Dealing with Difficult Students

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Dealing with Difficult Students

• Types of Difficult StudentsDifficult students
  may manifest themselves as such in various ways.
  These include

The Angry, Arguer, or Grade Grubber
The Excuse Making Student
The Needy Student
The Cheating, Plagiarizing Student
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Angry and Aggressive

• Angry and aggressive students may fall into many
  categories including those who

Violate rules
Manipulate instructors and/orother students
Post abusive or inflammatory remarks in
discussions
Make unwarrantedcritical or abusiveremarks to
professors or other students
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Excuse Making

• Excuse making students can often be very
  creative, supplying instructors with detailed
  excuses for not submitting their assignments (the
  cat died, the computer is down, mother had
  surgery, etc.).

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Needy Students

• Needy Students are those who require an unusually
  high amount of feedback and interaction with the
  professor. If given the opportunity, they will
  dominate the professors time, flooding the
  instructor with e-mails, pressuring for immediate
  feedback. This type of student should be attended
  to, but not allowed to dominate the instructors
  time. A word of caution the instructor should
  keep an eye on this type of student, because
  he/she has the potential to turn into the angry,
  hostile student.

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Cheating, Plagiarizing Student

• The Cheating, Plagiarizing StudentWhile some
  students purposely engage in cheating, other
  students may unknowingly violate plagiarism rules
  by incorrectly citing material or paraphrasing
  anothers work without properly giving credit.

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Preventing Difficult Students

• Although there is no fool proof way of inhibiting
• difficult behavior online, there are some things
  that
• can be very effective in preventing students from
• turning into difficult students.

Preventing Cheating Plagiarism
Preventing the Angry or Excuse Making Student
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Preventing Plagiarism

• Here are some suggestions for preventing problems
  with cheating and plagiarism

Post Universitys Academic Code
Provide Definitionsand Examples
Consider Creating an Academic Honesty Contract
Create Varying Assessment Formats
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Provide Definitions Examples

• Provide clear definitions and examples of
  different forms of plagiarism. For example, show
  students examples of acceptable citations and
  paraphrasing, compared to unacceptable examples
  of each.

Definitions
Examples
Avoiding Plagiarism in an Online Environment
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Example Definitions of Plagiarism (Crawford,2002)

• Ghostwriting when a person takes credit for work
  that someone else is writing.
• Patchwriting when parts of a paper are taken
  from another source without giving credit.
• Inappropriate citation and reference when a
  reference is overused or other authors' names
  were added to the reference list to make the
  paper look much better than it is.
• Inappropriate quotation when a person fails to
  put qutation marks around verbatim remarks from
  the text of another author, but cites that author
  correctly, or when a person uses too many quoted
  materials in a paper.
• Contextual Fraud the deliberate changing of
  words quoted from another author with the intent
  of changing the meaning of the passage.

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Examples of Plagiarism

• One excellent strategy in preventing plagiarism
  is to provide students with examples. Princeton
  University provides some excellent online
  examples of textual plagiarism.

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Varying Assessment Formats

• Another excellent strategy in preventing
  plagiarism among students is to break assignments
  into sections. For example, for a writing
  assignment, students may be required to first
  submit a title or subject, then a general
  outline, followed by a bibliography, and last,
  the entire paper.

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Varying Assignments (contd)

• By incorporating varying assessment formats into
  the course, instructors are able to get a better
  sense of each students understanding of the
  subject matter and way of communicating.

Get to know your students skill levels
Create assignments based around personal
experiences (eg., journal writing)
Provide opportunitiesfor students to resubmit
work
Break assignments into sections
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Academic Honesty Contract

• Consider having students sign a contract that
  advises students of the consequences of
  plagiarizing, their responsibilities regarding
  this matter, and agreeing to the consequences,
  should they intentionally plagiarize.

Sample Contract
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Preventing Angry Students

• Excuse making and angry students are placed
  together in this section because the excuse
  making student can easily turn into an angry
  student without proper preventive measures.There
  are some important steps instructors can take to
  prevent encountering excuse making or angry
  students.

ProvideClear Expectations
Make Yourself Available
Practice Good Communication
Promote InternalLocus of Control
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Provide Clear Expectations

• Provide clear expectations for your students.
  This is best accomplished through the use of
  learning objectives and specific
  directions/instructions for required activities.
  Other important things to consider are

Provide clear deadlines for assignments
Provide a policy on late work
Build a series of graded penalties, based upon
how late a paper is.
Maintain a file of all communicationwith
students.
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Make Yourself Available

• Post office hours and times that you will be
  available to correspond with students through
  instant messenger, e-mail, or telephone.

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Communication Styles in Feedback

• Communication is a key factor in preventing angry
  or excuse making students. Some vital
  communication techniques are

Listen carefully respect students opinions.
Respond to studentswork in a positive manner.
Promote communication social skills among
students.
Let students knowahead of time ifyou will be
out of town.
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Responding to Students Work

• Avoid potential eruptions by responding to
  students work in a positive manner and without
  discouraging your students. Avoid using
  accusatory remarks, such as You did not follow
  the directions of the assignment correctly.
  Instead, say something like, Please go back and
  review the directions for this assignment.

