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Many students think more flexibility on classroom deadlines, attendance and participation would boost their academic success, a recent Student Voice survey found. About a quarter of students also see strict attendance or participation requirements and unrealistic deadlines as actively impeding their success. But how do students define flexibility? In a new Student Voice pulse survey out today from Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse, nearly three in four students say that deadlines should be flexible when there are extenuating circumstances. Nearly half of students say that deadlines should be more flexible in general.
At the same time, half of students say they rely on deadlines to stay motivated and on track, and few think that deadlines should be eliminated altogether.
The survey of 1,250 four- and two-year college students at 55 institutions, fielded in March, also found that one in four students thinks class participation shouldn’t count toward a final grade. And nearly a third of students think that class attendance shouldn’t be tracked or count in grading.
Here are five takeaways about deadlines and flexibility:
How do students define flexibility regarding class attendance? Three takeaways:
Asked how participation in courses involving class discussions should factor into final grades, one in four students says that participation shouldn’t count at all for in-person courses. Similar to the responses on attendance, students graduating this year are more likely to say participation shouldn’t matter than are freshmen (31 percent versus 18 percent).
A third of students—the largest share—say that participation for in-person classes with discussions should be 5 to 10 percent of the final grade.
Another quarter of students say participation should count for 15 to 20 percent, with students at private institutions more likely to say this than those at publics (32 percent versus 24 percent).
Just 8 percent of students say class participation should count for 25 to 30 percent. Bigger class credit options were even less popular.
Students’ responses regarding participation in online courses were nearly identical to those for in-person classes.
Procrastination: Frode Svartdal, a psychologist at the Arctic University of Norway, has researched how academic environments foster procrastination and recommends against long deadlines for college students. “A student high in self-regulation (and low in procrastination) would probably accept flexibility because they know they can handle deadlines and attendance, but they would also accept a stricter regime because such a regime aligns with their own work habits,” he tells Inside Higher Ed. “However, students low in self-control would most probably prefer flexibility because of the opportunity to procrastinate, and chances are high that they would dislike a stricter regime.”
While the Student Voice pulse survey didn’t ask about procrastination explicitly, students who rely on deadlines to stay motivated are much likelier than students who don’t to: 1) prefer that professors break down big tasks into smaller deadlines throughout the term, 2) disagree that deadlines should be eliminated and 3) prefer flexible deadlines for emergencies over generally flexible deadlines.
Returning to Svartdal’s hypothesis, if students who rely on deadlines for motivation are more likely to be procrastinators, then these students seem interested in interim deadlines that help them work toward long-term goals, with flexibility reserved more for emergencies than general use. And if students who don’t rely on deadlines are less likely be procrastinators, they appear less interested in a strict deadline regime.
Structure vs. flexibility: Melissa Hills, an associate professor of biological sciences at MacEwan University in Canada who has written about how some flexibility around deadlines helps students manage their workloads, says both students and faculty members need structure. “However, sometimes life happens, workloads become unmanageable and a little flexibility can benefit student learning experiences.”
Building flexibility into course structure via transparent, accessible policies empowers students “to be self-directed learners and respects the inequitable barriers many face.” Hills adds that students should not have to make special requests or disclose personal information to use such policies. And faculty members developing these policies also must acknowledge “that we have structure imposed on us by term schedules, faculty workloads, institutional policies and more.”
Examples of flexible deadline policies include a no-questions-asked 48-hour extension and a one-time “free pass,” Hills says, noting that her own research demonstrates students use such policies sparingly. (Another strategy for helping students manage deadlines is the comprehensive syllabus, used by academic coaches at Wake Forest University.)
Similarly, Hills says that attendance policies should strike a balance between structure and flexibility, “where we ensure that students are achieving learning outcomes but respect that sometimes life happens.” Students must attend “most labs” if they’re to acquire the skills they need to be successful in subsequent courses, “and our policies have to reflect that.” Again, there is “no perfect solution, but some flexibility can and should be accommodated, and that flexibility should be accessible to all students.”
Meaningful participation: Regarding input during class, Hills cautions that any participation grade policies should reflect how different students engage in learning in different ways, with an emphasis on student “choice and flexibility in how they choose to participate.”
William S. Altman, a professor of psychology at Broome Community College of the State University of New York, says that whether class participation should be graded “depends on your objectives” as an instructor.
“Why would you want participation? What are you going to get from it? If you want groups to work together, then participation becomes important. If it’s just a way of taking attendance, then find another way to take attendance.”
Echoing Hills’s emphasis on transparency, Altman advises, “Whatever you choose, make sure your students understand why it’s there. Because if they understand why it’s there, they will participate if that’s what you want.”
And like Hills, Altman doesn’t necessarily require students to participate in group discussions. Instead, he asks students to complete quick written assignments at the beginning and end of class. The former ask students to respond to a quote or idea related to course content, and the latter serve as a memory-consolidation exercise as to what students learned or still have questions about from the class period.
These assignments only count for 5 percent or less of students’ grades, Altman says, but they’re significant nonetheless: “We have jumping-off points for the next class, as well. But the whole idea is, the more engaged the mind is, the better able it is to learn.”
Read more from the Student Voice survey on academic life, including how students view professor teaching style as a barrier to their success.
Many students think more flexibility on classroom deadlines, attendance and participation would boost their academic success, a recent Student Voice survey found. About a quarter of students also see strict attendance or participation requirements and unrealistic deadlines as actively impeding their success. But how do students define flexibility? In a new Student Voice pulse survey out today from Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse, nearly three in four students say that deadlines should be flexible when there are extenuating circumstances. Nearly half of students say that deadlines should be more flexible in general.
At the same time, half of students say they rely on deadlines to stay motivated and on track, and few think that deadlines should be eliminated altogether.
The survey of 1,250 four- and two-year college students at 55 institutions, fielded in March, also found that one in four students thinks class participation shouldn’t count toward a final grade. And nearly a third of students think that class attendance shouldn’t be tracked or count in grading.
Here are five takeaways about deadlines and flexibility:
How do students define flexibility regarding class attendance? Three takeaways:
Asked how participation in courses involving class discussions should factor into final grades, one in four students says that participation shouldn’t count at all for in-person courses. Similar to the responses on attendance, students graduating this year are more likely to say participation shouldn’t matter than are freshmen (31 percent versus 18 percent).
A third of students—the largest share—say that participation for in-person classes with discussions should be 5 to 10 percent of the final grade.
Another quarter of students say participation should count for 15 to 20 percent, with students at private institutions more likely to say this than those at publics (32 percent versus 24 percent).
Just 8 percent of students say class participation should count for 25 to 30 percent. Bigger class credit options were even less popular.
Students’ responses regarding participation in online courses were nearly identical to those for in-person classes.
Procrastination: Frode Svartdal, a psychologist at the Arctic University of Norway, has researched how academic environments foster procrastination and recommends against long deadlines for college students. “A student high in self-regulation (and low in procrastination) would probably accept flexibility because they know they can handle deadlines and attendance, but they would also accept a stricter regime because such a regime aligns with their own work habits,” he tells Inside Higher Ed. “However, students low in self-control would most probably prefer flexibility because of the opportunity to procrastinate, and chances are high that they would dislike a stricter regime.”
While the Student Voice pulse survey didn’t ask about procrastination explicitly, students who rely on deadlines to stay motivated are much likelier than students who don’t to: 1) prefer that professors break down big tasks into smaller deadlines throughout the term, 2) disagree that deadlines should be eliminated and 3) prefer flexible deadlines for emergencies over generally flexible deadlines.
Returning to Svartdal’s hypothesis, if students who rely on deadlines for motivation are more likely to be procrastinators, then these students seem interested in interim deadlines that help them work toward long-term goals, with flexibility reserved more for emergencies than general use. And if students who don’t rely on deadlines are less likely be procrastinators, they appear less interested in a strict deadline regime.
Structure vs. flexibility: Melissa Hills, an associate professor of biological sciences at MacEwan University in Canada who has written about how some flexibility around deadlines helps students manage their workloads, says both students and faculty members need structure. “However, sometimes life happens, workloads become unmanageable and a little flexibility can benefit student learning experiences.”
Building flexibility into course structure via transparent, accessible policies empowers students “to be self-directed learners and respects the inequitable barriers many face.” Hills adds that students should not have to make special requests or disclose personal information to use such policies. And faculty members developing these policies also must acknowledge “that we have structure imposed on us by term schedules, faculty workloads, institutional policies and more.”
Examples of flexible deadline policies include a no-questions-asked 48-hour extension and a one-time “free pass,” Hills says, noting that her own research demonstrates students use such policies sparingly. (Another strategy for helping students manage deadlines is the comprehensive syllabus, used by academic coaches at Wake Forest University.)
