Teaching College Students Basic Studenting
Do you take time to teach your lower level students basic student skills? How do you do it?
Detail of Sculpture by Tatsuya Tanaka
Increasingly, I’ve had students who don’t seem to know how to take notes during class. Or know that they should take notes.
This is one of several abilities college professors tend to assume their students will have been habituated into by the time they get to us, but perhaps such assumptions are based on outdated views of pre-college pedagogy and an underestimation of just how much culture and technology has changed how students conceive of their own role in their education.
In addition to in-class notetaking, other basic student skills that may need shoring up include:
- reading
- taking notes on readings
- keeping track of when assignments are due
- finding reliable information online.
Perhaps you have others to add to this list.
What, if anything, do you do to communicate your expectations to your students regarding these basic skills? Merely mentioning them on the syllabus won’t cut it, it seems.
And what, if anything, do you do to teach these skills to them? Discussion and lesson ideas welcome.
Universities should be more organized in getting first-year students into workshops on these things. I know in some schools students on academic probation attend workshops on notetaking, etc., but it’s getting to the point at which all incoming students should attend. Not all students will need this training, but it would be nice to know that all students have been brought up to speed on these expectations.
Similarly, I know many colleges require that certain first-year/semester students with “low college-preparedness” (however that is assessed by admissions/provost offices) enroll in entire courses geared around teaching and instilling these basic skills. I know my undergrad SLAC did such a thing ~10 years ago. At the institutional level, the incidence of greater underpreparedness among students nowadays might warrant expanding these sorts of programs wrt both the number of students they include and the number of course sections they offer. However, given that most institutional budget-spenders don’t want to fork over more money for course sections if they don’t need to, and many students already resent gen-eds let alone “college preparedness” courses, I don’t know how attractive such a proposal would be for any of the stakeholders involved besides instructors.
I also think there’s just a really big planning problem around *who* should be carrying the bulk of the work in getting students up to speed with these skills. Justin seems to have phrased the OP in terms of instructor-level efforts. I commend this direction and try to incorporate some informal academic coaching into my office hours with students. But I can only do so much with limited time and hundreds of students per semester. Many institutions have offices/centers (plural!) that are supposed to help students with exactly these sorts of skills, and at my own institutions I try to refer students to these offices/centers when they clearly need more assistance than I can offer. I’d encourage other instructors to get to know what offices/centers your institution has along these lines and make heavy use of referrals to them for your students. If your institution doesn’t have any of these…well, hopefully the other commenters here can provide helpful instructor-level guidance.
This is one of those issues that can have any number of causes.
I’m a first-gen college student, so I’m particularly sensitive to the idea that some people lacking these skills are either first-gen themselves, from a lower-income background, or otherwise didn’t have the family support or educational background that would have made some of these skills trivial to acquire in most any other circumstance.
So, I myself tend to err on the side of giving people the benefit of the doubt, and if someone is willing to come to me and explicitly ask for help, I will help them at least once and then determine if they seem serious about putting that help to good use. That does mean that sometimes you end up helping students who probably could have been more self-sufficient from the get go, but I prefer to help someone and then learn they may not have needed it, then to not help someone who was vulnerable enough to put themselves out there.
I think there are both practical and social benefits to this approach. For one, something that seems trivial to one person could be a substantial blocker for another person. I prefer to remove blockers that are easy for me but may seem monumental to students.
Second, if a student from one of those backgrounds is in university, it’s very likely they’ve spent a significant portion of their life learning to do things ‘on their own‘. So sometimes getting help is not about what they *can* do alone (which may be a lesson students from better supported backgrounds need to learn), but about helping them understand that they shouldn’t *have* to do everything alone and that there is emotionally safe, reliable help available if they need or want it. This is the social-emotional aspect of learning that I think is easy to miss when evaluating a task purely based on competence.
I think for anyone who is not as accustomed to working with students from first-gen, low-income or otherwise differently prepared backgrounds, Jenifer Morton’s book does a great job at explaining some of the signals that might otherwise get missed by people who were prepared for university in the traditional way: Moving Up without Losing Your Way
These are great thoughts!
I think it’s also worthwhile to make it clear early on in the term that you really are available for help, ranging from generic how-to-study advice to help thinking through philosophical issues from class or even philosophical issues more generally.
I, too, was a first-generation student, and I had no real clue, as an undergrad, what kind of help/support I could count on receiving until I had a wonderful professor who made this all clear to us. I knew about office hours, of course, but found the idea of going quite intimidating, thinking the main purpose was to attempt to impress the professor, and I didn’t quite know what sorts of things could or couldn’t be discussed in office hours — until I learned better.
So true, Will. I was a first-generation college student, and I was at a well regarded university. It was a large university. I was sitting in classrooms with children of professors. They were getting lots of guidance. In at least one case a fellow student was publishing with her father in a very well regarded journal. Such kids were getting a lot more guidance through the system than the rest of us. My mother quit school after grade 10. We never published together and she stopped helping me with school after about grade 3. The presumption was the teachers will take care of me. How I got where I am now is beyond me.
Several years ago, my university created a type course with exactly this goal. All first-years had to take it. I was assigned to teach it, but the university didn’t say much about the content. So I just wrote a bunch of lectures giving away my personal secrets to learning and doing well in college courses of any subject. It ended up being pretty fun and rewarding.
I have lectures on:
How to Strategically Read a SyllabusWhy You Should Keep a CalendarHow to Take NotesHow to Read and *Retain* the InformationHow to Memorize ThingsHow to Overcome ProcrastinationThe Unspoken Norms of Higher Education (how to interact with professors, etc.)
As a general rule, I am in favor of explicitly telling people how to do things, rather than assuming everyone will absorb it via osmosis from their upbringing.
I have video versions of the lectures here and here, which anyone is welcome to use.
This is very useful, thanks!