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Community College Students are Strong Transfer Students

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Community College Students are Strong Transfer Students

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Most deadlines for fall transfer admissions land between January and March. That means that admissions committees around the country are starting to make their decisions about who they'll be accepting right now. Yet when it comes to building a student population that's likely to graduate, many of the promising students are likely to get into the best schools. The source of these star pupils? Community colleges.

New research from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation makes it clear: community college students who transfer to selective four-year schools perform as well as- or even better than -their peers who come directly from high school .

Here are the facts:

The six-year graduation rate (a standard metric for four-year U.S. colleges) for students who transferred from community colleges to "most competitive" or "highly competitive" institutions in Fall 2010 is 75%.

The rate for students who enrolled directly out of high school is 73%.

For students who transferred from one four-year college to another, it's 61%.

The bottom line? Transfer students from community colleges are the group most likely to actually graduate.

Unfortunately, many top colleges don't seem to have gotten the message. The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation also reports that, at the United States's 100 most selective colleges, just 14% of students transfer in, and the students most likely to graduate, community college students, represent only 5%.

Given these figures, it seems that many of our best colleges and universities aren't focusing on the students that would perform best, if only they were given the chance. But just because some schools have ignored or discounted community college transfer students in the past doesn't mean they can't start making meaningful changes today.

The first step any college or university can take toward accepting more community college transfers is to perform an honest self-evaluation of how well it meets the needs of potential transfer students. Leaving aside hard enrollment numbers for the moment, is it easy for transfer students to understand what the school has to offer, make an informed decision, and apply? If it's more difficult for a community college transfer student to apply than it is for a high school student, it's time to start thinking about how to fix that.

Remember, these aren't charity cases, these are the students most likely to graduate . If a school wants to enroll students who outperform, it needs to provide the best resources, tailored to those same students, to attract and retain them.

Another essential piece of the puzzle for any school looking to become a more welcoming place for transfer students is to look past the acceptance phase of the process and think about what's provided to students after they enroll. Designing orientation sessions for transfer students is a good place to start. Customizing financial aid and housing policies for these students is even better. Providing the best experience for transfer students will help recruit and retain the best in the country.

For a long time, administrators, faculty, advisors,and even many community college transfers themselves have had doubts about whether they could succeed at the most competitive schools around the nation. Now that the facts are in, it's clear they can, and can do so at even higher rates than their peers. Let's start acting like it!

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Community College Transfers Outperform High Schoolers At Top Colleges, So Why Do We Ignore Them?

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Most deadlines for fall transfer admissions land between January and March. That means that admissions committees around the country are starting to make their decisions about who they'll be accepting right now. Yet when it comes to building a student population that's likely to graduate, many of the promising students are likely to get into the best schools.

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Easing Test Anxiety May Help Low-income Students in STEM

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Easing Test Anxiety May Help Low-income Students in STEM

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At a large Midwestern high school, almost 40 percent of low-income biology students were poised to fail the course. Instead, thanks to simple measures aimed at reducing test anxiety, that failure rate was halved.

Psychological interventions that improve grades could ultimately help keep more low-income students in the sciences, says Christopher Rozek, a psychologist at Stanford University and lead author of the study, which appears online the week of January 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Low-income students are much less likely than high-income students to complete four years of high school science. That leads to those students being less likely, or unable, to major in science and math in college or to pursue related - often lucrative - careers in adulthood. One of the many factors underlying this achievement gap is low-income students' internalized feelings of inadequacy in such fields, Rozek says. Those feelings often translate to high pretest anxiety and worse grades.

In previous, smaller studies, researchers have shown that reducing performance anxiety can improve test scores. To scale up that work, Rozek and colleagues recruited 1,175 freshman biology students at a public high school in Illinois; 285 of those students came from a low socioeconomic background. At the school, slightly over half of low-income students fail their final biology exams compared with just 6 percent of high-income students.

Rozek's group investigated whether 10-minute-long reading and writing prompts before an exam could improve test performance. Students were placed in one of four groups. A control group was simply told to ignore anxiety. Another group of students wrote about their fears, a method intended to clear up the headspace needed to focus on an exam ( SN: 2/12/11, p. 9). A third group read a statement explaining that the physiological responses to stress, such as a racing pulse or sweaty palms, can actually be beneficial and help with attention. Students in a fourth group participated in both activities.

Of 205 low-income students in the three experimental groups, 168, or 82 percent, passed their exams, compared with just 49 of 80 students, or 61 percent, in the control group. The three types of interventions all worked equally well.

Higher-income students, though, experienced no benefit. Rozek suspects that these students were already more adept at emotional regulation.

Robert Tai, a science education expert at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, questions the study's emphasis on passing exams. "Improving a student's test scores will not improve the rate of them pursuing the sciences," says Tai, whose research has shown that students' interest in math or science matters more than grades when it comes to later career trajectories.

Psychological interventions of this sort don't close the achievement gap, Rozek says. But the study illustrates that at least part of a test score has less to do with knowledge of the material than mind-set. And tipping scores even slightly has real-world implications. "You can imagine students who are failing science courses maybe can't even register for additional science courses," Rozek says.

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Easing test anxiety may help keep low-income kids in STEM classes

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At a large Midwestern high school, almost 40 percent of low-income biology students were poised to fail the course. Instead, thanks to simple measures aimed at reducing test anxiety, that failure rate was halved.

