Principle 6: Communicate High Expectations
Good practice in undergraduate education communicates high expectations.
Introduction
Expect more from students and you will get it. High expectations are important for everyone — for the poorly prepared, for those unwilling to exert themselves, and for the bright and well motivated. Expecting students to perform well becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy since students tend to live up to an instructor's expectations. In fact, there is solid research evidence for this phenomenon. One of the watershed publications supporting the importance of expectations was Pygmalion in the Classroom (Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson). In this book, the authors describe how teachers in an elementary school could make their students successful or not, depending on what the teachers believed about their students. It is still true today that instructors determine their students' success by what the instructors themselves believe about their students.
Instructors can communicate high expectations by using:
- Real-world tasks. Whenever possible, have students do work that benefits people outside the college; sometimes called "service learning." As examples, an art class could paint a mural for a shelter or a building trades class could do repairs for a nursing home. These types of projects make students work to a higher expectation than simply getting an "A" for a class.
- Online (or public) presentations. Students seem to take more care when completing a project that is to be presented in public (or online). Therefore, consider the possibility of requiring projects to be posted to a public Web site in order to encourage students to do their very best work.
- A well-designed scoring rubric will help urge students to do better work. I have more information about rubrics in Practice Four.
Portfolios
Portfolios provide a public place for students to share what they have learned in a class, or their entire college career. Because portfolios are public and are, potentially, used to secure employment, students tend to take a lot of time to make them perfect. This is the very essence of high expectations.
Portfolio Tools
FolioSpaces. This site provides free e-portfolio space for students. For a small fee, they can upgrade to a "premium" account and get more storage space. Students, though, should be warned to always keep a backup copy of everything in their e-portfolio. Businesses on the web tend to come and god rather quickly; so don't depend absolutely on FolioSpaces (or any other web site) being around for the long haul.
Anti-Plagiarism Tools
The control of plagiarism is one of the high standards all instructors set for their classes. However, many students do not understand the concept of plagiarism since they are able to download whatever they find on the Web with impunity. Perhaps the first challenge to the instructor is to define plagiarism and then the second is to enforce anti-plagiarism rules. The following sites will help.
MOSS. Instructors can submit a group of programs written by their students in their classes and MOSS will detect if two or more students share the same code base. MOSS uses a very sophisticated algorithm (which is described on their site) and can handle C, C++, Java, Pascal, Ada, ML, Lisp, and Scheme. Best of all, MOSS is free to use.
Plagiarism.org. This web site is maintained by TurnItIn and contains a lot of valuable information about plagiarism for both students and faculty members.
TurnItIn. This is not a free service; however, students at subscribing institutions can submit papers to TurnItIn and it will check them against a huge database of journal articles, web sites, and even other students' papers to look for copied phrases. Instructors receive an "originality report" that details what passages were copied and where they were found in the literature.