You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Media’ category.
I wrote a brief response on Wednesday to the article “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors” by Ellen Greenberger et al, promising more soon. Then the NYU occupation hit, and I didn’t get back to it as quickly as I’d hoped. But the article, which appeared in the November 2008 issue of The Journal of Youth and Adolescence, is riding a wave of media attention, and there’s a lot more that needs saying about it.
The crucial problem with the article is in its methodology. It’s not at all clear that it measures what it claims to be measuring, and it presents its findings in such a way as to seriously mislead the casual reader as to what the students it surveyed actually said. I’ll dig into those issues in an upcoming post.
For now, though, I’d like to point out one narrow fact: Greenberger’s findings are based on an extremely unrepresentative sample of American college students.
As many academics do, Greenberger and her colleagues found their research subjects by advertising among students on their home campus — they put up flyers asking students to participate in a study, and gave a questionnaire to the students who responded. In this case, the home campus was University of California at Irvine, a highly-competitive university whose entering students have an average high school GPA of 3.95.
For this particular study, the researchers posted flyers in the UC Irvine Social Sciences Human Subjects Laboratory, and posted a notice at the lab’s website.
As they report in their article, these postings brought in 466 student participants. Of those students, 364, or 78.1%, were women, and 269, or 57.7%, were of Asian or Pacific Islander descent. Nearly all were social science majors.
The sample, then, was unrepresentative of the nation as a whole, and unrepresentative in ways that the authors acknowledge may have influenced the study’s results — they note, for instance, that students of Asian descent returned higher scores on measures of what they call “Academic Entitlement” than non-Asians, and that students who were not born in the US returned higher scores than those who were.
So this was a study of social science majors at an extremely selective, extremely competitive research university. It was a sample that was demographically unrepresentative of the nation as a whole. And yet its findings have been eagerly reported as evidence of what American students, as a group, believe.
All of this is significant to our interpretation of the study, but it’s just a lead-up to my favorite tidbit about the way the sample was assembled. More on that in my next post.
(If you’d like to be notified about that post when it goes up, feel free to start following our twitter feed.)
Note: I’ve put up a second response to the Greenberger article, addressing the skewed demographics of the sample it relied upon, here.
A journal article by Ellen Greenberger et al, “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors,” got a big writeup in the New York Times this morning, and it’s been making a pretty serious splash online as a result.
In a nutshell, the article explores what it refers to as the “sense of entitlement” that many professors believe students today exhibit. It reports the findings of a study in which students at one California university were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with fifteen statements regarding their “expectations of special consideration and accommodation by teachers,” and examines some of the factors that may underly such expectations.
I read the study this afternoon, and I’ll have more to say about it tomorrow, but for tonight I just want to highlight one aspect of how it’s been reported. Here’s a passage from the Times article that summed up what many journalists took away from the study:
A third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.
Pretty startling, I’ll admit. But it’s a serious misrepresentation of the original article’s findings. Here’s why.
As I noted above, the folks who conducted the study asked students to respond to fifteen statements designed to determine their level of “Academic Entitlement.” Two of those fifteen statements were these:
If I have attended most classes for a course, I deserve at least a grade of B.
If I have completed most of the reading for a course, I deserve a B in that course.
For each statement, students were asked whether they strongly agreed, agreed, slightly agreed, slightly disagreed, disagreed, or strongly disagreed. The study’s authors aggregated all of the “strongly agree, agree, and slightly agree” responses into a percentage, and that’s the percentage the Times used as the basis for the passage quoted above.
Let’s set aside for the moment whether the phrase “If I have attended most classes for a course, I deserve at least a grade of B” means the same thing as “I expect B’s just for attending lectures.” I’m not certain that it does, but let that go for right now. The more important point is that the Times reporter, following the lead of the study’s authors, interpreted even slight agreement with the first statement as identical to the second.
There are other problems with the study, but this is a big one.
Nelson D. Schwartz, “Job Losses Pose a Threat to Stability Worldwide,” The New York Times, February 15:
High unemployment rates, especially among young workers, have led to protests in countries as varied as Latvia, Chile, Greece, Bulgaria and Iceland and contributed to strikes in Britain and France.
Ian Traynor, “Governments Across Europe Tremble As Angry People Take to the Streets,” The Guardian, January 31:
Europe’s time of troubles is gathering depth and scale. Governments are trembling. Revolt is in the air.
Hugo Rifkin, “Student Activism Is Back,” The Times of London, February 16:
For decades, student activism has been in the doldrums in this country. It is hard to think of any large-scale student protests since busloads descended on the capital in the late 1980s in a wave of anti-apartheid rage. But that may be about to change.
The Chronicle of Higher Education made four three major errors in a single sentence on Friday, mangling issues of technology, due process, and sexual ethics in an online story about a student at Calvin College.
Here’s the original lead to the article, posted on their blog…
A Calvin College student has been suspended for one year over a lewd Facebook message he allegedly sent to an ex-girlfriend.
And here’s what’s wrong with it…
1. The student, Tony Harris, wasn’t suspended, he was expelled. The university called it a suspension, but according to the Grand Rapids Press he will have to re-apply after the year is up. If you’re barred from campus and told you have to apply for re-admission, you haven’t been suspended. You’ve been kicked out.
1. The problem with the Facebook posting wasn’t that it was “lewd,” but that it was found to be harassing. The policy Harris was charged under prohibits “communication that degrades or harasses individuals or groups.” Harris was accused of harassing his ex by posting a derogatory sexual message about her, not of posting something lewd.
2. He wasn’t expelled because of the Facebook incident. He was given probation over it, and told to post an apology on his Facebook page. He was expelled for refusing to apologize, and he says he refused to apologize because he wasn’t the one who put up the post.
3. The post in question was a Facebook status update, not a message to the other student.
Why does any of this matter? Because these aren’t random errors. They’re symptomatic of larger weaknesses in writing about student disciplinary matters, sexual ethics, and new technology, failings that are commonplace not just at the Chronicle, but elsewhere as well.
If you’re going to write a story like this, the details matter. The details are all that matters.
There’s a huge difference between being suspended for sending someone a smutty email and being expelled for contesting a disciplinary finding that you harassed someone in a semi-public forum. If you neglect those distinctions, you’re not getting the story. The Chronicle didn’t get this story.
Update: As reader JRH notes, Harris’s status amounts to a suspension rather than an expulsion under the terms of the Calvin College student handbook. Studentactivism.net regrets the error.
The Guardian, Britain’s most prominent left-leaning daily newspaper, has a substantial article out today on the UK’s recent wave of protests. Here’s how it starts:
A new wave of student activism sparked by events in Gaza has seen dozens of university buildings occupied in Britain, with some of the UK’s top educational establishments agreeing to set up scholarships for Palestinians or disinvest in arms companies linked to Israel.
Though the assault on the territory ended three weeks ago, lingering anger over the attack has prompted students to stage sit-ins at 21 universities, many organised via blogs, Facebook and text messages.
Students at Glasgow and Manchester are refusing to leave the buildings until their demands are met, after similar occupations at other universities provided tangible results in what is being seen as a new era of highly organised student activism.
You can read the whole thing here.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments