One well-known feature of our trimester calendar is the crazy crush of busyness during the last few weeks of the term. You can see it in the eyes of almost every student as they trudge up and down the quad (and if you look closely you can see it in many instructors’ eyes too). Although it’s not fun, I’m not sure that experiencing this kind of crunch of deadlines is such a bad thing. After all, our students will more than likely be required to successfully juggle multiple time-sensitive pressures often after they graduate. So the issue may not be whether or how we might dial back the seemingly inevitable onslaught of curricular deadlines. Instead, our greatest contribution to our students might be to:

1. help them learn how to successfully navigate these experiences, and
2. ensure that our instructional interactions allow them to focus their energies on increasingly efficient navigating strategies instead of adding extraneous noise, unnecessarily vague direction, or downright confusion into the mix.

Last week, I shared findings that explored the things students can do to help them develop better time-management skills. This week I thought it might be useful to focus on the potential impact of instructional behaviors on this equation. Just like last week, these findings are the result of teamwork in the IR office. Katrina, one of my three student workers, and I worked together to develop the analysis and run the statistical tests; I’m responsible for writing up what we found.

In our mid-year freshman survey (data collected during the last third of fall term), we ask first-year students to tell us how often they struggle to balance their academics with their extra-curricular activities. They can choose from five response options that range from “most or all of the time” to “never.” Most of the students select “sometimes,” the middle response (i.e., a three), while the second most popular response selected is “rarely” (AKA a four).

Like last week’s analysis, we wanted to hold constant some of the typical potentially confounding variables – demographic traits and pre-college academic preparation – so that we could hone in on instructional behaviors that appear influential for all types of students. (This turned out to be particularly important for reasons that I’ll discuss later.) After a series of preliminary tests, we added three items to our analysis to see if they produced statistically significant results.

• I had access to my grades or other feedback early enough in the term to adjust my study habits or seek additional academic help as necessary.
• My LSFY/Honors instructor helped me develop at least one specific way to be a more successful college student.
• My first year adviser helped me understand my Student Readiness Survey (SRS) results.

The first two items offer five response options that range from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” The question about the SRS includes a different set of four response options that seem more appropriate to the question: “We never talked about them (What is the SRS?),” “Only briefly,” “Yes, but they weren’t all that useful,” and “Yes, and they influenced how I approached the beginning of my freshman year.” We hypothesized that all three of these items might have positive effect on students’ frequency of struggling to balance academic and extra-curricular activities.

Our analysis confirmed our hypotheses in two out of the three cases (last week we were right once, wrong once, and neither once, so maybe we’ve improved our prognosticating skills a little bit since last week!). Even though one of the elements of the Student Readiness Survey focuses on academic habits, the first year adviser’s use of the Student Readiness Survey didn’t have any effect one way or the other. Maybe it was a bit aspirational to think that one conversation could impact something as potentially continuous or more likely intermittent as struggling to balance academic and co-curricular activities.

However, both early access to grades or other feedback and an LSFY/Honors instructor who helped the respondent develop at least one specific way to be a better student produced statistically significant positive effects. In other words, as students agreed more strongly that they had received access to information that helped them calibrate the effectiveness of their study habits they struggled less often to balance academics and co-curricular activities. Similarly, as students agreed more strongly that their LSFY/Honors instructor helped them become a better college student, the students indicated that they struggled less often in balancing academics and co-curricular activities. In both cases, these findings held even after accounting for differences in race/ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status, and pre-college academic preparation (i.e., ACT score).

Thus, it appears that instructional behaviors can play an important role in helping students develop the ability to effectively balance their curricular and co-curricular obligations. Instructors can certainly design their courses to provide substantive feedback early in the term instead of waiting until a mid-term exam or late term paper assignment. Likewise, LSFY/Honors instructors can insert experiences or assignments into their courses that, instead of merely focusing on the production of intellectual work, also focus on the process of more efficiently and effectively producing intellectual work.

Now, remember my foreshadowing about the importance of demographic traits in this analysis? Even in the final equation, being female or being white still produced statistically significant positive effects. In other words, even after accounting for all of the other variables in our equation, white students and female students struggled to balance less often than their non-white and male peers.

It makes intuitive sense that gender would appear significant in this equation. We know from all sorts of research on men that their time-management skills and general maturity is usually behind women at this age. This finding highlights the additional effort that we need to make to help male students grow. Finally, the finding about race struck me as particularly important. In the context of the other research we’ve published about a lower sense of belonging scores for non-white students, maybe the findings in the current study reflect another way in which the collateral damage that comes from feeling less like you belong on our campus hinders the success of minority students. We have all experienced the negative effects of disturbing distractions that hinder productivity. Maybe the persistent negative effect of being non-white is a function of just such a destructive distraction and is another confirmation of the corrosive effect of stereotype threat.

We all want our students to be active and involved on campus. We also want them to develop and maintain a healthy balance between their academic and co-curricular obligations. It seems to me that historically we have put the onus for maintaining this balance on our students, providing all sorts of guidance on time management, priority setting, and life organization. Maybe, just maybe, we could also contribute to their success by focusing more on what we do to set them up for success. And I don’t mean dialing back our expectations of them. Instead, we might add to their potential for growth if we help them obtain and use the right information at the right time in order to continually (re)calibrate their balancing efforts. In the midst of the seemingly accelerated trimester calendar, this might be even more important than usual.

Good luck with week 10, everyone. For all of you who by now have noted that I’ve pointed out the increased busyness that occurs at the end of the term and followed that with an unusually long blog post that has just soaked up that much more of your time . . . I’m truly sorry.  Ok, well kind of sorry.

Make it a good day,

Mark