Similarly, Hills says that attendance policies should strike a balance between structure and flexibility, “where we ensure that students are achieving learning outcomes but respect that sometimes life happens.” Students must attend “most labs” if they’re to acquire the skills they need to be successful in subsequent courses, “and our policies have to reflect that.” Again, there is “no perfect solution, but some flexibility can and should be accommodated, and that flexibility should be accessible to all students.”
Meaningful participation: Regarding input during class, Hills cautions that any participation grade policies should reflect how different students engage in learning in different ways, with an emphasis on student “choice and flexibility in how they choose to participate.”
William S. Altman, a professor of psychology at Broome Community College of the State University of New York, says that whether class participation should be graded “depends on your objectives” as an instructor.
“Why would you want participation? What are you going to get from it? If you want groups to work together, then participation becomes important. If it’s just a way of taking attendance, then find another way to take attendance.”
Echoing Hills’s emphasis on transparency, Altman advises, “Whatever you choose, make sure your students understand why it’s there. Because if they understand why it’s there, they will participate if that’s what you want.”
And like Hills, Altman doesn’t necessarily require students to participate in group discussions. Instead, he asks students to complete quick written assignments at the beginning and end of class. The former ask students to respond to a quote or idea related to course content, and the latter serve as a memory-consolidation exercise as to what students learned or still have questions about from the class period.
These assignments only count for 5 percent or less of students’ grades, Altman says, but they’re significant nonetheless: “We have jumping-off points for the next class, as well. But the whole idea is, the more engaged the mind is, the better able it is to learn.”
Read more from the Student Voice survey on academic life, including how students view professor teaching style as a barrier to their success.
James Walsh, an education major at the University of South Carolina at Aiken who’s been recognized for his ability to creatively teach middle schoolers math, has some strong opinions about college teaching: “The notion that everyone learns the same way is ridiculous, but professors tend to stick to what they know and what they have always done.”
Outside of the education program at USC Aiken, nearly all of Walsh’s professors lecture nearly all the time, he says. With one exception—a professor of biology who facilitated lively lab discussions prompted by images—Walsh, a senior, can’t name a single professor who’s used “different teaching styles to engage us as learners.”
Lectures are a “great tool for college courses, but they are just used way too often,” he says. And while the idea that “learning can be fun is thrown out the window once in college,” it can be “just as exciting for us.”
Walsh’s credentials aside, it apparently doesn’t take a teacher in training to critique faculty teaching styles, or to want more from the college classroom experience: more than half of respondents to the recent Inside Higher Ed/College Pulse survey of 3,004 students at 128 four- and two-year institutions say teaching style has made it hard to succeed in a class since starting college.
This makes a “teaching style that didn’t work for me” the No. 1 barrier to academic success cited by students in the survey over all. The share of students who say this is even larger for key subgroups, including those with learning disabilities or related conditions.
Relatedly, half of students want professors to experiment with different teaching styles. This was the No. 2 response to a separate survey question about which faculty actions students believe would promote their academic success. Only more flexible deadlines was more popular.
Beyond deadlines, some 44 percent of students say they want greater flexibility when it comes to class attendance and participation. This was the No. 3 faculty action students say would promote their academic success.
Students see both internal classroom dynamics and external factors as getting in the way of their success.
One in four students cite strict attendance or participation requirements as a barrier to success. The same goes for unrealistic deadlines. One in five students cite a professor whose office hours conflict with their schedule, an online course they would have preferred to take in person or inaccessible course materials.
Although sense of belonging is increasingly part of student success discussions, this issue fell lower on the list of barriers noted by survey respondents. Sixteen percent of students say they’ve been negatively affected by the feeling that they don’t belong in their academic program. Among students with learning disabilities or similar conditions, it’s 22 percent.
Relatedly, 14 percent of students over all say their success has been impeded by feeling like they don’t belong at their institution (not just their academic program). That increases for LGBTQIA+ students (19 percent) and Black students (18 percent).
Amy Salazar, associate vice provost for student success at Sam Houston State University, says that even though belonging ranks lower than some other barriers, it remains “troubling to me given that this lack of belonging is reported as more significant for our most marginalized student populations.”
There’s still work to be done to create classroom environments “where every student feels as though they belong and is affirmed in their ability to be successful,” she adds.
Regarding students’ other concerns, Salazar recalls the work of psychologist Ella R. Kahu of Massey University in New Zealand on framing student engagement, which asserts that “lifeload” is a critical factor. (What is lifeload? Kahu described it in one 2013 paper as “the sum of all the pressures a student has in their life,” including college but also employment, finances, family needs and health, among other dynamics.)
That instruction- and classwork-related barriers barely outrank school-life balance and mental health “reminds us that our students are carrying a lot into the classroom, and that is impacting their ability to be successful,” Salazar says. “All of these point back to a generation of students who are coming to college less academically prepared given pandemic learning loss, with more financial concerns and higher rates of mental health needs.”
The next step? “For us as higher education institutions to adapt to the students we have today and not the students we were in prior decades. Our understanding of the college experience has to adapt to the students entering our campuses now that are coming with radically different lived experiences than we had.”
When asked to reflect on what educators could do to help them be more successful, Student Voice respondents zeroed in on flexibility, variety, clarity and affinity.
One-quarter of respondents say they want their professors to offer some class sessions online, even for in-person courses. And about one in five students say professors could boost their academic success by being more accessible outside of class hours, by including wellness resources in syllabi or discussing them in class, and by including academic support resources in syllabi.
Few students—less than one in 10—want professors to set higher expectations for them and their peers, with 12 percent of male students and 5 percent of women saying this.
Louis Deslauriers, director of science teaching and learning at Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and senior preceptor in physics, has found that even when students say they prefer learning from lectures over active learning methods, they’ve learned significantly more in the active learning classroom. (This is consistent with many other studies finding that students learn more in class when they’re required to engage with the material via individual or group activities.) Of the Student Voice findings, Deslauriers says he can make some educated guesses about what’s driving certain responses.
On teaching-style concerns, for example, Deslauriers says students might have become “more discerning about effective pedagogies during the pandemic.” Why? It’s hard to forget “the experience of enduring a 90-minute online traditional lecture.”
That students are concerned about flexibility with deadlines and attendance also makes sense, as “many students today juggle multiple responsibilities,” he adds.
The Student Voice survey also asked students about their experiences with grading and with asking professors for accommodations that aren’t required (think: a deadline extension for a personal emergency). Some key takeaways:
Among students who’ve asked for discretionary accommodations (n=2,196), just over half say the response or responses were positive. A slightly smaller share says reactions were mixed. Just 5 percent report negative reactions only.
Some 12 percent of students taking online courses only report negative reactions, however.
Asked in the survey to share an example of a faculty action that made them feel like they had a better chance of succeeding in a class, students tend to recall actions that illuminate other data points. These include deadline extensions for personal issues, large workloads or mistakes, and professors reaching out or making themselves unusually available to struggling students.
One respondent at Lansing Community College remembers how a professor even gave out his personal cellphone number for after-hours help, and that this made the difference between the student staying enrolled and dropping out.
Here are some additional examples of helpful faculty actions students have experienced:
“One time, I got confused with a deadline and thought an assignment was due at 10 p.m. instead of 10 a.m.,” wrote a student from Louisiana State University. “I raced after my professor, told them about the situation and how I had so much on my plate at the time (school, club, research, grad apps, etc.). They let me turn in the assignment late without penalty and were very understanding. That gesture alone made me more motivated to attend class and do well in the course. I got 10 times more engaged in the material and did extremely well in the class.”
“Not giving multiple assignments during exam week,” says a University of Houston student. “Another good thing that I had a professor do was that they stated that the first midterm could only help your grade. If you scored well, it would be helpful, if you didn’t score well, it wouldn’t hurt your grade. This way I was more enthusiastic and actually learned things instead of being only focused on my grade.”
At Drexel University, a student recalls a professor reaching out when an assignment didn’t get handed in.
“I explained that I was simply behind and not deserving of an extension. My professor said that next time, I should reach out beforehand (not just to her, but to other professors as well) because the professors in my university are generally nice people. This has made me reassured in her class and feel more comfortable with asking questions and requesting extensions.”
Sara Brownell, a professor of life sciences at Arizona State University whose research focuses on inclusive learning environments in the natural sciences, says that some of the anecdotes stand out because they’re “just examples of instructors being compassionate and caring. Students deserve that and instructors can bolster student learning by showing that compassion and caring.”
At the same time, such examples raise potential questions about how students’ needs and expectations may conflict with faculty members’ own needs and expectations in this new era of teaching and learning. (And it’s worth highlighting that not all such actions are desirable to all students. Kathryn Lakin, a sophomore majoring in English at Boston University, who was not part of the survey, tells Inside Higher Ed she’s glad that having a professor’s cellphone number proved helpful to someone else, but that “I am very much against the idea of constant availability. I think being constantly available by phone eliminates important boundaries and creates a work-all-the-time culture we should try to avoid,” in the interest of both student and faculty mental health.)