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5 Strategies to Demystify the Learning Process for Struggling Students

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5 Strategies to Demystify the Learning Process for Struggling Students

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Oakley recognizes that "many educators are not at all comfortable with or trained in neuroscience," so she breaks down a few key principles that teachers can use in the classroom and share with students to help them demystify the learning process.
1. The Hiker Brain vs. The Race Car Brain
Start by teaching students the difference between focused and diffused thinking, says Oakley. When the brain is in focused mode, you can get started on the task at hand. But deep understanding is not fully accomplished in this mode.

Diffused thinking occurs when you allow your mind to wander, to imagine and to daydream. In this mode, the brain is still working -- consolidating information and "making sense of what you are trying to learn," says Oakley. If a concept is easy for you to grasp right off, the focused mode might be sufficient, but if a new skill or concept "takes consideration, you have to toggle back and forth between these two modes of thinking as you get to true understanding of the material -- and this doesn't happen quickly."

Because toggling is essential to learning, teachers and students need to build downtime into their day -- time when learning can "happen on background" as you play a game, go on a walk or color a picture. It's also one reason why sleep is so vital to healthy cognitive development.

Since students tend to equate speed with smarts, Oakley suggests sharing this metaphor: "There's a race car brain and a hiker brain. They both get to the finish line, but not at the same time. The race car brain gets there really fast, but everything goes by in a blur. The hiker brain takes time. It hears birds singing, sees the rabbit trails, feels the leaves. It's a very different experience and, in some ways, much richer and deeper. You don't need to be a super swift learner. In fact, sometimes you can learn more deeply by going slowly."
2. Chains and Chunks
In cognitive psychology, "chunking" refers to the well-practiced mental patterns that are essential to developing expertise in a topic. Oakley prefers the image of a "chain" when she explains this to students.

Learning is all about developing strong chains. For example, says Oakley, when you are first learning how to back up a car, you have to consciously think about each step, from how to turn the steering wheel to how to use your mirrors. But "once that process is chained, it's easy" -- it becomes automatic. Similarly, once solving certain equations becomes automatic in math, students can apply these equations to more complex problems.

Teachers can help students identify the procedures in a unit of study that they to master in order to take their learning to the next level -- from the steps of the scientific method to fundamental drawing techniques.

"Any type of mastery involves the development of chains of procedural fluency. Then you can get into more complex areas of fluency," says Oakley. Here's another way to think about it. We all have about four slots of working memory that we can use to problem-solve in the moment. One of those slots can be filled with an procedural chain -- and then you can put new information in the other slots.
3. The Power of Metaphor
"Metaphor and analogy are extraordinarily powerful teaching tools and very often underused," says Oakley. "When you are trying to learn something new, the best way to learn it is to connect it with something you already know."

The formal term for this is " neural reuse " -- the idea that metaphors use the same neural pathways as the concept a metaphor is describing. So familiar metaphors allow a learner to draw on a concept they have already mastered and apply it to a new situation. Or as Oakley says, metaphors "rapidly on-board" new ideas. For example, says Oakley, comparing the flow of electrons to the flow of water is a way to "jump-start students' thinking."

As part of her research, Oakley reached out to thousands of professors who are considered top teachers in their fields. "Many of these professors had a secret that they used in their teaching: metaphor and analogy. It was like a secret shared handshake." Oakley encourages teachers to not only use metaphor but to challenge students to develop their own metaphors as a study strategy.
4. The Problem of Procrastination
Oakley says that procrastination is the number one challenge facing most learners. To train the brain to systematically focus and relax -- to -- she recommends the "Pomodoro Technique."

Developed by Francesco Cirillo, this strategy uses a timer to help the learner work and break at set intervals. First, choose a task to accomplish. Then, set a timer for 25 minutes and work until the timer goes off. At that point, take a five-minute break: stand up, walk around, take a drink of water, etc. After three or four 25-minute intervals, take a longer break (15 - 30 minutes) to recharge. This technique "trains your ability to focus and reinforces that relaxing at the end is critical to the process of learning," says Oakley. Teachers and administrators can build a similar rhythm into the schoolday, providing brain breaks and movement time to help students toggle between focused and diffused thinking.
5. Expanding Possibilities

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5 Strategies to Demystify the Learning Process for Struggling Students

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Oakley recognizes that "many educators are not at all comfortable with or trained in neuroscience," so she breaks down a few key principles that teachers can use in the classroom and share with students to help them demystify the learning process. 1. The Hiker Brain vs.

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Being More Informed About Campus Resources Helps Students in Introductory Classes

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Being More Informed About Campus Resources Helps Students in Introductory Classes

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Joshua Lott for The Chronicle

Introductory courses can open doors for students, helping them not only discover a love for a subject area that can blossom into their major but also feel more connected to their campus.

But on many campuses, teaching introductory courses typically falls to less-experienced instructors. Sometimes the task is assigned to instructors whose very connection to the college is tenuous. A growing body of evidence suggests that this tension could have negative consequences for students.

Two papers presented at the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting in New York on Sunday support this idea.

The first finds that community-college students who take a remedial or introductory course with an adjunct instructor are less likely to take the next course in the sequence.

The second finds negative associations between the proportion of a four-year college's faculty members who are part-time or off the tenure track and outcomes for STEM majors.

The community-college paper, "Role of Adjunct Faculty in Realizing the Postsecondary Dreams of Historically Marginalized Student Populations," is not the first to examine the link between part-time instructors and student outcomes, said Florence Xiaotao Ran, its lead author. Several previous papers have found a negative relationship between contingent faculty members and student outcomes.

At least one study has found the opposite effect, although that research was conducted at Northwestern University, which, as its authors noted, is typical in neither its student population nor its working conditions for adjuncts.

Because Ran's new paper combines administrative data from six community colleges with a detailed faculty survey, it is able to shed light on why students who take early courses with adjuncts (a term it uses interchangeably with part-time faculty) fare worse, said Ran, a senior research assistant in the Community College Research Center at Teachers College of Columbia University.

