dealing with difficult students

1. Dealing with Difficult Students Types of Difficult StudentsDifficult students may manifest themselves as such in various ways. These include:

3. 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.).

4. 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 professor�s 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 instructor�s 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.

5. 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 another�s work without properly giving credit.

6. 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.

7. Preventing Plagiarism Here are some suggestions for preventing problems with cheating and plagiarism:

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. Varying Assignments (cont�d) By incorporating varying assessment formats into the course, instructors are able to get a better sense of each student�s understanding of the subject matter and way of communicating.

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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:

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

17. Communication Styles in Feedback Communication is a key factor in preventing angry or excuse making students. Some vital communication techniques are:

18. 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.�

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. 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 student�s 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.

22. 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).

23. 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).

24. 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, 1988;Self-Brown and Mathews, 2003).

25. 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

26. 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.

27. Handling Angry Students Proper communication is essential in handling the angry student.

28. Communicating with Angry Students

29. Angry Students (2)

30. Angry Students (3)

31. Detecting Plagiarism

32. Google Searches

33. Anti-Plagiarism Tools

34. References