Slashdot Mirror
Disadvantaged Students Stay In College If They're Told Everyone Struggles (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader shares an Ars Technica report: Lower-income and minority college students often have trouble sticking with higher education. But past studies have indicated they would be less likely to drop out of school if they receive appropriate counseling once they start experiencing academic problems. A new study published in PNAS demonstrates that if students receive this kind of intervention prior to college enrollment and during their first year at college, they are more likely to avoid having academic trouble in the first place. And the counseling can be done over the Internet. The counseling involves letting students know that it is common for students to struggle with the transition to college and that this transition will get easier with time. This is known as a "lay theory intervention."
I took to college like a fish to water myself. It was high school that sucked ass.
I loved the freedom and the fact that the cro-magnon bullies were, for the most part, gone (redneck idiots and ghetto thugs usually don't make it to college). To me it was like breathing for the first time. I never really learned anything in high school (except which bullies to avoid). But college was a learning paradise! And the parties were much better too. And I didn't have to live at home and listen to my parents anymore!
Shit, I would have never LEFT college if they had let me stay on after grad school.
Everyone does not struggle. There are reasons you have difficulty--not that you're too stupid for college, or that the next guy has a better brain; it's that you're using the wrong methods, and you're entering an unfamiliar environment.
The brain, first and foremost, is an energy-hungry organ. To minimize energy usage, it restructures to readily follow the most common set of actions. Overriding this--self-activation or response-inhibition--requires first formulating a plan in the prefrontal cortex, then activating the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to directly control the midbrain. In short: your brain out of high school is a high school brain, and making it take actions different in *any* way from high school requires using one part of your brain to force the rest of it into compliance. Those parts of your brain all consume energy and, just as doing an endless stream of push-ups will eventually leave your muscles physically-incapable of lifting any more, your brain will run down the ATP supply in involved cells and become fatigued and, eventually, physically-incapable of taking these actions.
Many people work around this by setting schedules and reframing.
Setting schedules creates a low-energy activation system: your brain, over an average six weeks of effort, restructures such that keeping to that scheduled set of actions is a lower-energy behavior. Over years and with the experience of repeatedly changing schedules as necessary, your brain even develops the facility to set new schedules and adhere strongly to them in a few weeks as *the* lowest-energy behavior. Lowering the energy expenditure makes it easier to cope with something like a move from high school to college.
Reframing reduces energy expenditure by connecting one impulse to another. If you can evaluate an activity in terms of how it supports something you are actively interested in, that activity becomes a low-energy pursuit. Think of it like changing your work into a distraction: studying engineering is hard and boring, but you *like* tinkering with engines and building go karts and such; studying engineering will let you build *better* go karts, and that connection draws your brain to react on impulse by studying engineering. When that study converts quickly and recognizably into a greater depth of enjoyment of your hobby, you get positive reinforcement, causing your brain to structure itself around seeking those results by executing those actions.
Besides all of this, the geniuses among us are only using competent mental techniques. These range from scheduling and reframing as above to structured study techniques (SQW4R, OK4R), casual or systemic mnemonics (simple visualization up through mind palaces and other systems), and even structured note-taking systems (Cornell notes are the best generic; there are better systems for certain specific materials). Developing and exercising the correct skills *vastly* reduces the difficulties faced in college because time spent studying is optimized: less effort and less time produces more complete understanding and better grades.
Telling people to grin and bear it because college is hard is idiotic. If the effort and cost of college are high enough, it's *not* worth the investment--I dropped out and it was the best decision of my life; this may have been wholly untrue if I had employed more-advanced study techniques (and, in fact, I've gone back and structured my own computer science program to self-teach on the weekends because it's a six-month task if I can find 1 hour per day). Identify *why* they're struggling and fix it.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
When I transferred from community college to university in 1994, I applied to the Equal Opportunity Program. Being a poor white boy who was the first person in his family to go to college, I got accepted into the program. The Latino guidance counselor told me not to bother with the tutoring resources, because, you know, I was white, and didn't need that much help, and to come back next year to renew the EO&P contract.
My first year in the university ended with my girlfriend and I breaking up, leaving me depress and on academic probation. I got called into the EO&P office to explain my situation to a different guidance counselor. She demanded to know why I listened to that "idiot" from the year before and not follow the program as laid out in the contract. I pointed out the contract language that specifically stated that I must do everything that the guidance counselors told me to do. That took the wind out of her sails. Either way, I got kicked out of the program and the university. Ironically, the academic probation policy changed the following year because 10% of the student body was at risk of being kicked out (typically, it's 3%), which was too much money for the university to let walk away, and many of those students stayed.
I never went back to the university. A decade later, I went back to community college to learn computer programming and made the president's list for maintaining a 4.0GPA in my major. That was the beginning of my technical career.
I'm visually impaired, when I went into the Computer Systems Technology program at NAIT they hadn't really dealt with a visually impaired person before. The committee running the program at the time recommended I take semesters in halves so I wouldn't get overloaded. I took this advice and started during the summer intake. That first half semester was a bitch, they didn't have materials to help me along and the 13" monitors they had were brutal for my vision. Anyway, I got OK grades in most classes, but nothing great, in the introduction to programming I passed with a 65% (bare minimum pass) but I felt like it just wasn't for me. The instructor there at the time took me aside during one of the last days before the semester closed and told me that I had a lot of potential and that I should give it another try.