"We do find that in both remedial and college-level gatekeeper English and math, students who take those with part-time faculty are less likely to proceed to the next level of study," she said. That's a better outcome to measure than students' grades, she added, in part because there is some evidence that adjuncts grade more leniently. It's also an important outcome, she said, because reaching the next course may be a required step on the path to a degree.

The survey reveals that "the biggest difference between part-time and full-time faculty is that part-time faculty have less access to information about how to advise students," Ran said. That suggests that the issue may well be adjuncts' ability to help students navigate a particular college, and not their teaching ability, she said.

The study is part of a larger, continuing project that is exploring ways to include adjunct faculty members in the student-success efforts of the six community colleges. One college, for instance, is creating teaching collaborations in which full-time and part-time professors observe one another's classes and share ideas, Ran said. The research center at Teachers College will evaluate the impact of this and other efforts.

The second paper uses national data from three sources to investigate the association between the characteristics of four-year colleges' professoriates and the outcomes of students who initially majored in STEM fields. Titled "Early College Exposure to Non-Tenure Track and Part-Time Faculty - Examining Effects on Socialization and Student Success in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics," it, too, is part of a larger project, this one focused on the socialization of students in STEM.

It finds that for every 1-percent increase in the share of faculty members who work full time and off the tenure track, students' chances of graduation drop 1.75 percent. If a college's professors predominantly work off the tenure track, students are 1.5 percent more likely to change out of a STEM major.

The findings are not causal but suggest that "who's teaching matters, and tenure seems to matter as well," says Ray Franke, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and the paper's lead author.

In STEM fields, especially, students benefit from interacting with professors who can provide career mentorship, perhaps supervising their undergraduate research, the study says. Such roles are often harder for part-time or non-tenure-track professors to fill.

Like Ran, Franke suspects that these findings have more to do with institutional conditions than with individuals' teaching ability. Professors off the tenure track tend to have higher teaching loads and fewer resources, he said. "Often non-tenure-track or adjunct faculty don't even have an office."

The new papers suggest that providing better support for nontraditional faculty members could make a difference for students - the very hypothesis Ran's future work will test.
Impressions for Life
Structural aspects of adjuncts' working conditions could play a role, too, said Daniel F. Chambliss, a professor of sociology at Hamilton College and co-author of the book How College Works (Harvard University Press, 2014).

"One problem with using adjuncts in, say, intro," he said, "is they may not be there next semester." If a student has a bad experience with that adjunct, the student has a bad experience. If the student has a good experience, that professor is not on hand to teach the next course, or to suggest a colleague the student might want to take it with.

That connection between introductory courses and what comes next matters a lot, he said. "The crucial thing is that students are the most open to new stuff when they walk into college."

To a student who has never encountered a discipline before, the professor teaching the introductory course is the discipline, Chambliss said. "If the physics professor is cool, then physics is cool." If the professor is dull, the student will think the same of the discipline. If the professor is so dull that the student never takes another physics course, well, that impression could hold for the rest of her life.

"The crucial thing is that students are the most open to new stuff when they walk into college."

That's one reason Chambliss advocates that colleges put their very best professors in front of as many students as possible, as early as possible. That doesn't mean every senior professor needs to teach introductory courses, he said - it's a matter of departments moving a few people around, and rewarding them for their efforts.

Professors and administrators often see a major as a coherent whole, he said. But to students, what matters is the particular course they're taking this term. If they have a bad first experience, they're unlikely to stick around for a second one.

The English department at the University of Kentucky followed a similar logic to increase enrollment in its courses. "The most crucial thing - and perhaps the hardest change to effect - is to have the department's best and most experienced professors teach introductory and general-education courses on a regular basis," wrote Peter J. Kalliney, the associate chair, in a recent essay in The Chronicle. "Gen-ed courses are where humanities departments fight for majors and should be used as recruiting opportunities."
Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.

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It Matters a Lot Who Teaches Introductory Courses. Here's Why.

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Introductory courses can open doors for students, helping them not only discover a love for a subject area that can blossom into their major but also feel more connected to their campus. But on many campuses, teaching introductory courses typically falls to less-experienced instructors.

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Not long ago, I spotted some students getting ready for an exam. They were sitting in the library of American University in Washington, hunched over a table, highlighting key sections in a textbook, marking up the words in neon pinks, yellows and blues. The students sat together conspiratorially, commiserating over their upcoming exams and hoping that their dedication would pay off.

Highlighting is a time-honored study practice, of course. But it turns out that it might not be the most effective way to learn. In recent years, research on the skill of learning to learn has found that approaches like self-quizzing are far more effective than more traditional approaches like highlighting or even rereading.

What's more, many recent studies have shown that when educators teach their students the skill of learning, the students perform much better in class. The effects have been particularly large for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who might not have acquired robust learning skills in high school.

For a long time, colleges and universities have dismissed the skill of learning as mere study skills. But there's growing interest in giving students a richer sense of how to gain knowledge. After all, one of the constants of the modern world is dramatic change. That makes the ability to acquire new skills crucial, and the faster someone can learn a new area of expertise, the better they'll do in college -- and their career.

Some colleges and universities have been pushing the skill of learning, and professors at those institutions are encouraged to teach students not only content and skills but also how to learn. One example is the Iron Range Engineering program of Minnesota State University, Mankato. Students at the school gain the skill of learning to learn by working on real-world projects (instead of just taking exams). Professors also encourage students to learn how to engage in thinking about thinking as well as self-quizzing (instead of just reading the textbook).

