Are your students too conservative? I don't mean their politics—I'm talking about their attitudes toward ideas and actions that are new, difficult, or complicated. Many of my writing students are conservative learners: they worry about grades and want to "play it safe," they don't take time to imagine alternatives, or they have low skill or confidence levels that reduce their abilities to try new things. And sometimes my own teaching or grading practices undermine my invitations to take the intellectual risks that are crucial to student learning.

"It is a story replicated in many history classrooms during the semester. Students have once again done poorly on an assignment or exam. Their essays are the sites of massive, undifferentiated data dumps. They have paraphrased primary sources instead of analyzing them, ignored argumentation, confused past and present, and failed completely to grasp the 'otherness' of a different era." (p. 1211)

Once again I’m trying to clean out my collection of articles on teaching and learning. I’ve been collecting for years and have hundreds ... yes, hundreds. Now that everything is available online there is no reason to keep the many stacks and boxes that have filled my office to overflowing. The problem, of course, is that I run into all these wonderful articles that I have forgotten about. If I toss them, will I ever encounter them again? So much good material is so rarely referenced.

Yvonne is frustrated. She wants to do well in her language arts class, but each essay she completes fails to earn her the grade she believes she deserves. Although her teacher thoughtfully writes out corrective comments on her essays, to Yvonne these seem to run together, forming a nonsensical sea of red ink. With each assignment, she feels less capable and grows more resentful of her instructor.

“For the most part, college students enrolled in beginning chemistry courses do not, during laboratory-based experiences, learn to follow directions. Instead they learn to depend excessively upon oral directions presented by the instructor in response to their queries.” (p. 103) When I happened on this quote (referenced in another article) it reminded me of my chemistry lab experience—I took a chemistry course with 20 beginning students as part of a first-year seminar program. The teacher, also our lab instructor, refused to answer questions in lab, and we hated him for it. Ask him a question and rather than answer he’d ask you a question back. It was infuriating—you had to figure everything out for yourself or with your lab partners.

Self-directed learning skills involve the ability to manage learning tasks without having them directed by others. They are skills necessary for effective lifelong learning and are one of many learning skills students are expected to develop in college. The expectation is that students will become self-directed learners as they mature and gain content knowledge. Here's a study showing how students can become self-directed with explicit instruction.

As Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Anderson point out in their venerable book on grading (now available in a revised 2nd edition) goals can motivate students. Unfortunately, too often they are motivated only by the goal of getting grades and getting courses out of the way. Walvoord and Anderson suggest you tell student you know they have these goals but that you are (and they should) also be interested in what they want to learn in the course. Here are some of Walvoord’s and Anderson’s good ideas for making learning goals a part of the learning experience in a course.

In a 2009 editorial, John Moore lists some impressive figures about community colleges. There are almost 1,200 of them in the U.S., and they enroll 11.5 million students a year. About 60 percent of those students are attending college part time. Their average age is 29. Especially impressive is the fact that about 40 percent of them are first-generation college students. Moore who edits the Journal of Chemical Education notes that 44 percent of the recent graduates in science and engineering have taken at least one course at a two-year college. He also points out that enrollment in two-year colleges significantly increases the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in science and engineer. I suspect that’s true for other disciplines as well.