The next half-semester I re-took the introduction to programming, by now the program had purchased 17" monitors and my grade shot up 30%. Maybe it was finally having the equipment I needed, maybe it was taking the course for the second time but I know it was the words of encouragement that made me do labs as soon as I got them, try to work harder in other courses too, connecting the dots between them.
After that second half-semester I decided to go to normal semesters like everyone else and excelled. Turned out I was naturally gifted for problem solving and all sorts of other things that I didn't really think I was capable of.
Anyway I graduated in 1999 with a love of programming and a lot of confidence. Sometimes I wonder where I would have been now if I hadn't been given that little boost of encouragement from a person I respected, it's not easy to want to achieve things when you are a "minority" particularly when you have a disability because the deck is stacked against you, but then somebody tells you it doesn't matter and maybe the first time in my life I really believed it.
crazy dynamite monkey
Indeed, and in this case it's extra effective because the rest of the time they are getting lots of little subtle cues telling them that they are going to fail. Being followed around shops by the security staff, the look of mild surprise when someone finds out they are in college, the lack of interest from former teachers who seem to have decided they were going to fail anyway.
When they start to struggle it's easy to think, somewhat subconsciously, that the signs where there all along and they aren't cut out for this. Just pointing out that most people are in the same boat, that they are actually pretty normal, goes a long way.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Newly arriving students will have been accustomed to being in the top 1-2% of their peer group. They will have been used to being recognised as outstanding by their teachers. They will have been used to sailing through tests that their classmates struggle with and being only moderately challenged by meetings that their classmates find night-impossible. Depending on their school and its culture, they may have been used to being given particular perks or privileges.
I think a lot of times the problem for disadvantaged students is that while they were in the top 5% of their class or whatever, when they get to university they discover that the top 5% of their class was performing like the 75th percentile compared with a lot of their new peers. The shock isn't so much that there are a lot of other high performing kids there (though that's going to happen too); the shock for the disadvantaged kids is that what they thought was high performing is actually closer to just barely average.
... is the very same need in telling oneself "I am weak, I can't stand on my own"
Maybe not. Maybe it means, "I need a little help getting started."
When I was an MIT undergrad way back in the late 60s, MIT was just beginning to try to identify high-potential students from "disadvantaged" backgrounds. They would be offered a preparatory summer session to prepare them for the rigors of freshman year. While there were some flaws in the initial execution, the program had some real successes.
There were a number of black kids brought in under this program, and they soon formed their own affinity group, the Black Students Union (BSU). (There were other similar groups for Chinese students, etc.) A year or so later, the BSU did something that has me respecting them to this very day.
MIT was offering four years of full scholarship for the disadvantaged students--- very generous indeed. The BSU went to the administration and said that one year is fine, to help students get started, but more than that is sending a message to the student that you're incapable of making it on your own. So here we have a minority group offered something for nothing, turning it down because they were wise enough to realize that it could be harmful in the long run. Hats off to them.
The poor and disadvantaged don't have relatives that have made it through college. They don't know anyone to encourage them generally because the people they know have no experience with university. Many won't even realize the kids they think are doing great are struggling as hard as they are. Study groups can help this if they join them and most don't but it's better to be told by someone that's done it that it was hard for everyone, not just them.
Some people just feel better when they learn that someone else is also doing badly. Studies have been made and it has been proven again and again.This new study, again, supports it.
Most famous empirical, yet cruel real life exercise took place in Soviet Russia in 1920-1930. They were building socialism, and anybody who was successful (irrespective of whether individual was loyal or not - that did not matter) was under the risk to be reported as a bourgeois government hater. Millions and millions people were pushed to the soviet class warfare mincer by their neighbors.
The rich and powerful started doing everything to look like they are normal people. No efforts are spared to be "accepted". That is why rich and powerful are polite in public, hate scandals, despise scandals of other rich people and try behaving like most of us mortals: Hillary riding subway, Warren Buffet living in his $600K house, IKEA owner driving a beater car, governor attending baseball game and so on and on. However, that does not change reality and to quote cynic George Carlin: There is a club and you ain't in it.
The study is merely a repetition of the experiment about monkeys, cucumbers and grapes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Except that it was done on humans, who were made to believe that everyone else is getting cucumbers. This is a well known phenomena, because positive attitude, (or, as experiment demonstrates, ignorance of the true state of affairs) combined with a good word, encouragement can do wonders for the inherently capable people.
You have it completely backwards- middle class folks aren't usually eligible for aid and there is no way in heck they can divert 1/3 of their household income to tuition.
love is just extroverted narcissism
the shock for the disadvantaged kids is that what they thought was high performing is actually closer to just barely average
That's what he is saying and every single person there is experiencing the same thing. Every person present was extremely highly performing in their high school class and are now distributed around the new (much higher) average. The level of performance didn't really change much, but the average is now based on the subset of very high performers. The only difference is their ranking relative to their peers.
In fact, if the disadvantaged students are finding themselves at the 75th percentile of all highly performing students, then their "disadvantage" was really more of an advantage. They're significantly outperforming most of their "advantaged" peers.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.