Only 51 percent of high school graduates who took the ACT met ACT’s College Readiness Benchmark for Reading, which demonstrates their readiness to handle the reading requirements for typical first-year college coursework. For some groups, the percentage is even more discouraging: African American students are at 21 percent, while Hispanic American students and students from families whose annual income is less than $30,000 are both at 33 percent.

I wonder about the long-term effects of grades on the ability to self-assess. I got to thinking about this after I read the study referenced below. In it, 97 students assessed the participation of their peers and their own participation. Professors in the study also assessed students’ participation. The researchers looked at the correlations between peer assessment and teacher asssessments, and between self assessment and teacher assessments.

Following up on the previous post, I wanted to write a bit about how teachers might intervene with those students who don’t believe they can learn something, whether it’s math, writing, French, economics, or whatever it is you teach.

We know that what students believe about themselves as learners makes a difference, but sometimes a specific example really makes the point. Here’s a study that does just that. It involved beginning students taking a general chemistry course. At the beginning of the course they took a Self-Concept Inventory designed for chemistry students. Its five scales measure, among other things, a chemistry self-concept, a mathematics self-concept, and an academic self-concept.

If you have been teaching for any time at all, I’ll bet you’ve encountered what I call the interested but noncompliant student (hereafter, the INC). Here are some examples encountered in my courses: In an ancient language course, one INC would not take the trouble to learn her noun forms and verb endings but, fascinated by the language, went online to find an inscription that she tried to decipher. Another INC read more than I have in a subdivision of my field. He wanted to talk about it endlessly before and after class, so much so that I had to chase him away to give other students a chance to talk to me. Am I describing student behaviors that sound familiar?

The scholarship of teaching movement has made us aware that the effectiveness of those new activities and approaches we implement in the classroom must meet higher standards of evidence. Even though we may be thrilled with the effectiveness of what we tried, it no longer suffices to say that we thought it worked really well and our students loved it. Evidence of effectiveness needs to include more objective measures of success.

Some years back The Teaching Professor featured an article highlighting Mano Singham’s wonderful piece describing how he moved away from a very authoritarian, rule-centered syllabus (reference below). It’s one of my very favorite articles—I reference it regularly in presentations, and it appears on almost every bibliography I distribute.

As a marketing professor, I often found myself scouring publications, stores, and my cabinets prior to a lecture, to find real-world examples of concepts I was teaching. Although students seemed to appreciate and learn from these examples, it didn’t get them as actively involved in their learning as I’d like.

Most faculty (especially those reading a publication like this) do care about students. We wouldn’t be doing all that we do if we didn’t. However, some semesters are long, some students are difficult, we get behind, we have too much on our plates, and we get stressed and tired. When that’s how we’re feeling we don’t always show that concern in tangible ways.