At my organization, the Learning Agency, we launched an online learning to learn course recently that aims to give people robust learning skills, and we've seen a surprising amount of interest in the class from people who just want to improve their learning skills.

When it comes to the science of learning, one key practice is to make learning cognitively demanding. Students should aim to make studying a matter of mental struggle. This approach makes learning more active and more effective. Indeed, one of the reasons that highlighting is not a great way is learn is that it's simply too passive.

Instead, students should learn the art of quizzing. When students ask themselves -- or other students -- questions, the learning becomes more active and thus more effective. Sometimes known as retrieval practice or the testing effect, this approach to learning is highly effective and been replicated in many studies. Researchers have found the approach to be particularly potent for disadvantaged students, and in one study, the practice helped lessen the achievement gap by more than 50 percent.

The quizzing doesn't have to look like a quiz, either, and at Iron Range Engineering, professors have been putting this idea into practice by using clickers and pair and share (basically having a student talking to another student). "We need to help students find more meaning in their work, and so we do a lot more questioning than ever before," says Ron Ulseth, the director of academics and research at Iron Range.

One simple approach to promote more quizzing is to ask students to do a "brain dump." As cognitive scientist Pooja K. Agarwal argues, this "free-recall" strategy is a " small strategy with a big impact." Basically, the professor pauses a lesson or activity and asks every student to write down everything that they can remember. Once that's been done, the lesson or activity is continues.

When using the free-recall activity, be specific with your prompt. For example, let students know how many items you're looking for or any time limit. You might say, "OK, let's take a pause and see how we're doing ... please write down three things you remember about XX topic." Or, "Let's see what we remember ... take 60 seconds to write down everything you can remember about XX topic."

This active-learning approach can take just five minutes or less. And it is more effective than just calling on one student at time, as the writing guarantees that all students are actively retrieving what they remember from the lesson. The approach can count toward the student's final grade or not.
The Power of Forgetting
Another important aspect of learning to learn is to embrace the power of forgetting. Old or young, forgetting is inevitable. Some recent research argues that forgetting is actually a product of evolution, helping us to "optimize decision making." To account for this fact, students need to make sure to spread their learning out over time. Practically speaking, it's better, for instance, to study a little bit each day rather than do one massive study session. Students will simply forget a lot less.

Again, some institutions are leading the way. Dozens of graduate programs in pharmacy, for instance, now require regular cumulative assessments, which encourage students to do more to space out their learning.

Another approach that professors can take in the classroom is to regularly revisit material. Students tend to do better when they are given several opportunities to review what they've learned. A professor can help facilitate this by periodically revisiting key topics throughout the semester.

For instance, a few weeks into a unit, you might incorporate a brief review of what was covered early on in the lesson. Homework, group activities and project assignments can also be used to facilitate this revisiting of material. For example, you can ask your students to split into small groups and review some key concepts from previous lessons. They can discuss several topics and then share them with the larger group.

For educators, it's not enough to model these learning strategies around forgetting or quizzing, though. The approaches also need to be put directly into the hands of students. Young people need to understand the basics of how to learn, and these practices can be taught -- and learned.

Last month, for instance, featured a study in which the instructor offered a short lecture to students on the benefits of spacing and self-quizzing. The research found that the approach helped students improve their learning strategies. The effects of these interventions can be large, too. In a different study, some students saw their grades jump by more than 20 percentage points, or about two grade levels, after learning about how to learn.

The science of learning is contextual, of course. It's no silver bullet. It looks different in different courses and subject areas, and just teaching students to quiz themselves isn't enough to guarantee success.

But too many students lack an understanding of the science of learning. To prepare them for the future, our colleges and universities need to do much more to give them the skill of learning to learn.

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Advice for faculty members on how to teach students how to learn (opinion)

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Not long ago, I spotted some students getting ready for an exam. They were sitting in the library of American University in Washington, hunched over a table, highlighting key sections in a textbook, marking up the words in neon pinks, yellows and blues.

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Throughout your college career, note taking is a vital skill to a student's success. At the university level, large amounts of information are covered in a short amount of time. Thus, it is imperative that students master note taking skills required to adequately keep track of and organize the information received. This involves not only good note taking skills during class, but also adequate preparation and review outside of class. In this module, we will examine the following areas: Taking Notes in Class, Effective Listening, and the Five R's of Note taking.

Lecture Note Taking

Before Class:

Read or survey the material that will be covered in the upcoming lecture.

Read over your notes from the previous class.

Look at the course outline to see where you've been, where you're going, and how it all fits together.

Meet with your instructor/TA to clarify concepts from the last lecture.

Get the notes from any class session you've missed.

During Class:

Date and title each set of notes and keep notes from different classes separate.

Sit where you can hear and see clearly without distractions.

Don't crowd your notes! Leave blanks to fill in missed items and to expand your notes later on.

Ask your instructor, TA, or classmate to help you fill in the gaps if you think you missed one or two important points.

Stay involved in the class and ask questions. Volunteer for demonstrations. Join in class discussions.

Take too many notes, rather than not enough. You can always omit unnecessary information later.

Think to yourself, "Why is this important?"

Focus on what point the professor is on, rather than scrambling to write down the whole overhead without listening to what the professor is saying.

Write down notes in your own words when possible and think about what the professor is saying. However, definitions of technical terms should be recorded exactly as given.

Use abbreviations and symbols to save time. Make sure you understand your abbreviations!

Take notes in different colors to highlight important points.

Use underlining or symbols, such as an asterisk or star, to identify points your instructor emphasizes.

Keep alert for and highlight points your instructor emphasizes by means of verbal cues. Watch for lists such as "the following 5 steps" or "the 4 major causes" and for summaries signaled by words such as "consequently" or "therefore."

