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Fact Check: Are Flexible Student Deadlines at Odds With Real Life?

Will flexibility around due dates deliver a reprieve for stressed-out students—or ruin them for real-world work? A high school teacher examines the practice.

One Sunday evening last spring, I opened my work email to see a request from a student: He was very sorry, but he had underestimated how much work he needed to do for an important oral presentation. Could he receive an extension?

Teachers are familiar with these emails that arrive the day—or night—before a project is due. I considered writing back that the deadline had been set a month ago and that since we’d met to discuss his plan already, he should just do his best. But the student, Alex (a pseudonym), had been sick the prior week with Covid-19 and had missed work in all classes. Alex also noted that he had worked through multiple revisions of the presentation, but he felt stuck. His request could be seen as an example of honest self-assessment and critical reflection.

Deadlines set by teachers are a source of student stress but can have clear value. Check-in dates help students break complex processes into manageable chunks as they plan and progress through course goals, and final deadlines can help them organize and prioritize work, complete tasks that are required to move to the next sequential skills, and avoid the anxiety of missed work piling up at the end of the term. (Having a due date for this article, for instance, helped me decide which of my many tasks to tackle when.) Teachers benefit too: Managing moving due dates for 150 students can quickly turn into chaos.

For many educators, strict adherence to deadlines is just one of many important skills they expect students to master before entering college and the world of work. “There is a camp that believes that setting deadlines and meeting deadlines is a life skill, and if we don’t hold kids accountable in K–12, then they won’t know how to perform in jobs,” says Denise Clark Pope, senior lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Education and cofounder of Challenge Success. “But a lot of us who teach have realized flexibility is key.”

It’s almost certainly not a zero-sum game in life, or in classrooms, and the challenge for teachers such as me, and for leaders in business for that matter, is to judge when flexibility can improve work outcomes and lessen stress—and when it’s important to firmly enforce deadlines.

What Is Flexible and What Isn’t?

Middle and high school-aged students are stressed —and that’s been going on since before the pandemic . Research points to excessive homework loads , pressure to compete for coveted spots at competitive colleges, and lives increasingly shaped by smartphones and social media use . Even the word deadline is stress-inducing, with roots in a Civil War–era line drawn around a prison that an inmate crossed “at the risk of being shot,” according to Merriam-Webster . Some teachers are almost that deadly serious about grades, opting to mark zeros for late work or docking 10 percent each day, making completion after four days nearly pointless.

In the much-cited “real world,” however, when a challenge to an anticipated timeline arises, colleagues often meet to discuss how to work with it, whether more people will need to join the task, or which due dates need to be revised. (Plus, few adult workers have as many as eight people they must report to, with separate policies, as students do with their teachers.)

When Ashley Whillans, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School, and her colleagues surveyed working adults in 2021 about their willingness to ask for deadline extensions, they discovered that 53 percent of respondents’ task deadlines were in fact adjustable. In the same study, Whillans and her team found that, based on survey responses from 10,000 working professionals, asking for deadline extensions is generally viewed favorably by managers—and it decreases employee stress while improving performance.

Yet employees, especially women, rarely asked for extensions, even when it was clear that due dates were flexible. They worried that managers “would think they were incompetent and unmotivated,” the researchers wrote , even though “in contrast to employees’ predictions, managers judged both male and female employees who asked for an extension as more motivated than those who did not,” the researchers concluded.

If emulating real work conditions is an end goal, then perhaps holding your ground on all student extension requests doesn’t make sense, given the Harvard workplace findings. To figure out which due dates are fixed and which are mutable, teachers might consider whether students are asking for extensions too frequently, whether adjusting the due date impacts any other student work, whether the completion date of the particular assignment is inherently difficult to gauge, or whether providing a little breathing space might allow the student to do better work.

Especially for students dealing with organizational issues, unilaterally inflexible deadlines without opportunity to revise contribute to high levels of anxiety around work completion. New Jersey parent Maureen Gallagher has found that homework zeros can accumulate very quickly for her child who has ADHD. Even though he tests well, his grades reflect attentiveness to tasks outside the classroom rather than mastery of material. To add to the frustration, teachers often are strict with students but then late themselves to enter grades, so students don’t realize how many zeros they have until it’s too late.

When Flexibility Is Baked In

A Universal Design for Learning framework acknowledges these contradictions and frustrations by emphasizing student choice and participation in task designs and goal-setting and helps support all learners , according to advocates. Students encounter goals, timetables, planning resources, and check-ins, as well as tasks with strong inherent interest, through collaborative planning and strong scaffolding.

Some schools have this process of continuous revision to one’s thinking built in through standards-based or mastery-based grading. “The question of ‘Did you turn it in on time’ becomes even more arbitrary if you are operating under the notion that students have multiple opportunities to do the work and try again throughout the term or year,” says Nataliya Braginsky, a social studies teacher and 2021 National History Teacher of the Year. At Metropolitan Business Academy, the magnet high school in New Haven, Connecticut, where Braginsky teaches, students receive benchmarks and guidelines but are not penalized for late work unless the work never comes.

Research backs up the effectiveness of offering regrading or multiple opportunities to submit drafts, in both humanities and STEM fields. Two different studies show that allowing students to be late without question by one to two days increased both turned-in work and student engagement and learning . That’s the flexibility sweet spot: According to a 2019 research paper , stretching due dates by a week or more resulted in a steep drop in the rate of students turning in work. Students also tend to appreciate and feel they learned more when given the opportunity to get a revised grade on a draft effort, according to a 2022 study .

Deadlines, of course, can help students prioritize, and some students do well with fixed due dates. But even fixed due dates can be generated collaboratively and revised as longer projects and papers wind on—a common practice in the professional world, where deadlines are initially agreed upon, and then often extended as the complexities of a project become clearer. Braginsky, for instance, checks in with her classes throughout a project, especially during new units or work outside the classroom, and revises due dates if students need more time to do good work.

Finding the Right Degree of Flexibility

If extensions are common in the work world, then finding your own sweet spot—the point at which both you and the student are able to function at a reasonably high level—is the sanest way to manage the question of flexibility around deadlines. There are many places to start.

Allow extensions selectively: Teacher approaches to due dates can range from limited to near-total flexibility. Limited flexibility might include giving passes for late work—with two to three passes a semester, no explanation required. Stanford’s Pope says that “just having that lowers the tension; even if they don’t end up using it, it is a way to lower the stress.” A second approach is to allow extensions as long as the student asks 24 to 48 hours before the due date, although this approach does not account for sudden emergencies. A third option is to allow any assignment to be handed in two days late without penalty.

Grade completion and quality separately: I often input two separate grades, one for completion and one for the academic quality of the work submitted. The completion grade is not worth a lot—in fact, I make it a binary of 0–1 in most cases—but it cannot be changed. This separates critical thinking and academic work from compliance or work habits, as Jennifer Gonzalez suggests , without entirely conceding the issue of deadlines. It can also be part of a standards-based grading approach , where students and teachers are clearly and continuously communicating goals and how to reach them, and therefore feel safer taking risks.

Take a mastery approach: Greater flexibility by necessity invokes mastery-based approaches, in which students have an array of tasks throughout the semester where they may set the due dates or check-ins collaboratively. Kathy Gentle, a chemistry teacher in Stamford, Connecticut, says her deadline is really the end of the marking period. Work in chemistry does build on prior work, and she reviews the sequence at the beginning of the year. But turning in something on time doesn’t mean the work is good, she notes, and having a strict deadline doesn’t mean students observe it. “I know that kids have other things going on in their lives,” she says. “I let them be a little more responsible for deciding what they need to get done when.”