Scott Freeman, a teaching professor emeritus of biology at the University of Washington who has found that active learning increases student performance across demographics and especially among historically minoritized students, says that individual outreach to students proves especially “tricky” in the kinds of high-enrollment courses he taught. Moreover, he says, “we’re trying to prepare students to be competent professionals and contribute to the to the world. If you work for a company, there may not be a lot of flexible deadlines.”
In any case, he says, “I would love to see more work on all that—when is it positive and supports better student outcomes?”
What would you like to hear more about from this survey? Share your reactions and questions here.
The University of South Dakota’s TRIO Student Support Services is like all other federally funded TRIO SSS programs in that it serves low-income, first-generation or disabled students. Similarly, it offers tutoring and assistance with choosing courses, applying for financial aid, building financial literacy and applying to graduate programs. But an innovative first-year experience program is central to USD’s TRIO approach.
Impact on persistence: Beyond the basic TRIO requirements, USD’s SSS program offers an original first-year experience, which staff members say contributes to program participants’ high persistence rate. How high? Ninety-four percent, compared to 69 percent for USD students with similar backgrounds who are not enrolled in TRIO. Staff members also say TRIO program participants’ good academic standing rate is 96 percent, compared to an institutional baseline of 82 percent.
“TRIO SSS is a federal program, so many projects exist nationwide,” explains Dallas Doane, USD’s TRIO SSS director. “Our first-year experience program really is unique, though. It gives us a common intellectual experience and academic component in providing our services. Additionally, we know for the students we serve—first-generation, income-eligible and students with disabilities—that feeling a sense of belonging can make or break their persistence.”
The federally funded TRIO program, which offers programs beyond Student Support Services, considers itself the originator of the first-generation concept. In a 2021 interview published in the Journal of First-Generation Student Success, council president Maureen Hoyler and Arnold Mitchem, president emeritus, say that the term has its roots in the 1980 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.
Ahead of that legislation, Mitchem says, TRIO educators were asked to put together recommendations, including TRIO eligibility criteria. Income alone proved problematic given differing costs of living across the country, they say, and educators rejected the loaded terms “culturally disadvantaged” or “rurally isolated.” “First-generation” was suggested, and it stuck. Hoyler adds, “The term was introduced to promote change and to produce equity and to produce a recognition of individuals’ potential that may not have had their potential recognized without the term.”
What the experience includes: Supports for this population of students cover a number of areas within the first year.
The need: Kimberly Jones, executive vice president of the Council for Opportunity in Education, says research shows that “for all students, regardless of what income you’re coming from, the first few weeks of your experiences of undergraduate are determinative of whether you're going to sink or swim. And so TRIO especially makes it a priority to grab ahold of those young people, and sometimes not-so-young people, early.”
Jones’s favored analogy for TRIO? “You can give a 16-year-old a pair of car keys, but if you don’t give them driving lessons, they’re not going anywhere,” she says. So by supporting new college students “intentionally, aggressively and early on, we’re helping give them the tools to succeed.”
Another benefit of TRIO is community. Jones explains, “For students, especially if you're first gen, no one else in your family can tell you what it's like to be on a college campus and talk to professors, or about the syllabus and the registrar’s office. So TRIO gives you a community that’s going through that experience with you. It gives you a home base on campus where you can just go and feel safe for a minute.”
Jones adds that because the federal guidelines for a what a TRIO program must include are somewhat limited, it becomes “incumbent upon the project directors and their staff to be innovative.”
Does your campus have an innovative approach to federally funded TRIO programs? A notable first-year experience program? Tell us about it.
James Walsh, an education major at the University of South Carolina at Aiken who’s been recognized for his ability to creatively teach middle schoolers math, has some strong opinions about college teaching: “The notion that everyone learns the same way is ridiculous, but professors tend to stick to what they know and what they have always done.”
Outside of the education program at USC Aiken, nearly all of Walsh’s professors lecture nearly all the time, he says. With one exception—a professor of biology who facilitated lively lab discussions prompted by images—Walsh, a senior, can’t name a single professor who’s used “different teaching styles to engage us as learners.”
Lectures are a “great tool for college courses, but they are just used way too often,” he says. And while the idea that “learning can be fun is thrown out the window once in college,” it can be “just as exciting for us.”
Walsh’s credentials aside, it apparently doesn’t take a teacher in training to critique faculty teaching styles, or to want more from the college classroom experience: more than half of respondents to the recent Inside Higher Ed/College Pulse survey of 3,004 students at 128 four- and two-year institutions say teaching style has made it hard to succeed in a class since starting college.
This makes a “teaching style that didn’t work for me” the No. 1 barrier to academic success cited by students in the survey over all. The share of students who say this is even larger for key subgroups, including those with learning disabilities or related conditions.
Relatedly, half of students want professors to experiment with different teaching styles. This was the No. 2 response to a separate survey question about which faculty actions students believe would promote their academic success. Only more flexible deadlines was more popular.
Beyond deadlines, some 44 percent of students say they want greater flexibility when it comes to class attendance and participation. This was the No. 3 faculty action students say would promote their academic success.
Students see both internal classroom dynamics and external factors as getting in the way of their success.
One in four students cite strict attendance or participation requirements as a barrier to success. The same goes for unrealistic deadlines. One in five students cite a professor whose office hours conflict with their schedule, an online course they would have preferred to take in person or inaccessible course materials.
Although sense of belonging is increasingly part of student success discussions, this issue fell lower on the list of barriers noted by survey respondents. Sixteen percent of students say they’ve been negatively affected by the feeling that they don’t belong in their academic program. Among students with learning disabilities or similar conditions, it’s 22 percent.
Relatedly, 14 percent of students over all say their success has been impeded by feeling like they don’t belong at their institution (not just their academic program). That increases for LGBTQIA+ students (19 percent) and Black students (18 percent).
Amy Salazar, associate vice provost for student success at Sam Houston State University, says that even though belonging ranks lower than some other barriers, it remains “troubling to me given that this lack of belonging is reported as more significant for our most marginalized student populations.”
There’s still work to be done to create classroom environments “where every student feels as though they belong and is affirmed in their ability to be successful,” she adds.
Regarding students’ other concerns, Salazar recalls the work of psychologist Ella R. Kahu of Massey University in New Zealand on framing student engagement, which asserts that “lifeload” is a critical factor. (What is lifeload? Kahu described it in one 2013 paper as “the sum of all the pressures a student has in their life,” including college but also employment, finances, family needs and health, among other dynamics.)
That instruction- and classwork-related barriers barely outrank school-life balance and mental health “reminds us that our students are carrying a lot into the classroom, and that is impacting their ability to be successful,” Salazar says. “All of these point back to a generation of students who are coming to college less academically prepared given pandemic learning loss, with more financial concerns and higher rates of mental health needs.”
The next step? “For us as higher education institutions to adapt to the students we have today and not the students we were in prior decades. Our understanding of the college experience has to adapt to the students entering our campuses now that are coming with radically different lived experiences than we had.”
When asked to reflect on what educators could do to help them be more successful, Student Voice respondents zeroed in on flexibility, variety, clarity and affinity.
One-quarter of respondents say they want their professors to offer some class sessions online, even for in-person courses. And about one in five students say professors could boost their academic success by being more accessible outside of class hours, by including wellness resources in syllabi or discussing them in class, and by including academic support resources in syllabi.
Few students—less than one in 10—want professors to set higher expectations for them and their peers, with 12 percent of male students and 5 percent of women saying this.
Louis Deslauriers, director of science teaching and learning at Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and senior preceptor in physics, has found that even when students say they prefer learning from lectures over active learning methods, they’ve learned significantly more in the active learning classroom. (This is consistent with many other studies finding that students learn more in class when they’re required to engage with the material via individual or group activities.) Of the Student Voice findings, Deslauriers says he can make some educated guesses about what’s driving certain responses.
On teaching-style concerns, for example, Deslauriers says students might have become “more discerning about effective pedagogies during the pandemic.” Why? It’s hard to forget “the experience of enduring a 90-minute online traditional lecture.”
That students are concerned about flexibility with deadlines and attendance also makes sense, as “many students today juggle multiple responsibilities,” he adds.
The Student Voice survey also asked students about their experiences with grading and with asking professors for accommodations that aren’t required (think: a deadline extension for a personal emergency). Some key takeaways:
Among students who’ve asked for discretionary accommodations (n=2,196), just over half say the response or responses were positive. A slightly smaller share says reactions were mixed. Just 5 percent report negative reactions only.
Some 12 percent of students taking online courses only report negative reactions, however.
