduates, if they aren’t well-steeped in political saavy they will be gone by semester three or four. Political land mines get more new school teachers than low salaries or frustration with thick students.

Those college graduates who come back home after four or five years at “teachers college” and know how to work the hometown system, will stay and stay and stay — maybe even become school board president, while brilliant scholars (but poor politicians) sell vehicles or fry hamburgers.

Dr. F. Gump, at 9:20 pm EDT on May 16, 2007

Ah Statistics ... Thy Death Is Nigh!

Just a few corrections to Marvin McConoughey’s mistaken laments about the distribution of IQ scores.

Second, he claims that the distributions of IQ “within [unnamed] populations ... form roughly a bell curve.”

Just for the Hell of it, let’s call the bell curve a normal distribution. I imagine that if the population were all Americans over the age of 18, he might be right. If the population were all students who take the SAT exam in a given year, he may be right.

But I imagine if the population were all faculty at institutions in the U.S. with “university” in their names (Dartmouth College doesn’t count) the distribution of IQ would be seriously skewed to the right (lots at the low end and fewer, really high IQ scores spread out to the right).

If the population were all master or journeyman electricians, the distribution is probably markedly skewed to the left (lots at the high end and a few spread out to the lower end). What Mr. McConoughey is carelessly expressing is the “tyranny of normality” propagated by most introductory statistics texts and research scientists who tend to view statistical analysis through rose-colored glasses.

First, McConoughey laments the fact that, given a randomly selected population, IQ is not uniformly distributed. Truth be known, I have been wracking my brain over that one, and I can’t think of a single reason why anyone would wish to have IQ uniformly distributed. I realize it’s all a matter of centrality and dispersion, but with the proverbial “all other things equal,” we’ve got to live with waaay too many stupid politicians as it is. A uniform distribution of IQ over the population of members of Congress doesn’t work for me ... although I admit the actual distribution of IQ over that population is probably seriously skewed to the right. Am I allowed to introduce bimodality here?

Finally, if there is any merit at all in Mr. McConoughey’s lament about uniformity, I’m quite certain Stanford-Binet, WISC-R, etc. will be more than happy to do the scaling required to satisfy his requirements. They could knock off that challenge in a long weekend.

[Disclaimer: The author of this post may have accessed Wikipedia within the past 24 hours]

Frizbane Manley, at 6:20 pm EDT on May 19, 2007