The arrival at York of a double cohort of secondary school graduates has prompted interest in a number of related teaching issues. Some of these, like the instruction of first year students in large classes, are not new. The double cohort has been accommodated for the most part by adding additional sections of the same size as have been offered previously; but these sections are generally large, and, thus, in this issue of CORE we offer some advice on maintaining quality instruction in large-enrollment courses. In this space, I would like to discuss some other teaching issues associated with the double cohort, issues having to do with the age of the students and their experience under the new Ontario secondary school curriculum.
The double cohort is widely understood as resulting from Ontario's decision to eliminate Grade 13, or, more properly, the OAC courses previously required for admission to university. Less well understood is that the first group of students to graduate under the new system have experienced a different curriculum and associated form of instruction. Thus, not only is this group a year younger than their predecessors in our first-year classes, but they have prepared for university in a different manner. Each of these has implications for York instructors. And complicating matters is that this year, and probably for a few years to come, students who have completed high school under the new system will be sitting side-by-side with just as many who studied under the former system.
Students graduating under the new curriculum are younger. Because high school can now be completed in four years, many students will be entering university at age 17. Students certainly have been entering university at this age in other jurisdictions for many years and succeeding very well, too. Nevertheless, at York we have worked with young people who have had an additional year in which to mature as students. Both the ability to manage the unfamiliarly heavy workload of university and that of managing their time generally are likely to be less developed in the younger group.
What can an instructor do to assist students who are less experienced with workload and time management?Students graduating under the new curriculum have a different set of educational experiences, and with those experiences come a different set of expectations for university. Major emphases in the new curriculum include: sequences of short assignments building towards larger projects (often with an emphasis on critical thinking and writing); considerable group work, including collaborative assignments; and very precise statements of the criteria for evaluating students' work. Though some of these features might well be appropriate and found at the university level, I do not want to suggest that an instructor's only option is to adopt them. Instructors who do not follow these practices can enhance their students' success by clearly, and frequently, explaining the differences from them that the students are going to encounter.
Certainly breaking assignments down into component parts is often a good instructional strategy. It can help students build the component skills required for success on a larger project, and it provides feedback on that development rather than leaving the evaluation to the end. As a minimum I suggest that you describe carefully, and frequently, the major stages you would expect students to complete as they progress on your major assignment(s). Attaching suggested dates for completing these stages would also help your students fit the assignments into the framework they have come to expect and thus gain more control over the learning process.
I know that many instructors feel that group and collaborative work is too difficult to implement in large-enrollment courses; but I encourage you to look at some of the suggestions in this direction that are available in this issue of CORE and in the CST webliography to be found on our website. A particularly interesting idea is to assist your students to form study groups, a project that the Mathematics Department has taken on with much success. More information about their efforts can be found at http://www.math.yorku.ca/new/undergrad/studygroups.htm.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the province's new secondary school curriculum is the emphasis on "rubrics," a means of providing students with precise grading standards and examples of the expectations associated with each level of performance on each assignment. For example, in the Grade 11 Canadian and World Studies course, students must write a eulogy for a historical figure of their choice. With the assignment the teacher provides a chart describing expectations in each of 6 categories (e.g. knowledge/understanding, thinking/inquiry, communication) at each of four performance levels. To meet the expectations at the highest level of the "application" category, for example, the student must make "the connection between the qualities exhibited by the historical figure and their relevance in today's world... with a high degree of effectiveness."
Having received a rubric of this sort with every major assignment for the past four years, it would not be surprising if this year many instructors find themselves pressed by their students for similar statements of evaluation criteria. Of course, the secondary school curriculum's demand for rubrics is part of a political accountability agenda that to my mind has more negative than positive features. Certainly I do not believe that all our assignments at the university are of the sort for which we can state in advance what we expect the students to learn from engaging in the activity. I want my first-year students to read seriously, and I provide them with reading material that I know has great potential for promoting intellectual development; but I do not know exactly what that development will look like for each student. The specific results will depend on the student's prior knowledge and areas of interest; and, thus, my examinations must leave room for different results for different students. I am not likely, therefore, to provide my students with complex rubrics of the type they have experienced previously.
Just the same, disagreement with the Ontario government's accountability agenda is not sufficient reason to leave students in the dark about the criteria that will be used in assessing their work. My suggestion is that we tell our students as clearly (and, again, frequently) as possible what our assignments are designed to accomplish and how we will make judgments about their success. In my course, for example, I emphasize that in reading the material I want them to "draw relationships" between that material and their prior knowledge/experience, including knowledge of other material on the course.
Double cohort students who have just completed the new secondary school curriculum come to university with a set of educational experiences that we will not replicate at the university level. But it is incumbent on us to be aware of the nature of their prior experience and to explain the grounds and nature of our own instruction. Where their assumptions about teaching and learning match with our instruction, so much the better; but where they do not, then I think the better consists in helping them recognize those assumptions and their discrepancy with our own expectations. Clear, frequent statements of what we are up to would always seem to be in order.