Asked in the survey to share an example of a faculty action that made them feel like they had a better chance of succeeding in a class, students tend to recall actions that illuminate other data points. These include deadline extensions for personal issues, large workloads or mistakes, and professors reaching out or making themselves unusually available to struggling students.
One respondent at Lansing Community College remembers how a professor even gave out his personal cellphone number for after-hours help, and that this made the difference between the student staying enrolled and dropping out.
Here are some additional examples of helpful faculty actions students have experienced:
“One time, I got confused with a deadline and thought an assignment was due at 10 p.m. instead of 10 a.m.,” wrote a student from Louisiana State University. “I raced after my professor, told them about the situation and how I had so much on my plate at the time (school, club, research, grad apps, etc.). They let me turn in the assignment late without penalty and were very understanding. That gesture alone made me more motivated to attend class and do well in the course. I got 10 times more engaged in the material and did extremely well in the class.”
“Not giving multiple assignments during exam week,” says a University of Houston student. “Another good thing that I had a professor do was that they stated that the first midterm could only help your grade. If you scored well, it would be helpful, if you didn’t score well, it wouldn’t hurt your grade. This way I was more enthusiastic and actually learned things instead of being only focused on my grade.”
At Drexel University, a student recalls a professor reaching out when an assignment didn’t get handed in.
“I explained that I was simply behind and not deserving of an extension. My professor said that next time, I should reach out beforehand (not just to her, but to other professors as well) because the professors in my university are generally nice people. This has made me reassured in her class and feel more comfortable with asking questions and requesting extensions.”
Sara Brownell, a professor of life sciences at Arizona State University whose research focuses on inclusive learning environments in the natural sciences, says that some of the anecdotes stand out because they’re “just examples of instructors being compassionate and caring. Students deserve that and instructors can bolster student learning by showing that compassion and caring.”
At the same time, such examples raise potential questions about how students’ needs and expectations may conflict with faculty members’ own needs and expectations in this new era of teaching and learning. (And it’s worth highlighting that not all such actions are desirable to all students. Kathryn Lakin, a sophomore majoring in English at Boston University, who was not part of the survey, tells Inside Higher Ed she’s glad that having a professor’s cellphone number proved helpful to someone else, but that “I am very much against the idea of constant availability. I think being constantly available by phone eliminates important boundaries and creates a work-all-the-time culture we should try to avoid,” in the interest of both student and faculty mental health.)
Scott Freeman, a teaching professor emeritus of biology at the University of Washington who has found that active learning increases student performance across demographics and especially among historically minoritized students, says that individual outreach to students proves especially “tricky” in the kinds of high-enrollment courses he taught. Moreover, he says, “we’re trying to prepare students to be competent professionals and contribute to the to the world. If you work for a company, there may not be a lot of flexible deadlines.”
In any case, he says, “I would love to see more work on all that—when is it positive and supports better student outcomes?”
What would you like to hear more about from this survey? Share your reactions and questions here.
The University of South Dakota’s TRIO Student Support Services is like all other federally funded TRIO SSS programs in that it serves low-income, first-generation or disabled students. Similarly, it offers tutoring and assistance with choosing courses, applying for financial aid, building financial literacy and applying to graduate programs. But an innovative first-year experience program is central to USD’s TRIO approach.
Impact on persistence: Beyond the basic TRIO requirements, USD’s SSS program offers an original first-year experience, which staff members say contributes to program participants’ high persistence rate. How high? Ninety-four percent, compared to 69 percent for USD students with similar backgrounds who are not enrolled in TRIO. Staff members also say TRIO program participants’ good academic standing rate is 96 percent, compared to an institutional baseline of 82 percent.
“TRIO SSS is a federal program, so many projects exist nationwide,” explains Dallas Doane, USD’s TRIO SSS director. “Our first-year experience program really is unique, though. It gives us a common intellectual experience and academic component in providing our services. Additionally, we know for the students we serve—first-generation, income-eligible and students with disabilities—that feeling a sense of belonging can make or break their persistence.”
The federally funded TRIO program, which offers programs beyond Student Support Services, considers itself the originator of the first-generation concept. In a 2021 interview published in the Journal of First-Generation Student Success, council president Maureen Hoyler and Arnold Mitchem, president emeritus, say that the term has its roots in the 1980 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.
Ahead of that legislation, Mitchem says, TRIO educators were asked to put together recommendations, including TRIO eligibility criteria. Income alone proved problematic given differing costs of living across the country, they say, and educators rejected the loaded terms “culturally disadvantaged” or “rurally isolated.” “First-generation” was suggested, and it stuck. Hoyler adds, “The term was introduced to promote change and to produce equity and to produce a recognition of individuals’ potential that may not have had their potential recognized without the term.”
What the experience includes: Supports for this population of students cover a number of areas within the first year.
The need: Kimberly Jones, executive vice president of the Council for Opportunity in Education, says research shows that “for all students, regardless of what income you’re coming from, the first few weeks of your experiences of undergraduate are determinative of whether you're going to sink or swim. And so TRIO especially makes it a priority to grab ahold of those young people, and sometimes not-so-young people, early.”
Jones’s favored analogy for TRIO? “You can give a 16-year-old a pair of car keys, but if you don’t give them driving lessons, they’re not going anywhere,” she says. So by supporting new college students “intentionally, aggressively and early on, we’re helping give them the tools to succeed.”
Another benefit of TRIO is community. Jones explains, “For students, especially if you're first gen, no one else in your family can tell you what it's like to be on a college campus and talk to professors, or about the syllabus and the registrar’s office. So TRIO gives you a community that’s going through that experience with you. It gives you a home base on campus where you can just go and feel safe for a minute.”
Jones adds that because the federal guidelines for a what a TRIO program must include are somewhat limited, it becomes “incumbent upon the project directors and their staff to be innovative.”
Does your campus have an innovative approach to federally funded TRIO programs? A notable first-year experience program? Tell us about it.
The recent Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse Student Voice survey of two- and four-year college students about academic life revealed gaps in core advising functions. Just 55 percent of students say they’ve received guidance on required courses and course sequences needed for graduation, for instance, and just 52 percent say they’ve gotten help reviewing their degree progress to make sure they’re on track to graduate.
This doesn’t mean students don’t benefit from advising, however. To the contrary—existing research positively links increased engagement with advisers to student success metrics such as retention. The Student Voice data also suggest that students benefit from more face time with advisers. Students who report that they are required to meet periodically with their advisers (n=613, or about 20 percent of the sample) are more likely than the group over all to say they’ve received guidance on required coursework (69 percent) or reviewing their degree progress (64 percent).
Even students who report being required to meet just once with their adviser (519 of the 3,004 total respondents) appear to benefit: 68 percent say they’ve received guidance on required coursework, and 60 percent say they’ve reviewed their progress to degree with an adviser.
That said, many institutions don’t mandate meetings with advisers. (Just one in five Student Voice survey respondents says they’re required to meet periodically with advisers, though the number is closer to three in 10 for students at private institutions and just 14 percent for community college students.) Why not? Advisers face caseloads in the hundreds, adviser turnover is a problem that COVID-19 only exacerbated and institutions don’t always prioritize advising for resource distribution. Some colleges and universities also refrain from mandating advising because of concerns about enforcement—that is, students who don’t meet with advisers as required may face administrative holds on their accounts, and such holds can backfire.
So if students benefit from meeting with their advisers and institutions can’t always mandate such meetings, what can be done to encourage students to engage with advising? Experts offer the following eight actions:
Jennifer Bloom, professor of educational leadership and research methodology at Florida Atlantic University, recommends connecting with students via appreciative advising, a framework she co-founded 20 years ago that’s now widely practiced.
Bloom defines appreciative advising as the “intentional, collaborative practice of asking generative, open-ended questions that help students optimize their educational experiences and achieve their dreams, goals and potentials.” There are six stages to appreciative advising: disarm, discover, dream, design, deliver and don’t settle.
Amanda Propst Cuevas, director of the Office of Appreciative Education at Florida Atlantic, says that while appreciative advising is rooted in appreciative inquiry, an organizational development framework, “it really is a relationship-building framework. We build relationships primarily with our students, but also it’s a framework that we use to build relationships with one another.”
Cuevas sees both student engagement and advising-team morale as relatively low post-pandemic. But she says “we can’t wait for a windfall of mega dollars to hit our campuses, and we can’t wait until we have a full staff. We’ve got to start making a difference where we are, and it’s within our control and power to be able to do that.”
Melinda Anderson, executive director of NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising, says that her group has noticed “differences in who seeks support based on race.” Student Voice findings indicate the same—nearly two in three white students have received guidance on required courses and course sequences needed for graduation, compared to about half of Asian, Black and Hispanic students.
Anderson attributes differing levels of engagement and supports received, in part, to students “knowing where support is located and feeling comfortable with the support available. Many campuses are working on creating campus environments that create a strong sense of belonging for students of color, adult learners and students who identify as LGBTQIA.” This includes advising spaces.
