Behavior Modification and Skill Enhancement for High-Risk

Behavior Modification and Skill Enhancement for High-Risk Students in Community Colleges

Community colleges traditionally maintain an open-door policy, often enrolling students who are poorly prepared to enter higher education.

Once these students are enrolled, they often find themselves struggling with severe skill deficiencies and, in a survey of 6,246 students attending a large, urban community college, Jack Friedlander (1981) discovered that, of the students who were not confident in one or more skill areas, less than 30% took advantage of available support services to help with issues of remediation.

This issue is one of great debate today, with many educators arguing that it is the responsibility of community colleges to assess underprepared and "at-risk" or "high risk" students to better provide the developmental support requisite to educational success.

This research project will define underlying causal factors for high-risk behaviors in community college students and compare/contrast outcomes when neurolinguistic programming is correctly applied to predetermined behaviors.

Behavior Modification and Skill Enhancement for High-Risk Students in Community Colleges

The High-Risk Student Identified

Neurolinguistic Reprogramming

Prather, et al.

Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP)

Presuppositions

Modern Submodalities

Meta-Model

Sensory Acuity

Milton Model

PROPOSAL APPROVAL PAGE

Behavior Modification and Skill Enhancement for High-Risk Students in Community Colleges

INTRODUCTION

College success depends upon both cognitive and affective skills. Based on this empirical truth, communities that support colleges within their confines often urge these learning institutions to assess an incoming student for both psychological factors (e.g., interpersonal skills, motivation, self-image, self-directedness, and so on) and competencies in basic skills (e.g., reading, writing, mathematics, and so on).

In order to address and carry out this comprehensive assessment program, large investments of time, money, and human resources are required. While thorough assessment of all freshmen and transfer students is the ideal, the reality limits assessment efforts to basic skill areas, which are more easily definable than affective competencies.

The High-Risk Student Identified

High-risk students in the community college setting are defined as students whose probability of withdrawing from college is above average. Found mostly in the underrepresented in higher education, this group of students have a disproportionately higher rate of attrition than the general student population.

In an attempt to limit these attrition rates and increase graduation numbers, most community colleges implement programs with an eye to curtail the problems that high rates of noncompletion and declines in student populations directly affect the ever-increasing costs per student.

The high-risk student's demographic components have included:

racial and ethnic minorities;

economically disadvantaged;

disability affected;

first generation to attend college;

international students;

women working in traditionally male-oriented fields;

non-traditional (age-basis) students; athletes; and transfer students.

Neurolinguistic Reprogramming

The manner in which a problem is defined often shapes the efforts aimed toward a solution. For the high-risk student, a preparation problem has often been generally defined in terms of the student's deficiencies.

This deficiency approach uses assessment testing to help identify those under prepared, high-risk students, but not without major limitations.

Prather, et al.

In 1986, Prather, et al. conducted a study on why high-risk, non-traditional students succeed. This study focused on the reasons for success, not the reasons for failure and made an effort to provide an alternative to the widely used, prevailing deficiency model.

Prather and team interviewed 107 minority graduates, many from community colleges and over half of whom had begun college careers branded "underprepared."

Opportunity Orientation

Prather's study demonstrated that "preparation includes accurate expectations" regarding college preparation. The term "opportunity orientation" was coined to represent the position that students held regarding the part education plays in allowing them access to valued adult roles.

When a student excludes education in their "opportunity orientation," if they ever attend college, it is as adults bringing along the liabilities of previous education experiences as well as the innate challenges of balancing coursework with the natural demands of a job and family.

Student Categories

Prather, et. al. also defined four categories of student preparedness for community college educations:

Well-prepared with High Opportunity Orientation: this group included minority graduates from educated families who had attended suburban or high performing inner-city schools and had always assumed they would go to college. Findings indicate that these students succeed at selective institutions, despite often being stereotyped as underprepared.

Marginally-Underprepared with High Opportunity Orientation: this group involved first-generation college students who - although lacking the preparation of the first group - had grown up with strong parental support and encouragement to build a rewarding life by attending college. Findings indicate that these students identified mentoring, summer programs, tutoring, and learning laboratories as critical to their ability to persist; a significant proportion began postsecondary careers in a community college.