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Communication Among Students

• One way to promote communication and social
  skills among students is to incorporate a
  cooperative group activity. By laying down clear
  guidelines for social interaction you can
  encourage respect for other peoples beliefs.

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Notify Students if Leaving Town

• Most students expect instructors to respond to
  their e-mails and assignments within a certain
  amount of time.If you plan on going out of town
  and anticipate sketchy Internet connectivity, let
  your students know. It is better to tell them up
  front to prevent student frustration.

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Promote an Internal Locus of Control

• Locus of control refers to the types of
  attributions we make for our successes and/or
  failures in academic tasks.
• A students locus of control can have a profound
  impact on academic achievement (Anderman and
  Midgley, 1997). If a student, in turn, does well,
  he/she is less likely to become a problem
  student.

Internal Locus of Control
External Locus of Control
How to promote an internal locus of control
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Internal Locus of Control

• If someone believes that his/ her successes and
  failures are due to factors within his/her own
  control, such as ability or effort, then that
  person is said to have an internal locus of
  control.
• Persons with an internal locus of control
  attribute poor performance to a lack of important
  skills or to poor study habits, and are more
  likely to persist in the future (Anderman and
  Midgley, 1997).

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External Locus of Control

• If someone believes that his or her successes and
  failures are due to factors outside of his/her
  own control, such as fate or luck, then that
  person is said to have an external locus of
  control.
• This person may feel that working hard is futile
  because his/her efforts have only brought
  disappointment (Anderman and Midgley, 1997).

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Promoting an Internal Locus of Control

• One way to promote an internal locus of control
  is to incorporate a Mastery Learning (Guskey,
  1997) approach. This allows students to learn
  material in increments, by breaking down material
  into subskills. Students are not allowed to
  proceed to the next level of material until they
  have mastered the pre-requisite knowledge.
• Another approach is to promote learning goal
  orientation among students rather than
  performance goal orientation. In other words,
  promote a desire to learn and master the material
  rather than to perform at a certain level. This
  can be accomplished by designing multidimensional
  learning spaces (Dweck, 1988Self-Brown and
  Mathews, 2003).

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Multidimensional Virtual Classrooms

• Multidimensional classrooms tend to incorporate
  the following components into the virtual
  classroom structure (Lotan, 1997)
• More varied materials and methods of assessments
• Assessment methods where students are not openly
  compared to one another.
• Higher degree of student autonomy
• Collaborative learning activities
• Active participation
• Contingency contracts

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Handling Difficult Students

• Even in well-planned courses, where goals,
  instructional objectives, and criteria for
  assessment are clearly identified, there exists
  the potential for misunderstandings or
  interpersonal conflicts to arise. What do you do
  when this happens?
• You can often de-escalate a heated situation if
  something like this happens in your course, if
  you show support, encouragement, respect and
  empathy towards your student.

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Handling Angry Students

• Proper communication is essential in handling the
  angry student.

Communicating withAngry Students
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Communicating with Angry Students

• Communicate with student in a private setting.
• Rephrase what is being said in an attempt to
  identify the issue(s) at the heart of the
  situation.
• Acknowledge students opinion and be positive
  about his/her input.
• Remain calm and nonjudgmental, no matter how
  agitated the student becomes.
• Stay open minded-the student may have a point.
• Be careful about your language.

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Angry Students (2)

• Use evidence when disagreeing with a student.
• Avoid beginning critical statements with I.
• Ask the student to clarify using the class
  material, rather than dismissing an idea
  immediately.
• Avoid making an issue out of a small incident.
• Maintain your professionalism by not responding
  as if you feel personally attacked.
• Do not continue trying to reason with a student
  who is highly agitated.

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Angry Students (3)

• Consider your response carefully and seek other
  opinions before submitting if you are concerned.
• Copy and save all communications with students.
• Notify your administrator if you have a student
  who is abusive, threatening, or uses foul
  language.
• In the event that you meet face to face with your
  student, look for warning signs that the person
  is about to explode (changes in physical demeanor
  such as visible tensing of the body, assuming an
  aggressive stance, etc).

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Detecting Plagiarism
When paragraphs dont flow well, or students
writing techniques seem markedly different than
previously submitted work, it is always a good
idea to check for plagiarism. Two popular ways of
doing this are through search engines (such as
Google) or anti-plagiarism tools, such as
turnitin.com.

Google Searches
Turnit.com, etc.
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Google Searches

First, select a sentence or phrase such as the
topic sentence, or one with several unique words
in it. Next, enter this phrase into one of the
search engines (Google, AltaVista, etc.) Make
sure to enclose the suspect phrase in quotation
marks. Try entering the phrase into several
different search engines for the best results.
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Anti-Plagiarism Tools
Some universities subscribe to anti-plagiarism
tools such as turnitin.com or MyDropBox.com.
These services maintain a database of papers
collected from sources such as term paper mills
and academic works available online. In order to
use this service, the instructor uploads the
electronic file of the students paper. The paper
is then checked against billions of pages from
papers submitted to term paper mills, the
Internet, commercial databases of journal
articles and periodicals, and papers previously
submitted.
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References
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