Advisers can practice proactive advising by using student success platforms and predictive analytics to do outreach, says Tom Nguyen, director of advising and career operations at Palm Beach State College. “Each adviser can pull reports on their students in their caseload, and then they can send an email, send a text message or simply just call the student.” Advisers can send general wellness messages (“Hey, how are you doing? Hang in there, keep going”), Nguyen says, or target specific groups, such as students nearing graduation or those with grade point averages below a certain threshold.
Nguyen encourages advisers to directly call each student once per semester, versus messaging via email or text, to “implement a more personal touch.” Yet there is a balance to strike with outreach, in that students may feel “spammed” by too many messages, putting the adviser at risk of being blocked, he says. “We do outreach almost weekly but not more than once a week.”
Regarding outreach and other written advising communications, language matters. One recent study on email micromessaging linked the use of growth mind-set-oriented language and appreciative advising-oriented language to better student outcomes than mere informational messages. The effects were biggest for underrepresented student groups.
Monica Parrish Trent, vice president of network engagement at Achieving the Dream, advocates not just holistic advising but holistic student support in general. This involves using qualitative and quantitative data to understand students and their needs and then designing services around them.
“You can have the services, you can have an advising office, you can have student coaches, you can have interventions, tutoring centers, et cetera. But if they’re not delivered in a way that the students find inviting and inclusive, they’re not necessarily going to access them,” Parrish says. “And then you miss the connection students really need to feel like this is the place that they belong, in order to get the help that they need.”
Parrish praises leaders at Coahoma Community College, a historically Black college in rural Mississippi, as having worked to understand the students they serve and then redesigning services accordingly. Some examples: Parrish says Coahoma added a mandatory student success course to familiarize students with campus supports and connect their student experiences with career goals. Administrators also rethought the advising model to better accommodate working students, including by extending hours.
In a similar vein, Florida Atlantic added limited virtual advising hours in the evening.
No technology can replace expert advising and the relationships foundational to it. But many advising and student success teams now use virtual platforms such as EAB’s Navigate or Salesforce Education Cloud to manage caseloads, to coordinate student support among faculty and staff members, and to help students schedule appointments.
Steve Estes, director of academic advising at Northern Illinois University’s College of Liberal Arts, which uses Navigate, praises the platform’s appointment campaign feature for proactive outreach and advising.
“We find those tremendously successful in terms of nudging students ahead of registration periods,” he says. “Registration starts in a month, and our advisers are putting campaigns out for their students to be able to just click on a link and schedule an appointment with their assigned adviser.” Of course, Estes cautions, “it’s great for getting students here.” Then the question becomes whether they understand their degree requirements and more—and “you can never do too well in that department.” Estes says the next step for Northern Illinois is creating customized degree plans within the Navigate platform.
Southern New Hampshire University has revamped its advising model to now support students for all four years with both a professional and faculty adviser—a big investment in human capital, explains Scott Barker, vice president of student advisement. At the same time, SNHU is investing in technology to bolster advising supports. One example? A texting chat bot named Penny, which Barker says “allows us to identify students who may be at risk of failing or dropping out and triggers the adviser to reach out to the student. We view it as a tool and never something that would replace an adviser.”
Kathe Pelletier, director of teaching and learning at Educause, notes that the group recently expanded its technology solutions market dashboard within the analytics services portal to include advising-related technologies in the following categories: education plan creation and tracking, credit transfer and articulation, advising case management, and early alert. The dashboard allows institutions to view technology solutions used by other institutions and find peer and aspirational institutions.
Managing the advisee-adviser relationship is the student’s job, in part (not just the adviser’s). But students generally need to be taught what advising is, why it matters and how it works. Many institutions address advising during orientation, and some cover it in mandatory student success courses. Even prospective students can be taught about advising, says Patti B. Harris, director of Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP) in North Carolina, part of a federally funded college access initiative. Advisers can partner with on-the-ground admissions officers to make sure this is happening, she adds.
“There is a literacy aspect to this and an awareness of the college setting,” Harris says. “We [at GEAR UP] are doing our best to support students at the high school level to get them acclimated to much more of terminology around what it means to register for classes and deciding when to meet with your academic adviser. That you have to schedule those things, and you may not always be given a day and time, and no one’s coming to knock on your door.”
Some institutions also set clear expectations for what students should contribute to the adviser-advisee relationship. High Point University, for example, tells students they should communicate their goals and values, contact and schedule regular appointments with advisers, and prepare for advising sessions, among other responsibilities.
Numerous institutions now employ student success coaches to help first-year students, students from certain demographic groups or students generally in ways that overlap with traditional academic advising.
Ohio State University started doing something a bit different just prior to and throughout COVID-19: using federal CARES Act money to hire “substitute” advisers into two-year, remote positions do some traditional advising and the outreach that full-time advisers don’t have enough time to do.
Amy Treboni, senior director of academic advising at Ohio State, says that these six advisers (and an incoming seventh) have allowed the university to offer 6,000 additional advising time slots to students. Substitute advisers (now called “TAG” advisers, because they’re tied to the Office of Transition and Academic Growth) have run various outreach campaigns, as well, including a “kudos” campaign to students who improved their grade point averages by 0.5. The kudos campaign, in particular, saw unusually high email-open rates from students—about 70 percent.
“How often does your university send you something saying, ‘You did awesome’?” Treboni asks. “They might have gone from a 2.0 to a 2.5. GPA, so they’re not going to be on the dean’s list. But they’ve made a huge change, right? We want to be able to acknowledge that and help them build and keep confidence in their academic endeavors.”
When students do seek out advisers, getting an appointment may be difficult at peak times, such as during registration. To meet demand, some colleges offer group advising appointments. Among them: Tallahassee Community College, where students can sign up for one of two daily small-group Zoom advising sessions. The goal of this particular event is to get students fully registered.
Small-group advising as a concept isn’t limited to registration, though. Rachel Moody, director of international academic partnerships and international academic advising at the University at Albany, part of the State University of New York (who clarified she was speaking as an advising scholar and not on behalf of her institution), says she prefers mandatory one-on-one advising, even if it’s just over email. But in situations “where advisers have very high caseloads and one-on-one meetings are 15 to 20 minutes long,” she says, “small-group advising sessions with students with similar academic or career interests can work very well,” especially when students know they’re welcome to follow up with a one-on-one meeting.
Small-group meetings work particularly well “when students know what to expect and how to prepare,” Moody adds, and when peer advisers join.
Ultimately, Moody says, “the absence of strong, positive advising relationships that foster a sense of belonging will always yield dissatisfied students. Academic advising needs to be part of the culture—a good part. If advisers are only seen when it is time to schedule courses for the next semester, that is a sign of a transactional relationship versus a transformational one.”
Does your institution do something not noted in this article to encourage student engagement with the academic advising process or with advisers? Tell us about it.
The recent Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse Student Voice survey of two- and four-year college students about academic life revealed gaps in core advising functions. Just 55 percent of students say they’ve received guidance on required courses and course sequences needed for graduation, for instance, and just 52 percent say they’ve gotten help reviewing their degree progress to make sure they’re on track to graduate.
This doesn’t mean students don’t benefit from advising, however. To the contrary—existing research positively links increased engagement with advisers to student success metrics such as retention. The Student Voice data also suggest that students benefit from more face time with advisers. Students who report that they are required to meet periodically with their advisers (n=613, or about 20 percent of the sample) are more likely than the group over all to say they’ve received guidance on required coursework (69 percent) or reviewing their degree progress (64 percent).
Even students who report being required to meet just once with their adviser (519 of the 3,004 total respondents) appear to benefit: 68 percent say they’ve received guidance on required coursework, and 60 percent say they’ve reviewed their progress to degree with an adviser.
That said, many institutions don’t mandate meetings with advisers. (Just one in five Student Voice survey respondents says they’re required to meet periodically with advisers, though the number is closer to three in 10 for students at private institutions and just 14 percent for community college students.) Why not? Advisers face caseloads in the hundreds, adviser turnover is a problem that COVID-19 only exacerbated and institutions don’t always prioritize advising for resource distribution. Some colleges and universities also refrain from mandating advising because of concerns about enforcement—that is, students who don’t meet with advisers as required may face administrative holds on their accounts, and such holds can backfire.
So if students benefit from meeting with their advisers and institutions can’t always mandate such meetings, what can be done to encourage students to engage with advising? Experts offer the following eight actions:
Jennifer Bloom, professor of educational leadership and research methodology at Florida Atlantic University, recommends connecting with students via appreciative advising, a framework she co-founded 20 years ago that’s now widely practiced.
