Are students emerging from remote learning worse?

[Kron3007]

I had a second student crawl out of the woodwork the night before our group assignment was due to ask what group they are in (they formed their own groups during lab periods).  They said they were having attendance issues due to transportation challenges or something.  What I love about courselink is that you can see what materials students have accessed and when.  From this I could see that they had not done any of the online activities that could have been done at their leasure, had only looked at one of the lecture slides I had posted, and only looked at the instructions for the group assignment the day they reached out.  So, clearly their lack of participation and understanding goes deeper than transportation issues etc.  I explained all of this and am making them work alone since it would not be fair to force them on a group that is well on their way in the assignment.  The other student in this boat has dropped the course.

So, it seems I do have a couple students who dont seem to remember how this F2F school thing works.  However, even pre-pandemic there are always a couple.  The main difference I see is that they have grown accustom to the university accommodating this type of attitude.  In both cases, I told them this is not a remote course and participation is expected (it is a lab heavy course, and I continued to run a F2F lab in 2020 (last time I tought it)).     

[Ruralguy]

Yes, in my experience it isn't so much that every student is "worse," its more about them expecting or at least asking for, much more in the way of accommodations, and I don't mean disability accommodation (which they were asking for anyway).

[mamselle]

You may also be seeing a kind of 'trickle-down' of a pattern I started finding when subbing about 5-6 years ago.

Even in elementary and jr. hi., students showed a tendency to try to 'negotiate requirements downwards,' which I don't recall seeing as much in previous interactions with younger students.

I've made it very clear to my music students that, no, there are 12 scales, not 8, and we're doing all 12 today--this is the kind of thing one gets--and they all know now not to try it with me, but at the outset with every new student, if I assign 3 pages of a piece, they want to do 2, or 1 1/2, as well.

Some of this might be due to being overwhelmed with a fair bit of work required of them, but by my observation in the public schools, most requirements weren't that onerous, they were just 'trying it on.'

Many, I suspect, have upscale parents whom they hear negotiating prices, interest rates, and other things downwards on the phone at home.

At least, that's my best guess where it comes from.

M. 

[Biologist_]

...The latest news is that they are planning to discontinue Scantron scanning and the only offered solution to instructors who give partly or wholly multiple choice exams is to give online exams, outside class, through the LMS and use Respondus/Lockdown Browser as desired.  Nevermind that these are much less effective ways of ensuring exam integrity than having students take the exam in person.  The alleged reason is that Scantron usage has been low and they can save money by getting rid of it, but I can't help wondering if it's not part of pushing for what students prefer...

I stopped using Scantrons years ago but I still give in-class exams that include multiple-choice questions and grade the multiple choice questions by machine.

Two good options are Akindi and Gradecam. Both allow you to print your own exam answer sheets, run the filled sheets through a sheet-feed scanner, and then upload them for scoring. Then you can download detailed response data and analyze it in whatever detail you like. It's all a lot more user-friendly than Scantron.

If you're lucky, your institution or department might sign up for Akindi. If not, you can pay for Gradecam on your own. It's a reasonable price for the convenience, especially if you can remember to stop your subscription for the summer, and you can try it out for free for 60 days.

[Puget]

...The latest news is that they are planning to discontinue Scantron scanning and the only offered solution to instructors who give partly or wholly multiple choice exams is to give online exams, outside class, through the LMS and use Respondus/Lockdown Browser as desired.  Nevermind that these are much less effective ways of ensuring exam integrity than having students take the exam in person.  The alleged reason is that Scantron usage has been low and they can save money by getting rid of it, but I can't help wondering if it's not part of pushing for what students prefer...

I stopped using Scantrons years ago but I still give in-class exams that include multiple-choice questions and grade the multiple choice questions by machine.

Two good options are Akindi and Gradecam. Both allow you to print your own exam answer sheets, run the filled sheets through a sheet-feed scanner, and then upload them for scoring. Then you can download detailed response data and analyze it in whatever detail you like. It's all a lot more user-friendly than Scantron.

If you're lucky, your institution or department might sign up for Akindi. If not, you can pay for Gradecam on your own. It's a reasonable price for the convenience, especially if you can remember to stop your subscription for the summer, and you can try it out for free for 60 days.

I use GradeYourTest which works similarly, and costs $15/year. You can try it with a free trial. Very easy to make a customized printable answer sheet and then scan them on a standard copier-scanner like most institutions have (with a bulk feed tray) and load them in to the software for automatic scoring (you can fill out an answer sheet yourself as the key, or manually enter the key within the software). I like that it gives not only scores but item level analytics and a printable sheet for each student showing their answers, the correct answer, and their grade. Much more functionality than our old Scantron had, and that was apparently costing something ridiculously high-- we should have gotten rid of it sooner!

[mamselle]

Possible commentary on the topic: others in the field may be better able to evaluate this idea:

   https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/06/young-adults-are-more-neurotic-now-than-before-the-pandemic.html

M.

[the_geneticist]

GradeScope is another option for scanning and scoring.  You can do bubble sheets, short answer, diagrams, etc.
I like the combination of students take the test in class on paper with online scoring.

[marshwiggle]

Possible commentary on the topic: others in the field may be better able to evaluate this idea:

   https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/06/young-adults-are-more-neurotic-now-than-before-the-pandemic.html

M.

