Does Being Student-Centered Lead to Lower Academic Standards? Faculty Orientations and Undergraduate Grading Practices. AIR 1995 Annual Forum Paper.

This study investigated an apparent dilemma suggested by previous research on faculty orientations toward students and academic standards. Some research suggests that encouraging faculty to be student-centered is an effective way to increase student learning and development, while other research indicates that being student-centered leads to lenient grading and lower academic standards. Information was obtained from 134 institutions based on a longitudinal data set from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program, providing a nationally representative cohort of college freshmen who completed questionnaires upon entry in 1985 and again 4 years later in 1989. Faculty data were obtained from a Higher Education Research Institute survey of teaching practices. Student-centered evaluation methods were considered to be student presentations, student evaluations of each others' work, and weekly essay assignments. Using a series of multiple regression analyses predicting undergraduate grades, it was found that student evaluation practices and the ways in which faculty viewed their orientations toward students were not significantly related to institutional average grades. Faculty views of student-centeredness were also unrelated to institutional grades. (Contains 40 references.) (SW)