Have Students Believe They Can Dazzle You

There is a relationship between a student’s perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes and the probabilities that he or she will perform well academically and take on challenging academic tasks. The likelihood that a typical community college student, who often enrolls at a two-year institution due to academic, social, and/or economic underpreparedness for college, will possess a sufficient level of self-efficacy upon entering college is low. A professor at an urban community college uses “Dazzle Me” assignments to address this situation. Introduction A most disturbing aspect of being a college professor is that one can observe students wasting opportunities to do their best, or even to excel, in your classes. Today, when it is possible that a student’s GPA and/or his or her placement in the graduating class may be a determining factor regarding whether or not he or she will get accepted into a first-choice four-year or graduate school, every grade counts. Yet, there are students who are content to “coast” to an A or B, seemingly pleased that they needed to do very little to earn those grades. And, at the other end of the spectrum, there are students with such low opinions of themselves as students and such low academic expectations that they make no attempt to accept academic challenges which they deem to be too difficult. In this way, they avoid receiving confirmation that they are incapable of achieving academic success. This paper presents a challenging, but low-risk, technique for engaging students at both ends of this spectrum, and for those at every point in between, to the benefit of all. When was the last time that one of your students approached you after class to say, “I was amazed to learn that I can discuss any subject presented to me with confidence”? When was the last time that you met a student at a college function and he or she told you “I expressed my opinions in a way I never did before”? And when was the last time that a student dropped into your office to tell you that “You gave me the opportunity to show you my intelligence through something other than doing well on an exam”? Ask me any of these questions and I would reply “Why, just this past semester!” I have observed over the years that some of my students have “learned” that the best way to get through a course is to do the minimum that is required at the minimum level of acceptable performance, i.e., take a C (or D), and move on to the next course. In developing what I call my “Dazzle Me” assignments, my starting point is the principle that some of my students are attending class just to get through the course, possessing neither a particular interest in the subject matter nor a belief that a good grade is possible for them. These students will invest a minimum amount of energy in a task which they have done numerous times before, i.e., cutting corners in a class, without a sufficient amount of emotional investment to excel. It’s like reading an eye chart. Just get through it. And it is while I was reading an eye chart that the idea for the creation of “Dazzle Me” assignments first came into my mind. Having worn eyeglasses since the age of seven, I estimate that I have had my eyes examined about seventy times in my life. Nothing special. You sit in the chair, the doctor says something like “Read the line underlined in red” and off you go. No emotional involvement. Just get the job done, get your prescription, and move along. But my last eye exam was different. The ophthalmologist lit up the eye chart, leaned back on his seat, and said, “Dazzle me!” I couldn’t speak for what seemed to me to be at least a few seconds. Not a word. Because I was being challenged! I suddenly had an emotional investment in the process. I really wanted to dazzle him! Even knowing that there was nothing that I could do in the following few seconds to make myself see better, I really wanted to! And as I was reading out the letters, part of my consciousness was focused on “I wonder how I could get my students to feel like this?” As a professor at an urban community college, I struggle with ways to improve my students’ academic self-concepts and their expectations for academic success. In this paper, I will describe a set of assignments that I have begun to use in my classes which have provided outstanding results. I call them my “Dazzle Me” assignments. Literature Review Self-efficacy is defined as “the belief that one can master a situation and produce favorable outcomes” (Santrock, 2014). It has been related to the probability that students will perform well academically (Bandura, 2006) and that students will accept challenging academic tasks (Schunk, 2012). The likelihood that a typical community college student, who often enrolls at a two-year institution due to academic, social, and/or economic underpreparedness for college (Valadez, 1993), will possess a sufficient level of self-efficacy upon entering college is low. And, to add to the difficulties that many of these students will face, Grubb (1999) reports that a percentage of community college students are not really very committed to attending college at all and choose a two-year school because they have no other socially-approved way to spend their time. What, then, can the academic outcomes possibly be for these students? Even though many community college students are burdened by work and family responsibilities and some take breaks from their quests for college degrees as the pressures of their personal lives accumulate, the fact is that only 29.9% of students entering community colleges in 2007 were able to earn their two-year degrees within four years (National Center of Education Statistics, 2011). This is an indication that community colleges need to do more than just provide opportunities for higher education; they must also improve their students’ rates of success. Increasing the low levels of academic self-concept these students possess is often overlooked as a means by which this may be accomplished. Research has shown positive correlations between self-efficacy and academic success both in first-generation community college students (Majer, 2009) and in students at four-year institutions (Dispenzieri, Giniger, Reichman, & Levy, 1971; Lent, Brown, & Gore, 1997; Caprara, Fida, et al, 2008) and positive correlations have been reported between what has come to be called academic self-concept and academic achievement across many cultures and in a variety of countries (Marsh, 1990; Marsh & Yeung, 1997; Guay, Marsh, & Boivin, 2003; Arens, Yeung, Craven, & Hasselhorn, 2011). Also, students’ self-beliefs (Chambres & Martinot, 1999) and ideas about what kind of students they are and/or might become (Oyserman, Bybee, & Terry, 2006) have been shown to have an impact on their academic success.