With all of this in mind, I considered my response to Alex. Yes, I wrote, you can present at a later date. But, I added, come in at your originally scheduled time to discuss your ideas. In the end, Alex was learning how to manage due dates, stress, and his sense of what was possible both in his analysis and in his relationship to authority. This was as important an insight as one he might have about Hamlet or any other text we studied.

As teachers, we have to evaluate how much the deadline is part of the progression of student learning and how much it is for our own convenience (important too!) or sense of power and order. In the end-of-year class survey, Alex wrote that he felt “immense relief” when he received my email granting the extension. With extra time to discuss and revise, he decided to fully change a text he was discussing. He had a breakthrough, he wrote, and actually enjoyed the work.

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Editorial: How can kids learn without homework and rigid deadlines? Quite well, it turns out

The usual system for grading students is, bit by bit, going by the wayside in favor of one that emphasizes learning over traditional measures. It's a healthy shift, though traditionalists no doubt are raising their eyebrows and muttering darkly about lowered standards and kids skating through school. The skepticism is especially likely now that the changes are being hastened by the realization that the current system puts students of color and those from lower-income households at a distinct disadvantage.

So-called mastery-based grading and a very similar method known as specs (for specifications) grading have been written about in academic circles for decades. But schools have stuck to an outdated system that relies heavily on students’ compliance — completing homework, behaving in class, meeting deadlines and correctly answering questions on a one-time test — as a proxy for learning, rather than measuring the learning itself.

That’s been a disservice to all students, whether they are academically gifted or struggling. It rewards students for grade-grubbing and has them feeling like failures when conditions at home — such as crowding, the need to work a part-time job to help the family finances or caring for younger siblings — make it especially hard to meet all the course requirements on a rigid deadline.

If there were a valid reason for this, that would be one thing. But obeying arbitrary and sometimes unfair rules doesn't translate into better learning. The goal should be assessing the skills and knowledge students gained and how well they think. Mastery-based education and specs grading, and some of the elements that go with them, put the emphasis back on learning. Imagine that.

It shouldn’t matter, for example, whether students get a sterling grade on the first chapter test on human anatomy, or if they learn from their mistakes and go on to ace a second test. Students who redo an essay, even two or three times, in ways that show they’ve grasped concepts of research and critical thinking, and can write cogent and well-organized sentences, are showing that they’re gaining important skills. That willingness to try and try again until a skill is mastered is something to celebrate, not penalize with points off for multiple efforts.

It sounds vague and perhaps airy-fairy, but education experts point out that, in some ways, this kind of grading is more rigorous. Under the specs model, students are graded pass/fail on their tests, but they don’t pass unless they do well — usually at a minimum level of 80%, or a low B. There’s no passing with a C or D. It’s the opposite of skating by; students don’t move to the next level of skills with minimal grasp of the material.

Rather than being given a grade or a comment that they failed to meet a couple of deadlines, students receive specific information about their progress and what they need to do to move forward. This system transfers more of the responsibility for learning to the student.

Several states, including Vermont and Maine, already have adopted this model for their public schools. A middle school in Brooklyn, N.Y., witnessed phenomenal improvement in students’ scores on standardized tests after a few years of mastery-based learning, even though it is in ways the antithesis of a one-time, standardized test. And in case this seems like just the latest instance of touchy-feely liberal thinking limited to the Northeast, Idaho adopted mastery-based education in 2015.

The concept’s roots lie in the 1960s work of Benjamin Bloom , an education psychologist at the University of Chicago who said that given the right conditions, almost any student could achieve at high levels. Now the Black Lives Matter movement has raised awareness that traditional schools are assessing the learning of students — especially Black and Latino children — in ways that both discourage them and fail to hold them to high expectations. In addition, more than a year of remote learning has familiarized students with how to use technological tools to learn; in the classroom, those can be used to individualize instruction so that teachers have a chance to work with small groups.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is shifting toward this new model of grading this year by encouraging teachers to give kids a chance to redo tests or reports and to base grades on what students have learned, not on their work habits. It’s off to a slow start, but that’s the better way to go when introducing an era of assessment so radically different from how it’s been for the last century.

Teachers need time to understand, embrace and start incorporating these practices. And they’ll need training, administrative help and aides to help instruct small groups and track progress.

In other words, careful implementation is as important as the reform. This is where new education initiatives tend to fall apart. Too often, L.A. Unified has used changes in course and grading requirements to lower its standards. Kids can’t infinitely skip school and miss deadlines; that’s not how college or the work world operate. Students should be given extra time to learn, but the schools can’t keep a student in middle school indefinitely, while he or she builds crucial skills.

Mastery-based learning gets students to think about their own progress and encourages them to take their skills as far as they can. If done right — and not as an excuse for lack of progress — it could reinvigorate classrooms and give students a sense of control over their own educational destiny.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times .

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How to help students thrive during pandemic times and beyond

Being overtly trauma-conscious and openly discussing current events provide a solid foundation for creating a compassionate classroom, says Ivania Delgado

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Students in helping professions are taught to uphold self-determination, autonomy and to identify the strengths of the people they serve. They learn and apply a systems-based understanding of people’s circumstances. Professors ask students to be trauma-informed and maintain a spirit of compassion and acceptance in their practice, yet many students will disclose that they have the opposite experience in the classroom. Students want to be seen and heard and want us to move beyond upholding a culture of punishment via grading practices and biased behavioural expectations under the guise of academic rigour.

Fellow educators, there is a disconnect between what we teach and what we do. Teaching to thrive means putting relationships and connections first and creating a learning community that increases the students’ awareness of their strengths. As such, teaching to thrive means we must ask ourselves tough questions about the learning spaces we create.

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In the past couple of years, we have collectively witnessed continued state-sanctioned anti-Black violence, disabled people being left behind by ableist policies across institutions that leave them unprotected against Covid-19 risks,  and the recent reversal of Roe v Wade . I repeat to my students that anyone tell ing them, “I had to do this too”,  is blatantly incorrect . None of us had to attend lectures, take tests or complete graduation requirements with a million deaths in our backyards.  

In my attempt to remain trauma-conscious, for the past couple of years, we have openly discussed Covid-related deaths and other pandemic-related losses in my courses. We have discussed the exacerbation of all inequalities, including poverty, housing, anti-Black racism, anti-LGBTQIA2S+, classism and more in our backyard: Miami, Florida.

We have normalised speaking about current events such as school shootings, the hate-filled rhetoric surrounding the “Don’t Say Gay” law and our feelings about them. We have centred lived experiences and marginalised voices that dare to speak their truth about what it means to be a student today. We have made connections between the micro and macro and discussed how these connections have played out in the students’ lives. We did not look away, and we leaned into the discomfort.

Educators reading this and thinking: “Oh, that’s too political ”, are absolutely correct , but as Bessel van der Kolk shared with us in his book The Body Keeps the Score , you cannot separate trauma from politics since your zip code plays just as much of a role in your health as your genetics do.

F or folks that may be looking for help on this, here are s ome of the practices that students responded positively to in my courses:

1) Provid e content warnings :  L et the student decide how they will participate and encourage students to take breaks when needed to prioritise self-care. After all, they are the experts in their own lives.

