Students Don’t Know What They Don’t Know… or THAT They Don’t Know!

Last week, Sheila Jarrell (our Registrar) came into my College Success class to share about how the college “works” in terms of registration processes, grades, transcripts, appeals, etc.  I think it’s fair to say that most of this was new information to the students.  To be honest, I even learned some things that, if I was a student here, would have been very advantageous.

At one point we put up “vocabulary words” regarding terms we use in higher education and asked the students to tell us what they understood about them.  The first words that Sheila threw out to the class were “Academic Standing”—you know, whether a student is in good standing, academic probation (or financial aid probation, which is different than the academic version), etc.  Certainly the class would know SOMETHING about this, right?

Dead, still silence.  The “deer in the headlights” look.  Not a clue.

The point here is not what “Academic Standing” is.  What struck me (and not for the first time) is the ASSUMPTIONS we (who have gone through the higher ed process and have obtained graduate degrees) make regarding what our students know and don’t know.  Many of us have been teaching for decades, and the processes for navigating a fairly complex culture and the strategies for success are second nature to us.  Indeed, they are a “taken for granted” part of our academic culture.

But students straight out of high school or coming to us from the work force for the first time don’t have this “insider knowledge,” much of it critical for their success.  I have likened coming to college as moving to another country to live.  Stepping off the plane, everything is quite foreign.  The “taken for granted” knowledge about how the world works suddenly doesn’t cut it anymore.  We experience “culture shock.”  Our students, for the most part, experience “college shock” when they come here for the first time.

When I first arrived in Indonesia to live in 1980, I remember stepping off the plane in 90 degree heat with 90+ percent humidity (with all the smells that accompany that climate in an overcrowded, Third World city like Jakarta), finding breathing (a normal activity for most of us) a very different, and even difficult, experience.  On the taxi ride to my accommodations (a frightening experience in and of itself), I saw numerous billboards advertising what seemed to be different kinds of “air.”  (The ads were written in Indonesian, a language I literally knew not one word of at the time.)  This kind of made sense to me, given my immediate experience.  I quickly learned that “air” (pronounced ‘aye-er’) in Indonesian was the word for “liquid or ”water.”  The billboards were pushing juice and soft drinks!

After teaching what has become our First Year Experience course for five semesters, I am convinced that the majority, if not all, our new students experience this kind of disorientation, EXCEPT--because this is Prescott and our policies, procedures and ways of doing things are expressed in English--they often don’t realize how disoriented they really are!  They need “air.”  It doesn’t matter how smart the students are or how well they did in High School or their jobs, college is still a new culture.

Bottom line is simply this:  Students don’t know what they don’t know, or even that they don’t know!  We wonder why our retention and completion rates are low when we don’t equip our new students with the “cultural knowledge” to be able to survive and thrive in this new place.  It seems we could almost say that, if we encourage or expect success, we have a kind of moral obligation to provide our new students with what they need, in terms of information and strategies, to succeed.

That’s why I am an unapologetic advocate of mandatory new student orientation and a required First Year Experience course for all new students.  I deeply want our students to succeed, both at Yavapai College and in life.  We can’t expect this if we don’t intentionally equip them with the tools to navigate our “cultural environment” (which, by the way, sometimes even confuses us!).