How many students fail your course?

[boulderjohn]

This post will come from my years studying curriculum design and working as the Executive Director of Curriculum for a major education company.

Curriculum is supposed to be designed in such a way that EVERY student who enrolled in a class will pass the class in the amount of time allotted for the class.

If the course is properly designed, then the reasons for student failure would include...

• Unmotivated students not putting in the time and reasonable effort required--this is the reason for probably 75% of high school and college course failures.
• Students accepted into the course without the proper prerequisite knowledge and skills--no one will pass calculus coming out of Algebra I. Either the course did not have proper course requirements for screening, or the student did not actually learn the required skills during prerequisite preparation.
• Poor instructional quality.
• Some student quality that interferes with learning--often called "ability." Recent research has shown that this is really a rare situation--pretty much any motivated student who has the required prerequisite skills has the ability to succeed in a course.

If a course with motivated and prepared students and with sound instruction has a high failure rate, then the course was not properly designed. Common factors in poor course design include...

• Too much being taught in too little time. (You will not pass calculus in a month.)
• Poor sequencing of instruction. (I once had an English course design team that thought it would be best to have the students start the year with a research paper, since it would be best to get the hardest thing out of the way first. After that, they would teach the student how to use the library, take notes, etc. That made sense to them.)
• Improper focus on concepts, including a focus on unimportant details. (ou should identify essential learning and make sure that is the primary focus of the course--students MUST leave the course knowing this. You should then identify the things that are good to know as well and have them as a secondary focus. Things that are nice to know should not be emphasized. Identify the things that students don't need to know and omit them from the course, because the time and effort spent learning them detracts from their ability to learn what is important.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

I’ve taught for PADI, SSI in the past, currently SDI.

I’ve had 3 students not meet performance requirements when I taught through shops, but they went complete certification with other instructors (as instructors rotate each month).

I hope to never have a student quit now that I’m independent. Any schedule pressure is theirs alone, as if the conditions are miserable, I’d rather reschedule as open water is supposed to be as enjoyable as possible).

Also, I only teach 1:2 now, so I hope that they get the coaching they need to become proficient divers.

I also filter out whom I teach in that I only teach people who think they want to dive in the Puget Sound. My focus is really low volume.

I think the answers will be all over the map as the conditions and pressures under which we teach vary so dramatically.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

• Improper focus on concepts, including a focus on unimportant details. (ou should identify essential learning and make sure that is the primary focus of the course--students MUST leave the course knowing this. You should then identify the things that are good to know as well and have them as a secondary focus. Things that are nice to know should not be emphasized. Identify the things that students don't need to know and omit them from the course, because the time and effort spent learning them detracts from their ability to learn what is important.

This last bullet point is super useful for me as I am working the second revision of my dive planning doc where I’ve added a lot of “good to know” information along with some essential content.

I’m working on how to distinguish those sets of information as I’m wary of interference theory, a concept about which I learned from you. It makes no sense for me to add something if my students result in learning less. My intent is to simply do a better job of teaching dive planning. As I type this, I think I figured out how to break up the document so the split is crystal clear. Thanks for posting useful information from your expertise,

 

[BlueTrin]

Bravo, scrane.
I had the less common pleasure of taking SCUBA as a university offering. Taught mainly by a ex-D-day frogman. On the first meeting (A Thursday?) he warned us that we'd have to do 40 laps in the Olympic sized pool on Monday morning and we all quietly stared at each other and said "Did he say 40? Did he really say 40?" and being as it was pre-classes and parties, well, I never did any practice that weekend. And had just come out of three months mainly in the desert, not a lot of swimming. But I figured, wtf, they've got hooks and poles and things and surely, when I stop swimming they'll fish me out right?
Monday comes around, fully half the class (and you needed either seniority or great luck to sign up for it) wasn't there. And the instructor says "OK, everyone in and you need to swim 20 laps and at least half have to be some kind of crawl or..." and we're looking at each other again, "He said *20* today, right? He said 20?!"
AFAIK there were no fails. If you needed work (like, I couldn't handle breathing through my mouth while my nose was open underwater) you got extra time and coaching and someone helped you through it. When we finally were certified, by NASDS, as far as I know everyone passed.

But that's because we were taught by a professional, teaching a skill, concerned with safety, and under no great constraints for time or generating customers. That's not the reality of diving shops today. They break everything down piecemeal, so passing every "nugget" is real easy, and if the result is a diver who's missing some basic skills for a couple of years....well, it keeps the shop in business, and that's a reality that takes priority.

If an instructor isn't passing everyone--isn't the shop owner going to start complaining that he's costing them business?

Do you really feel like this was necessary for recreational divers who are staying only above 18m under supervision of a divemaster ?