Add examples your professor provides in order to clarify abstract ideas and to jog your memory when studying later.

Make eye contact with the lecturer.

Don't be a clock-watcher. Instructors do not always pace themselves accurately and may cram half of the lecture into the last 15 minutes

Learn as much as you can in class because this will better help you understand and complete outside assignments. For example, if your instructor pauses during lecture, use that time to review the notes you've taken so far.

Use a tape recorder only to clarify lecture points-- use the counter.

Meet a conscientious and success-oriented student in each class at the beginning of every semester and share notes.

After Class:

Review notes within 24 hours of class, or else you are relearning.

Should you recopy your notes? Some people benefit from rewriting or recopying their lecture notes. However, be sure to leave time to think about your notes. Experiment and find out what works best for you.

Use margin space to fill in abbreviations, add omitted points, correct errors, and write key words. Read notes to be sure you can clarify confusing or illegible material.

As you read your notes, underline, highlight, or mark main points or important points you will want to give special attention to when you study the material again for the exam.

Elaborate your notes. Compare the information to what you already know. Write additional information from the text into notes.

Connect concepts to see their meaning in the larger picture- think of a summary in your head or write it at the end of your notes (Cornell Method).

Practice reciting the information using only key words.

Talk with other students about the lecture.

Conduct short weekly review periods. Once a week, go through all your notes again. Put reviews on your calendar and make it a habit.

****Don't miss class!!!!! If you have to miss a lecture, ask someone to tape the lecture for you or borrow a classmate's notes.

Effective Listening

Sit near the front of the room.

Find a reason to listen to the speaker. Why is this important??

Listen for more than just facts; Try to understand the big picture.

Recite key ideas to yourself.

Take more notes than necessary.

Pay attention.

Avoid outside distractions and internal noise.

Anticipate what the speaker is going to say next.

Try to select main ideas and supporting details (mentally organize).

Prepare for lectures beforehand.

Listen first, then write; leave spaces to fill in gaps in your information.

Formulate questions to look up later, or ask the instructor.

Put aside personal bias and listen to the content of the speaker's message.

Write It Down If the Speaker...

Repeats an item.

Writes an item on the board or overhead.

Points or gestures.

Changes tone or volume of voice.

Makes a direct reference to the book.

Asks if everyone understands.

Gives an example.

Slows down.

The Five R's

1. RECORD: During the lecture, write all meaningful information legibly.

2. REDUCE: After the lecture, write a summary of the ideas and facts using key words as cue words. Summarizing as you study helps to:

Clarify meanings and relationships of ideas.

Reinforce continuity.

Strengthen memory retention.

Prepare for exams in advance.

3. RECITE: To study properly, you must recite all the information in your own words without looking at your notes or the text.

4. REFLECT: Think about your own opinions and ideas as you read over your notes. Raise questions, then try to answer them creatively. Record original ideas in your notebook and review them regularly. Use your creative ideas when answering exam questions, in classroom discussions, and when writing papers.

5. REVIEW: Before reading or studying new material, take ten minutes to quickly review your older notes. Skim over the main ideas and details. Review enhances more effective retention of old material when adding new material to your memory system.

Source: Pauk, W. (1989). How to Study in College (4th Ed.), Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin

Daydreaming

Be in class in body and mind

Notice your writing. When you discover yourself slipping into a fantasyland, notice how your pen feels in your hand. Notice how your notes look. Paying attention to the act of writing can bring you back to the here and now.

Write your thoughts down. If you are distracted by errands you have to run or other things you have to do, write them on a 3X5 card and put it in your pocket. Mark your notes so you know where your mind started to wander.

Be with the instructor. In your mind, put yourself right up front with the instructor. Imagine that you and the instructor are the only ones in the room and the lecture is a personal talk with you. Pay attention to the instructor's body language and facial expressions. Look the instructor in the eye.

Notice your environment. When your mind starts to wander, bring yourself back to class by paying attention to the temperature in the room, the feel of your chair, or the quality of the light in the room. Run your hand along the surface of your desk. Listen to the fan running or the sound of the teacher's voice. Be in that environment.

Source: Ellis, David B. (1994). Becoming a Master Student: Tools, Techniques, Hints, Ideas, Illustrations, Examples, Methods, Procedures, Processes, Skills, Resources, and Suggestions for Success. Rapid City, SD: College Survival, 378pp.

Technical Symbols

Technical Abbreviations

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Throughout your college career, note taking is a vital skill to a student's success. At the university level, large amounts of information are covered in a short amount of time. Thus, it is imperative that students master note taking skills required to adequately keep track of and organize the information received.

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Reading Comprehension | Penn State Learning

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Many students find that reading the text is an enlightening experience; whereas others find this task dreadful and boring. If you're like some students, you tend to put your reading off until the very last minute and try to cram and comprehend material the night before the exam.

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Secondary Traumatic Stress For Educators

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Secondary Traumatic Stress For Educators

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Secondary Traumatic Stress for Educators: Understanding and Mitigating the Effects

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Teaching kids who have experienced trauma can be stressful to educators. Acknowledging that teachers might be experiencing secondary traumatic stress is a step in the right direction to help teachers feel that they are not working alone.

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Inspiring Commencement Address by Student Colin 

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Inspiring Commencement Address by Student Colin 

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Free Online Course to Prep for College Bio

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Free Online Course to Prep for College Bio

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California State University, Northridge biology professor Cindy Malone is developing a free, online biology course that covers high school biology curriculum to help high school students prepare for college-level biology majors.

