Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
Financial aid significantly boosts persistence rates for the neediest students, but doesn’t make much difference for average students.
Also on Community College Spotlight: To qualify for financial aid, college students must declare they’re seeking a degree. People who enroll to learn some English or brush up on basic skills will be counted as drop-outs.
What does success look like for community colleges? It’s not a simple question.
Also on Community College Spotlight: Persistence pays. Forty years after enrolling in college, Jeanee Bernek completed an associate degree in business. She’s 81.
Adult students who connect with an instructor persist in community college.
Also on Community College Spotlight: Community colleges must compete for job training funds with for-profit career colleges.
As a second-year teacher of fifth-grade special education students, Mark Anderson often feels like a failure. He hasn’t mastered the “pedagogical and content master of all subject areas” or learned how to meet all of his students social and emotional needs. Also, “I’m not Superman.” But that’s OK. “Learning is fundamentally about persistence through failure,” he writes on Gotham Schools.
Anderson was inspired by Rita Smilkstein’s “We Were Born to Learn,” which calls for “making mistakes, correcting mistakes, learning from them, and trying over, again and again.”
He also quotes Deborah Meier, from her book on trust in schools:
There is no way to avoid doing something dumb when you are inexperienced or lacking in knowledge, except by not trying at all, insisting you don’t care or aren’t interested, thinking the task itself is dumb (not you), or trying secretly so no one can catch your mistakes — or offer you useful feedback. Of course, these are the excuses we drive most kids into when they don’t trust us enough to make mistakes in our presence.
As he learns to be a teacher, Anderson makes mistakes. He tells students when he’s made a mistake and what he’s learned from it.
The important part of learning is not that we fail, nor even that we fail over and over again. The important part is that we persist. And with time and the proper support, anyone can get better.
Of course, learning from failure is a skill.
Three-year-olds with poor self-control are “more likely to have health and money problems and a criminal record by the age of 32, regardless of background and IQ,” according to research conducted in New Zealand and Britain. From Reuters:
They found that children with low self-control were more likely to have health problems in later life including high blood pressure, being overweight, breathing problems and sexually transmitted infections.
They were also more likely to be dependent on substances such as tobacco, alcohol and drugs, more likely to be single parents, have difficulty managing money and have criminal records.
The study has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
In the New Zealand study, teachers, parents, observers and the children themselves assessed their ability to tolerate frustration, persist in reaching goals and think before acting.
Researchers also looked 500 pairs of five-year-old fraternal twins in Britain.
They found that the sibling with lower self-control scores at age five was more likely to start smoking, do badly at school and engage in antisocial behavior at age 12.
Children can learn self-control skills, said Alexis Piquero, a Florida State criminology professor who was not part of the research team. “Identifying low self-control as early as possible and doing prevention and intervention is so much cheaper” than dealing with the problems as impulsive children grow up.
Via FuturePundit.
This sounds like another version of the Stanford marshmallow experiment: Preschoolers who are able to delay gratification did much better in school and in life than the marshmallow grabbers.
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