2 Preparing Students with Habits of Mind for the First Day of Class

Students often come to university with preconceived but in many cases inaccurate notions of what the university experience is like. They have been told that they need to go to college to get a good job; that their professors do not care about how they do; and that they are now on their own. This can be an overwhelming perspective to have when starting a new chapter in life. College students, including those who may not have experienced even minor academic failures to this point in their lives, are particularly impacted by this mentality. It should come as no surprise, then, when many first-year students find themselves lagging and failing to persist with their academic studies. At Utah State University (USU), we believe programs that support academic success within the first year must encompass Habits of Mind, so much so that USU has instituted a first-year student program called Connections. One of the goals of Connections is to model Habits of Mind of the successful student to normalize these habits for all our students.

Connections is concerned with ensuring student success at USU. Academic buoyancy, a newer concept in the pedagogical literature, describes the likelihood a student will continue to persist despite normal, everyday setbacks. These setbacks might include a challenging assignment, multiple due dates around the same time, a pending deadline, or receiving a poor score on an exam (Martin & Marsh, 2008). Academic buoyancy is closely related to grit, or, more specifically, the consistency of effort that is used to define part of the idea of grit (Duckworth et al., 2007). The Habits of Mind Institute uses the term “persisting” to describe this concept, which focuses on staying with one’s goals in the face of obstacles and challenges (Institute for Habits of Mind, n.d.; Costa et al., n.d.). Though related to academic resilience, academic buoyancy is a distinctive concept in the literature. Academic buoyancy consists of the common challenges that a student faces, whereas academic resilience emphasizes chronic and acute threats to a student’s ability to persist (Martin & Marsh, 2006; Martin, 2013).

A recent review of the literature on this topic found several psychological predicters of academic buoyancy within higher education (Datu & Yuen, 2018). Among the predictors of academic buoyancy were the concepts of self-efficacy, a sense of purpose, motivation, control, engagement, and striving for one’s personal best (Martin & Marsh, 2008). Students who exhibit a mastery approach to tasks, which necessitates engaging in a task repeatedly to improve one’s performance at that task, usually exhibit higher levels of academic buoyancy than students with a performance-based approach, which involves engaging in the task once to highlight the person’s current level of performance. Mastery approaches are important and encompass the idea of striving for one’s personal best. Students who have a mastery approach to learning have been shown to be more successful at academic persistence than those interested in extrinsic rewards or who are merely checking a box on the way to their degree (Dweck, 1986).

It is imperative for students to exhibit academic buoyancy because, inevitably, they will be faced with tough challenges, either in college or in their personal lives. Yet, academic buoyancy is especially crucial at a land-grant university like Utah State. Many of our students do not come into higher education fully prepared to meet these challenges. USU consists of several residential campuses but also has a large nontraditional and first-generation student population. These students’ likelihood of success will be threatened if they fail to persist when faced with the initial challenges that come with entering higher education.

This chapter provides a framework for educators to start communicating with students about academic buoyancy. The focus is on USU’s Connections program, which students enroll in before the start of the academic year. Connections instructors help students use tools to support academic buoyancy. Instructors also introduce many of the most important components of Habits of Mind that lead to academic buoyancy. Although almost all of Connections could be discussed within the context of Habits of Mind, this chapter focuses on select assignments to highlight how instruction happens in this first-year course. In short, many of these assignments get students thinking about their own thinking and what they may not know about Habits of Mind. This approach to a first-year course engages students with the resources and academic dispositions that will supplement their current study skills and academic and personal knowledge.

About Connections

The USU Connections program’s curriculum, structure, and outcomes have thoughtfully and intentionally worked to address Habits of Mind. Connections serves approximately 3,000 incoming students every year at Utah State’s multiple campuses. Much of the instruction for this program happens before the first day of classes. Other components of the Connections occur early in the first semester of a student’s higher-education experience. Students within each section of the course have both an instructor and a peer mentor. Students have one-on-one meetings with both their peer mentor and instructor at least once during that first semester of their college education. Over 90% of the instructors are faculty, and as part of their responsibilities, they agree to stay in touch and to engage with students around the program’s curricular concepts. For this, the instructor must mentor the students over the course of two semesters (or one academic year). Connections has shown that in a short period of time, it is possible to teach various Habits of Mind that can have an impact on a student’s approach to their academic course of study.