Bloom defines appreciative advising as the “intentional, collaborative practice of asking generative, open-ended questions that help students optimize their educational experiences and achieve their dreams, goals and potentials.” There are six stages to appreciative advising: disarm, discover, dream, design, deliver and don’t settle.
Amanda Propst Cuevas, director of the Office of Appreciative Education at Florida Atlantic, says that while appreciative advising is rooted in appreciative inquiry, an organizational development framework, “it really is a relationship-building framework. We build relationships primarily with our students, but also it’s a framework that we use to build relationships with one another.”
Cuevas sees both student engagement and advising-team morale as relatively low post-pandemic. But she says “we can’t wait for a windfall of mega dollars to hit our campuses, and we can’t wait until we have a full staff. We’ve got to start making a difference where we are, and it’s within our control and power to be able to do that.”
Melinda Anderson, executive director of NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising, says that her group has noticed “differences in who seeks support based on race.” Student Voice findings indicate the same—nearly two in three white students have received guidance on required courses and course sequences needed for graduation, compared to about half of Asian, Black and Hispanic students.
Anderson attributes differing levels of engagement and supports received, in part, to students “knowing where support is located and feeling comfortable with the support available. Many campuses are working on creating campus environments that create a strong sense of belonging for students of color, adult learners and students who identify as LGBTQIA.” This includes advising spaces.
Advisers can practice proactive advising by using student success platforms and predictive analytics to do outreach, says Tom Nguyen, director of advising and career operations at Palm Beach State College. “Each adviser can pull reports on their students in their caseload, and then they can send an email, send a text message or simply just call the student.” Advisers can send general wellness messages (“Hey, how are you doing? Hang in there, keep going”), Nguyen says, or target specific groups, such as students nearing graduation or those with grade point averages below a certain threshold.
Nguyen encourages advisers to directly call each student once per semester, versus messaging via email or text, to “implement a more personal touch.” Yet there is a balance to strike with outreach, in that students may feel “spammed” by too many messages, putting the adviser at risk of being blocked, he says. “We do outreach almost weekly but not more than once a week.”
Regarding outreach and other written advising communications, language matters. One recent study on email micromessaging linked the use of growth mind-set-oriented language and appreciative advising-oriented language to better student outcomes than mere informational messages. The effects were biggest for underrepresented student groups.
Monica Parrish Trent, vice president of network engagement at Achieving the Dream, advocates not just holistic advising but holistic student support in general. This involves using qualitative and quantitative data to understand students and their needs and then designing services around them.
“You can have the services, you can have an advising office, you can have student coaches, you can have interventions, tutoring centers, et cetera. But if they’re not delivered in a way that the students find inviting and inclusive, they’re not necessarily going to access them,” Parrish says. “And then you miss the connection students really need to feel like this is the place that they belong, in order to get the help that they need.”
Parrish praises leaders at Coahoma Community College, a historically Black college in rural Mississippi, as having worked to understand the students they serve and then redesigning services accordingly. Some examples: Parrish says Coahoma added a mandatory student success course to familiarize students with campus supports and connect their student experiences with career goals. Administrators also rethought the advising model to better accommodate working students, including by extending hours.
In a similar vein, Florida Atlantic added limited virtual advising hours in the evening.
No technology can replace expert advising and the relationships foundational to it. But many advising and student success teams now use virtual platforms such as EAB’s Navigate or Salesforce Education Cloud to manage caseloads, to coordinate student support among faculty and staff members, and to help students schedule appointments.
Steve Estes, director of academic advising at Northern Illinois University’s College of Liberal Arts, which uses Navigate, praises the platform’s appointment campaign feature for proactive outreach and advising.
“We find those tremendously successful in terms of nudging students ahead of registration periods,” he says. “Registration starts in a month, and our advisers are putting campaigns out for their students to be able to just click on a link and schedule an appointment with their assigned adviser.” Of course, Estes cautions, “it’s great for getting students here.” Then the question becomes whether they understand their degree requirements and more—and “you can never do too well in that department.” Estes says the next step for Northern Illinois is creating customized degree plans within the Navigate platform.
Southern New Hampshire University has revamped its advising model to now support students for all four years with both a professional and faculty adviser—a big investment in human capital, explains Scott Barker, vice president of student advisement. At the same time, SNHU is investing in technology to bolster advising supports. One example? A texting chat bot named Penny, which Barker says “allows us to identify students who may be at risk of failing or dropping out and triggers the adviser to reach out to the student. We view it as a tool and never something that would replace an adviser.”
Kathe Pelletier, director of teaching and learning at Educause, notes that the group recently expanded its technology solutions market dashboard within the analytics services portal to include advising-related technologies in the following categories: education plan creation and tracking, credit transfer and articulation, advising case management, and early alert. The dashboard allows institutions to view technology solutions used by other institutions and find peer and aspirational institutions.
Managing the advisee-adviser relationship is the student’s job, in part (not just the adviser’s). But students generally need to be taught what advising is, why it matters and how it works. Many institutions address advising during orientation, and some cover it in mandatory student success courses. Even prospective students can be taught about advising, says Patti B. Harris, director of Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP) in North Carolina, part of a federally funded college access initiative. Advisers can partner with on-the-ground admissions officers to make sure this is happening, she adds.
“There is a literacy aspect to this and an awareness of the college setting,” Harris says. “We [at GEAR UP] are doing our best to support students at the high school level to get them acclimated to much more of terminology around what it means to register for classes and deciding when to meet with your academic adviser. That you have to schedule those things, and you may not always be given a day and time, and no one’s coming to knock on your door.”
Some institutions also set clear expectations for what students should contribute to the adviser-advisee relationship. High Point University, for example, tells students they should communicate their goals and values, contact and schedule regular appointments with advisers, and prepare for advising sessions, among other responsibilities.
Numerous institutions now employ student success coaches to help first-year students, students from certain demographic groups or students generally in ways that overlap with traditional academic advising.
Ohio State University started doing something a bit different just prior to and throughout COVID-19: using federal CARES Act money to hire “substitute” advisers into two-year, remote positions do some traditional advising and the outreach that full-time advisers don’t have enough time to do.
Amy Treboni, senior director of academic advising at Ohio State, says that these six advisers (and an incoming seventh) have allowed the university to offer 6,000 additional advising time slots to students. Substitute advisers (now called “TAG” advisers, because they’re tied to the Office of Transition and Academic Growth) have run various outreach campaigns, as well, including a “kudos” campaign to students who improved their grade point averages by 0.5. The kudos campaign, in particular, saw unusually high email-open rates from students—about 70 percent.
“How often does your university send you something saying, ‘You did awesome’?” Treboni asks. “They might have gone from a 2.0 to a 2.5. GPA, so they’re not going to be on the dean’s list. But they’ve made a huge change, right? We want to be able to acknowledge that and help them build and keep confidence in their academic endeavors.”
When students do seek out advisers, getting an appointment may be difficult at peak times, such as during registration. To meet demand, some colleges offer group advising appointments. Among them: Tallahassee Community College, where students can sign up for one of two daily small-group Zoom advising sessions. The goal of this particular event is to get students fully registered.
Small-group advising as a concept isn’t limited to registration, though. Rachel Moody, director of international academic partnerships and international academic advising at the University at Albany, part of the State University of New York (who clarified she was speaking as an advising scholar and not on behalf of her institution), says she prefers mandatory one-on-one advising, even if it’s just over email. But in situations “where advisers have very high caseloads and one-on-one meetings are 15 to 20 minutes long,” she says, “small-group advising sessions with students with similar academic or career interests can work very well,” especially when students know they’re welcome to follow up with a one-on-one meeting.
Small-group meetings work particularly well “when students know what to expect and how to prepare,” Moody adds, and when peer advisers join.
Ultimately, Moody says, “the absence of strong, positive advising relationships that foster a sense of belonging will always yield dissatisfied students. Academic advising needs to be part of the culture—a good part. If advisers are only seen when it is time to schedule courses for the next semester, that is a sign of a transactional relationship versus a transformational one.”
Does your institution do something not noted in this article to encourage student engagement with the academic advising process or with advisers? Tell us about it.
Explicitly teaching character in college? It’s not a new idea, but it’s not widespread. For that reason (among others), Wake Forest University’s Program for Leadership and Character has attracted interest from other institutions since its founding in 2017.
Now the Lilly Endowment is giving the program $31 million over five years to expand—including by helping build a network of character education programs across academe. The funds allow Wake Forest to oversee a competitive grant-application process for the following, all related to character education in higher education:
Lilly’s grant to Wake Forest also enables conferences and summer seminars that explore new ways to measure and develop character, along with workshops and the creation of additional teaching resources.
“Focusing on character can help many colleges and universities realize their aspirations to educate the whole person and generate the knowledge, capacity and character that our students will need to live and lead well in the 21st century,” says Michael Lamb, program executive, F. M. Kirby Foundation Chair of Leadership and Character, and associate professor of interdisciplinary humanities at Wake Forest.
