Mid-May 2017 CCCSAA Newsletter

5/11/2017

2017 CCCSAA Professional Development Conference

Standing Up for Civil Liberties
Wednesday, June 7 to Friday June 9, 2017
Hilton San Francisco Airport Bayfront
Burlingame, California

Deadline for Regular Registration:
Friday, June 2, 2017

Members: $185
Non-Members: $235

Free Speech or Hate Speech?
How We Can Keep our Campuses
Safe in 2017

Presenter:
Dr. Khushnur Z. Dadabhoy
Vice President Student Services,
Barstow Community College

Meet the Other Presenters

Crisis Text Line Webinar

Kari DeCelle, Project Manager
California Community Colleges Student Mental Health Program (CCC SMHP)
www.cccstudentmentalhealth.org

The Chancellor's Office, in partnership with the Foundation for California Community Colleges, is currently working with the Crisis Text Line, a national organization that facilitates text-based mental health support. The goal of the collaboration is to implement a Crisis Text Line service specifically targeting California community college students.

Crisis Text Line tool kits will be distributed to various campus departments including health centers, mental health centers, and Veteran Resource Centers. Tool kits will be distributed to all colleges, including those not hosting one of the centers listed above. The tool kits may, in some instances, be distributed directly to the Chief Student Service Officers. The tool kits will include extensive outreach collateral materials to be displayed at multiple locations throughout each of the 113 CCC. The outreach materials are designed to inform students about the Crisis Text Line services, and instructs the students to text the word "courage" to a designated number. Students accessing the text service will be able to receive immediate and ongoing support from trained Crisis Text Line counselors, available 24/7. Additional information about the Crisis Text Line service is available at http://www.crisistextline.org.

Crisis Text Line Presentation
File Size:	4926 kb
File Type:	pdf

Download File

Webinar Recording

Message from CCCSAA President Regarding GA Weekend

Michiko “Misha” Maggi, CCCSAA President

It was so wonderful to see so many of you at General Assembly. We were able to come together as an association to approve next year’s budget, completely revamp the association bylaws, cover the upcoming conferences and scholarships, and elect an incredible new board to serve the state. I truly appreciate everyone’s hard work this weekend!

We were also very lucky to have such informative reports from the Chancellor’s Office on Friday. In case you would like to review the presentations we covered, I’ve linked both below:

Your knowledge and shared stories have brought me back to campus feeling so much more energized! Thank you again for everything you do on your campuses and within the state.

Volition: When the Going Gets Tough, What Do Good Students Do?

Adapted from Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning Message #1567 by Rick Reis

Who among us has resolved to lose weight, exercise more, get that paper written, meet that deadline for a proposal...only to find that our motivation to complete the task has fallen aside in the face of competing priorities or flagging will? This is one of the most common problems with resolutions—they are very motivating in the abstract, but very daunting in execution.

This is also a problem for students, particularly those with many responsibilities, a heavy workload, or, to be honest, some not very interesting assignments. In the psychological literature, this is a problem of volition, the ability to move a task forward once the intention to tackle it has been invoked. This has been called the Rubicon Model, alluding to the observation that striving for a goal progresses in two stages: the assertion of an intention to act and, on the other side of the Rubicon, the realities of following through. A lot of research has been conducted on the motivational side of the Rubicon model, what motivates the learner initially, but not as much on the volitional side, the processes that support working toward the goal.

So what can a student do? Researchers in motivation have tackled the question of what needs to happen on the volitional front for some time, but it’s difficult. In 1999, Teresa Garcia and Erin McCann were trying to understand how to help students see what is possible when they get stuck. McCann and Garcia went through the procedures to generate and explore what students do to “regulate their emotion and motivation if faced with distractions threatening ongoing goal activity” (McCann & Garcia 1999, p. 262). They developed a three-factor model of volitional strategies and created a survey entitled the “Academic Volitional Strategies Inventory” (the AVSI) to study volitional strategies based on what real students do. The survey is composed of three groups of strategies: strategies to support student self-efficacy for studying, strategies to reduce emotional responses to stress that come with getting stuck, and strategies to imagine the consequences of finishing or not finishing the study task. Each item on the survey is preceded by the phrase “When I am unable to get started on my assignment or if I get distracted...” and the student responds on a five-point scale from 1 - (“I never do this”) to 5 - (“I always do this”.)

Self-efficacy enhancement strategies—The goal here is for students to believe they can finish the assignment successfully. Two sample items in this category are:

“I remind myself that I usually do fine on exams and/or other course assignments when I stay on track with my studying.”
“I tell myself ‘You can do this!’

Stress-reducing strategies— When things get difficult, a person feels an increase in the stress response, which in turn makes things more difficult. You want the students to relax or refocus on the positive. Two sample items are:

“I concentrate on my breathing, taking deep, steady, slow breaths to help me focus before beginning my studying, or to help me resume my studying if I get distracted, frustrated, or bored while studying.”
“I think of interesting or different ways to make studying more fun or challenging for me.”

Negative-based incentives strategies—I’m not a fan of these items, but providing a reality check about the negative consequences of not studying might help the students to keep going. Personally I’d mix positive and negative consequences and hope the students focus on the positive actions. Here are some items:

“I think about the mistakes that I have made on past assignments and exams when I’ve procrastinated in my studying.”
“I think about the possible negative consequences of doing poorly in the class.”

Now, if you want to use this in a research project in your class, access the latest (2004) version by McCann and Turner. If you make your own survey or you have your class create a survey from their experiences, your students might be surprised at how many things they can do to get unstuck. And you might be surprised at how many fewer calls for help you get from those same students.

References

McCann, E.J. and T. Garcia. 1999. “Maintaining motivation and regulating emotion: Measuring individual differences in academic volitional strategies.” Learning and Individual Differences, 11(3), 259–279.
McCann, E.J. and J.E. Turner. 2004. “Increasing student learning through volitional control.” Teachers College Record, 106(9), 1695–1714.

Contact
Marilla D. Svinicki, PhD
Professor Emeritus Educational Psychology , The University of Texas at Austin

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