Tag: student

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 Learning to Fail: Higher Education’s Broken Ladder

Work hard, play by the rules, and success surely will follow. This well-known promise has kept generations of students obediently studying and fretting over grades. But conventional knowledge hides a downside. This meritocratic parable advances individual will as democracy’s great social leveler, with talent and effort overriding bias or disadvantage. In the already-achieved equality of the U.S.,  anyone with enough drive can rise to society’s highest tier. Colleges have enthusiastically adopted this philosophy and present themselves as impartial judges of ability and determination. They use GPA’s as moral scorecards, standardized tests as scales of human worth, and class rankings predictors of future success. This merit machine functions so effectively that few question what is being measured or how the process began.

Only now are colleges and universities starting to see the problem. Students meeting every academic benchmark increasingly find achievements unreal and lacking practical benefit. Many feel scammed by promises that effort pays off, only to hit structural barriers from the start. The premise of fair and equal opportunity works like a shell game, held in place by invisible rules and roadblocks institutions pretend aren’t there. And while bad for nearly every student, the effects have been catastrophic in the highly charged post-DEI atmosphere of reverse discrimination, “racial exhaustion,” and the rollback of civil rights advances on nearly front.[i]

These contradictions now undermine the foundations of higher ed. While students may arrive on campus with a genuine desire to learn, the atmosphere around them quickly shifts from a common pursuit of knowledge into a zero sum game of individual achievement. The psychological effects of this are documented in a growing body of research showing spiking levels of anxiety, depression, and disengagement among students who otherwise should be thriving. Meanwhile, first-gen students, working learners, and those historically minoritized are overlooked by a system designed (and increasingly politicized) to support others with social and economic capital. The dichotomy is stark and relentless. Just as schools have developed metrics to quantify student outcomes, many conceal and often inadvertently intensify the inequities they claim to alleviate. Continue reading ” Learning to Fail: Higher Education’s Broken Ladder”

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Present but Absent: The Affective Disconnect

What kind of problem stays visible for years and still has no name? The sorting machinery of merit accounts for part of it, and the refusals that machinery provokes account for more. Something still lingers in a room after both have finished explaining themselves. This chapter looks at the roots of the missing vocabulary,  the background issues beneath the disconnect. Faculty notice it first as an odd kind of restlessness. Students seem distracted, but not in typical ways. They’re present in the room but emotionally absent. There’s an undercurrent in the group dynamic, which lingers despite best efforts. When asked about their feelings, students report being stressed or preoccupied, but nothing quite describes what’s going on.

At issue is something more fundamental in the culture of higher education. On one level, it comes from a mismatch between who students are and the character of the institutions they inhabit. Gone are days of carefree learners confident that college was a ticket to a better life. Today’s student population finds itself on contested terrain, while often juggling a myriad of responsibilities in addition to studies, facing a future in which technological change and attitudes towards higher education itself present novel uncertainties.[i]  The National Institutes of Health has further documented how intersecting factors of financial insecurity,  political turbulence, and doubts about college are wreaking havoc on student mental health [ii] Continue reading “Present but Absent: The Affective Disconnect”

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Emotional Intelligence in the Classroom

Everyone knows that schools have a problem with feelings. Walk into any classroom and you’ll witness the elaborate dance of affective suppression that defines modern education. Students learn to hide frustration behind blank stares, to swallow anxiety whole, to perform engagement even when drowning in confusion. Faculty become masterful at reading the affective climate while pretending emotions don’t exist unless they become “disruptive,” at which point they’re quickly pathologized or punished. This affective hide-and-seek isn’t merely unfortunate. It’s academically devastating in ways that most educators are only beginning to understand.The recognition that emotion fundamentally shapes learning has deep roots in psychological research, though it took decades to gain educational traction.

Howard Gardner’s groundbreaking theory of multiple intelligences, introduced in the 1980s, challenged narrow definitions of cognitive ability by identifying “personal intelligences” as distinct forms of human capacity. These included both intrapersonal intelligence (understanding oneself) and interpersonal intelligence (understanding others), categories that opened space for recognizing emotional and social skills as more than personality traits.[i] Gardner’s framework provided crucial legitimacy for educators who suspected that success required more than traditional academic skills.

It was Daniel Goleman’s 1995 bestseller Emotional Intelligence that brought these ideas into mainstream conversation, arguing that EQ often matters more than IQ for success in work and relationships.[ii] Goleman synthesized research from psychology and neuroscience to demonstrate what many educators intuitively knew. Emotions are not distractions from thinking but rather integral to how thinking happens. When learners cannot recognize, understand, or regulate their emotional states, everything else becomes exponentially harder. Memory formation falters under affective stress. Attention scatters when anxiety floods the system. Continue reading “Emotional Intelligence in the Classroom”

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Evidence-Based Teaching Ideas for Academic Equity

From Degrees of Difficulty: The Challenge of Equity in  College Teaching by David Trend, forthcoming from Worlding Book

In recent years, the premise of “evidence-based teaching” has emerged as a key strategy in addressing outcome disparities in higher education. Much like evidence-based practices in medicine and social science, this approach draws on empirical research to inform teaching methods, moving beyond practices based on personal experience or intuition. This shift represents a major change in how educators view the art of teaching itself, acknowledging that while intuition has value, it must be balanced with systematic investigation of what actually works in the classroom. The development of evidence-based teaching can be traced to the late 20th century, along with advances in cognitive science and educational psychology. As researchers gained new insights into adult learning and intellectual development, their findings found their way into the university classroom.

The earliest educational research came from simple comparative methods. Researchers typically would divide classes into control and experimental groups, with one cohort receiving standard instruction and the other a modified version. These “split-class” experiments provided the first rigorous evidence that teaching methods could affect learning outcomes significantly. While rudimentary, these early methods established the crucial principle that teaching effectiveness could be measured and improved through systematic study rather than innate talent alone. Educators also relied heavily on pre- and post-testing, administering assessments before and after interventions to measure knowledge gain. Though simple, this proved particularly good for seeing which teaching strategies led to lasting comprehension versus short-term memorization. Besides this, some faculty maintained teaching journals for documenting their own methods and student responses, which later would be shared with others. While lacking the sophistication of conventional educational studies, these varied methods laid the groundwork for an evidence-based teaching movement asserting that teaching effectiveness could be studied and improved. Continue reading “Evidence-Based Teaching Ideas for Academic Equity”

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When Universities Become Brands

Choosing a college from one of the America’s 5,775 public and private options in the U.S. can be one of the biggest decisions a young adult makes.  With 25-million applicants making these choices, a large industry exists to help with this process, encompassing high-school guidance counsellors, college admissions offices, professional advisors, industry organizations, books and guides, and ranking publications – all devoted to help applications find the “best” school for them.[i] From elite private universities to regional state colleges, for-profit institutions, and community colleges, the hierarchy of institutions is well-recognized and often shapes public opinion. This stratification raises crucial questions about access, equity, and whether the status of an institution significantly determines a graduate’s long-term success.This “brand hierarchy” is a reality of the U.S. higher education system. The public often assigns greater value to highly selective, well-resourced institutions with name recognition.

Rankings and media portrayals fuel this perception, creating an implicit understanding that some colleges are simply “better” than others. In fact, studies from the U.S. Department of Education show 74 % of prospective students rating important “reputation/academic quality” the most important factor in choosing a school –– more important than tuition cost (67%), proximity to home (26%), or personal recommendations (24%).[ii]

A central question for the public is whether the name of the institution on a diploma translates to tangible differences in earnings potential and life satisfaction. There’s a prevailing assumption that graduates of elite universities have a clear advantage, but the reality is more complex. Partly this has to do with the structural benefits that higher education institutions provide as a transitional ground between high school and adulthood. For many young adults, elite colleges are seen as sources of social connections, professional networks, access to organizations, recommendations, and mentoring, much of linked to a particular college or university brand identity.

Continue reading “When Universities Become Brands”