The online class, Biology Open Online Prep Sessions (B-OOPS), is a massive open online course (MOOC) currently being offered to several Biology 100 and 101 students along with a few 9 th grade students who are giving Malone feedback on the course's effectiveness.

Once it is ready, Malone plans a soft rollout of the course, offering it first to CSUN students, before opening it up to all students across the country and beyond through the Canvas.net MOOC system.

The course gives students the option to control what, when and how they want to learn. B-OOPS targets students who want to expand their biology knowledge, refresh their memories about the academic material or utilize the course as a tutorial guide if they are struggling in biology.

"B-OOPS will be open to anyone in the world," said Malone. "People who use the MOOC do not have to complete the entire course. If they want, they can just look through some of the sections. They don't have to go through everything."

Malone is currently working on enabling the course to give high school and transfer students CSUN life science general education credit. Students considering biology as a major can use the course to gain in-depth knowledge of their high school biology curriculum and it may help them decide if biology is the field they want to study in college, Malone said.

The course is free, but to receive academic credit, CSUN students must access the quizzes and the ebook at a set price of $57.

"People who do not plan to attend CSUN but are still interested in taking the course, can receive the same informative and educational benefits from the class without CSUN course credit," Malone said.

"Our current Biology 100 curriculum [at CSUN] is almost identical to high school biology content, just with more in-depth thinking and higher-level evaluation," said Malone. "When students take B-OOPS they can perfect their studying style."

The online course is based on Malone's textbook "Biology Now," which features adaptive learning methods, benchmark assignments, flashcards, animations and quizzes. Tutorials and classroom lectures created by Malone are included in the course modules.

Although there are a few recorded in-class lecture videos in B-OOPS, the class primarily features quick videos on course topics.

Malone has anecdotally found that in an online course, long lecture videos were not as useful in helping students retain what they learned from textbook reading. Malone said that social scientific studies showed that short tutorials were more effective than long recorded lectures.

According to Malone the demands of the course are similar to courses with a traditional, in-classroom structure but it allows students to take the class at their own pace.

"It is extremely important to read the book, do the assignments and develop your own learning style with this voluntary course," said Malone. "The course is a lot of work, but it should be more fun than work. We're trying to get more relevance and a little more fun into biology. This course could help anybody, but people really have to put in the time to gain the knowledge that they wish to receive."

For more information on release dates and registration for B-OOPS, please contact cindy.malone@csun.edu.

College of Science and Mathematics, Department of Biology

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CSUN Professor Creates Free Online Course to Prepare High School Students for College Biology

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California State University, Northridge biology professor Cindy Malone is developing a free, online biology course that covers high school biology curriculum to help high school students prepare for college-level biology majors.

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Name it to Tame Strategy Described by Dan Siegel

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Name it to Tame Strategy Described by Dan Siegel

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Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education

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Reducing Test-Taking Anxiety Lesson Powerpoint

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Reducing Test-Taking Anxiety Lesson Powerpoint

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This video from the American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF) features the stories of several first-generation college students and graduates, and explores their challenges, sources of support, and recommendations for policymakers.

As AYPF policy associate Jenna Tomasello writes in an accompanying blog post, it is estimated that between one-third and one-half of college students are first-generation. However, fewer than one-third of these students who enroll in a four year college will graduate within six years.

AYPF, a nonprofit, nonpartisan professional development organization based in Washington, DC, provides learning opportunities for policy leaders, practitioners, and researchers working on youth and education issues at the national, state, and local levels.

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First in My Family: Supporting First-Generation College Students - Higher Education Today

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This video from the American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF) features the stories of several first-generation college students and graduates, and explores their challenges, sources of support, and recommendations for policymakers. As AYPF policy associate Jenna Tomasello writes in an accompanying blog post, it is estimated that between one-third and one-half of college students are first-generation....

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Interview with Engineer and First-generation College Student Juan Soto

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Interview with Engineer and First-generation College Student Juan Soto

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Weber State College Testing Anxiety Tips, Audio & Resources

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Weber State College Testing Anxiety Tips, Audio & Resources

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This is my classic body scan relaxation induction. I offer it at no charge to give you a sense what it would be like to work with me in the office.

Please play it on earphones or earbuds, not on loudspeakers.
It is best played at night before bed or anytime you need to relax and 'settle.'
Caution: do not play this while driving a vehicle or in any other situation where you need to be mentally alert.
Go to download page

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Dr. Joe Persinger- Santa Rosa Psychologist - DOWNLOADS

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This is my classic body scan relaxation induction. I offer it at no charge to give you a sense what it would be like to work with me in the office. Please play it on earphones or earbuds, not on loudspeakers. It is best played at night before bed or anytime you need to relax and 'settle.'

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Math Study Skills

Read what the instructor will be lecturing on before you go to class.

Read slowly. Reading mathematics is not like reading a novel or even history. Speed reading techniques are not appropriate. Every word and symbol is important to the meaning. Do not skip the symbolic part of the text. This is often the most important part. If you do not understand a symbol, look in the glossary or in the earlier part of the text. Symbols are often explained when they are first introduced. If you still can not find out what a symbol means, ask!

Read with a pencil in hand. Every time the author does a problem, do it on your own-either before or after you read his or her explanation. This makes sure you know what steps have been shown and, more importantly, which ones were omitted.

If there is something you do not understand, try to formulate a question about it. Often if you can ask a specific question, you can answer it yourself. If you can't answer it, you know what part of the instructor's lecture requires your complete attention. Your question is ready if the lecture does not clear up your misunderstanding.

Understand the concepts

Don't be satisfied with vague ideas about how to work problems. Do the examples yourself, understand the concept illustrated, then try making up your own examples. Keep in mind that the questions on the exam may be very different from the example in the book.