2) Allow resubmissions:  S elf-correction, revision and extract ing knowledge from the errors we make are essential parts of learning.

3) Anti-racism and anti-oppression in the classroom start with the self :  Considering that educators have historically graded and evaluated students through a white, middle-class lens, it opens the door to biased evaluations of our students. BAME students know that proximity to whiteness correlates with higher rewards and have enough lived experience to know when they are recipients of implicit bias under the guise of rigour, responsibility and opinions on how a “disciplined” student performs. An excellent book to read to increase our self-awareness as educators is Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks. It is important to remember that this is a lifelong learning process, and humility will help keep us grounded in this work.

4) Flexibility with deadlines without penalty : We too readily reduce points for behaviour that may or may not be part of the assignment. For example, a project may reflect a deep understanding of the material, extensive preparation and research but lose marks for lateness . Educators could consider giving students soft deadlines and one hard deadline for pending tasks, allowing the instructor enough time to calculate overall grades. Let this also be an invitation to consider that late submissions aren’t the only behaviours we judge. We unconsciously grade behaviours such as absences, participation, completion of assigned readings or whether a student’s camera is on or not .

5) Recorded lectures for students to review at their own pace:  Students have shared that having access to recorded lectures and discussions allowed them to pause the lecture, adjust the lecture speed, take notes and revisit content they struggled with. They feel in control of their learning by creating their optimal learning conditions.

6) Transparency in assignments :  Provide descriptive details of why the students will benefit from completing this work. This includes clearly and explicitly mentioning the skills and knowledge they will acquire and how their assignments will be evaluated. A great way to ensure that students know what a successful final draft consists of is by providing samples of the completed work.

7) Offer e xtra Zoom meetings to focus on the most challenging and time-consuming projects : I call these working meetings. We all show up to actively work on the assignments together. In the community, students answer each other’s questions, listen in on brainstorming and work through the pieces of the assignment they find the most challenging. This is a practice inspired by Paulo Freire’s pedagogy. In these meetings, we are all students and we are all teachers. It allows the students to learn from and with each other in ways that are not present in my teaching. This practice conveys that they can be each other’s sources of knowledge and resilience during their academic journeys.   

8) Establish w eekly check-ins to set the tone for the class : I always try to be intentional with my check-ins. Every group of students comes with their histories and personalities. Being student-centred, trauma-informed and culturally responsive means we ask them what their needs are and shape the learning experience to meet them. For example, a great tool to use is mentimeter.com . I use it to ask them to share their psychological, spiritual and community resources with our class, and we put them on display for everyone to see. I remind them that we will lean into these resources during difficult times.  Go all in, ask how they feel , get creative, play music and complete a gratitude activity .

9) Democratise the class as much as possible:  Let’s co-create the learning experience with our students. I use several tools to create opportunities for students to vote on their preferences. Consider using a Google form to create a survey, while Zoom polls, Padlet and even the chat function on any of the live session applications can be effective. Creating a culture of feedback and opportunities to vote on their choices may not eliminate the classroom’s power imbalance but it can reduce it.

Adopting some of these practices over the years has allowed the most-impacted students during these pandemics to work at their own pace, complete revisions and resubmit without penalties – and have their behaviours met with compassion, not judgement and bias. It is important to co-create spaces for learning with our students where mistakes, and authentic participation as the whole human beings that they are, are welcomed.   Ivania Delgado is an assistant teaching professor with the School of Social Work at Florida International University and an adjunct professor at Pepperdine Graduate School of Education and Psychology and Miami Dade College. She is also a mother, hija , partner and part of the Miami-Dade County community.

If you found this interesting and want advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,  sign up for the THE Campus newsletter .

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College can still be rigorous without a lot of homework

Senior Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Southern California

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KC Culver does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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How hard should it be to earn a college degree?

When the book “ Academically Adrift ” appeared in 2011, it generated widespread concern that college was not effectively educating students and preparing them for today’s world. Among other things, authors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa claimed that most colleges were not rigorous or demanding, in part because college students were not reading and writing enough in order to build their critical thinking skills. But is it really how much work students are assigned that makes college rigorous and helps them learn?

As a scholar of higher education , I have taken a close look at college students’ academic experiences and outcomes for several years. Some people define rigor as how many pages a student reads or how many pages a student writes. But in a 2021 peer-reviewed study that I published with colleagues John Braxton and Ernie Pascarella , I found that if they do that, they might miss key elements of what it takes to help students develop critical thinking skills and become lifelong learners. They also might create an unnecessary burden for students who have other demands on their time.

What is rigor?

In education, academic rigor tends to be defined in two different ways : as a workload that is demanding and difficult or as learning experiences that challenge and support students to think more deeply.

Given the importance of critical thinking, the way rigor is defined makes a big difference in terms of the ways that the general public – as well as administrators, policymakers, journalists and researchers – assess if a college is rigorous. It also makes a difference in terms of faculties’ expectations for students, the types of classroom activities they use and the assignments they give.

In other words, if rigor means workload, then students who spend a lot of time studying should become better critical thinkers. In contrast, if rigor means academic challenge, then students who practice higher-order thinking skills, such as analysis and evaluation , during class, on assignments and during exams should become better critical thinkers.

That’s why my study examines each definition of rigor – workload and academic challenge – in terms of helping students develop critical thinking skills. The study also looks at those definitions of rigor in relation to two related dimensions of lifelong learning. One is reading and writing for pleasure, and the other is the habit of thinking deeply and critically about things.

The college difference

The study included about 2,800 students who attended one of 46 four-year colleges in the U.S. between 2006 and 2012. These students took part in the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education , which was a large, longitudinal study of how college experiences affected outcomes associated with a liberal arts education. They completed surveys and tests at three different points during college: at the beginning of their first year, at the end of their first year and at the end of their fourth year.

In these surveys, students reported their course workload, including how many books they read, pages they wrote and hours they spent studying for class. They also reported how much their courses challenged them to engage in higher-order thinking. Faculty ask students to practice higher-order thinking when they ask challenging questions in class and give assignments that ask students to analyze information or form an argument.

Since the Wabash National Study measured students’ critical thinking and lifelong learning skills at multiple timepoints, my study looked at how much students developed these skills in relation to their workload and the academic challenge of their classes. Of course, students who are motivated to get good grades may be more likely to develop these skills. And lots of other college experiences, like interacting with faculty outside of class or being in an honors program, might also make a difference. My study accounts for these factors in order to better understand the unique influence of each definition of rigor.

What matters

Here’s what we found.

In the first year of college, higher-order thinking was related to an increase in both dimensions of lifelong learning: reading and writing for pleasure and the tendency to think deeply. Higher-order thinking was not related to development of critical thinking skills. Workload was not related to students’ critical thinking or either dimension of lifelong learning.

Across four years of college, higher-order thinking was related to an increase in students’ critical thinking skills and both dimensions of lifelong learning. Workload was related to only one dimension of lifelong learning: reading and writing for pleasure. This relationship was driven primarily by the amount of reading students did, rather than the amount of writing they did or the amount of time they spent studying.

Perhaps most importantly, my study suggests that students learn important critical thinking and lifelong learning skills because of challenging class experiences regardless of the workload. In other words, college can help students be better critical thinkers and lifelong learners without requiring them to spend a lot of time studying.

[ You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter .]

