Freshmen entering universities across the country are having a difficult time grasping basic higher education concepts, a group of University faculty members meeting Monday and Tuesday on campus said. The faculty gathered for the National Conversations conference to address the fact that 40 percent of all college students are having to take some remedial classes in preparation for standard college courses.
Faculty and administrators broke into focus groups during the conference, with subjects including math, science, social science, English and foreign languages, to discuss areas where students need the most improvement and to critique samples of exemplary student work submitted by faculty members.
In the English discussion group, participants raised their concerns that many incoming students are lacking general background knowledge, which is necessary to understand the context of subject material, said Andrea Conklin Bueschel, facilitator for the English discussion group.A lot of first-year students don’t have the clear cultural or historical background knowledge needed to understand texts, Conklin Bueschel said.
This conference served as a pilot for five others, which will be held February through May across the nation as part of the national Standards for Success project, sponsored through the Association of American Universities. The AAU universities are divided into regions, with conferences being held at the University of Oregon and the University of California, Berkeley on the West Coast; the University of Iowa and the University of Missouri in the Midwest; and at Rutgers and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the East Coast, said David Conley, director for the Center of Applied Policy Studies and the director of the national Standards for Success project.

“From these conferences, we get a much better idea of what the faculty want from students,” Conley said.
One of the goals of the conference was to gather material for a CD-ROM, including exemplary work samples and support information, which will be sent to every high school in the nation, as well as to policy-makers and other officials. Participants hope the information will help close the gap between university and high school standards.
Francois Bodone, a research associate for Standards for Success, said there was quite a bit of feedback in terms of content and format from the small groups.
One important modification to the program that faculty members said they would like to see is the inclusion of syllabi, assignment guidelines and a scale of work for the work samples, Bodone said. Rather than presenting just examples of “A” papers, work samples for the CD-ROM should include examples of “C” and “F” papers, she said.”We need to work on the whole package,” Bodone said.
She said results from the conference showed a desire by faculty and administrators to work with the program.
“There was a lot of engagement and a strong willingness to participate and discuss the issues,” Bodone said.
Although the overall attitudes from the sessions were positive, Conklin Bueschel said one of the primary concerns raised was whether the University would dictate what high schools could teach.
“We want to see communication, not just a dictum coming down from the University,” she said.