Practice

Be sure you understand the concepts before you practice. Then practice will help you remember and give you confidence in your mastery. Force yourself to remember the methods as you work problems; don't look back in the book.

Keep up with assignments
(whether they are graded or not)

The pace is much faster in college and keeping up to date with assignments helps you to better understand what is going on in class. Mathematics is not a spectator sport. The only way you can learn mathematics is by doing it. Following are some suggestions for getting the most out of the time you spend on homework.

Understand the purpose of homework. Homework in mathematics classes is assigned to help you understand certain concepts and to help you build certain skills. Homework is not assigned to you because it is important to get the right answers. Your instructor already knows the answers.

Try to understand the process, not the specific problem. Classify problems in the assignment by problem type. Although this is often done for you by the directions, it is not always. Do each assigned problem and then check it in the back of the book. Try to figure out why you missed the ones you did instead of just working toward the answer. A similar problem may be on a test or quiz.

Mark homework problems you still do not understand and get help with them before the next class. The next lecture may build on a concept or skill you did not understand in the homework. When you do get help, make notes on what you learned, so that you can study them for the test.

Before closing the book, look back over the assignment and try to explain to yourself what the assignment was about, what each kind of problem was asking, how you got the answers and what the answers tell you. This process will help you understand the material and will help you discover what you don't understand.

Keep your homework in a convenient and neat notebook so that you will be able to find questions or difficulties you have quickly and easily. This will also provide an invaluable study guide for tests.

Ask questions

Do not hesitate to ask questions. Ask your instructor for help after you have tried to pull class notes and textbook explanations together for review and still don't understand. Write down specific problems so you have them ready; don't be vague and say you just don't understand.

Don't hesitate

Get help right away. Tutoring and help sessions are available. The longer you wait before getting help, the harder it will be to get caught up. Most of the time when you feel lost, it is just one concept that you are missing, so get help quickly. One missed concept in a math class will make the rest of your math career a hardship. Don't feel embarrassed to ask questions and get help; even the best mathematicians have felt completely lost at some point.

Suggestions for Preparing for and Taking Math Tests

Keep a list of things to remember - problems stressed by the instructor, definitions, terms, diagrams and graphs, formulas.

Keep up with the work - some courses can be passed by cramming, but math isn't one of them. Skills in math, as in sports, must be practiced.

Study copies of old exams, chapter tests from the book, or make up your own. Then practice them with the same limits as the real exam.

Get a good night's sleep before the test so that you are rested and alert; a quick review before the test should be a summary only.

Arrive at the test early so that you can be relaxed when the exam begins.

Quickly look over the test and budget your time - don't spend too much time on any single problem or section of the test.

Do some work on each problem - try to work at least part of each problem because partial credit is better than none.

Check your answers and look for careless mistakes during the last few minutes of your test time (budget this important time).

Suggestions for Word Problems

Solving problems is a practical art, like swimming or playing the piano; you can only learn it by imitation and practice. There is no magic key that opens all doors and solves all problems. The major goal in solving word problems is to translate the written words into a mathematical equation that we know how to solve.

Read the problem for a general sense of what it is about; sometimes putting it into your own words will help.

Then re-read it to pick out specific information:

What you are asked to find? Usually you choose a variable to represent one unknown and other unknowns will be represented in terms of the first.

What information is given? Make a list, then organize it into a diagram, picture, or chart.

What are the relationships among the information given and the information to be found? Sometimes it helps to think of similar problems from arithmetic and the formulas needed there.

Translate the information into an equation - get into the habit of doing this for easy problems. The longer problems will not seem as difficult.

Solve the equation you have written and label your answer - then find any other quantities to be found.

Return to the original problem and check your answer(s). Do they make sense in the original problem and answer the question posed in the problem?

Adapted from On Your Own in College by William C. Resnick and David H. Heller.

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Math Study Skills Read slowly. Reading mathematics is not like reading a novel or even history. Speed reading techniques are not appropriate. Every word and symbol is important to the meaning. Do not skip the symbolic part of the text. This is often the most important part.

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
Sponsored by Write About

It happens at the start of every school year: Teachers decide that once and for all, they are going to fix the problem of student grammar errors. These kids can't write, they say. They don't know their parts of speech. They can't spell. They write in "text language." Their writing is full of run-on sentences. They don't even put capital letters at the beginning of sentences anymore!
I mean, what did they teach them last year, anyway?
And so it is decided. Before getting into any curriculum this year, before having students write a single thing, they are going to get back to basics: One, two, three full weeks of nothing but parts of speech lessons, grammar drills, punctuation exercises. Surely if they teach it hard enough, that ought to take care of it.

Except it doesn't.

As the school year wears on, despite all those drills, students continue to make the same mistakes. And all across the land, their teachers' voices rise in chorus: "I taught you this! We went over this! Don't you remember?"

Teaching Grammar Out of Context Doesn't Work

First of all, let me quickly mention that when I say "grammar," I am broadly referring to all the conventions that make writing correct: spelling, punctuation, usage, capitalization, and so on. Rather than list all of those every time, I'll use the term "grammar" to save time.

Okay, with that out of the way, here's the most important thing any teacher of English language arts should take away from this post: Grammar taught in isolation, outside the context of meaningful writing, has been found to have no significant impact on the quality of student writing; in fact, excessive drills can have a detrimental impact on it.

These findings have been supported by decades of research.