Various elements regarding the program’s process and curriculum are designed to support student success. Connections intentionally keeps each instructional section small, capping enrollment at 32 students, to help instructors identify students who may need support in gaining the tools to be successful. (This contrasts with the large general education courses offered at USU, which can sometimes include over 200 students.) Small sections of Connections courses also allow for more personalized interactions to occur between students and instructors, with instructors being able to learn every student’s name, at the very least (Glenz, 2014).

In addition to fostering meaningful engagement between instructors and students, the small class size in Connections allows for organic and intentional peer interactions to happen. Many of the assignments and activities are discussion-based, where students can hear responses from their peers to hopefully learn and gain greater perspective about themselves. These discussions may help to normalize the struggles that many students have with Habits of Mind and the transition to college.

Habits of Mind in the First Year

One of the foundational assignments within the Connections curriculum is introducing the idea of Habits of Mind. Most students have never heard of Habits of Mind. Many have never had an intentional discussion around study skills. Other students have not realized that there is a process behind how one goes about learning and may not regularly engage in this type of metacognitive thinking. Initially, students think that the skills they have used up to this point in formal education are good enough to succeed in college. It is thus important to introduce and to explain the impact that having good Habits of Mind can play in higher education. For example, having the ability to read course materials or textbooks that encourage better retention can give a student an advantage on the quality and quantity of time that they spend studying.

One unique challenge of a curriculum like this is that sometimes high-achieving students will discount the need for Habits of Mind. These students view their process as something that has worked well up to this point. After all, they succeeded by getting into college. They may not see the need for more efficiency or different study strategies. It can be helpful to persuade even these students to reconsider how they think about their learning processes. A key strategy to engage these students is to provide examples of how professionals in various fields use different Habits of Mind to be successful, modeling good habits and skills that they developed. Students can then identify Habits of Mind that they might need to work on to be successful in their area of study. They may also be more apt to become self-aware of the Habits of Mind that they see as their own strengths, along with those that they may need to improve.

Course Elements that Encourage Habits of Mind in the First Year

There are various ways that Connections instructors provide formative feedback to students throughout the course. Providing opportunities for formative assessment can help students get feedback more regularly, allow them to correct errors, and for students to feel they have more control over their academic performance. This is one overarching characteristic to a process that can be helpful in building the components of academic persistence. This is possible due to Connections’ smaller class sizes and the ability for instructors to connect with students and their work.

There are numerous assignments in the Connections curriculum that help students prepare for their college careers, such as regular writing exercises and assignments. These Connections assessments are sometimes framed as reflective exercises, and they aim to help students understand that reflecting, or metacognition, is something that we engage in for our own learning processes. Students engage with instructors through these exercises; the instructor provides feedback that the student can then use to improve future assignments and assessments. The program’s emphasis on formative assessment allows for regular check-ins with instructors, which can be useful in identifying problematic issues with students and assisting them with support early. These reflective exercises also help instructors build mentoring relationships with students, as they can highlight topics of conversation to aid students. This process can help to increase a student’s sense of control of the outcome of their academic work.

Another overarching component to the Connections program is having many low-stakes assignments throughout the course. These assignments give students the opportunity to improve without the stress of having to be “perfect.” They can make mistakes and revise without significant damage to their grade. This pedagogical approach supports a mastery mindset for learning the subject matter. It also gives students a way to take reasonable risks with their education. This is particularly helpful for first-year students who may not have taken classes as rigorous as those in higher education.

Lower-stakes assignments can build academic buoyancy by providing students a way to still be successful if they practice persistence. It could be one of the first times they are presented with a disappointing score. It would be tempting to give up if that disappointing score held a lot of weight in the Connections course. It is also hard to be creative and innovative and to take challenges within one’s own learning process when there is a lot at stake with every assignment. These lower-stakes assignments can be a good method to encourage students to do their personal best, working more on mastering concepts and taking risks in their learning process.

Self-Efficacy and Resiliency

Connected to the practices outlined above, self-efficacy (or the belief that one can control the outcome of their own situation) is critical to academic buoyancy. When students feel like they can influence the outcome of their situation, it gives a sense of control that is powerful to them (Cassidy, 2015). USU’s Connections program highlights how there are several ways self-efficacy can be increased with regards to first-year students.

