TRANSCRIPT: The Difference Between High School & College

Speaker: Laurie Hazard

The Difference Between High School & College

Hi, my name is Laurie Hazard; and my background is in personality, psychology, and student success. For a number of years, I've been studying academic achievement and what kinds of personality, habits, traits, and attitudes make students successful in an academic environment.

Today we're going to be talking about the transition from high school to college and basically what's the difference between high school and college and, when you arrive at college as a rising high school senior, how to claim your education.

High School Vs. College

We're going to first start out talking about what are the obvious differences between high school and college. First of all, in high school you're in what is called a teacher-directed environment, where your teachers are really directing your activities for the day; and your activities are very structured.

In college, you're in a student-directed environment, where you assume more responsibility for your academic activities throughout the day. If you think about it, college is really a choice that you make after you graduate from high school. High school is compulsory. Most parents want their students to attend high school, and it's required of you either by your state or your family. College is a choice. When you graduate from high school, you're faced with a variety of choices of where you want to attend college.

Another big difference between high school and college are faculty expectations. You'll notice the expectations between your high school teachers and your faculty in college are heightened. That is, they expect more from you; and they expect more independent learning outside of the classroom.

Another big difference is the number of hours that you spend in the classroom. Typically in high school, you'll be classes for five to six hours a day. A typical college schedule, you might only be in school for about three hours a day taking one or two classes.

We're going to dig in a little bit deeper into the difference between high school and college, but those are some of the obvious surface-level ones.

Areas Of Adjustment

Now, digging in a little bit deeper, there are four main areas of adjustment to college: academic, social, emotional, and intellectual. We're first going to talk about the academic adjustment.

When I think about the academic adjustment to college, there are two really big areas. One is the amount and volume of reading you'll have to do while you're in college. Some experts say that your generation of students is what is called a-literate. It's not that you're illiterate and don't know how to read. Aliteracy means you don't tend to read for enjoyment as much as generations before you. Because of that, you're not used to reading the amount and volume of reading that's required when you get to college. So typically, first-year college students will struggle a little bit with the amount and volume of reading. 

Another big area of academic adjustment is your time management or behavior management. As I mentioned earlier, because you're in classes for a lot less time, there's a lot more free time in college. So you operate under this sense of an illusion of free time. You have lots of free time to do extra things. But really, that extra free time should be dedicated to your academics. So watch out for that illusion of free time during your first semester of college because you'll want to take the extra time that you're not spending in classes like you were in high school, aiming that energy toward your academic work and that large volume of reading that I referenced before.

Social Adjustment 

The second area of adjustment for first-year college students is social adjustment. Perhaps the social adjustment is most difficult for students living on campus. I want you to close your eyes right now and think of your five or six best friends. Imagine what it would be like living with your five or six best friends. Students are faced with living with their friends, and it feels like one big pajama party during your first year of college if you're living in residence halls. This makes it really difficult to focus on your academics.

Imagine your friend coming through while you're studying for a math exam and inviting you out to, let's say, do a pickup basketball game. And you know you don’t have the time because you have a math test or quiz the next morning. You manage to dodge that bullet and tell your friend, "No, I'm not going to go out. I have work to do." 

Your next friend walks through and asks you do you want to go in his room and maybe play some video games or spend some times on Xbox. And you really want to do that, but you know you can't because you have a test or quiz the next day. And you assert yourself and say, "No, I'm not going to do that." By the time your third friend comes in and asks you to maybe have some pizza or socialize with a group of friends down the hall, you feel like your stamina is breaking down. And you just want to give in and say, "Yes," and go toward the social activity. 

During your first year of college, you are going to have to work really hard to sustain that peer pressure and not agree to all of the social events that are going on, on campus. It's tempting because you'll want to be meeting new people and find a social circle of friends. But remember, your aim is to be in college for your academics. So have a balance between your fun times and your academic work.

Emotional Adjustment

The emotional adjustment to college is the third area we're going to talk about. Depending on how far away from home you decided to go to college will mediate the extent to which the emotional adjustment is difficult for you. You'll probably have a close social circle at home that you're used to spending time with; and you're used to spending time with people who you really feel comfortable with, like your family. When you get to college, you'll be in the position of having to make new friends.

Missing home is typically the biggest emotional adjustment issue I hear from first-year students. I encourage you to focus on staying on campus and involving yourself in activities, which will make the emotional adjustment a little bit easier. It's always good to call home and connect with your family and friends; but remember, it's also important to make new friends in this new environment. 

If you're having trouble with the emotional adjustment to college, remember there are several campus resources that can help you with that. You'll want to talk to your Student Affairs division and investigate that because there will be places, like a Counseling Office, that can help you if you're struggling with your emotional adjustment.

Intellectual Adjustment

The last area of adjustment to college is intellectual adjustment. You are going to be learning about new things that stretch your mind and make you rethink what you always thought about your life and the world around you. 

When I was a first-year student, the course that did that for me and made me really rethink my perspective on things was a Women's Studies class. It was a long time ago, and I remember learning that women at that time made $0.65 for every $1 that men made for equal paying jobs. As a young person, this made me really angry. And a feminist and an activist was born after I took that course.

You will have similar experiences where you'll be taking courses that will change the way that you think of yourself and the world around you. And for some students, changing those ideas and those thoughts can be a little scary and intimidating because your values that you learned at home may kind of be different than what you're learning and thinking about in college. So this tends to be difficult for some students.

But you should expect an intellectual adjustment because you'll want to learn new things and stretch your mind when you leave high school and move to a university or college environment.

Increased Responsibility

Increased responsibility is a huge part of leaving high school and coming to college. If you think about the word "responsibility," it's response ability - your ability to choose a response. So we're going to talk about two different examples of responsibility. One is responsibility in the social arena of college, and one is responsibility in the academic arena of college.

If you think about responsibility in the social arena of college, you're going to want to take a look at your Student Activities Office or your Center for Student Involvement. There are a wide variety of programs and services that are available to you on a college campus.  So how are you going to choose to respond to this new environment and all of the opportunities that are available to you?

In terms of academics, an example of responsibility might mean that there is a particular course during your first year that you're struggling with. You can do two things. You can approach the problem of struggling in the course, or you can avoid it. In psychology, students either approach or avoid. Avoid means they ignore the source of anxiety; that is, the struggle that they're having in a particular course. Approach is they approach the problem.

If you're struggling in a course, you want to choose and take responsibility and perhaps either visit your professor in his or her office hours or go to your Learning Center. Most colleges and universities have a Tutoring Center to help you with academic struggles. So make sure that you take responsibility for both your academic and social activities when you're in college.

Claiming Your Education

We're going to extend the concept of responsibility a little bit further. When you come to college, you really want to do what's called "claiming your education." You want to claim your education. When we talk about claiming your education, what we're really talking about is your active agency. You're the person who is responsible. So let's take a look at the distinction between claiming and receiving.

Claiming is you taking action, possessing your experiences in college - academic and social, emotional and intellectual - as the rightful owner of those experiences as you become an active member of your new community. Receiving means to come into possession of. So what we're really talking about is your action and you taking responsibility and choosing to make choices that are going to create success for you when you're in college.

Reciprocal Determinism

We're going to further talk about how you interact with your new environment is ultimately up to you. There is a term in psychology called "reciprocal determinism." What that means is that there's an interaction between the environment and the person. For example, a person can exert their behavior over an environment; but an environment can also change a person's behavior. So let's think about this in two areas.

Let's say, again, if we go back to an example of you studying in a residence hall, and you have a big test the following day and you'd really like to get some sleep. So you're thinking maybe I should go to sleep at 10 or 11 o'clock at night. But there's a huge party going on in the atmosphere in the residence halls; and you're listening to the music and starting to think, "Hmm, maybe I'm going to participate in the party that's going on in this environment." And in that way, the environment scoops you up; and you decide to stop your studying and hang out in the party with your friends in that environment.

Had you been studying at the library, you wouldn't have been in an environment where a party would have swept you up. So you want to think carefully about the environments that you choose to study in. That's an example of reciprocal determinism.

Let's say you arrive on your campus, and you're a swimmer; and you discover that your university or college doesn't have a swim team. And you decide that you want to take a look at the environment at the university, and you want to rally a group of friends together and create a swim team. So you go talk to the administrators about perhaps creating a swim team on your campus. In that case, the person exerted an influence over the environment. In the former example, the environment exerted influence over the person who got swept up into the party.

So think about reciprocal determinism and how the person and the environment can interact to change a person's behavior.

