Diversity, Achievement and Retention--A Conversation with Administrators

with Craig E. Nelson

Background points:
The faculty workshop I do on diversity is directed to individual faculty thinking about their own courses (the usual audience interest). The key conclusion of the workshop will be that low grades most often (but certainly not always) reflect out-of-date pedagogy and dysfunctional illusions of rigor. In the workshop, we consider several important but easy pedagogical changes. From an institutional perspective, at least three additional perspectives are important.

  1. It is important to review all large and multi-section introductory courses and ask which are serving as strong filters to retention. For these it is important to provide individualized reviews of the pedagogical literature. (What has made a difference in achievement and, hence, retention in similar courses elsewhere?) Often modest additional resources in will be needed for approaches such as peer tutors or supplemental instruction (unless these are already in place) as well as for individualized faculty development.
  2. Institutions often engage in self-defeating resource allocation. Specifically, will additional resources spent on retention be recouped by tuition paid later for advanced courses? (These often have unutilized marginal capacity.)
  3. A key problem in higher education is the failure of institutions to get a broad range of faculty to understand and apply well established findings from research on learning in post-secondary settings. A faculty project-based scholarship of teaching and learning program, if sufficiently extensive, can be one effective way to foster such understanding and application.

Time 1 to 2 hours

in: