Online sources revealing the extent of academic disengagement (updated Dec. 31, 2007)Academic disengagement is widespread in our schools at all levels. It has many sources, but a primary one is the fact that we are trying to keep virtually all young people in the educational system through high school, and increasing at post-secondary institutions.
Quite simply, many young people have neither the motivation nor the ability to reach such heights in academic attainment, yet they are pushed to attend. Consequently, we find that a substantial proportion of students put out very little effort, and they get away with it because schools are either mandated to keep them enrolled by the government (in the case of high schools), or they are a source of revenue (as in the case of universities).A good place to start if you want to see how students justify their disengagement, and how frustrating it is to instructors, is to view the documentary Declining by Degrees. This eye-opening, 2-hour documentary shows the extent of disengagement among American university students. Canadian teachers will see that the situation here is not much different. The video is available from Amazon for a modest price.
Similarly, a very telling video was recently posted on YouTube depicting the sense of alienation, disengagement, and entitlement experienced by students. Note from this student-produced video the sense of entitlement regarding the use of new technologies, even though they clearly interfere with the ability to learn in class or to focus on studying out of class.
Professors are slowly clueing into this, but many universities are afraid of being accused of not being “with it,” so few policies exist to help professors deal with these unnecessary distrations. Notwithstanding the claims of some self-styled hi-tech gurus (who make lots of money giving advice, but have no experience in the trenches of a classroom), technologies can be useful learning aids in certain contexts, but cannot replace good face-to-face instruction, as systematic research is confirming.
For those who want hard data on disengagement, several sources can be consulted that report the results of studies that have monitored how much time students put into their studies. The Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) publishes The American Freshman every year, reporting the annual results of the oldest and largest survey of university students in existence, dating back to 1967. Each year the surveys include several hundred thousand entering freshmen at hundreds of higher education institutions in the U.S. In their 2001 report, they noted “today’s college freshmen continue to be academically disengaged. … Students spent less time studying and doing homework, with only 34.9 percent of entering students reporting studying or working on assignments for six or more hours per week in the past year. This marks the lowest figure since this question was first asked in 1987, when 47 percent reported studying six or more hours weekly.”In the book, we discuss the Canadian findings from the U.S.-based National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) that show that Canadian students are actually more academically disengaged than their American counterparts on a number of measures. (See the International Comparisons page.) Research into academic engagement at the primary school level shows that Canadian students rank about 22nd out of 28 countries studied by the OECD in terms of level of engagement measured by the extent to which students “identify withand value schooling outcomes, and participate in academic and non-academic activities.” Recent research by Statistics Canada shows that homework is a source of difficulty for many Canadian students and their parents. This same research found that “only 54% of parents said that the schools met or exceeded their expectations in terms of preparing students for work.”
The NSSE creator, George Kuh, has extended the scope of his assessment package to include high schools with the High School Survey of Student Engagement (HSSSE). Based on this reseacrh, Kuh recently summarized his findings for the US:
Taken together, HSSSE findings suggestthat many high school seniors are notprepared academically for college-levelwork and have not developed the habitsof the mind and heart that will standthem in good stead to successfully grapplewith more challenging intellectualtasks. The senior year in particular seemsto be a wasteland: the overall engagementof high school seniors is much lower thanthat of any previous year. In fact, studentengagement declines in a linear fashion between the first and the last year of highschool.
Students who do not put out an effort to study at lower levels of education will not be well prepared for university-level studies in terms of background knowledge and learning skills. Indeed, in their 2005 report, the Cooperative Institutional Research Program notes that “only half of educators today say that they are satisfied with the quality of their undergraduate students … across all types of colleges and universities, only slightly more than one-third (36 percent) of respondents agree that faculty on their campus feels that “most” students are well-prepared academically. Overall, 41 percent of the nation’s faculty believes that “most” of the students they teach lack the basic skills for college-level work.” Paradoxically, these same students tend to hold a high opinion of themselves: “record numbers of today’s entering college students (70 percent) rate themselves as “above average” or “highest 10 percent” academically.” This may be in part due to grade inflation, as “nearly half (48 percent) also report earning “A” grades in high school.”How are disengaged students managing to be successful in educational systems that are ostensibly nurturing and assessing their abilities? Aside from the laxness of the system and the low standards now found in many schools, cheating is widespread, including buying essays online (note the name of the website when you follow the link). Some universities are finally taking steps to address the problem.