One skillset that can be hard to master—but is important—is the ability to know how to engage with information to be able to help oneself. It is common for first-year experience courses to do a process of onboarding, where the course introduces students to various resources on that campus. This is valuable information, for sure. But it becomes less valuable if students do not know when and how to use these campus resources. Students might, for instance, know where the counseling center is on campus, but if they are struggling with their mental health, they may not make the appointment. In that case, the resource’s location is not going to be helpful to them and serve its purpose.

Part of a student building self-efficacy is also being honest with themself about time management. If not addressed carefully, a lack of time management can put students at risk for academic burnout or significant failure. Many first-year students are on their own for the first time in their lives. They have more freedom with their schedules—they can do what they want to do rather than working from a prescribed schedule. In high school or at a job, there were likely set times for when they had to be where. But we recognize that with a high number of nontraditional and first-generation students, there are other factors at play in our students’ lives. Nontraditional students might be juggling jobs and tending to family commitments. First-generation students, who may face similar time-management challenges, also have fewer people to ask for advice about how to succeed in college. This lack of social and cultural capital can present novel time-management challenges for USU students. Since many students have not had to manage their schedules to the extent that college often requires, Connections has assignments to improve students’ time-management skills.

In Connections, we employ a time-management exercise to specifically help students put realistic expectations on the time commitments they have now made by enrolling in courses. This assignment is done during class time, but it is one that can be referred to for the remainder of the fall semester. For this assignment, students create a chart containing specific information related to their course schedules. The chart contains the following information in columns: course name; presumed ranking of level of difficulty (low, medium, high); how many credit hours for each course; estimated study hours per credits; and needed hours per week of out of class studying time.

Ranking a course’s level of difficulty is a subjective measure that can be acquired by informal means. Students can talk to their peers about the level of rigor of the content in a specific course. Or they can consider how prepared they are for that course, reflecting on their past success in a subject. The estimated study hours that are referenced and used by USU is such that high-difficulty courses require 3 hours, medium-difficulty courses require 2 hours, and low-difficulty courses require 1 hour per week of class study time for every credit. Students, in other words, take the estimated amount of required study hours and multiply it by each course’s level of difficulty ranking (e.g., a high-difficulty course that was three credits would equate to 9 hours of out-of-class study hours per week).

The last component of this assignment is for students to create a weekly schedule. Connections instructors encourage students to create the weekly schedule in whatever format (online or paper) will be most useful to them. Then students work on scheduling in their classes, study time (calculated from the first component of the assignment), sleep, work, self-care activities, and other social and personal activities. It is helpful for students to be able to see how time-consuming college can be. This time-management assignment can also lead to a fruitful discussion about values and how, by enrolling in higher education, students have indicated that they value gaining an education for themselves.

The Connections curriculum also involves having students identify the process by which they engage in resiliency and where they might have some needs for support in the future. Student mental health is of great concern to higher education institutions. This concern involves not only providing adequate resources to students but also ensuring that students use these resources. This assignment tasks students with creating a timeline of their own trials and triumphs throughout their lifetime. Students craft a visual display of the information so that they can see their own timeline. The visual display is graphed in a way that shows a timeline from birth to the present. It has a scale from +5 (the best triumph) to -5 (the worst trial). Then students connect each trial and triumph with a line so they can see a continuous line with highs and lows on their timeline. Students then go through the process of identifying the tools, resources, or people that helped them get through those challenging points in their life. They can write people who helped them for each event directly onto the timeline. This assignment leads to a productive discussion of the types of resources and supports that can be helpful in responding to hard times, which students will experience again in their lives.

To protect students’ confidentiality, Connections instructors do not discuss the events themselves but rather how each person responded to these trials and who assisted them in bouncing back from the challenge. This discussion can highlight the additional resources that others have used, helping to normalize the experience of facing challenging situations in schooling and life. Instructors draw from some guiding questions to facilitate a fruitful discussion around this topic, including: How have these events impacted your self-confidence? What behavioral habits have you learned that helped you? And who are the people who have assisted you through these events? Connections instructors also assist students in realizing that they are capable of handling hard things and have done so already. This matter-of-fact statement, though challenging for some students to see on their own, is an important realization, particularly for nontraditional and first-generation students.