I couldn’t find the DAN equivalent of the BSAC report with nice historical graphs:

https://www.bsac.com/document/diving-incident-report-2017/bsac-diving-incident-report-2017.pdf

But it seems to me that the number of accidents has been down, unfortunately it is not factored by the number of divers ...

 

[TMHeimer]

In 4 years assisting OW courses maybe 2 --possibly 3. One couldn't swim at all, or float (even with both arms & legs motoring), and the other was very small, fell in the sand en route to the water and couldn't get up--think she was about 22?

 

[CAPTAIN SINBAD]

Almost all agencies now use an educational approach modeled on Benjamin Bloom's concept of Mastery Learning. In mastery learning, the students keep working on skills until they master them. They thus never fail--they are always still working toward a goal. Students who do not pass such classes do not fail them--they just decide that the goal is not for them and stop working toward it.

Here is a quick summary of the difference:

• In traditional education, time is the constant, and learning is the variable. (We teach for a specified amount of time and then measure the student's performance to determine the results.)
• In mastery (or standards-based) education, learning is the constant and time is the variable. (We teach the students for however long it takes for them to reach the specified standard of performance, monitoring their progress and providing help all along the way.)

I suspect that the question is based on a belief in one of a handful of agencies that reject that notion, some of whom take great pride in their high failure rates, as if that means they do a better job than others. To me, that is like a plumber bragging about the high number of repairs he makes that still leak when he is done. An instructor's job is to work with a student to bring the student up to an acceptable level of performance, not merely to assess the student and walk away.

There is wisdom in what you say. However if Benjamin Bloom's concept of mastery was being mass applied by the scuba industry the way you have described in your post then instructors and dive shops would not be able to advertise a fixed time frame for their courses. "LEARN TO DIVE IN 5 DAYS!" Instead the way they would pitch their open water course is the way GUE pitches their Fundies or UTD pitches their Essentials.

You pay for one week of coaching. If you do not meet standards, you will know enough to practice on your own and return for an evaluation!

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

You pay for one week of coaching. If you do not meet standards, you will know enough to practice on your own and return for an evaluation!

It is GUE fundies and former students that convinced me to break up teaching and testing with practice in between for recreational con ed. Deep and dry suit are obvious exceptions as I have to be with them on every dive.

 

[pauldw]

I was at my local dive shop taking a Nitrox course, which involved reading a book and then passing a written test, and also sort of testing a tank's air mix (standard going through the motions training), and while I was taking the written test a couple of instructors came in to chat with the owner, and I got to chatting with one of the instructors. The instructor told me he never takes people to the small, warm water diving spot that is quite popular near here and where people pass off things like navigation in a thermal crater that's not even very wide, but instead he takes them to a big reservoir where they actually have to prove they can do their skills. The next time I take a course where I want to learn well, I'm going to ask for that guy. Because I think he will fail me if I'm unsafe.

 

[boulderjohn]

There is wisdom in what you say. However if Benjamin Bloom's concept of mastery was being mass applied by the scuba industry the way you have described in your post then instructors and dive shops would not be able to advertise a fixed time frame for their courses. "LEARN TO DIVE IN 5 DAYS!" Instead the way they would pitch their open water course is the way GUE pitches their Fundies or UTD pitches their Essentials.

You pay for one week of coaching. If you do not meet standards, you will know enough to practice on your own and return for an evaluation!

This happens all the time in education, even when using that system.

Using a well designed curriculum, instructors learn easily how long it will take for all but the more stubborn cases to be able to complete the work. A dive shop will schedule pool time (etc.) for the amount of time their experience tells them it should take for a typical class to complete the work. Some students do not need that much time. Some students will need more. A skilled instructor learns how to manage that time in order to get everyone through. If a single student in a large class is having trouble and is slowing the class down, an assistant can be assigned to give that individual student some remedial help.

There is also an "accordian" time factor in the pool sessions--a fair amount of time is spent free swimming, and that amount of time is not specified. If students are doing really well, the instructor will give extra time for free swimming and fun activities; if some students have taken up more time doing skills, that time can be condensed a bit.

But sometimes an individual student is really not going to get it in that amount of time. When that happens, it is pretty much always obvious to the student as well. That is the time to discuss extra sessions, private instruction, etc.

All of the above is for the pool sessions. If a student has been properly prepared, there should be no surprises for the OW dives.

 

[hilljo88]

PADI
Fail, or bail?
Maybe 1-2% struggle enough to give up, usually folks who can't deal with mask removal. Often they are there for a spouse etc. and not for themselves, not motivated to overcome.
Only ever said "no" to one youth. Too distracted in the water, was a danger to himself and others.

Yep..I’ve seen a number fail PADI OW, although small percentage. Unmotivated teens only there because parents want a dive vacation. A rare adult who couldn’t/wouldn’t pass the wrtten exam. A number who repeatedly panicked with mask removal. One young woman panicked on open water quarry dive in bad viz. Her ditched weight belt missed my head by inches.