Implications for colleges

This study has implications for how courses and colleges are assessed as being rigorous. It also has implications for how faculty teach, as it suggests that they should create courses that engage students in higher-order thinking, rather than asking them to complete long reading and writing assignments.

These implications matter particularly for students from low-income backgrounds, who are more likely to work full-time during college. Low-income students are also more likely to commute to campus and have family responsibilities .

Because of these responsibilities, students from low-income backgrounds often have less time to dedicate to homework compared to students from wealthier backgrounds who live on campus and who don’t work as many hours. This creates an opportunity gap in students’ ability to be successful. A 2018 report from the Pell Institute shows that low-income students graduate at much lower rates than students from higher-income backgrounds.

If campuses want students from low-income backgrounds to graduate at the same rate as their peers, then it is important that these students have a reasonable workload in their courses so that they don’t have to choose between college and their other responsibilities.

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Flexible Due Dates: How it Works in College & K12

Strict due dates are ingrained in all levels of education but some educators find when they get rid of them there’s less stress and more learning.

The concept of loosening due dates used to terrify me. 

However, recently thanks to the advice of some innovative educators, I instituted flexible due dates in my classes with positive results. Through my experience and conversations with these educators, I've learned that there are many misconceptions about flexible due dates and our collective thinking around deadlines is overdue for an update. 

Flexible Due Dates are Implemented on a Spectrum 

Not all flexible due dates course design looks the same. For example, Holly Owens, who teaches graduate instructional design classes at Touro College and hosts the EdUp EdTech podcast, includes due dates on her course schedule. However, these are soft due dates, as students have a four- or five-day grace period afterward in which they can submit work without penalty. 

If they miss that grace period, they can still submit up until the end of the semester with only a 5-point deduction out of a 100-point submission. 

Dr. Kathryn J. Biacindo’s online education courses at Fresno State are more truly self-paced. Though there is a course calendar that provides students with a sense of the order in which they can complete assignments, they’re free to finish the course early or binge on several assignments at the end of the semester. There is no pressure to stick to the course schedule.  

Briana Breen, a grad student of Biacindo's at Fresno State and a second-grade teacher in California, links flexible due dates with mastery learning, which also eliminates grading. Her students are given time to gain proficiency in a topic before moving on to the next phase of the class. If that means a student needs more time to complete an assignment, Breen is perfectly fine with that. “I don't penalize students for not doing homework because outside the classroom, I can't control what happens. Students have a million things going on in their life just like I do,” she says. But structuring her classes around mastery and student achievement instead of grades and due dates has made students more enthusiastic about completing assignments. 

In my classes, I tend to take an approach that is similar to Owens. I still have due dates but now include brief "grace periods" during which students can submit work without penalties. If they miss the grace period, small penalties start to accrue. In the workshop writing classes I teach, keeping as close to a schedule is important. However, building some flexibility into the class helps provide students who have fallen behind a lifeline to catch up to their classmates. 

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Flexible Due Dates Can Reduce Stress and Increase Productivity  

The goal behind flexible due dates is to reduce stress while maximizing opportunities for student success. Giving students who miss a due date an opportunity to catch up encourages them to keep engaging with the class rather than give up. “It's kind of like when you start eating healthy or exercising and you miss one day, you're like, ‘I just give up.’ I don't want that,” Owens says. 

Both Biacindo and Breen have researched the impact of due dates and other mastery-based strategies on their students. Their results overwhelmingly favor the more flexible approach. 

Breen says letting her students know that a writing assignment is due at the end of the week, but they can take more time if they need to, reduces student panic, which helps drive the increase in productivity she sees from students. “The worst thing to see in a student is a panic because it closes their mind. It takes away their growth mindset,” she says. 

I found that to be the case as well. In the past students who have missed assignments early often fall too far behind to succeed and end up either dropping or failing the class. Since I've included more opportunities for students to catch up, I've seen certain students excel who may not have in the past. 

Not Everyone Waits Until The Last Minute Without Due Dates 

My nightmare scenario before I started offering flexible due dates was being buried under a mountain of ungraded assignments at the end of the semester. But that doesn’t actually happen, say flexible due date practitioners. 

“The majority of students are on deadline or right next to it,” Owens says. “It's a few students who you're accommodating.” To manage her time, Owens lets students know that if a submission is late, she may not grade it right away but will instead wait until her next scheduled grading session. 

Even in Biacindo’s self-paced courses, not every student waits until the end of the semester to submit work. “About a third of my students will finish early, then I have a third who are normal, and then I have a third who are bingers, but that's their personal learning style and they’re allowed to express it,” she says. 

While this flexible schedule does give her more to grade during the final week of each semester, she factors that time in from the beginning and says it remains manageable. 

Another common misconception about flexible due dates is that courses that employ this approach are less rigorous. Flexible due dates should not be linked to academic rigor. For instance, I teach graduate writing courses that require students to complete a great deal of work that includes producing a lot of original writing and providing detailed feedback on the writing of their classmates. The course is a lot of work, and giving students a little more breathing room on an assignment doesn't change that.

Instructor Feedback Still Matters Without Due Dates  

When I teach writing, assignments build progressively and my hope is that students improve based upon my feedback throughout the semester. On the surface, this seems undoable with flexible due dates. However, the idea of learning new skills and then building on these skills is at the heart of mastery education – and even without due dates instructor feedback remains key. 

Instead of keeping students to a preconceived schedule, Breen makes sure they’ve learned a previous lesson before they advance to the next. “Most of the material, especially in K through 12, it's all building bridges,” she says. “When we push the kids through on [a topic] without it being completely mastered, it just weakens their learning for the next step of it.” 

In her classes, Owens says she’s often able to provide more feedback in a condensed amount of time to students who have fallen behind. However, there are times when students fall too far behind and will need to withdraw from the course or take an incomplete. 

Group Work Without Due Dates and "Real Life"  

Another concern I've had with due dates is group work and peer review. I teach a writing workshop in which students are required to read 15-20 page submissions from classmates and provide detailed feedback and line edits. It feels unfair to ask others to adjust their schedules to accommodate students who submit late work, which is why I still have due dates, just more flexible ones. 

When it comes to this type of work and due dates,  it can be necessary to find creative ways to incorporate group work and assignments more flexibly. For instance, Biacindo makes group work optional. “There are people who like to run solo, but if you do things in a group, it will be a little easier, and so I give them that option,” she says. 

One common argument in favor of a due date is that’s how the real world works. Only it isn’t .

Supervisors who give rigid arbitrary deadlines are also supervisors who have trouble keeping employees. Even in the world of journalism, in which a due date is as important as almost any professional field, it is not generally etched in stone. It’s common for journalists working outside of breaking news to ask for, and be granted, small extensions. I ask for these regularly. I even asked for one for this story. Thankfully, I wasn’t penalized. 

• Using Virtual Environments & Other Edtech to Foster Inclusivity
• Educators Moving Away from Seat Time for Mastery-Based Education

Erik Ofgang is Tech & Learning's senior staff writer. A journalist,  author  and educator, his work has appeared in the Washington Post , The Atlantic , and Associated Press. He currently teaches at Western Connecticut State University’s MFA program. While a staff writer at Connecticut Magazine he won a Society of Professional Journalism Award for his education reporting. He is interested in how humans learn and how technology can make that more effective. 

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Letters to the Editor: Schools teach kids not to slack off. How would no more homework help?

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To the editor: Reading your editorial favoring a school grading system that deemphasizes homework and task completion , I though what great news this might mean to journalists. Just turn your articles in whenever, no consequences, and don’t worry about work outside your official hours.

