Why do students fail in their college courses? There are many reasons of course. But given the selective nature of the admissions process at Case Western Reserve University, they should not be failing because they are not prepared academically. The University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education (UCITE) will host a session June 5 centering on the theme “Changing students’ mindsets from failure to success.”
An important factor as to whether students succeed or fail is how they react to an early setback in a course, such as a poor score on a test or a poor grade on a paper or a poor evaluation on a performance. How students interpret that result and respond to it can often make the difference between rebounding to a success or spiraling into deeper failure.
One recent article looks at what we can learn from a natural experiment that occurs at the University of Texas due to that university’s policy of admitting the top 7 percent of students from each high school class irrespective of other scores, and how they set about improving the success rates of those who might have otherwise failed.
It turns out that if teachers are attuned to those subtle factors of student self-perception and address them with the students who get off to a rocky start in their courses, they can turn them around. The results in Texas are in support of other studies about how the way students perceive themselves influences how they perform.
To learn more, join UCITE for the session on Thursday, June 5, from noon to 1 p.m. in the Herrick Room, which is on the ground floor of the Allen Building (at the corner of Euclid and Adelbert). Please use the Adelbert Road doors.
Pizza, sodas and water will be provided at this session. To help estimate the amount to order, email ucite@case.edu to RSVP.