Scholarly Community 

What is this new special environment that you're joining as you leave high school and come to college? Some people refer to it as a scholarly community. A scholarly community is a group of people working together on intellectual pursuits. But remember, your membership in this community isn't guaranteed. In order to earn membership into the scholarly community, you're going to have to work hard. You'll be living and learning with classmates.

But besides classmates, faculty are also members of the scholarly community. You'll be working with them in classrooms on projects, on papers; and you'll all be living and learning together.

So joining a scholarly community includes you working with both classmates and with faculty.

Faculty Expectations

Your faculty members or the professors at your college or university will expect you to be self-motivated, be hard-working, have intellectual curiosity, and be active learners. Where are you going to find out exactly what your faculty members expect?

There's something called the syllabus. Essentially, that's a contract between students and faculty members. A really detailed syllabus will outline all of the expectations for how you're going to perform in a particular course. What will you find on your syllabus? For example, you might find your faculty members' office hours. This is really important because this is the time outside of class where you can go get assistance and outside help for your course.

Other things that you might find on your syllabus are grade expectations; that is, how are you going to be evaluated in the class. Your professor will tell you what percentage each thing that you're expected to do will be worth. For example, how much is a group project worth toward the final grade; how much are tests, quizzes, homework assignments? The wide variety of things that they're going to grade and they're going to evaluate you on will be outlined clearly on the syllabus. Your readings will be presented on the syllabus.

All of the academic activities that you'll be learning about in that class typically will be outlined in the syllabus. And it's designed to create a sense of expectations for you and what you're going to need to do in that particular class.

Syllabus Analysis

How exactly can you get a really keen sense of awareness of what the expectations are for you in a particular class? What I would suggest is for you to do a syllabus analysis exercise. Take each one of your syllabus. Using this graph, compare your syllabus to the items that this graph is asking you about. For example, take a look. Does this class require that you're going to have to take a test? How many tests? When are those tests mapped out for you during the semester? What weight do they have toward your final grade?

Look at the syllabus and see if there are projects. Are there quizzes? Are there homework assignments? For each one of those items that you're going to be evaluated on, like a paper, typically your faculty member will tell you what percentage the grade is worth toward your final grade and then how you're going to be evaluated. This syllabus analysis exercise will give you a detailed sense of the expectations and those details for each and every one of your classes.

Student Dispositions

Besides the syllabus, which is a contract between professor and student, there are other dispositions that students need to create when they’re in college. One is intellectual curiosity, one is active learning, and the other is collaboration.

So, intellectual curiosity is the characteristic ability to question, challenge, look at issues from multiple perspectives, seek more information before rushing to judgment, raise questions, deliberate, and craft well-reasoned arguments.

Intellectual Curiosity

One of the dispositions of intellectual curiosity is not rushing to judgment. For example, let's say that you were taking an environmental biology class; and the professor presented you with an example of a factory that needs to be closed down because the waste from the factory is going into a river. As a result, the waste from the factory is killing the fish in the area; and environmentalists are very upset because it's going to affect the food chain.

So now you have to think about both perspectives. If the factory closes down, some of the families in the area will lose their jobs; and it will affect the economy. But if the factory isn't closed down, the fish may die; and it could affect the food chain. As someone with intellectual curiosity, if you were going to take one side of that debate, you would have to form a well- reasoned argument. These are the kinds of dispositions that you're going to be asked to cultivate while you're in college - to look at things from multiple perspectives.

Intellectual curiosity seems like something that's hard to develop, but you can do it if you become an active learner.

Passive Learning 

As I mentioned, intellectual curiosity requires you to be an active learner. So what is active learning? In order to understand active learning, we should distinguish between active learning and passive learning. Active learning and passive learning are psychological mindsets. You can develop a mindset of being an active learner.

In order to distinguish between the two though, let's first talk about an educational philosopher named Paulo Freire. In order to describe passive learning, he talked about this idea of the banking concept of education. The banking concept of education is this idea that we're just going to deposit knowledge into your brains, just like we would deposit money into a bank. So imagine a professor chopping off the top of your head and inserting knowledge into the top of your head. This is kind of a passive way of learning.

Instead in college, we expect you to be active learners and, again, claim your education. It's more than just depositing knowledge and information. It's processing it in an elaborate way, like people with intellectual curiosity do.

So now we're going to talk about active learning.

