Raw Responses
Summary of Responses (I have to demo this from the live form.)
Demographics for the U of I as a whole regarding family income of students
The Website is acting up so I'm including a screen shot of the relevant table.
Our class seems to have some immigrant students or children of immigrants plus students from working class families. So we may have greater representation of students from families in the middle 60% of the household income distribution. We also have out-of-state students and international students. I don't know whether they are in the table above or not.
This new program Illinois Commitment is aimed at attracting more students in Illinois from households that are below median household income.
But many students from families that are above median are struggling to make ends meet. It's not just an issue at the U of I. It's a national issue.
So one clear driver of students becoming more mercenary about grades and less concerned with anything else about their learning is the force of student loan debt. The issue is whether other factors act to reinforce this outlook or counter it.
Metacognition
Nice site from Vanderbilt
I wanted my course to help students be metacognitive about their own learning. But the first two weeks were disappointing that way.
Reasons for my stress
- At the start of week three attendance dropped off substantially.
- I had the sense that many students "weren't getting it."
- The first blog post on experience in organizations had many students not understand what transaction costs were about.
- The first real Excel homework on Efficiency Concepts wasn't intended to be difficult. But many students were challenged by it and some never got it done.
- Many students weren't getting their work done in a timely fashion.
- In both of these cases I sensed a lot of student stress. I don't want to add to that stress unless I'm quite sure doing so improves student learning.
- There were a few late adds to the course and some other students who have all but dropped, yet are still on the course roster. Managing that is a challenge. I am still struggling with it.
- I truly detest that first 10-day add/drop period. It makes it a nightmare to manage.
- This time around I tried something to adjust to that period. In the past I had the first session on the course as an organization and the second session as the university as an organization. This time, we did a week on each of these by expanding the topic. We only got to M&R in week 3. This may have backfired.
Good Reads About Why Students Today Aren't Getting A Full Education
The Overprotected Kid (2014)
To the extent that this article correctly depicts a rather broad developmental problem - kids have too much adult supervision - they don't learn to think and act independently. This carries over into college when students don't have the adult supervision, but confront this freedom without the accompanying skills to navigate it.
This is a nostalgic piece by me about how my childhood was different this way.
Slapball
Stop Googling. Let's Talk. (2015)
This piece is saying that schmoozing skills are not developing because everyone is on their phones.
This is a Ted Talk by Peter Doolittle which explains the limits to thinking that multiprocessing imposes. (2013)
A much older piece about the decline in reading - including the cognitive consequences of that.
The Death of Reading (1991)
And a much more recent piece that is not as interesting to read but does give current data to support that the downward trend in reading has continued.
Why We Don't Read, Revisited (2018)
What are the consequences on students development as adults?
This is a site that offers a summary of Arthur Chickering's work on Student Development. The seven vectors may be useful as guidelines for you to gauge yourself as to how you are developing and to determine whether you are attentive to your own further development. I confess that I only found this site a few days ago and haven't read the book on which this site is based. But I think it useful to aid your own metacognition.
How is undergraduate education at the U of I responding to these factors? Is it accommodating them in a way that students get back onto a path of good development?
I'm somewhat out of it now, so I may be wrong in my assessment. But my sense is that most students, at least those majoring in economics, feel the university doesn't care about them much at all and, given that feeling, it's hard to be disciplined and motivated to give it your all.
I am basing this from discussion with students when I first taught this class back in spring 2012. At the time there were only 8 students so I made a pact with the students to teach the class like a seminar and with that made attendance mandatory. In spite of that there were attendance problems later in the semester and one student stopped coming entirely for the last third of the course. Since then, I've only taught in the fall. Now I'm wondering what implicit contract can I make with students in our class so it works reasonably for both you and me.
The design of homework in Econ 490
It is meant as a readying activity. Some of you are involved in consulting of one form or another. And others in the class are preparing for job interviews and dealing with recruiters. How do you get ready for those things. Seen that way, it is natural do do the homework first, so you come prepared to the session and you can demonstrate "you did your homework." Yet in most other classes, I believe you view the lecture as the readying activity to prepare you to do the homework. I did make some adjustment about that this week in video that is now available. Let's see if that helps.
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