LibLog

March 10, 2008

Retrograde First Year?
By Bob Connor, The Teagle Foundation

A recent article by James Lang in the Chronicle of Higher Education ("The Myth of First Year Enlightenment") and a new book by Tim Clydesdale, The First Year Out (The University of Chicago Press, 2007), provide a tough-minded look at the first year of college. Remember? It’s not an easy time.

It can also be a disillusioning time, especially for kids who come in expecting to find fresh ideas, big questions, and opportunities for personal and spiritual growth. The disconnect between student expectations and academic reality can be seen in a recent study of sixty-six introductory theology and religion courses conducted by Barbara Walvoord of Notre Dame (“Students’ Spirituality and ‘Big Questions’ in the Introductory Religion Courses”, in Teaching Theology and Religion 11 (February 2008): 3-13.) She found a “great divide”: faculty members typically had “critical thinking” at the top of their list of goals while students, she reports, say they want spiritual and religious development.

Their frustration may be just the tip of the iceberg. Charles Blaich, director of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College, has reported some disturbing preliminary results from their survey of first year students at nineteen colleges and universities. The study followed over 3,000 students from a spectrum of institutions ranging from community colleges to research universities, with private liberal arts colleges strongly represented among them. The results may well change as these studies go forward, but at the very least the questions it raises are important and troubling.

The survey sought among other things to find out what changes took place during the first year of college. Adapting the “Defining Issues Test,” the Survey found significant improvement (about 10%) in students’ moral reasoning. But in other respects, such as critical thinking, well-being and leadership, the changes were small. When it came to diversity, the changes were overall, negative. Even greater declines were evident in academic motivation, community involvement, and even professional success.

This is not a happy picture, but there is some good news. The good news comes when you look at the minority of students who report a truly positive academic experience. Three sets of practices are strongly associated with positive growth among those students who encountered them: “Good Teaching and High Quality Interaction with Faculty,” “Diversity Experiences,” and “Academic Challenge.” (See the Center’s website, for more details.) These practices, including “academic challenge,” correlated with all sorts of positive growth, “personal” growth, as well as strictly “academic” achievement.

That is an extremely important point: the data suggest that one of the best ways to increase students’ sense of motivation and well being is to see that the college’s environment provides rich diversity experiences, and high levels of challenges and teaching practices geared to helping students meet those challenges.

Ready to switch back to the bad news? While institutions vary greatly in this respect, by and large students simply are not experiencing these best practices very often. For example, less than half the students—even at small institutions that pride themselves on their devotion to their students—report that they “frequently” or “often” experienced the practices grouped together as “Good Teaching and High Quality Interaction with Faculty.” Without those practices students may actually regress!

Let me put it in extreme form: The bright eyed and bushy-tailed students who arrive in late August for their first year may become the beer-guzzling, tail-gate partying seniors, sitting in the back row of class, playing video games on a PC, unreachable, and now un-teachable.

Too bleak? Tell me what you’re finding.

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