Note the intervention to prime a desired response to difficulty.
With active learning, it's clear that early description of the approach, its effectiveness, and that it often doesn't feel like that, improves student approval, and outcomes(IIRC).
With 'belonging interventions', priming at-risk freshman with a narrative of "everyone here struggles - you get help, work hard, and succeed" inoculates against a narrative of "I'm struggling - they made a mistake admitting me - I clearly don't belong here", flipping a feedback loop of (not)forming academic and emotional support networks and (not)seeking help, and (not)succeeding.
One fun corner of medical reform involves medical interventions that are cheap, easy, with little downside, large upside, and no disagreement that they should happen. And still often don't. Promptly getting aspirin when presenting to the ER with heart pain, I recall as an example. It's been a long-term process improvement struggle that the profession has been pursuing for decades now.
One reflection of the state of education process improvement, is that this is barely even a conversation yet. And perhaps something personalized semi-automated teaching can help with. Everyone gets an intervention 'punch list'.
For example, checking and rechecking that everyone, but especially students from no-previous-college families, has an "education is something I create for myself with help" model, instead of a "education is something the teacher does to me" model, seems something we might actually do, to great effect.
With active learning, it's clear that early description of the approach, its effectiveness, and that it often doesn't feel like that, improves student approval, and outcomes(IIRC).
With 'belonging interventions', priming at-risk freshman with a narrative of "everyone here struggles - you get help, work hard, and succeed" inoculates against a narrative of "I'm struggling - they made a mistake admitting me - I clearly don't belong here", flipping a feedback loop of (not)forming academic and emotional support networks and (not)seeking help, and (not)succeeding.
One fun corner of medical reform involves medical interventions that are cheap, easy, with little downside, large upside, and no disagreement that they should happen. And still often don't. Promptly getting aspirin when presenting to the ER with heart pain, I recall as an example. It's been a long-term process improvement struggle that the profession has been pursuing for decades now.
One reflection of the state of education process improvement, is that this is barely even a conversation yet. And perhaps something personalized semi-automated teaching can help with. Everyone gets an intervention 'punch list'.
For example, checking and rechecking that everyone, but especially students from no-previous-college families, has an "education is something I create for myself with help" model, instead of a "education is something the teacher does to me" model, seems something we might actually do, to great effect.