| 1/06/05
Update by Topsy After perusing the periodical literature,
including ERIC documents and Web resources, and not finding much,
I queried people in the field. People kindly responded, and I
have checked up on Web sites and other resources they recommended.
- Most people
responded with lists of approaches used in other programs to
assure student success, e.g., tutoring, mentoring, learning
communities, individualized learning assistance, attributional
retraining (from National College Transition Network), teaching
students academic self-regulation (for example, Self-Regulation
in College Science Teaching), and on and on. No one referred
to behavioral programs for adult students, though, of course,
that was what I had inquired about.
- Antony
Lising Antonio of the Stanford Institute for Higher Education
Research (SIHER) wrote me that the information I was seeking
"unfortunately will be difficult to find because you all
are treading on completely new territory." (Antony Lising
Antonio is a major researcher connected with Stanford's prominent
The Bridge Project: Strengthening K-16 Transition Policies.)
If I am understanding
correctly, instructors in the WDBA are finding that some of your
students are not well socialized to how things work (what their
responsibilities are) in academic environments, and you would
like to become acquainted with a model behavioral program that
works with adult students, and, hopefully, an in-service for teachers
to implement the model. I am beginning to think you're not going
to find a blueprint, or even a "best practices."
I wonder
if you could tease out best approaches by contacting other bridge
programs. I would imagine that faculty in those programs would
have students in their classes similar to those in the WDBA. Maybe
someone from the WDBA would want to make contact with someone
connected with these bridge programs? (If someone wants to make
these kinds of inquiries, I'd be happy to post info about more
bridge programs.) For starters, here are some programs and some
contacts:
- BRIDGE
program at Mount San Antonio College Students in the BRIDGE
program can do a summer academy or a freshman experience. Contacts:
Patricia Maestro, email: pmaestro@mtsac.edu and Carlos Arredondo,
email: carredon@mtsac.edu
- Sacramento
City College has a EOPS
Summer Bridge Program. Contacts: rasuld@scc.losrios.edu
or molloyk@scc.losrios.edu
- Southern
Illinois University (Edwardsville) has a Summer
Bridge Program. It's an "intensive program;" in
2005 it will run from June 15 through July 29. Contact: Mary
Lou Wlodarek, her email is mwlodar@siue.edu
- Florida
State University has a CARE
Summer Bridge Program. Contact is listed as care@admin.fsu.edu
The only
program I have found that sort-of responds to your needs, as I
understand them, comes from a company called Teaching
for Success which offers a QuickCourse on positive
classroom discipline for college teachers
(by clicking on the link, you can sample that course). If you
look out on the Web, you can see that some community colleges
offer this course (and other courses from Teaching for Success)
to their faculty. It costs $ (looks as though a site license is
$197 per course).
Material
that might be helpful -- I would categorize as offering
good advice:
Anger
and Discipline in the Classroom -- vol. 3, 2003, of The
Adult Basic Classroom, a series of publications developed
for Florida Adult Basic Education Practitioners. See page 2
of this pdf document. "Students can't learn in a classroom
where behavior is out of control."
Most
of the 1990s literature about disruptive behavior on the part
of college students concerns really disruptive behavior
(violence, drug and alcohol problems, date rape, etc.) People
wrote articles that outlined possible causes (emotional problems;
difficulties with medications), and discussed possible instructor
reactions. One such article, referred to by a lot of writers,
is Kuhlenschmidt and Layne's Strategies
for Dealing with Difficult Behavior, published in 1999. Many
colleges and universities had orientations and materials for classroom
faculty, e.g., Promoting
Positive Student Behavior in the Classroom, from Joliet Junior
College. In the 1990s, Cabrillo College produced its own handbook
for faculty on dealing with disruptive student behavior.
There are
bibliographies about discipline issues and disruptive behavior
in college classrooms, but they cover the literature of the 1990s
(or a bit earlier), and I don't find any from the last several
years. If, by chance, you see anything listed on these that you'd
like a copy of, just let me know.
As you might
expect, another very strong recent focus of interests concerns
special education students (developmental education students)
K-12.
I
did find one fairly recent (2003) article about disruptive behavior
in college classrooms, so maybe we're into a new cycle?? Now it's
cell phones, etc.
- "Sssshhh.
We're Taking Notes Here. Colleges Look for New Ways to Discourage
Disruptive Behavior in the Classroom." Chronicle on
Higher Education 8 August 2003. Copy
of the article in Word.
|