Links on first-year student retention research

A $100,000 Lumina Foundation grant-funded study at Ball State University that attempted to answer the question “How do faculty engage first-year students in the classroom?” Directed by Paul Ranieri, acting English department chair and former director of a residence hall program for freshmen. " Some highlights:

• Ranieri spearheaded a series of summer workshops over three years starting in 2003. Instructors of core curriculum and early major courses applied to participate by identifying specific teaching challenges they wanted to tackle.
  
• ... while the general trend toward higher retention rates and overall grade point averages among students who were in the classes taught by participating faculty is not entirely consistent, the data are “consistent enough through all these different faculty members to raise some questions.”
  
• [While the grant money has been used up, Ranieri said] he hopes to expand a report he’s writing — which tracks retention and GPA data for students who enrolled in the “Lumina” courses as freshmen throughout their college careers — for publication.

Some good stuff on reading in a philosophy course:

David W. Concepción, an associate professor of philosophy, came to the first workshop series in 2003 wondering why “students in courses for some number of years said, ‘I get nothing out of the reading’” (specifically the primary philosophy texts). Discovering through student focus groups that what they meant was that they couldn’t ascertain the main points, Concepción realized that he needed to explain the dialogical nature of philosophy texts to students in his 40-person introductory philosophy course.


Whereas high school texts tend to be linear and students read them with the objective of highlighting facts paragraph by paragraph that they could be tested on, “Primary philosophical texts are dialogical. Which is to say an author will present an idea, present a criticism of that idea, rebut the criticism to support the idea, maybe consider a rejoinder to the rebuttal of the criticism, and then show why the rejoinder doesn’t work and then get on to the second point,” Concepción says.

“If you are reading philosophy and you’re assuming it’s linear and you’re looking for facts, you’re going to be horribly, horribly frustrated.”

So he worked with reading instruction:

Based on the constructivist theory of learning suggesting that students make sense of new information by joining it with information they already have, his guidelines suggest that students begin with a quick pre-read, in which they underline words they don’t know but don’t stop reading until they reach the end. They then would follow up with a more careful read in which they look up definitions, write notes summarizing an author’s argument into their own words on a separate piece of paper, and make notations in the margins such that if they were to return to the reading one week later they could figure out in 15 seconds what the text says (a process Concepción calls “flagging).

Concepción also designed a series of assignments in which his introductory students are trained in the method of reading philosophy texts. They are asked to summarize and evaluate a paragraph-long argument before and after learning the guidelines (and then write a report about their different approaches to the exercise before and after getting the “how-to” document on reading philosophy), turn in a photocopy of an article with their notations, and summarize that same article in writing. They participate in a class discussion in which they present the top five most important things about reading philosophy and face short-answer questions on the midterm about reading strategies (after that, Concepción says, students are expected to apply the knowledge they’ve learned on their own, without further direct evaluation).

Very similar to the tip sheet "Six Reading Myths" from Syracuse that I have linked to my faculty page. My classroom assessments have suggested weak reading skills across the board in all my students, even though our sophomores test at national averages on normed ACT Inc. reading tests. This has been consistent in freshman English, sophomore lit, introductory mass communications and junior- and senior-level news-editorial classes.

Carnegie Mellon has good advice for teaching first-year students on its website for TAs, including a a checklist for covering course objectivesin daily lesson plans. Included are these that relate to reading, or more properly provide students with a context for their reading:

• Prioritize 2-3 main points that you want students to leave the room remembering.
  If you try to cover much more, the key points can get lost in a flood of details.
  
  
• In prioritizing, be sure that you can explain why learning each main topic is important.
  When you can identify up front why students should learn about a topic, students are often better able to follow the goals, structure, and flow of the class.
  
  
• Plan classes to complement the textbook, not replace it.
  It is useful to check with colleagues in your discipline to see how they connect readings with in-class learning.