Advertisers, turn in your ad copy whenever. Delivery folks, take your time, because deadlines don’t matter. Custodians, clean the toilets whenever you feel like it.

Now, to real life: There are very few tests given once we are adults, but there are many daily chores that must be done and deadlines that must be met. My job as a teacher is not only to educate my students, but also to turn them into employable and responsible adults.

That means daily practice with a routine that becomes ingrained. Completing homework teaches a student organization and planning; it also improves academic skills and reinforces knowledge.

Kathleen McCarthy, Torrance

To the editor: After raising a family of seven quite successful students and teaching public school for 10 years, I agree with your editorial about homework and grading.

I graduated from Reed College in Oregon, a school that deemphasizes grades and is renowned for sending many alumni to graduate school. As students we got many comments on the margins of our papers and tests followed by a conference with the professor or our advisor.

I was also influenced by a book I read early in my career pointing out that if you gave a test on the first day of school, some children would ace it, others would have mixed results, and some would fail. If you did a good job, by the end of the term, everyone should do fairly well on the test, even those who initially failed. The grade should reflect the knowledge gained.

I did my best to follow this advice, and I am encouraged that people are once again considering what education is really all about — and it certainly should not be about averaging test scores.

Sharon Toji, Irvine

To the editor: Letter writers brought up important issues on homework and education . Missing, however, was the fact that students are different, with different interests and talents. The human race depends on this diversity.

As the late psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi pointed out: “If we were all more or less alike, humans would grow into narrowly specialized organisms. It would be difficult for us to adapt to changing conditions.”

An important function of school is to help students discover and develop their interests and pursue their strengths. Overemphasizing “requirements” not only leads to boredom, it also doesn’t result in as much learning as encouraging students to engage in tasks they find natural and interesting.

Plato understood this: “Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.”

Stephen Krashen, Los Angeles

The writer is a professor emeritus of education at USC.

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5 Ways Kids Can Learn and Thrive Without In-Person School

The science of facilitating intellectual and social growth at home.

Posted October 3, 2020 | Reviewed by Matt Huston

The millions of American parents with children stuck at home due to the pandemic don’t just have to cope with the added demands of child care and supporting online classes, but also with the fear that their children are essentially losing a year of education , academically and socially. But as a former professor of child development , child psychotherapist, and parent, I can reassure parents that a year spent at home will not be lost, and might even produce gains. Better yet, there are simple ways to improve children’s outcomes—without taking much time away from overburdened parents.

Children constantly explore their physical and social environments, driven by curiosity and innate desires for mastery, to help others, and to emulate those they admire. They are ceaseless experimenters , making conscious and unconscious predictions while observing the consequences. Children gain knowledge, expertise, and even wisdom , whether or not they attend school.

Of course, what they learn depends partly upon the environments we provide. Children may not learn as well from online classes as they do in classrooms, and they might learn even less from other virtual screen worlds. But they absorb information continuously when engaged with the real physical and social worlds at home.

1. From family members and other people, they learn new ideas, how to compromise, converse, cooperate, and manage conflict—all vital skills throughout life . By playing a board game, they learn social and cognitive skills including turn-taking, rule-following, strategy, concentration , and graciousness in victory or defeat. Active play develops physical and cognitive intelligence , while reading anything from a comic book to a cereal box can develop creative, imaginative skills.

2. Routine household tasks offer educational opportunities and enhance self-respect, while freeing parental time. For example, preparing meals builds understanding of fractions, temperature, measurement, time and following instructions. Planning balanced meals and making shopping lists that fit a budget teach math, organization and nutrition . Even younger children can ease parental loads and feel proud of their helpful accomplishments by doing tasks like sorting laundry by color.

3. Pre-literate children will learn everything they need to by playing with toys, household objects, and people—whether indoors or outdoors. One of the most successful school systems in the world, Finland’s , starts formal schooling at age seven—younger children simply play. Beginning academic instruction at a more mature age, when mastering the curriculum comes more easily, helps Finland’s world-beating school system vastly out-perform ours—even for Finnish students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

4. Older students can improve their academic abilities by teaching younger children (or their parents) what they learned in school last year. Their understanding of the material will deepen, as they must think about answers, instead of parroting them to pass an exam.

5. A weekly trip to the library is also worthwhile, as books that satisfy children’s curiosity will provide hours of educational diversion . Teaching them to locate reliable sources of information online can provide endless research opportunities. Independently finding answers to gripping questions is the foundation of education for life, as well as school.

Pioneering 20th-century researchers including John Dewey, Piaget and Montessori advocated for what 21st century “Hole in the Wall” educational innovator Sugata Mitra now calls Minimally Invasive Education , which “uses children's natural curiosity and focuses on providing an enabling environment where they can learn on their own.”

Minimally invasive education is what parents can provide with a library card or an internet connection. Spending an hour or two a day engaged with inherently interesting topics, whether dinosaurs or baseball or dog training or how to bake the best brownies, will teach children a tremendous amount—not least about how to research, how to discriminate amongst competing experts, and the pleasure of satisfying one’s curiosity. Far from costing children a year, this can lead to a lifetime of greater academic success and self-confidence .

But what happens next year?

What can parents expect to happen next year, when students are back in the classroom and expected to take the next standardized exam? Will they be prepared? Will they pass? The truth is that we don’t know, and outcomes will vary depending on local conditions. But even in what parents typically consider a “worst case” scenario—a child having to repeat a grade due to lack of progress—there are potential gains.

During my decades of work as a psychotherapist and as a school consultant, I have often recommended that a child repeat a grade because of behavioral or academic struggles. Each time, their parents agonized, afraid their child would be damaged or fall behind. Instead, 100% of those children improved dramatically—psychologically, academically, and socially. A previously ostracized child would become class president, or an academic failure turned into a class star. Their self-esteem skyrocketed, and students who experienced learning and social difficulties ended up, years later, at top universities.

Why did these children thrive? Because, instead of feeling defeated by overly challenging assignments or painful social interactions, things finally came easily to them. “Hey, I’m actually good at this—I want to do more,” they thought, as they went from the bottom of the class to top.

Now, through no fault of their own or their parents, some students may fall behind due to pandemic-based disruptions, and could end up repeating a grade to master the curriculum. My expert prediction is that rather than falling behind, these children - if they engage their brains and bodies with interesting and helpful real-world projects and play for just a few hours a day – will ultimately meet with greater academic and social success than their peers who graduate a year earlier.

This “lost year” may actually be a tremendous gift to your child’s education. Unfortunately, this does not diminish the stress of the pandemic, the loneliness of missing friends, or the enormous difficulties facing parents struggling to find child care. But let me take one worry off of parents’ overflowing plates: your children will continue to learn and grow this year—guaranteed.

