I caught news of the just-released 2004 National Survey of Student Engagement in a recent article in The Chronicle (which is available online for a limited time). Addressing the degree to which students are "engaged" in their studies, it also features some interesting results about college student study habits, student "selectivity" among college admissions, grade inflation, and more. There's way too much to cover here -- if you're interested in recent changes in collegiate life, I recommend you read and muse over the findings by downlowding the report (.pdf format).

Overall, students are happier with their college lives than in years past and while they're studying far less than their profs would assume is necessary to succeed in their classes (and still getting Bs or higher, for the most part), colleges seem to have become vastly more "student-friendly" than in the past. One interesting realization I had while reviewing the data was that students seem to talk more with their peers about substantial issues and education than they do with their teachers outside of class. Although I'm sure that learning takes place, and all is not glum in the NSSE report, the general devaluation of the role of the professor in the student's academic life is a bit worrisome to me.

I'm resisting the urge to launch into a series of complaints about anti-intellectual shifts in our culture, the commodification of collegiate educational systems, and the general malaise and hostility of today's youth toward anything that doesn't give them immediate pleasure or a wage that can buy pleasure later on. I'm reminded instead that I still have power as a teacher to shape and transform the thinking of my students, to challenge their assumptions and engage them in thinking contextually about themselves and others. One way to do that is to remember that I'm a role model of the engaged thinker. And to challenge my own assumptions and continue to pay attention to the context in which student learning takes place. Students might not be as engaged today as they used to be, but if I'm engaged fully in the learning process, I'll be doing all I can to try to get them to be engaged, too.

Here's a handy refresher of strategies for engaging students, provided by Val Farmer-Dougan and Kathleen McKinney at Illinois State University, part of an excellent Center for the Advancement of Teaching which hosts a great deal of information on this topic.

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