Marginally-Underprepared (or lower) with Low Opportunity Orientation - this smaller group come from families and communities where peers and associates have never been to college and were consistently advised that attending community college would make no difference in subsequent opportunities presented to them. With low opportunity orientations and held back by a severe lack of preparation, findings demonstrate that this group overcame high odds - to include negative peer and family pressure - to earn degrees from community colleges.

Well-Prepared with Low Opportunity Orientation - this final group of students were well-prepared yet lacked the conviction that college could make significant contributions to their lives. Significantly, this group was composed mainly of American Indians living on reservations where unemployment rates and professional opportunities were very limited.

Preparation issues for community colleges supporting high-risk students rely on the characteristics of the four identified groups.

Group 1 students - either minority or city - are among the highest recruited since existing programs and services can best serve them.

Group 2 students are also heavily recruited in spite of the fact they often require special assistance; traditionally full-time and on site, they are usually highly motivated to complete their degree plans.

Group 3 is African-American and Hispanic in disproportionate numbers and usually concentrated in urban areas. It is rare than a community college will heavily recruit this group; the responsibility for assisting them across the wide range of academic majors is very serious for the student, community, and college. Colleges will take these students as long as the outcomes defined for judging institutional success are preparation for lower-level vocational careers or socially welfare-oriented.

Group 4 is viewed as something of an anomaly created by the unique conditions of life on an Indian reservation; however, an additional group could well include majority students without persuasion that the quality of their lives is dependent upon their own efforts and college educations.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

NLP strategies can be found in most community colleges, although often sporadic and unstructured. Some improvement in outcomes may result from further refinement, better coordination, and making programs and services more widely available.

It seems highly unlikely, however, that community colleges can solve the underpreparation problem by relying exclusively on these interventions. Rather, they will have to modify their learning environments to broaden the range of diversity they effectively serve.

Changing Organizational Culture

College leaders can manage organizational culture to provide a more supportive learning environment for underprepared students by developing and implementing strategic plans, focusing on the assessment of selected outcomes, selecting new staff that embody desired values and behaviors, and providing incentives to existing staff to encourage them to support needed changes.

Key strategies may include student assessments to create more manageable learning conditions in the classroom. Developmental education programs can be used both to provide direct support to students and to pressure faculty by demonstrating that underprepared students can achieve academically under the right conditions.

The use of technology to alter classroom dynamics still contains untapped potential. Promoting curricular and pedagogical change can also be used as a powerful strategy for changing culture, especially where faculty are central to institutional decision-making.

Arguably, community colleges have paid more attention to all of these strategies than their four-year counterparts. In fact, part of the transfer issue clearly relates to the unwillingness of four-year institutions to match the scheduling adjustments, support services, and responsive learning environments routinely provided by many community colleges.

Changing organizational culture is the most promising long-term approach for dealing with preparation issues, though short-term strategies remain necessary to address immediate problems while awaiting longer-term culture change.

Deficiency and Achievement Models

Most institutions apply the deficiency model aimed at bringing everyone to a minimum level of academic preparation. A number of innovative programs, however, have piloted an achievement model that focuses on helping some students achieve excellence.

Inner-city schools have developed magnet school programs with striking results, and at least one medical school has developed a program that admits promising college juniors and assists them in preparing for the rigorous training while still undergraduates. Both programs remove barriers, help students adjust to high expectations, and change the learning environment they experience.

Unfortunately, community colleges are not free to choose between the deficiency and achievement models. Given scarce resources and continuing pressures from students seeking access, they must continue to implement the deficiency model as best they can. Concurrently, some may choose to dedicate more of their resources to programs where carefully selected and highly motivated nontraditional learners experience the opportunity to achieve excellence.

The preparation issue is arguably the most important challenge community colleges currently confront. It cannot be neutralized by redefining outcomes, nor avoided by excluding high-risk students.

Changing the learning environment, especially student interactions with faculty members, by employing an achievement model that builds upon students' strengths rather than focuses on their weaknesses is the only alternative promising long- term improvement.

The task of implementing achievement models in institutions historically committed to access is, above all, a task of managing culture. It is the only approach through which the faculty who control the nature of the learning environment and its impact on students can be influenced to alter their prevailing deficiency views and practices.

There are emerging models of the way the process works. Efforts to manage culture will be aided by the opportunity to employ new staff as those representative of founding values and beliefs retire in large numbers over the next decade.

HYPOTHESIS

Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP)

Neurolinguistic programming involves the brain and neural network feeding the brain (neuro), the content - verbal and non-verbal - traveling across and through the neural network (linguistic), and the way the content or signal is manipulated to convert the signal being transported into useful information (programming).

Experience and internalized feelings affect the way the human brain reacts to external stimuli. The brain interprets the implications of experiences (either good or bad), biases, opinions, value systems, and so on into useful data.

John Grinder and Richard Bandler - an information scientist and a linguist at the University of California, Santa Cruz - developed NLP in the early 1970's.

Observing people with similar educations, training, backgrounds, and years of experience who were achieving a wide range of results - ranging from amazing to mediocre - these scientists set out to learn the processes undertaken by successful people.

Study parameters included human performance and accomplishment, with a particular interest in behavior duplication - and accordingly competence measurements of highly effective individuals.

Known as the "golden era of modeling and simulation," the study focused on modeling human excellence by measuring factors such as education, business, therapy, and finally human communication.

Grinder and Bandler initiated the communication aspects by studying verbal language, eye movements, non-verbal communication, and so on. Following a modeling schema, patterns emerged which supported their theory that the brain can learn the healthy patterns and behaviors of successful people thereby bringing about positive physical and emotional effects. Thus, Neurolinguistic Programming was born.

Emergent theory is based on the premise that the words people use reflect an inner, subconscious perception of the problems they experience. If these words are inaccurate, they create underlying problems as long as the individual continues to use and think them; attitudes provide the culture for a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The neurolinguistic therapist analyzes every word and phrase a high-risk college student uses in describing feelings or concerns about higher education. He or she examined facial expressions and body movements.

After determining problems in student perception, the therapist assists the high-risk student in understanding the root cause. The therapist then helps remodel the thoughts and mental associations to reform all preconceived notions. These preconceived notions can prevent the high-risk student from achieving academic success and degree completion.

The hypothesis for this study is based on the premise that high-risk community college students' reality maps can be changed in order to achieve success in higher education careers.

RATIONALE

Presuppositions

NLP forces a number of presuppositions - beliefs the high-risk student will find useful in effecting the desired changes. For example:

communication is more than what is only said;

no one is 'wrong' or 'broken'; people work perfectly to accomplish what they are currently accomplishing;

the student already has all the resources they need to succeed;

behind every behavior is a positive intention;

every behavior is useful in some context;

the meaning of communication is the response received;

if the student is not getting the response (results) desired, different approaches must be considered; there is no such thing as failure, only feedback; having choice is better than having no choice at all; in any system, the element with the most flexibility exerts the most influence; the map is not the territory; and if one person can do something, the student can learn to do it as well; the student cannot fail to communicate.

Based on these assumptions, therefore, the high-risk student can be taught to alter preconceptions of failure in higher education and successfully complete the degree plan.

LITERATURE REVIEW severe paucity of scientific, empirical research has been produced to support the principles and techniques of NLP. What literature that does exist is primarily dedicated to defending the position that the effectiveness and usefulness of NLP intervention cannot be determined through scientific quantitative or qualitative experimentation.

There is no longer anything called NLP and probably hasn't been since Bandler and Grinder parted company and theoretical cooperation. NLP became a movement; rapidly growing, diversifying, and developing as a body of knowledge and insight. Rather than evolving into a scientific body of knowledge, it is now an emulate of the Internet: anarchic, uncontrollable, "owned" by its many contributors and developers around the world, and a continually creative entity.

Laboratory experimentation and the application of statistical models to testing hypothesis in the field of psychology have been questionable methods for determining the validity of numerous cognitive models (Southworth, 1995).

Neuro-linguistic programming, psychoanalysis, and the principle tenets of cognitive science are not easily studied through the comparison of expected and actual results of an experiment. As Southworth explains, statistical models rarely exhibit consistent results when applied to psychological hypothesis. In short, the number of factors, which affect cognitive processes and the resulting behavior, is far too complex to be fully understood.

Laboratory conditions can seldom be replicated, and the individuals being tested are continually affected by sensory experiences, even during the testing process.

Based on the preceding opinion, it would appear that all psychological models are relatively untestable in a laboratory environment. Many psychological models and hypothesis, however, have proven to effective and shown consistent results in numerous experiments. The proponents of neurolinguistic programming argue that NLP is uniquely untestable, or at least, is not accurately testable in a laboratory setting.

