Master's
Project
Askplorer
- Learn How to Learn -
Learning Problem
| The learning problem
of this project is: “high school students are choosing a college
without knowing enough about colleges.” Bridge Project of Stanford
University has done 6-year national research about high school students’,
parents’, teachers’ and college counselors’ understanding
of college preparation and college attendance. The report of the research
describes, “throughout the discussions with students, it became
apparent that they [high school students] had many misconceptions
about college preparation and attending college” (Venezia 2003).
Seideman (1989) suggests the same point that “many students
enter college with unrealistic expectation of the college environment.
Hence, it is important to supply the prospective student with accurate
information”. Misconceptions and unrealistic expectation are not the ends of not knowing about colleges. The further problem is the low retention rate of the U.S. colleges. Nationally, about 20% freshmen are not in the same college after one year from their enrollment. Of course, lack of knowledge about colleges is not the only reason for the low retention rate. However, there is the fact that the matching between a student’s personal values, attitudes and goals and those of the institution is an important factor for the student’s persistence (Seideman 1989). Therefore, being well-informed about the college of choice is related to the college retention rate. I did an interview with a professional college counselor whose job was to prevent students from dropout. According to the counselor, one of the reasons that students come to counseling was due to the student’s misexpectation of the college. To understand this problem, extensive observations and interviews were conducted at places such as college tours and undergraduate admission counseling sessions where high school students can ask questions about colleges. Through this research, I tried to come closer to the actual situation of high school students. The findings from the research are as follows: - Students asked very general questions and did not ask specific questions for their personal interests and needs - Students did not know what to do when an interviewee did not know about what they wanted to know - Students asked about the things that were available in resources such as websites and brochures - Many students were too focused on the admissions process From these findings, I made sure the existence and significance of the learning problem, and determined it meaningful to teach high school students what questions to ask about college and how to ask them. College brochures and websites might be suggested as resources to know about colleges, so they were also examined. These are good for general data, but not designed for needs of a specific student. Also, they provide only static information and do not provide dynamic on-going information that is shared among people on campus. Finally, these are the materials to sell colleges, which means that they do not provide information that is not beneficial for colleges. In addition, Bridge Project points out the fact that materials that are provided by colleges do not offer enough information: “Students, teachers, and counselors in Georgia, Illinois, Oregon and Texas often stated that the information they receive from postsecondary institutions is not helpful; it is usually glossy and superficial … also, students are not receiving current information.” Because of the shortcomings of college brochures and websites, high school students should collect information on their own by asking questions. I decided to make Askplorer for better college choice. Before moving on, a larger picture of the learning problem should be described here. Other factors for a successful college choice are academic competitiveness, self-awareness, and external influences. I did not address these other factors because of the following reasons. As for the academic competitiveness, there are many solutions already available such as Kaplan, EPGY, and non-profit organizations’ tutoring services. Self-awareness is another big challenge to address, and a lot of work is needed. According to Csikszentmihalyi (2000), teenagers generally do not have realistic expectation of their future based on the sound awareness of themselves, especially in terms of their future careers. Knowing about self is the half of the picture of matching between a college and oneself. Therefore that is very important factor in choosing a college. Many college counseling resources recommend students to do self-analysis. Yet, not much support is provided for this part. The student-counselor ratio is about 1:500 in an average public school, which is very low for enough counseling. Because of the significance of this issue, the initial plan of the project was to address this part of college choice. In addition, I thought that self-analysis skill was so important that a high school student could use it later in his/her life where he/she must do decision-making. However, the initial plan was aborted mainly because of the difficult nature of the problem for the scope of the master’s project. The detail of this process will be explained in the “design process” section. |