Thriving in Academe
Best Practices

Teaching the Underprepared Student

Virtually all higher education institutions have programs and strategies to help underprepared students to learn, usually with a focus on reading and writing. While many of these approaches are creative and effective, they sometimes are potentially limiting.

First, it is often the case that the responsibility for helping the underprepared student learn settles squarely on the shoulders of staff, not faculty. This does not mean that faculty play no role in teaching the underprepared student, but much of the work in this area is done by academic staff. We need to ask ourselves: How can we do a better job of taking collective responsibility for the learning of the underprepared student?

The primary, even exclusive, focus of programs for the underprepared is on first-year students. The assumption seems to be that significant learning deficiencies should be addressed before students move into serious academic course work. We should also ask how do we help underprepared students learn in a developmental way throughout their curriculum.

Finally, the domains of learning addressed in programs or strategies for underprepared students are usually restricted to fairly generic analytic and expressive abilities. They deal more with general academic unpreparedness than with difficulties related to study in a particular academic discipline. How might we address more broadly and deeply the different kinds of underpreparedness students bring to their learning?

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