Teaching College Freshmen

Teaching practices, both in high school and college, frequently help create disengaged students. High school teachers often rely too heavily on memorization and require little rigorous academic discipline all the while developing a personal relationship with the students. College freshmen expect that same supportive personal relationship with the college professor. The supportive relationship in high school between the student and the teacher is probably especially strong with the better students; thus, the better students may be especially vulnerable in the shift to the university with larger classes and less personal attention from the professor. In addition, in high school material is usually covered in class, requiring little outside reading, and testing is more frequent and lacking in demands for critical thinking. Consequently, students enter college with little understanding of what is needed, even though they think they will have to study harder when they are in college: they end up trying to do more of what they did in high school. They have not developed the reading (generally being able to learn material from class presentation rather than reading the text) and analytic skills that are demanded of them in the university.

Bette LaSere Erickson and Diane Weltner Strommer's Teaching College Freshmen. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1991, pp. 3-23.