To understand how humans evolved as a uniquely cooperative species, see “The Role of Ontogeny in the Evolution of Human Cooperation, by Michael Tomasello & Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera: https://sites.duke.edu/tomasellolabduke/files/2017/06/Tomasello2c-Gonza…

For a discussion of the remarkable learning instrument that is the brain of a human infant, see “The Infancy of the Human Brain” G Dehaene-Lambertz and E S Spelke: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26447575/

For research on the importance of social interaction (as opposed to passive viewing and listening) for language learning, see “Is speech learning ‘gated’ by the social brain?” by Patricia K. Kuhl: http://ilabs.washington.edu/kuhl/pdf/Kuhl_2007.pdf

On the importance of play for learning, see “Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think By” Alison Gopnik: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/opinion/16gopnik.html?scp=2&sq=Aliso… , and on the importance of learning from household objects and tasks, see “How We Learn,” also by Alison Gopnik: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/16/education/edlife/how-we-learn.html

To learn about Finland’s remarkably successful school system, see “Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful?” by LynNell Hancock: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-schools-succ…

To learn more about Minimally Invasive Education, visit the Hole in the Wall site: http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/MIE.html

Ruth Bettelheim, Ph.D. , is a psychotherapist, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, life coach, writer, and lecturer specializing in the development of human potential.

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Students Can Thrive in STEM—But They Need the Right Push

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As a child, I dreamed of becoming an astronaut or marine biologist, but my life’s trajectory changed during middle school when a teacher told me I didn’t have a place in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects and that I would never be successful in those fields.

I don’t know exactly why she thought I wasn’t “cut out” for science; she never told me. And I, as a young teen, unfortunately, never questioned her. But had I known what I do today, I would have understood I was being deprived of the future I longed for. Unfortunately, at the impressionable age of 13, I fell into the trap of believing there were limits to what I could do. So, instead, I threw myself into sports and other subjects—such as English, the arts, marketing, and communications—where I felt more confident.

Childhood through adolescence is a critical period for students’ confidence-building and identity formation. It’s also a time when the adults around them can—often accidentally—send young people the message that they aren’t good enough because of their gender, race, identity, orientation, or family background. These moments that can instill doubt have the potential to damage students’ self-worth for a lifetime.

As adults, it can be difficult for us to see beyond our own negative perceptions about ourselves, but it’s critical we encourage students’ identity discovery through participation in activities that can build their confidence and self-esteem.

Now, nearly 40 years after that teacher made me believe STEM wasn’t for me, it’s disheartening to see that the same barriers I faced in my youth are ones that students are confronting today. No young person deserves to be made to feel like they are less than, “not smart enough,” or “not right” for STEM or other educational pursuits.

STEM can be a pathway to prepare students to take on tomorrow’s challenges. Relevant STEM extracurriculars can not only bolster subject-matter competency, but they also give students teamwork-derived skills, such as how to prevent and navigate conflict; encourage balanced participation and inclusion; develop social competencies; build social bridges; and challenge assumptions and stereotypes.

However, a recent survey by the global marketing and communication firm Allison + Partners commissioned by FIRST , the global nonprofit youth education community I lead, found 29 percent of kids don’t feel smart enough to join a STEM-related program, despite 54 percent stating they did or would want to join a STEM or robotics extracurricular to learn a new skill. It’s clear that many more students could thrive in STEM if they just had a push to get started.

Recently, FIRST launched a new campaign designed to promote self-esteem through STEM. This campaign was informed by the work of several leading experts of student development—work which can help offer that push students need to find a more resilient mindset through STEM.

Robert Brooks—a clinical psychologist, part-time Harvard Medical School faculty member, and leading expert on resilience, motivation, and school climate—explains that a resilient mindset includes problem-solving, self-discipline, competence, the ability to view mistakes and setbacks as learning experiences, and a sense of purpose and meaning.

A basic foundation for resilience is the presence of encouraging and supportive adults; they may be in a child’s life for many years or just briefly, but those who convey unconditional acceptance and prioritize focusing on reinforcing students’ strengths—or as Brooks calls them, “islands of competence”—instead of their deficits can have a lifelong impact. In addition, providing youth with opportunities to use STEM skills to enrich the lives of others helps nurture empathy, compassion, and resilience.

Teacher, researcher, and consultant Diana Lockwood-Bordaña also provided insight through her focus on helping organizations create pathways for students to succeed in STEM. She advises parents and teachers to better engage students during middle and high school to help them emerge with greater resilience and clearer visions for their futures. Her recommendations include:

• Offering enrichment activities that connect to real-world issues. Encourage students and their parents to consider STEM after-school clubs, summer camps, or weekend activities to experience hands-on learning. Kids learn best through immersion. Teachers can bring in the real world by creating connections to “hot topics” in the news such as global warming, solar power, ocean pollution, and earthquake-safe buildings. When kids understand what STEM looks like practically, they have a better idea of what it would take to pursue a career in the field.
• Teach students about role models — in STEM or otherwise . Bring in guest speakers or mentors from the community, especially speakers who are female and from racial backgrounds underrepresented in STEM. This can help students grow up with an understanding of the possibilities that a STEM education can offer them both now and later in their lives. Showing kids examples of what STEM success looks like breaks down barriers. It helps them imagine a workforce without stereotypes of what a scientist or engineer is supposed to look like. Guest speakers, videos, and books are all ways to share stories about people in STEM who are making a difference and create a greater understanding of what success looks like in the field.
• Evaluate students from an asset-based mindset rather than a deficit-based one. Instead of saying, “This child is a bad math student and needs more practice,” consider how you can provide experiences that develop their strengths: “This child struggles with division, but they really understand multiplication, so, I can use multiplication to teach them division.” An asset-based mindset teaches kids and educators to recognize their strengths and use them to understand new, hard concepts as they are introduced.

Temporary loss of confidence is a normal part of growing up, but learning how to dust off and get back up again is critical. Teachers, parents, and other educators should unite to give students opportunities to fail safely and cultivate a resilient mindset through STEM. We all have a role to play in helping the next generation understand that they should not be defined by how others see them, that they have the potential to succeed, and that they can be more than what they are today in many ways.

A version of this article appeared in the November 02, 2022 edition of Education Week as What STEM Can Do For Student Resilience

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Kids can learn without homework and rigid deadlines

The usual system for grading students is, bit by bit, going by the wayside in favor of one that emphasizes learning over traditional measures.

So-called mastery-based grading and a very similar method known as specs (for specifications) grading have been written about in academic circles for decades. But schools have stuck to an outdated system that relies heavily on students’ compliance — completing homework, behaving in class, meeting deadlines and correctly answering questions on a one-time test — as a proxy for learning, rather than measuring the learning itself.

That’s been a disservice to all students, whether they are academically gifted or struggling. It rewards students for grade-grubbing and has them feeling like failures when conditions at home — such as crowding, the need to work a part-time job to help the family finances or caring for younger siblings — make it especially hard to meet all the course requirements on a rigid deadline.

The goal should be assessing the skills and knowledge students gained and how well they think.

It shouldn’t matter, for example, whether students get a sterling grade on the first chapter test on human anatomy, or if they learn from their mistakes and go on to ace a second test. Students who redo an essay, even two or three times, in ways that show they’ve grasped concepts of research and critical thinking, and can write cogent and well-organized sentences, are showing that they’re gaining important skills. That willingness to try and try again until a skill is mastered is something to celebrate, not penalize with points off for multiple efforts.

Rather than a grade or a comment that they failed to meet a couple of deadlines, students receive specific information about their progress and what they need to do to move forward. This system transfers more of the responsibility for learning to the student.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is shifting toward this new model of grading this year by encouraging teachers to give kids a chance to redo tests or reports and to base grades on what students have learned, not on their work habits. It’s off to a slow start, but that’s the better way to go when introducing an era of assessment so radically different from how it’s been for the last century.

Careful implementation is as important as the reform. This is where new education initiatives tend to fall apart. Too often, L.A. Unified has used changes in course and grading requirements to lower its standards. Kids can’t infinitely skip school and miss deadlines; that’s not how college or the work world operate.

