Developing a Student Conception of Academic Rigor

Draeger, John; Hill, Pixita del Prado; Mahler, Ronnie

doi:10.1007/s10755-014-9308-1

Cited by 16 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Questions were developed based on the Michael (2007) survey asking students to identify what makes physiology easy/hard to learn. An additional open-ended question was derived from interview prompts asking students to describe a learning experience they had in college and what made that experience so rigorous (Draeger et al. , 2015).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Draeger et al. (2015) found that students have a challenging time articulating definitions of academic rigor, and concluded that the term “rigor” itself may contribute to such confusion.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this study, we explore academic rigor from the experiences and perspective of the biology learner. We use the terms “rigor,” “challenge,” “difficult,” and “hard” interchangeably to reflect the student use of these terms (Draeger et al. , 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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“Is This Class Hard?” Defining and Analyzing Academic Rigor from a Learner’s Perspective

Wyse

Soneral

2018

LSE

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Despite its value in higher education, academic rigor is a challenging construct to define for instructor and students alike. How do students perceive academic rigor in their biology course work? Using qualitative surveys, we asked students to identify “easy” or “hard” courses and define which aspects of these learning experiences contributed to their perceptions of academic rigor. The 100-level students defined hard courses primarily in affective terms, responding to stressors such as fast pacing, high workload, unclear relevance to their life or careers, and low faculty support. In contrast, 300-level students identified cognitive complexity as a contributor to course rigor, but course design elements—alignment between instruction and assessments, faculty support, active pedagogy—contributed to the ease of the learning process. Overwhelmingly, all students identified high faculty support, learner-centered course design, adequate prior knowledge, and active, well-scaffolded pedagogy as significant contributors to a course feeling easy. Active-learning courses in this study were identified as both easy and hard for the very reasons they are effective: they simultaneously challenge and support student learning. Implications for the design and instruction of rigorous active-learning college biology experiences are discussed.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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“Is This Class Hard?” Defining and Analyzing Academic Rigor from a Learner’s Perspective

Wyse

Soneral

2018

LSE

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“…This ideal role includes effective self-regulation, significant effort, commitment and motivation. Empirical studies (Draeger et al, 2013) have indicated that teachers and lecturers would concur with the model presented above, however, studies with students paint a contrasting picture, with differing conceptions depicted (Draeger, del Prado Hill & Mahler, 2014;Mahler et al, 2014). Lecturers were mostly concerned with how quality learning could be attained while students' overriding concern was how hard it would be to get good grades.…”

Section: A Conceptual Framework For Understanding the Term 'Academic mentioning

confidence: 94%

The struggle for academic rigour in assessment education

Steinberg¹,

Waspe²

2016

PiE

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IntroductionA 2010 study of the experiences of the University of the Witwatersrand's (Wits) first year B.Ed. students negotiating their academic learning arrived at the claim that only students who achieved marks above 70% were able to adapt to the "new semiotic domain" of the university, where, compared to school, there is "less external locus of control and where knowledge is regarded as more than performance" (Shalem et al., : 1093. The students who were in the mark range of 40-60% (i.e. just below or above failure) were caught in a struggle for "epistemological access" and remained unsure of "how to differentiate between the words they need to select to explain a specialised idea. Furthermore, they are unable to identify the web of concepts within which their thinking is nested and how to select the textual evidence needed to explain their views and the examples required to demonstrate their point of view" (ibid: 1093). The form and criteria of academic discourse were so foreign to them that it prevented students from accessing the content that is offered by university courses. For them, at the time, writing in ways that could be considered as academically rigorous was still out of reach.It so happened that when we taught and evaluated the 4 th year assessment course in 2014, we were working with the same group of students. Looking at the final course marks, only 52 out of 371 (14%) students achieved a mark of 70% and above, while 264 (71%) were in the 50-69% range. That made our pass marks look acceptable enough but was it any indicator of the course having been, and enabled the students to become more, academically rigorous?This article tells the story of an assessment education (AE) course in which the staff intended to offer epistemological access to a course that was academically rigorous, which, at the time, we understood to mean high quality teaching and learning. We saw it as our responsibility to offer clear, explanatory lectures on key assessment concepts and debates, appropriate readings, challenging and relevant tasks, useful feedback, and explicit guidance for student self-regulation of their work, so that students could acquire key assessment concepts and the accompanying professional skills. From our perspective, the students' responsibility was to engage with the lectures and ask questions, read the provided texts with understanding, put effort into writing the set tasks and generally enjoy the learning. This intention requires effort all round, which we conscientiously put in. Yet, to our dismay, we found that many students did minimum work and some evaluated the course as being 'boring', 'irrelevant' and 'useless'. Rather than losing faith in ourselves and our students, we decided to embark on the road of academic rigour by engaging in "collegial conversations that encourage deep and critical reflection for teacher educators" (Selkrig & Keamy, 2015: 1) The question that drove this conversation was: What are students' perspectives about what and how they learned from the assessmen...

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“…Through mentoring, professors can individualize their support for both students’ subject matter learning and socialization so that unique learning needs are met. However, students and faculty may hold conflicting definitions and expectations of challenge and support, as well as of mentoring more broadly (Draeger, del Prado Hill, Hunter, & Mahler, ; Draeger, del Prado Hill, & Mahler, ; Posselt, ). Slay, Reyes, & Posselt () found through case study research in STEM doctoral education that when aggressive efforts to recruit students of color were not followed by provision of support for their specific needs, students read their recruitment as one of “bait and switch,” and they struggled to persist.…”

Section: Sociocultural Support Through Faculty Mentoringmentioning

confidence: 99%