Teaching

This week, I:

• Tell you about how one instructor handled a course where students weren’t doing the reading.
• Share findings from a new study on flexible deadlines.

When students don’t read

Amy Baldwin’s first-year seminar course, “Writing Your Success Story,” was designed to be relevant and appealing. Students read and discuss college memoirs. Modern ones, so the language shouldn’t be any barrier, notes Baldwin, a senior lecturer of writing, literacy, and academic success in student transitions at the University of Central Arkansas. These stories are meant to be a springboard for reflection that can help students make the most of their own time in college.

Even so, Baldwin found herself in a predicament that many other instructors have faced in recent years: Her students were not doing the reading.

Baldwin asked her students what would help. They asked for quizzes, to hold them accountable for the reading. So Baldwin gave quizzes. The students failed them.

At that point, Baldwin, whose career has focused on helping students adjust to college work, was out of ideas. She went back to the class for advice. One student suggested that the students do the teaching.

Baldwin was all for it. The 15 students paired up in different combinations to cover the remaining readings. Baldwin didn’t give them a lot of direction, and they pretty much copied her format, writing quizzes and discussion questions.

In the “Disney version,” Baldwin says, that’s when all of her students would have become fully engaged and would have done all the reading. That didn’t happen. But students did prepare the material they were on tap to teach. And more of them did more of the reading when their peers were running class than they had been doing before.

Baldwin caught a couple of them remarking, under their breath, that teaching is hard.

Baldwin plans to stick to the original plan for the rest of the course. Students will work in groups to make a podcast on college memoirs and take a final exam.

So, what did she learn? Teaching, Baldwin notes, is a valuable way to learn something. But she isn’t sure her students would have been as excited to try it had that been her idea rather than their own.

The incident also crystallized some of Baldwin’s observations about students. They don’t like ambiguity. They like to have agency in class. A discussion, Baldwin says, isn’t a lecture. But it felt too much like one to her students. They don’t like being talked at, and they bristle at gen-ed requirements, no matter how much effort has gone into making them sexier.

Given all of that, Baldwin isn’t sure she’d bake the students-as-teachers idea into the course in the future. But she might try giving students roles, even something like a designated note taker.

Baldwin is convinced that her students are part of “a generation that wants to have purpose and meaning.” Her course design was meant to help them find it. But it might take something different.

What have you tried when students aren’t doing the reading, and how has it worked? Do you share Baldwin’s assessment that students are looking for meaning? If so, what seems to be meeting this need for them? Share your ideas with me at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and they may appear in a future issue of the newsletter.

Buffers and extensions

Many professors have adopted some kind of flexible-deadline policy in an effort to support students and ease their stress. But what effect do such policies have on student performance?

A paper, “Cushions Don’t Hurt: Assignment Buffers, Extensions, and Learning,” published in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology this spring has encouraging findings for instructors using such policies.

The paper is based on a study of some 500 students taking an introductory psychology course in which they had a 48-hour buffer period after assignments were due when they could be submitted without incurring any late penalty. Students in the course could also request and receive extensions using an automated system.

Like other scholarship on the topic, the new paper offers reassurance that allowing extensions need not mean everyone will always turn everything in late.

“We did not find evidence that there was misuse,” said Regan A.R. Gurung, a professor of psychology at Oregon State University and the lead author of the paper. Most students turned their work in on time.

And overall, students who completed their work on time — including taking advantage of the built-in buffer — performed better. That’s probably not a big surprise; late work often happens because something else is going on in students’ lives, which might be expected to affect the quality as well as the timing of their work.

What’s interesting, Gurung added, is that from talking with the students, it’s suggestive, though not conclusive, that “they took that extra time and they did better than if they had just turned it in.”

That means that professors who let students have just a bit of extra time might get better-quality assignments in return. And, Gurung pointed out, if they have Friday deadlines like the psychology course did, it might not even change their grading workflow.

Beth and I are always interested in seeing new studies on effective teaching practices. If you’re publishing, or simply aware of, such research, do send it our way!

Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.

—Beckie

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