Mastery-based learning gets students to think about their own progress and encourages them to take their skills as far as they can.

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Do Deadlines Help Us Get Stuff Done?

• Michaela Rollings
• March 7, 2019

Deadlines have been part of most people’s life since early childhood when we were first introduced to the dreaded concept of homework. In kindergarten, I remember getting worksheets that helped me practice writing specific numbers and letters, and was tasked to turn it in the following morning. In retrospect, it seems a bit young to have homework in the traditional sense, but it’s actually estimated that the average  kindergartener has around 25 minutes of homework per night . The number goes up to 28 or 29 minutes in first or second grade.

Why? When we’re that young, deadlines are important — we don’t have any other frame of reference for “getting things done.” Time is a totally different concept, and still doesn’t seem linear. How could the hour spent on the playground be the same hour as the one spent in the classroom before lunch? Because of that lack of understanding, we need guardrails in place to direct our efforts and energies, enter homework.

Related : What Your Horoscope Says About Your Work Style

As we get older, deadlines are cemented as a core component of our education and learning experiences, for better or for worse. There are definitely  positive effects of deadlines and homework, including teaching students time management at a young age, building self esteem, and heightened academic achievement. But the negatives? They are daunting. Stanford research found that negative effects of homework, which averages out at around 3 hours per night for high school students, included extreme stress, sleep deprivation, general reduction in health, and “alienation from society.” In this  2013 Stanford study , 70% of students said they were “often or always stressed about schoolwork,” and 80% of students confirmed that they had at least one major health-related symptom (headaches, weight loss, sleep deprivation, stomach issues) as a result of this stress.

When we go on to college, or out into the working world, deadlines and the stress associated with it only grow. Responsibilities increase, and as you leave home and set off on your own, you are tasked with managing your entire calendar, which is a tough adjustment. Case in point: how many people started a massive college paper the night before it was due, only to spend the entire night and morning in the library finishing it? A lot — it’s estimated that 60% of college students have pulled an all nighter.

But for college students, who are learning how to manage their time, work, and social life on their own, usually for the first time, deadlines also seem like a necessary evil. If there were no deadlines, projects would take weeks or months to reach completion. Deadlines are almost like a training mechanism that programs the brain to set up timelines and workflows — if you fail to manage your time properly, you are punished by either staying up all night to complete the work, or doing poorly on the project or exam. Conversely, when you manage your time well, you’re rewarded with a good grade and praise for your work. This system existed in high school as well, but to a much lesser degree.

Once we’re out of college, though, the number of deadlines we face to continue to increase. There are deadlines for obvious things like rent or bills, and then there are work deadlines, which are the most life-consuming. Interestingly enough, it turns out that having a few deadlines can actually help improve performance, according to something called Yerkes-Dodson Law. This law basically states that the stress you experience from a deadline, referred to as “arousal level,” will motivate you and improve performance. However, there’s a point of diminishing returns — extreme stress makes it hard to focus and bring a task to completion. It’s a delicate balancing act.

Another interesting observation about deadlines is that longer deadlines convince people that a task is harder than it actually is. Deadlines that are further out prompt people to commit more resources to completion, when they might not be necessary, and can “ lead to increased procrastination and higher likelihood of quitting,” per a study by the Journal of Consumer Research.  

Related: Why Meditation Is The Next Big Productivity Tool

But generally, deadlines are still shown to illicit the same stress and anxiety in the working world as they did in our high school AP US History class. A study published by Harvard Business School even noted that deadlines actually made people less creative, which isn’t exactly how you want your employees to be working. Deadlines also contribute to a sort of “tunnel vision,” prompting employees to focus only on the deadline ahead and negate other important tasks. Also not ideal.

So what is the solution? The Yerkes-Dodson law, and basic human observation, prove that deadlines are actually important to ensure optimal performance and execution. But how do we ensure that rigid deadlines don’t provoke intense anxiety, stress and unnecessary health complications?

One idea is the concept of self-imposed deadlines. Individuals could work with their managers to assign a specific due-date to an item, instead of the manager slapping an arbitrary timeline on a piece of work. This will allow for more reasonable expectations, increased communication between parties, and ultimately higher quality work.  Mini-deadlines are another helpful tool. Creating smaller, potentially flexible, deadlines within a larger project can help prevent tunnel vision and reduce stress. Having check-ins with a manager or co-worker throughout the project also helps, as it will help reward progress and increase responsibility. You can also utilize a project management tool, like Hive , to set up project milestones and deadlines which are easily accessible by your manager and team. 

All in all, deadlines have been a key part of most of our education and growth for years — they are how we were initially incentivized to work. To do away completely with deadlines is unrealistic, despite the additional stress they cause. Instead, consider smaller inner-project deadlines and self-imposed deadlines to keep work on track but reduce potential long-term stress and anxiety. 

Do you have any tips and tricks for deadlines and project management? Let us know in the comments below.

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June 28, 2021

College can still be rigorous without a lot of homework

by Kc Culver, The Conversation

How hard should it be to earn a college degree?

When the book " Academically Adrift " appeared in 2011, it generated widespread concern that college was not effectively educating students and preparing them for today's world. Among other things, authors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa claimed that most colleges were not rigorous or demanding, in part because college students were not reading and writing enough in order to build their critical thinking skills. But is it really how much work students are assigned that makes college rigorous and helps them learn?

As a scholar of higher education , I have taken a close look at college students' academic experiences and outcomes for several years. Some people define rigor as how many pages a student reads or how many pages a student writes. But in a 2021 peer-reviewed study that I published with colleagues John Braxton and Ernie Pascarella , I found that if they do that, they might miss key elements of what it takes to help students develop critical thinking skills and become lifelong learners. They also might create an unnecessary burden for students who have other demands on their time.

What is rigor?

In education, academic rigor tends to be defined in two different ways : as a workload that is demanding and difficult or as learning experiences that challenge and support students to think more deeply.

Given the importance of critical thinking, the way rigor is defined makes a big difference in terms of the ways that the general public—as well as administrators, policymakers, journalists and researchers—assess if a college is rigorous. It also makes a difference in terms of faculties' expectations for students, the types of classroom activities they use and the assignments they give.

In other words, if rigor means workload, then students who spend a lot of time studying should become better critical thinkers. In contrast, if rigor means academic challenge, then students who practice higher-order thinking skills, such as analysis and evaluation , during class, on assignments and during exams should become better critical thinkers.

That's why my study examines each definition of rigor—workload and academic challenge—in terms of helping students develop critical thinking skills. The study also looks at those definitions of rigor in relation to two related dimensions of lifelong learning. One is reading and writing for pleasure, and the other is the habit of thinking deeply and critically about things.

The college difference

The study included about 2,800 students who attended one of 46 four-year colleges in the U.S. between 2006 and 2012. These students took part in the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education , which was a large, longitudinal study of how college experiences affected outcomes associated with a liberal arts education. They completed surveys and tests at three different points during college: at the beginning of their first year, at the end of their first year and at the end of their fourth year.

In these surveys, students reported their course workload, including how many books they read, pages they wrote and hours they spent studying for class. They also reported how much their courses challenged them to engage in higher-order thinking. Faculty ask students to practice higher-order thinking when they ask challenging questions in class and give assignments that ask students to analyze information or form an argument.