The Program for Leadership and Character already offers scholarships, courses, seminars, speakers and retreats to Wake Forest students. Some 350 students have participated in extracurricular discussion groups that explore such topics as “What Is College For?” and “The Character of Friendship in a Digital Age.”
Lamb, who previously served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Oxford Character Project at the University of Oxford, tells Inside Higher Ed that “many colleges hope to teach students how to think well and how to secure meaningful employment.” And while that’s “really important,” he says, “we also think that having key virtues of character, such as humility, empathy, courage, justice and a sense of purpose, can help students direct how they think and live, in ways that not only help them flourish but help their communities flourish.”
Students, Lamb says, “are hungry for this kind of work, and when they engage it thoughtfully and critically, they take those ideas and apply them in their own life. What we care about doing is giving them a very deep intellectual foundation in what character and leadership mean, and also helping them to then extend that and apply that in their own lives in meaningful ways. That translation of intellectual rigor and ideas to practical living is the core of our program.”
Measurement is key to the character education network Wake Forest is building: Lamb and colleagues will evaluate the impact of character-related courses and programs on students, including their sense of belonging, levels of civic engagement, career readiness and academic interests.
Lamb already has shared some findings to this effect, concerning Wake Forest students. One co-written study published in the Journal of Moral Education found that students in a Wake Forest course called Commencing Character demonstrated growth in seven targeted virtues and several nontargeted virtues, compared to a control group. A forthcoming paper by Lamb suggests that the course also helped students develop a sense of purpose, including a greater “beyond-the-self” orientation.
In addition, Lamb has written about seven strategies for cultivating virtue in the university, to inform course design and programs. Strategies include habituation through practice, reflection on personal experience, engagement with virtuous exemplars and friendships of mutual accountability.
Have you or your campus experimented with character education? Tell us about it.
Explicitly teaching character in college? It’s not a new idea, but it’s not widespread. For that reason (among others), Wake Forest University’s Program for Leadership and Character has attracted interest from other institutions since its founding in 2017.
Now the Lilly Endowment is giving the program $31 million over five years to expand—including by helping build a network of character education programs across academe. The funds allow Wake Forest to oversee a competitive grant-application process for the following, all related to character education in higher education:
Lilly’s grant to Wake Forest also enables conferences and summer seminars that explore new ways to measure and develop character, along with workshops and the creation of additional teaching resources.
“Focusing on character can help many colleges and universities realize their aspirations to educate the whole person and generate the knowledge, capacity and character that our students will need to live and lead well in the 21st century,” says Michael Lamb, program executive, F. M. Kirby Foundation Chair of Leadership and Character, and associate professor of interdisciplinary humanities at Wake Forest.
The Program for Leadership and Character already offers scholarships, courses, seminars, speakers and retreats to Wake Forest students. Some 350 students have participated in extracurricular discussion groups that explore such topics as “What Is College For?” and “The Character of Friendship in a Digital Age.”
Lamb, who previously served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Oxford Character Project at the University of Oxford, tells Inside Higher Ed that “many colleges hope to teach students how to think well and how to secure meaningful employment.” And while that’s “really important,” he says, “we also think that having key virtues of character, such as humility, empathy, courage, justice and a sense of purpose, can help students direct how they think and live, in ways that not only help them flourish but help their communities flourish.”
Students, Lamb says, “are hungry for this kind of work, and when they engage it thoughtfully and critically, they take those ideas and apply them in their own life. What we care about doing is giving them a very deep intellectual foundation in what character and leadership mean, and also helping them to then extend that and apply that in their own lives in meaningful ways. That translation of intellectual rigor and ideas to practical living is the core of our program.”
Measurement is key to the character education network Wake Forest is building: Lamb and colleagues will evaluate the impact of character-related courses and programs on students, including their sense of belonging, levels of civic engagement, career readiness and academic interests.
Lamb already has shared some findings to this effect, concerning Wake Forest students. One co-written study published in the Journal of Moral Education found that students in a Wake Forest course called Commencing Character demonstrated growth in seven targeted virtues and several nontargeted virtues, compared to a control group. A forthcoming paper by Lamb suggests that the course also helped students develop a sense of purpose, including a greater “beyond-the-self” orientation.
In addition, Lamb has written about seven strategies for cultivating virtue in the university, to inform course design and programs. Strategies include habituation through practice, reflection on personal experience, engagement with virtuous exemplars and friendships of mutual accountability.
Have you or your campus experimented with character education? Tell us about it.
More institutions are installing professional head-shot booths in their career centers to assist students on the job or internship hunt. These machines allow students to experiment with multiple poses and then will deliver high-quality, editable digital images within minutes.
The booths are getting students in career center doors while leveling the playing field between those who might otherwise be able to obtain a professional head shot and those who might not.
“In less than a month since formally launching, we’ve had nearly 500 sessions in the photo booth,” says Jacob Chabowski, a marketing specialist with Vanderbilt University’s Career Center. “Having a polished and professional image online is vital in today’s digital era. Students are tech-savvy, and many have already recognized the importance of having good head shots for their professional development. The challenge is removing barriers between college students and professional head shots.” Such barriers include having to hire a photographer and access to a good camera.
The photo booth “ensures equity and inclusion for each student at Vanderbilt,” Chabowski says.
Miami University in Ohio used to have interns take head shots “the old-fashioned way,” says Jennifer Benz, an assistant vice president with the Center for Career Exploration and Success. Since the university acquired its photo booth in 2021, demand for head shots has soared, and now interns take the lead on monitoring the booth and assisting users.
“During the last two-plus years, a lot of institutions like ours were noticing a decline in student engagement and co-curricular activities,” she says of the pandemic’s lingering effects. “And so we’re trying to retrain our students to re-engage them, and we did not want them to miss the over 300 employers that were coming to our campus to recruit them.”
Benz says some faculty members require that students visit the head-shot booth and establish LinkedIn accounts each semester, as coursework. The booth is also promoted to students during their first-year experience courses, as well.
The university sends students a guide to establishing and maintaining an online presence after they use the booth. The guide mentions LinkedIn, but Benz says that students are encouraged to use their professional head shots across their social media, or even for scholarship or graduate school application needs.
It’s long been “standard operating procedure” for employers to check job candidates’ social media pages before hiring them, Benz says, and this remains so in today’s strong job market.
“Every company wants to hire professionals who will represent their organizations properly, and this [booth] is just removing one of those barriers and rescaling it so more of our students will now have professional head shots than they ever have before.”
Chabowski, at Vanderbilt, says, “We encourage students to use these head shots in a variety of ways, including as LinkedIn profile pictures, in email signatures and incorporated into presentation slides.”
Having a professional head shot may be more important than ever, he adds, given that many more interviews, and jobs, now occur remotely.
Yolanda Norman, a Houston-based regional director of corporate partnerships for Vanderbilt, tells this to students she works with: “Employers are looking you up.” And whether they realize it or not, she says, students’ social media presence is “telling a story.”
The question for students, then, is, “What is the story that you want to tell?”
More institutions are installing professional head-shot booths in their career centers to assist students on the job or internship hunt. These machines allow students to experiment with multiple poses and then will deliver high-quality, editable digital images within minutes.
The booths are getting students in career center doors while leveling the playing field between those who might otherwise be able to obtain a professional head shot and those who might not.
“In less than a month since formally launching, we’ve had nearly 500 sessions in the photo booth,” says Jacob Chabowski, a marketing specialist with Vanderbilt University’s Career Center. “Having a polished and professional image online is vital in today’s digital era. Students are tech-savvy, and many have already recognized the importance of having good head shots for their professional development. The challenge is removing barriers between college students and professional head shots.” Such barriers include having to hire a photographer and access to a good camera.
The photo booth “ensures equity and inclusion for each student at Vanderbilt,” Chabowski says.
Miami University in Ohio used to have interns take head shots “the old-fashioned way,” says Jennifer Benz, an assistant vice president with the Center for Career Exploration and Success. Since the university acquired its photo booth in 2021, demand for head shots has soared, and now interns take the lead on monitoring the booth and assisting users.
“During the last two-plus years, a lot of institutions like ours were noticing a decline in student engagement and co-curricular activities,” she says of the pandemic’s lingering effects. “And so we’re trying to retrain our students to re-engage them, and we did not want them to miss the over 300 employers that were coming to our campus to recruit them.”
Benz says some faculty members require that students visit the head-shot booth and establish LinkedIn accounts each semester, as coursework. The booth is also promoted to students during their first-year experience courses, as well.
The university sends students a guide to establishing and maintaining an online presence after they use the booth. The guide mentions LinkedIn, but Benz says that students are encouraged to use their professional head shots across their social media, or even for scholarship or graduate school application needs.