Sense of Belonging within Higher Education

Connections recognizes that fostering a sense of academic belonging and creating communities of learning are both important to academic buoyancy. The program’s curriculum emphasizes how academic buoyancy can keep someone engaged with their higher-education career and find that experience more fulfilling. This can also inadvertently provide a person with the needed social support and communities that are helpful to turn to when students struggle to overcome a challenge and move forward. This helps with persistency by providing a sense of social support. Throughout the Connections program, instructors stress how a sense of belonging begins to form within the resiliency curriculum discussed above. This curriculum provides students insight on who those people are in their lives that have helped them (and can continue to do so).

Building community is another emphasis within Connections. The program begins to foster community through a discussion on what a learning community is and how learning communities can be defined. Instructors offer some examples of potential learning communities, including the one that students are currently part of. (They are, after all, first-year students in a Connections class!) It is important to note that learning communities can look different depending on the student. There is, in other words, no one-size-fits-all learning community. Finally, students work on actively investigating student organizations and clubs and other peer groups of interest to them.

This assignment can be done in several different ways, but one way is to have students break into teams and investigate and make lists of what groups are available to them at USU. Instructors can then lead a discussion on how one approaches a learning community, what this initial engagement might look like, and how to go about becoming part of a community. Students can roleplay this activity. Ensuring that students know what a learning community looks like helps support academic buoyancy by giving them the sense of belonging.

Conclusion

Higher education institutions—and those who work within those institutions—need to consider the Habits of Mind that are necessary to set students up for success. Utah State’s first-year experience, which we call Connections, comes with many challenges. But we recognize that students might not initially be equipped to face many of the difficulties they may encounter in higher education. These challenges can be exasperating, particularly in general education courses, if students have not established good Habits of Mind. It seems only equitable that there are not only discussions but also action put into place to support first-year students. Doing so ensures that students have the needed capabilities and tools to be successful during their time at USU.

References

Cassidy, S. (2015). Resilience building in students: The role of academic self-efficacy. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01781

Costa, A., Kallick, B., & Zmuda, A. (n.d.). TEACHERS: Habits of Mind Explanation. The Institute of Habits of Mind

Datu, J. A. D., & Yuen, M. (2018). Predictors and consequences of academic buoyancy: A review of literature with implications for educational psychological research and practice. Contemporary School Psychology, 22(3), 207–212. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40688-018-0185-y

Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087–1101. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.6.1087

Dweck, C.S. (1986). Motivational processes affecting learning. American Psychologist 41(10), 1040-1048. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.41.10.1040

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The Institute for Habits of Mind. (n.d.). What are Habits of Mind? Retrieved January 25, 2023, from https://www.habitsofmindinstitute.org/what-are-habits-of-mind/

Martin, A. J. (2013). Academic buoyancy and academic resilience: Exploring “everyday” and “classic” resilience in the face of academic adversity. School Psychology International, 34(5), 488–500. https://doi.org/10.1177/0143034312472759

Martin, A. J., & Marsh, H. W. (2006). Academic resilience and its psychological and educational correlates: A construct validity approach. Psychology in the Schools, 43(3), 267–281. https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.20149

Martin, A. J., & Marsh, H. W. (2008). Academic buoyancy: Towards an understanding of students’ everyday academic resilience. Journal of School Psychology, 46(1), 53–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsp.2007.01.002

About the author

name: Jennifer Grewe

institution: Utah State University

website: https://cehs.usu.edu/psychology/people/grewe-jennifer

Dr. Jennifer Grewe is an Associate Professor with the Department of Psychology at Utah State University. Dr. Grewe has taught thousands of undergraduate students in face to face and online courses. Since 2020, she has been the program director for Connections, which is Utah State’s first year experience program and is co-director of the undergraduate psychology program. She is an active member of her professional communities, which include the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (APA, Div.2) and serving as a consulting editor for the journal of the Teaching of Psychology. Dr. Grewe engages in opportunities to mentor students throughout their academic careers and is the advisor the local chapter of Psi Chi (International Psychology Honors Society). Dr. Grewe enjoys supporting student success and loves being an Aggie!