Since the Wabash National Study measured students' critical thinking and lifelong learning skills at multiple timepoints, my study looked at how much students developed these skills in relation to their workload and the academic challenge of their classes. Of course, students who are motivated to get good grades may be more likely to develop these skills. And lots of other college experiences, like interacting with faculty outside of class or being in an honors program, might also make a difference. My study accounts for these factors in order to better understand the unique influence of each definition of rigor.

What matters

Here's what we found.

In the first year of college, higher-order thinking was related to an increase in both dimensions of lifelong learning: reading and writing for pleasure and the tendency to think deeply. Higher-order thinking was not related to development of critical thinking skills. Workload was not related to students' critical thinking or either dimension of lifelong learning.

Across four years of college, higher-order thinking was related to an increase in students' critical thinking skills and both dimensions of lifelong learning. Workload was related to only one dimension of lifelong learning: reading and writing for pleasure. This relationship was driven primarily by the amount of reading students did, rather than the amount of writing they did or the amount of time they spent studying.

Perhaps most importantly, my study suggests that students learn important critical thinking and lifelong learning skills because of challenging class experiences regardless of the workload. In other words, college can help students be better critical thinkers and lifelong learners without requiring them to spend a lot of time studying.

Implications for colleges

This study has implications for how courses and colleges are assessed as being rigorous. It also has implications for how faculty teach, as it suggests that they should create courses that engage students in higher-order thinking, rather than asking them to complete long reading and writing assignments.

These implications matter particularly for students from low-income backgrounds, who are more likely to work full-time during college. Low-income students are also more likely to commute to campus and have family responsibilities .

Because of these responsibilities, students from low-income backgrounds often have less time to dedicate to homework compared to students from wealthier backgrounds who live on campus and who don't work as many hours. This creates an opportunity gap in students' ability to be successful. A 2018 report from the Pell Institute shows that low-income students graduate at much lower rates than students from higher-income backgrounds.

If campuses want students from low-income backgrounds to graduate at the same rate as their peers, then it is important that these students have a reasonable workload in their courses so that they don't have to choose between college and their other responsibilities.

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Students Select 2024 Undergraduate Instructor and Staff of the Year Winners

Friday, April 26, 2024

Seven extraordinary teachers and four outstanding staff members have been selected, by undergraduate students, as the 2024 recipients of the school’s Undergraduate Instructor of the Year and Staff of the Year awards.

Following undergraduate student nominations, a committee of three students, one staff member, and the associate dean of the Undergraduate Program selected the following winners. For each, select quotes from nominators are included.

Instructor of the Year

Nat Bennett, Senior Lecturer, Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship

"Nat Bennett is a fantastic professor who always puts his students first. He makes every class interactive and engaging. He challenges students and offers constructive feedback while also creating an open, welcoming classroom environment. I feel like I truly gain something from every lecture."

"Nat is the best professor I have had at Carlson! I was not excited to take business communications, but having Nat totally changed my view on the course. He is enthusiastic about what he teaches and truly cares about each student. From his lectures, you can tell he's wicked smart and intentional about everything he does."

Scott Johnson, Senior Lecturer, Accounting

"Scott does a great job engaging students with the material, breaking up lectures to work on problems and help some students directly on the content while allowing others to work it out on their own. Always kind, welcoming, and seems to know everyone by name making the classroom feel small and personal."

"Prof. Johnson has nothing but drive and compassion towards his students. Pushing us to our full potential and always making sure that his students feel comfortable with material before moving on. He makes the effort to interact and talk to each student even with 75+ students in his lectures. His passion for teaching and sharing his knowledge is beyond."

Ibrahim Keita, Senior Lecturer, Marketing

"Ibrahim is always looking out for his students. He encourages a collaborative classroom where students can feel comfortable going through the content and assignments together as a class and can ask him questions. He emphasizes the process of learning as opposed to the idea that your grade defines you which I really appreciate along with many of my peers."

"He has cared about me as a holistic person more than just a student. He has done Zoom calls with me and checks in on me during class to make sure I actually understand. He has also consoled me when I had a breakdown. Best teacher ever!!!"

Wendy Lutter, Senior Lecturer, Marketing; Academic Director: Master of Marketing

"Wendy is so passionate about what she teaches! She cares deeply about her students! We had a life-changing experience studying abroad with her in New Zealand in January of 2024. I can't thank her enough!"

"Wendy is more than just a professor; her enthusiasm for the subject and her genuine concern for her students are evident. The IBUS 3019 class I attended with her was not only successful in its conclusion, but it also altered my career outlook and motivated me to stand for gender equality even more."

John Molloy, Senior Lecturer, Finance

“A great professor who does not just teach his students the content, but also about the real world. I went in for office hours and ended up chatting with him for 2 hours about my early career and aspirations. He really cares about his students inside and outside of the classroom."

"John is my absolute favorite professor ever!! He is so awesome, engaging, and helpful -- also funny and keeps things light :) He took time to help me with homework and really helped me excel in a finance class (which is not my area of expertise.) He deserves all the recognition!"

Kendell Poch, Senior Lecturer, Accounting

"Kendell has made a monumental difference in my education. She always explains things in a clear way that makes me want to learn more about accounting. When a professor can make a class about a subject you have no interest in interesting, that's when you know they are special."

"She is truly the best. She treats her class with so much respect and like we are adults. She makes class engaging and is very knowledgeable about what she is teaching. She gets straight to the point and I never feel like any time is wasted in class. You can tell she cares about her students a lot and at the end of the day, she wants us to learn."

Richard Thakor, Assistant Professor, Finance

"Richard has been one of the best professors I have had. His lectures are incredibly engaging and he truly cares for each and every one of his students. He is amazing at explaining incredibly complex financial topics. GOAT." "I usually don't talk in class but Richard creates an environment where talking in front of the class is easy."

Staff of the Year

Geida Cleveland, Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Enrollment

"Geida is such a light in the Carlson School! She interacts with students with grace, confidence, and kindness. She's encouraging, diligent, passionate, and intelligent. I'm grateful for the opportunity to know her and work with her."

"Geida shows she truly cares about students and the Carlson School as a whole and consistently works hard to make it a better place. Geida is very welcoming and I have always felt supported by her."

Jenay Manydeeds-Park, Academic Advisor

"Jenay has been invaluable to helping me curate my perfect Carlson School experience. From questions about clubs to helping me create multiple 4 year graduation plans, she is a rockstar."

"I am constantly making appointments with Jenay to help with my advising, and I feel so comfortable and confident with where I am in my college experience. She makes me feel validated in every single decision I make and gives me so many great resources."

Maureen Maslinski, Wellness Counselor

"Maureen has done so much to better the health/wellness and increase awareness for mental health at the Carlson School. She also takes time out of her busy schedule to truly form relationships with students, and organizes Wellness Wednesdays which I always look forward to."

"Maureen helped feed and clothe me when I couldn't do it myself last semester due to multiple financial emergencies and guided me to emergency funds to help me stay in my apartment. She's a force for good in this establishment and it'd be hard to imagine where I'd be without her now."

Shontel Smith, Career Coach

"Shontel quite literally helped me find my career path. When I went to her I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Shontel is very kind hearted and a wonderful listener. I have always felt seen by her and have continued to talk to her about my school and career progress."

"Shontel is always in the Maroon Lobby offering her help and stops by to have a fun conversation. She's super supportive and her colorful clothes bring joy to the lobby."

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