In his exhaustive 1984 meta-analysis of over 500 published studies on composition, Hillocks found grammar instruction to be so ineffective that his summary sounded more like an admonition: "School boards, administrators, and teachers who impose the systematic study of traditional school grammar on their students over lengthy periods of time in the name of teaching writing do them a gross disservice that should not be tolerated by anyone concerned with the effective teaching of good writing. Teachers concerned with teaching standard usage and typographical conventions should teach them in the context of real writing problems."

These findings were corroborated three decades later. In a 2012 meta-analysis of 115 studies or other publications, researchers looked at the impact of six different writing interventions that involved "explicitly teaching writing processes, skills, or knowledge." The only one of the six that had no statistically significant effect was grammar instruction, and half of those studied actually produced negative results (Graham, McKeown, Kiuhara, & Harris, 2012).

In fact, the evidence is so strong against this kind of teaching that the National Council of Teachers of English put forth a resolution affirming that "the use of isolated grammar and usage exercises...is a deterrent to the improvements of students' speaking and writing."

Even without academic research to back it up, the ineffectiveness of piling on grammar drills is evident every time a teacher implements the practice, only to discover that it hasn't had any significant impact on the quality of student writing.

In her 2014 piece for The Atlantic, " The Wrong Way to Teach Grammar," Michelle Navarre Cleary describes her own experiences teaching in an urban community college, where most students failed to complete a two-year degree in three years. "These students are victims of the mistaken belief that grammar lessons must come before writing, rather than grammar being something that is best learned through writing. A primary culprit: the required developmental writing classes that focused on traditional grammar instruction. Again and again, I witnessed aspiration gave way to discouragement. In this seven-college system, some 80 percent of the students test into such classes where they can spend up to a year before being asked to write more than a paragraph. Nationally, over half of university and college students in developmental classes drop out before going any further. Essentially, they leave before having begun college."

A More Effective Way to Teach Grammar

So what should teachers do instead?

1. Give Students LOTS of time to read and write.
There is no better way to improve students' writing than to have them read and write as much as possible. Building your daily classes around some form of Reading and Writing Workshop is a good place to start.

By the way, "reading" means real books, articles, and other texts that will turn students into people who love to read and read frequently. Regular exposure to lots and lots of good writing will naturally improve the correctness of students' writing. This is much less likely to happen with scripted reading programs or day after day of reading passages that have no meaningful context. Read Donalyn Miller's The Book Whisperer for inspiration on how to make this happen.

"Writing" means both formal pieces that are taken all the way through the writing process and informal writing, like journal entries and free-writes. If you choose to abandon most or all of your formal grammar instruction, you'll free up lots of class time for students to do this.

2. Curate a database of quick grammar lessons.
All the reading and writing in the world won't magically turn students into perfect writers. Because they will continue to make mechanical errors, and because these conventions are best taught within the context of the writing they'll be doing in your class, set up a system that allows individual students to quickly learn the conventions they need: This could take the form of a file cabinet or even a shared drive with folders that contain one high-quality lesson for each error: a folder for your-you're errors, a file for then-than errors, and so on.

These lessons can come from almost anywhere-an old textbook, YouTube videos, worksheets you've collected over time, or a combination of these. What's important is that they are (a) effective: Rather than dumping everything you can find into this folder-which will only frustrate and confuse students-curate only the most effective materials, and (b) self-running: Set these up so that students can access and learn from them independently, without requiring your help.

3. Have individual students do individual lessons as needed.
Now, as students do the daily work of writing in a range of genres, for a variety of purposes-which you have just made lots of extra time for by cutting whole-class grammar instruction out of your plans-send individual students to these lessons as needed. Students can go to the lesson they need, refresh themselves on the rule, and then get back to their writing, where they can correct the error and keep an eye out for future uses of that same convention.

Occasionally, you might find that many students are making the same error, in which case it may be appropriate to spend five minutes reviewing a concept as a whole class. At other times, you might want to push students to try more advanced types of sentence structures; so doing craft lessons like a study of mentor sentences could be an effective way to accomplish that.

Eventually, once students become familiar with your database of lessons, they should start to seek them out on their own as they write. This is the ideal: Students who are aware of when they need help, and who can find the resources they need to help themselves.

4. Understand that this is a process.
You will never, ever be able to teach in such a way that all students are error-free, and even students who understand the rules will occasionally mess up. Spend 10 minutes on social media and you'll see that most adults are still constantly making grammar errors. So rather than try to fix it once and for all, get your students reading and writing as much as possible and help them develop a personalized, proactive approach to producing correct writing.

Want a Fantastic Collection of Short Grammar Lessons Ready to Use?

Grammar Gap Fillers are designed to fit perfectly into a writing workshop environment, where students access only the lessons they need, when they need them. Each Gap Filler contains a short video, a Self-Check quiz the student takes on their own, and a handy Cheat Sheet they can keep in their notebook to remind them of the rule.

References

Cleary, M.N. (2014, February 25). The wrong way to teach grammar. The Atlantic. Retrieved from theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/the-wrong-way-to-teach-grammar/284014/

Graham, S., McKeown, D., Kiuhara, S., & Harris, K. R. (2012). A meta-analysis of writing instruction for students in the elementary grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(4), 879-896.

Hillocks Jr, G. (1984). What works in teaching composition: A meta-analysis of experimental treatment studies. American Journal of Education, 93(1), 133-170.

National Council of Teachers of English. (1985). Resolution on grammar exercises to teach speaking and writing. Retrieved from ncte.org/positions/statements/grammarexercises

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Listen to this post as a podcast: Sponsored by Write About It happens at the start of every school year: Teachers decide that once and for all, they are going to fix the problem of student grammar errors. These kids can't write, they say. They don't know their parts of speech.

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Glossary of Higher Ed Terms for Students

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Glossary of Higher Ed Terms for Students