Identifying an Educational Challenge: Your Attitude

This idea of positive attitude appeared in a reading: Dana Lynn Driscoll and Jennifer Wells’ Beyond Knowledge and Skills: Writing Transfer and the Role of Student Dispositions. Their focus was on the effect of a student’s attitude on their ability to perform writing transfer, or the transferring of writing knowledge from different settings—from high school to college, from course to course, or from university to workplace. While traditional methods to tackle the challenge of students struggling to perform successful writing transfer was by targeting the school curriculum, Driscoll and Wells argue that a new factor should be added into the discussion—the student’s disposition and internal qualities or, in plain terms, attitude. I agree with their stance because one’s attitude towards challenges can determine if they will work hard to overcome them or lose hope and give up. For example, I am a Writing Center Tutor and there are many students that come to the center with drafts of their papers. However, the most successful tutoring sessions are the ones where the student is fully engaged with me to learn how to write better and to improve their paper no matter how challenging it may be.

On the other spectrum of writing students, there are those whose only incentive to come to the writing center is their professor requiring them to will be less willing to work to improve their writing ability and paper; as a result, these sessions are unproductive. The poor performances of these students add to the ongoing problem of unsuccessful writing transfer, as mentioned in Driscoll and Well’s piece. Therefore, a student’s disposition is very relevant in indicating the student’s performance in academia and should be recognized as an important issue to be addressed.

One solution to rectify the situation is to help students incentive themselves to attain success, starting at the academic level. Some students do not engage fully in a particular activity because they do not see much value in the task. Therefore, an external incentive, like requiring students to go to the writing center, may not be enough because students act upon incentive but still harbor little appreciation for the task. We must look within the student and make them truly believe that going to the writing center will benefit them in the long run; in this situation, we would need to make the student understand that going to the writing center to improve their writing skills can help them be successful in the long run, such as in the workplace.

Another possible solution is to target students’ beliefs about their capabilities to do something; Driscoll and Wells have presented evidence showing that students who had positive self-efficacy, or believed that they are capable in accomplishing a certain task, did not give up when they faced challenges. Persistence comes from the belief that a good outcome will result from consistent hard work, and this is something schools need to instill among students. Going back to my discussion about the writing center, I, as a tutor, would definitely praise students if they deserve it; I believe that preserving a student’s ego is important in keeping them engaged and determined to improve their writing ability and paper.

In conclusion, a student’s performance must be considered from both an external and internal point of view; while a good education system is important, the student’s internal qualities, or attitude towards learning is just as crucial. We can learn from Driscoll and Wells and perhaps if you feel that you lack good internal qualities, now is the time to do something about it.