Students Don’t Do Optional … or Options

In the Achieving the Dream (AtD) ‘world’, the phrase “Students do not do optional” is used as a message to colleges that policy and program decisions need to reflect what we believe students ought to do — if it’s a helpful thing, making it optional often means that the students who need it the most will not do it.  I tried something in my class that suggests a slightly different idea.

For the past two years, I have ‘required’ (assigned points) students to connect with a help location at the college.  The idea was that students need to know — before they think they need it — where they can get help for their math class.  I allow days for this — usually, until the 4th class day.

Until this semester, I provided students with options for how to complete this required activity.

• my office hours
• the college’s “Learning Commons” (tutoring center)
• the college’s library tutoring (also staffed by the tutoring center)
• special programs tutoring (like TRIO)

Typically, I would have about 70% of students complete this ‘connect with help’ activity; most of the struggling students were in the 30% who did not.  Some of these students eventually found the help.

This semester, I tried a revision to this connect with help activity.  I provided students the following choice(s):

1. the college’s “Learning Commons” (tutoring center)

The result?  I have 100% completion for this activity.  All active students have completed the activity, and most of these did it right away.

This is summer semester, and “summer is different” (though it’s difficult to quantify how different).  However, the results suggest that the existence of options creates barriers for some of our students.  We have evidence that this problem exists within the content of a mathematics class — when we tell students that we are covering multiple methods (or concepts) for the same type of problems, some students struggle due to the existence of a choice.  [For those who are curious, you may wonder if students are not coming to my office hour — so far, I actually have more students coming to my office hours.  No apparent loss there.]

I think the basic question is this:

Given that choices (options or optional) creates some risk for some students, WHEN are there sufficient advantages to justify this risk?

If dealing with a choice has the potential for improving mathematical understanding, I will continue to place choices in front of my students.  We should resist the temptation to provide simple answers when students struggle with mathematics; the process working (learning) depends upon the learner navigating through choices and dealing with some ambiguity. On the other hand, when the choices deal with something non-mathematical, we should be very careful before imposing the choice on students.

Some people might be thinking “So, it’s okay for us to be rigid and not-flexible” in dealing with students.  That is NOT what I am saying.  If one of my students gave me a valid rationale for why they could not do the ‘one option’, I would offer them an equivalent process.  Our rigidity needs to be invested in what is important to us; I would hope that the important stuff is something related to “understanding mathematics” (though we don’t all agree on what that means).

I would suggest that the AtD phrase be modified slightly:

Options will cause difficulties for some students.  Allow options when this provides enough advantages to students.

We usually try to be helpful to students, and part of this is a tendency to provide students with options. Putting choices in front of students is not always a good thing, so we need to be selective about when we put options in to our courses and procedures.

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