Robbins (1995) notes four primary problems with attempting to experimentally test neurolinguistic programming. First, experimenters are rarely sufficiently trained in NLP skills and techniques, and objective enough to do credible research. Second, there is no quality control in NLP. Neurolinguistic programming does not have a single governing body, which is recognized by all training institutes. Incompetent trainers have marred the credibility of NLP as a scientific practice.

What makes NLP different in this respect is that nearly all other scientific fields have either nationally or internationally recognized certification processes and guidelines.

Robbins also notes that NLP is untestable when specific techniques are isolated from the entire methodology. As Robbins explains, "Much of NLP research tries to "prove" diagnostics, like the eye movement or predicate accessing cues. NLP does not say there is an underlying relationship between these cues and the type of cognitive processing. NLP says if you pretend there is, you will get certain results by using the pretended relationship to guide the intervention. The distinction is critical" (p. 1-2).

The fourth problem Robbins explains with experimentally testing NLP techniques is that previous research has attempted to use DSM-III diagnostics with NLP techniques.

Neurolinguistic programming is a model of diagnosis. The NLP diagnosis determines the NLP intervention (Robbins, 1995). Neurolinguistic programming interventions have not shown to be effective (in previous research) with DSM-III diagnosis, but no research has been conducted to determine the effectiveness of NLP interventions with NLP diagnosis.

An NLP intervention cannot be tested with a traditional psychological diagnosis (or vice versa).

Many proponents of neurolinguistic programming (e.g., Einspruch & Forman, 1985; Robbins, 1995; Dilts, 1983) state that the procedures and interventions generated from the NLP model must be used within the presuppositions contained in the model.

Previous researchers have adopted only half of the model (the intervention), and ignored the presupposition related to the intervention. The entire model must be adopted in order to accurately test the effectiveness of an intervention. Previous research has attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of NLP techniques by isolating one piece or portion of the model and examine it as an independent pattern. Dilts states, "The various techniques that make up the body of NLP were isolated and made explicit, as separate pieces, in order to make them easily learnable. In order to make them useful, however, they must be applied simultaneously, as a whole" (1983, p. 65-66).

Einspruch & Forman (1985) believe that Sharpley (1984) failed to consider numerous methodological errors in his review of NLP research. The categories of errors include: researcher's lack of understanding of the concepts of pattern recognition and inadequate control of context, unfamiliarity with NLP as an approach to therapy, inadequate definitions of rapport, and "logical mistakes" (Einspruch & Forman, 1985).

Dilts defends neurolinguistic programming on several fronts. Two directions may be taken when researching a particular model or theory. Research may be designed to evaluate the truthfulness of the model's claims, or may be designed to evaluate the usefulness of the model's claims.

Neurolinguistic programming as a field of study is not concerned with researching the truthfulness of the model, only the usefulness (Dilts, 1983). NLP is an outcome-oriented model, and according to Dilts, and usefulness is determined by the effectiveness of an intervention, not whether the intervention can be "proven" in a laboratory.

A thorough review of the literature reveals that there is an obvious lack of supportive research for NLP techniques and interventions. Proponents of neurolinguistic programming publish literature, which attempts to explain why research cannot sufficiently measure the effectiveness of NLP. Proponents continually state that research in NLP is of little value, and time is spent evaluating "useful" practices rather than determining which practices research can evaluate as "truthful."

This author shares a similar opinion that useful models, interventions, techniques, and practices may not always be experimentally provable. When studying psychological theory or any "soft skills" training, value is determined by the extent of usefulness a particular intervention displays.

METHODOLOGY

http://www.timelinetherapy.net/(this may a method by which you can create a non-clinical, yet measurable model for your thesis) researcher-devised questionnaire will be constructed and offered to a cross-sectioned sampling of non-traditional, adult students, their counselors, and instructors. The sampling will be conducted over the Internet, distribution of questionnaires to on-campus students, counselors, and instructors.

An effective cross-sampling of types of questions will be developed using the following criteria designed to produce results that:

are relevant to the research problem, are as short as possible; this is a practical consideration due to study subjects time constraints, avoid ambiguity, confusion, and vagueness, avoid prestige bias, avoid double-barreled questions - avoiding questions that include two or more topics, avoid leading questions, and avoid asking questions that are beyond the respondents' perceived capabilities.