It’s long been “standard operating procedure” for employers to check job candidates’ social media pages before hiring them, Benz says, and this remains so in today’s strong job market.
“Every company wants to hire professionals who will represent their organizations properly, and this [booth] is just removing one of those barriers and rescaling it so more of our students will now have professional head shots than they ever have before.”
Chabowski, at Vanderbilt, says, “We encourage students to use these head shots in a variety of ways, including as LinkedIn profile pictures, in email signatures and incorporated into presentation slides.”
Having a professional head shot may be more important than ever, he adds, given that many more interviews, and jobs, now occur remotely.
Yolanda Norman, a Houston-based regional director of corporate partnerships for Vanderbilt, tells this to students she works with: “Employers are looking you up.” And whether they realize it or not, she says, students’ social media presence is “telling a story.”
The question for students, then, is, “What is the story that you want to tell?”
A new report from the National Humanities Alliance, based in part on a national survey of colleges and universities, finds that training in the public humanities is a relatively new offering but a growing one. Some 72 percent of 156 responding institutions said they offered a public humanities course, degree or credential for students. While the goals of public humanities training programs vary, the report says, the programs tend to share four interrelated goals: offering students the opportunity to act on civic and social justice commitments through the humanities, training current and future faculty members in publicly engaged methods to shape the future of humanities disciplines, equipping humanities students with tools and experiences that may help them succeed in a variety of fields, and addressing the challenges faculty members confront in their public humanities practices. The report further breaks down public humanities training trends by level, from graduate to undergraduate to faculty.
Isaac Newton wrote to fellow scientist Robert Hooke in a 1675, saying, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Centuries later, it remains generally understood that innovation builds on past science. So in this era of unprecedented research volume, breakthroughs should be increasingly common, right? Wrong, according to a new study finding that “disruptive” science is on the decline.
This trend downward “represents a substantive shift in science and technology, one that reinforces concerns about slowing innovative activity,” says the analysis, published this month in Nature.
Finding that the decline likely isn’t driven by changes in the quality of published science, citation practices or field-specific factors, the authors attribute this shift “in part to scientists’ and inventors’ reliance on a narrower set of existing knowledge.”
Relying on “narrower slices of knowledge benefits individual careers,” the paper warns, “but not scientific progress more generally.”
For their study, the authors analyzed 25 million papers in Web of Science databases published from 1945 to 2010, along with 3.9 million U.S. Patent and Trademark Office patents from 1976 to 2010. The idea was to analyze citations and texts to understand whether research and patents “forge new directions” over time and across fields. The authors replicated their findings using four more data sets: JSTOR, the American Physical Society corpus, Microsoft Academic Graph and PubMed, for an additional 20 million papers.
To measure disruption, the authors used a previously tested metric called the CD index, which characterizes how papers and patents change networks of citations in science and technology. The index, which ranges from -1 (consolidating research) to 1 (disruptive), is based on the idea that if a paper or patent is disruptive, the subsequent work that cites it is less likely to also cite its predecessors. For example, the paper says, James Watson’s and Francis Crick’s groundbreaking finding on DNA and Walter Kohn’s and Lu Jeu Sham’s major paper on quantum chemistry both received over a hundred citations within five years of being published. Yet the Kohn-Sham paper has an index of -0.22, indicating consolidation of previous work, the Nature paper argues. Watson and Crick have an index of 0.62, indicating disruption in science to that point.
Papers in life sciences and biomedicine, for instance, had an index of about 0.5 in 1950, compared to under 0.1 in 2010. Papers in the physical sciences, social sciences and technology saw similar declines. The same was true for chemical, computer and communications, drugs and medical, electrical and electronic, and mechanical patents.
Ultimately, the Nature study says, “We find that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions. This pattern holds universally across fields and is robust across multiple different citation- and text-based metrics.”
Co-author Russell J. Funk, associate professor of strategic management and entrepreneurship at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, told Inside Higher Ed that disruptive science is “work that introduces breaks with the status quo and carves out new directions for scientific inquiry.”
Of the new paper, he said, “We find a lot of evidence that scientists are building off increasingly narrow bits of prior scientific knowledge. Over time, there’s a steady increase in the rate at which “everyone is citing the same stuff.”
This narrowing, he continued, “is associated with a decline in disruptive work.”
Is that a bad thing? Funk said that “a healthy ecosystem of scientific discovery probably needs a mixture of both work that is disruptive and work that builds on and improves the status quo of scientific knowledge. The question, then, is what is the right mix?” A “dramatic decline” in the disruptiveness of papers and patents, as demonstrated in the analysis, suggests that “the balance may be off.”
What can concerned institutions and funding agencies do to encourage more innovation and disruption, if anything? Funk said that factors to consider include “funding higher-risk research that proposes and develops unconventional theories and methods.” Putting greater emphasis on the “quality of work rather than the quantity of papers” produced may also help, he added.
Funk’s analysis isn’t the first to explore whether innovative activity is really increasing. One 2020 study of 1.8 billion citations among 90 million papers across 241 subjects found that a “deluge of papers” does not lead to turnover of central ideas in a field, but instead to “ossification of canon.” That study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also noted that “fundamental progress may be stymied if quantitative growth of scientific endeavors—in number of scientists, institutes, and papers—is not balanced by structures fostering disruptive scholarship and focusing attention on novel ideas.”
Concern—and various theories—accompany such findings. Among them: that the low-hanging fruits of scientific discovery have largely been plucked already, and that scientists nowadays need so much training to reach the forefronts of their fields that they lose precious research time getting there.
But Funk’s paper has attracted particular attention from scientists concerned that science today is more about pushing papers and chasing funding than it is about doing the kind of deep work that leads to breakthroughs.
Itai Yanai, a professor of biochemistry and molecular pharmacology at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine who tweeted about the new study—arguing, in part, that science now encourages principal investigators to act as managers, leaving less time for innovation and disruption—told Inside Higher Ed, “The longer I have been a professor, the less time for science, unfortunately.”
Yanai said that “what really counts as science for me is working with the members of my lab and collaborators and also working alone,” but that this makes up about half of his working time. As for the rest of the time, he said, “There are so many obligations for a professor, including attending student committees, attending seminars, preparing and delivering lectures, writing and submitting grants, writing progress reports, traveling to present the work, reviewing manuscripts, reviewing grants, answering emails.”
Asked about the implications of Funk’s finding and others like it, Yanai said that “at the root of the situation is that science is not seen by administrators and funding agencies as a fundamentally creative process.” Instead, he said, it’s “portrayed as only hypothesis-testing, which is just half of the method.”
If institutions were to “recognize more fully that the main engine of science is coming up with creative new ideas in the first place,” Yanai said, “then we would ensure that scientists have more protected time.” To that end, Yanai and a colleague have been working a project called Night Science, which includes editorials and a podcast on the scientific creative process.
Writing about the new Nature study via Substack, political scientist Anna Meier compared “grant culture,” or the endless pursuit of funding to do one’s research, to “the grim reaper.”
When “you have to get a grant and competition for grants is so extensive, you propose the project that is most likely to get funded. Proposing something off the beaten path is an enormous risk in time and energy potentially wasted. This is especially true if it’s your first grant application, because getting one grant opens the door to getting others,” Meier wrote. “I think a lot of us are scared shitless of the grant grim reaper.”
The solution, Meier continued, “isn’t more ‘how to get a grant’ panels or emails with application opportunities. Those tactics may help on the margins, but they also overwhelm, and their functionalist framing inspires resentment rather than empowerment. An actual answer is structural transformation, starting (perhaps paradoxically) from the state with a recommitment to proper funding for higher education and the research its highly trained experts know how to prioritize and execute, if they are only given the space to do so.”
Drawing on her own experiences seeking funding from the National Institutes of Health, neuroscientist Elaine Sevier wrote in a similar essay for Research Theory that “scientists, generally, work very hard for relatively little money because they genuinely want to make discoveries. Everyone wants to write the classic paper that is still referenced in 100 years. But to advance your career, you need an easily digestible story that will be immediately popular—and you should seek, interpret, and present your data accordingly. This is a constant cycle of short-term thinking that does not tolerate slow, sometimes boring, sometimes weird work that lies outside the mainstream. That also means it does not tolerate the work that has the potential to become disruptive.”
Graduate assistants at Northwestern University voted last week to form a union, 1,644 to 114. Some 2,893 assistants were eligible to vote. The new union is affiliated with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. Kathleen Hagerty, provost, and Kelly Mayo, graduate school dean, said in a statement, “We thank the voters for casting ballots and respect their decision. We look forward to beginning the process of negotiating a collective bargaining agreement that works for both the University and graduate students within the bargaining unit.”
The election results are part of a larger trend toward graduate assistant unions at private institutions; graduate assistants at Yale University also announced earlier this month that they’d voted to form a union, for instance.
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