It's not surprising. From Jean Twenge's work, Gen Z who grew up with smartphones have suffered for it, and the pandemic meant that those same people were on them even more than before for months.
Had Dante lived today, surely one of the levels of Hell would have been all social media, all the time.

[Caracal]

I'm suspicious, as I always am, of these narratives.
Tha
1. I just looked quickly so the only data I saw were for grade school but math and reading scores dropped by 7 and 5 points nationally. That's bad in terms of educational policy, but it is also about a three percent drop, which makes these discussions of a "lost pandemic generation" silly. If you took ten random students, those numbers are small enough that you wouldn't expect to see them. You have to get larger samples. For the same reason, I'm a bit skeptical that this would really be showing up so clearly in students in college-especially because probably the effect of learning loss would be less on students who end up attending colleges.

2. I'm especially skeptical about the claim that post pandemic students are lazier/less motivated/ruder/lack perseverance. These things aren't really measurable and teachers always think that students are worse than they used to be and always have. Everyone always seems to assume they are the constant and its the students who must be changing, rather than considering the possibility that they are getting grumpier or noticing things they didn't used to. Personally, I feel like my students have actually been better behaved since we went back to the classroom. That might not be true either, it could just be that I'm so happy to not be on Zoom and to get to see actual humans in person that I don't pay much attention to the things that used to annoy me.

[marshwiggle]

I'm suspicious, as I always am, of these narratives.
Tha
1. I just looked quickly so the only data I saw were for grade school but math and reading scores dropped by 7 and 5 points nationally.

The study Mamselle referenced the youngest participants were 18.

[Caracal]

I'm suspicious, as I always am, of these narratives.
Tha
1. I just looked quickly so the only data I saw were for grade school but math and reading scores dropped by 7 and 5 points nationally.

The study Mamselle referenced the youngest participants were 18.

Not a psychologist, but that study seems a bit suspicious in terms of the categories. Besides can you really conclude that because more people feel that the world is "distressing or unsafe" after a global pandemic that was badly mismanaged ,that means they are becoming more neurotic? Seems like a perfectly rational conclusion to draw.

[marshwiggle]

I'm suspicious, as I always am, of these narratives.
Tha
1. I just looked quickly so the only data I saw were for grade school but math and reading scores dropped by 7 and 5 points nationally.

The study Mamselle referenced the youngest participants were 18.

Not a psychologist, but that study seems a bit suspicious in terms of the categories. Besides can you really conclude that because more people feel that the world is "distressing or unsafe" after a global pandemic that was badly mismanaged ,that means they are becoming more neurotic? Seems like a perfectly rational conclusion to draw.

"Neuroticism" is one of the Big 5 personality traits. They say in the article that the amount it declined in young people is about the amount it would change over about 10 years of normal adult development. That doesn't seem so far-fetched; the idea that it would typically take a decade of development to make the magnitude of change two years of pandemic did.

[Stockmann]

I recently also graded some resit exams for a class - of the four people who signed up for them, only two bothered showing up, and neither came close to passing. Given the numbers who failed the course (well into double digits), only four people signing up seems pretty low compared to the Before Times. Other resits for similar courses here seem to have comparable numbers.
On the other hand, a colleague who teaches an advanced course (so students taking it would've already been in college when the pandemic struck) that has always been largely computer-based says it was the best group he's ever had.

[Anon1787]

Yes, in my experience it isn't so much that every student is "worse," its more about them expecting or at least asking for, much more in the way of accommodations, and I don't mean disability accommodation (which they were asking for anyway).

Same here. The requests for open book exams are an order of magnitude greater than in the past (students end up performing worse on them, but they tend not to believe me unless I give them one of mine.).

[Caracal]

I recently also graded some resit exams for a class - of the four people who signed up for them, only two bothered showing up, and neither came close to passing. Given the numbers who failed the course (well into double digits), only four people signing up seems pretty low compared to the Before Times. Other resits for similar courses here seem to have comparable numbers.
On the other hand, a colleague who teaches an advanced course (so students taking it would've already been in college when the pandemic struck) that has always been largely computer-based says it was the best group he's ever had.

But this is the problem. Once you decide that students performance or ability or grit or whatever has decreased markedly because of the pandemic, everything can be explained by it. Is that really a low number signing up? Or a low number retaking compared to pre pandemic? Often our memories about these things are unreliable and you want to be careful about drawing too much meaning from small sample sizes.

Even if it turned out there now lower percentages of students retaking exams and passing, there are a lot of  possible explanations other than "learning loss during the pandemic" or "increased neuroticism." I'm not in a discipline where exam retakes are systematized, but I would assume that the students who take them are ones who managed to maintain at least a minimal investment in the class through the semester. If you just completely give up on a class (or school in general) at some point in the semester, you may not even take the final exam, but there always a fair number of students who reappear at the end hoping they can pull off a miracle. I'd assume that when those students don't come anywhere close to passing the exam, they usually realize there's no point trying again and if they do retake they fail.

Could there be more of those kinds of students now? Maybe. But, if there are, I'd be careful about assuming it is because of some general decline of skills during the pandemic. I'd be more inclined to look first at continuing disruptions from the pandemic itself-lack of child care options-disruptions in work, economic difficulties. You might also have changes in which students are admitted, or which students are pursuing certain majors. Or there could be internal changes within the school.

The point is that we should be wary of embracing simplistic arguments that tend to conform to the prejudices of faculty members-basic beliefs that the kids these days are worse than they used to be.