Active Learning

Active learning requires that you are your own agent in your educational process. A study example can be a really good illustration of this. Let's say that you decide that you're going to go back to your dorm room and do some reading. And you decide to lie on your bed and read your textbook. All you're doing is passively consuming the information in the textbook. You're not interacting with the text. I tell students to think of yourselves as being producers versus consumers. So all you're doing is lying on your bed consuming the word-by-word readings in your text.

In order to be a producer, what you might think about doing is sitting at your desk and actually taking notes on your reading. In that way, you're producing a product after you're done with your reading, an outline of a particular chapter. So a way of thinking about active learning, you might think about -- am I a producer or a consumer? So there are ways to be active agents in your educational process.

Another way of being an active agent in your educational process is interacting regularly with your faculty during their office hours.

Activity

One active learning activity is to visit your professor during his or her office hours. To think about doing this, pick a syllabus from one of your classes. Take a careful look at the syllabus and think about what you've been learning about over the past week or so. Now imagine yourself going to that faculty member's office hours. See if you can create three questions that you would ask if you were to attend those office hours. Take a few minutes right now and write down your top three questions that you would like answered when you attend this person's office hours.

Metacognition

To think about active learning, let's think about a case from a student's perspective. Here is a typical pattern of what happens to first-year students. They come to college with certain study skills honed, and they don't think about the idea that they might have to change their study habits when they get to college. Oftentimes, students will receive the first "C" when they get to college ever. Most students were used to getting "A's" and "B's" in high school, and earning a "C" is a little bit upsetting for them.

So what they do is they evaluate -- How did I study for my test? Well, I studied for four hours for my first college exam; and that yielded a "C" for me. And then they think, maybe what I should do is increase my study hours to six or seven. So the next time a test comes around, they increase their study hours. It seems to make sense. If only four hours yielded a "C," if they double their hours to eight hours, maybe that will yield an "A" or a "B."

Unfortunately, first-year students can sometimes get into that automatic thinking mode, where all they think is -- All I have to do is increase the number of hours that I'm studying. And they never think about the exact study strategies that they're using. Oftentimes, high school students will have to change to college-level study strategies in order to yield higher grades. Thinking about how you learn, thinking about how you study, and thinking about how you think is what is called a metacognitive activity. You don't want to fall into automatic thinking mode when you're studying in college. You want to be able to switch cognitive gears, which means switch between study strategies that will work for particular courses.

Collaboration

Another active learning activity you will be challenged to engage in when you're in college is collaboration. Collaboration is when a group of people get together and work toward a common goal. How will collaboration take the form in your classes? 

Well, for example, you might be challenged to work in groups by doing group projects, group presentations, group papers. Even a study group is an example of collaboration. How will you get along with your group members and get together and form an effective team? These are all of the kinds of things that you'll have to consider when you're working in a group. Things like feelings of the group members, the relative strengths and challenges of the group members when it comes to active activities, and how will you organize the division of labor and the work that you're going to have to do in a group.

So collaboration, while it's great fun to work with group members, can be challenging for students. You'll have to consider group dynamics. So collaboration is an activity that you'll be asked to engage in when you're in college. And you just want to think about what type of group member you are and how to effectively work in a team.

Research

The last active learning activity we're going to consider is doing research.  Scholars do research. Your professors do research.  You are a scholar in the making.  While you're in college, you will be asked to do research in different subject areas. So what is doing research? First, you'll be asked to investigate what others have written about topics in the field in which they are interested. You'll be asked to use your library and the Internet to perform your research and do some of this investigation. 

Scholars use references in the works that they find that lead to other useful sources. As a researcher, you'll be talking to your peers. You'll be talking to your professors and other scholars in the field. You may even attend a meeting or a conference. You'll talk to people by phone and perhaps in person. Again, you're a scholar in the making. While you're in college, as a researcher, you will be exposed to the new bodies of knowledge in a number of different disciplines.

Plagiarism

Doing research leads to the necessity of considering two different concepts, plagiarism and intellectual property. Have you ever had the experience where somebody's stolen your ideas? That's the very basic definition of plagiarism. You will want to take a look at your Student Codes of Conduct and your Student Handbook to see if your school has outlined rules about plagiarism and intellectual property.

Attribution is the key to avoiding plagiarism. What that means is if you're going to use somebody else's research and integrate it into your own, you will have to give attribution to the original authors of those sources. Remember, attribution is the key to avoiding plagiarism.