Bandwidth Recovery: Helping Students Reclaim Cognitive Resources Lost to Poverty, Racism, and Social Marginalization

Bandwidth Recovery: Helping Students Reclaim Cognitive Resources Lost to Poverty, Racism, and Social Marginalization 
by Cia Verschelden, 2017

Her summary (p. 59): "Poverty and racism rob our students of mental bandwidth so they have limited cognitive resources for learning. Poor people are physically and mentally less healthy than people who have adequate resources; they suffer the physical consequences of chronic stress.  People who experience racism every day experience similar stress and negative health outcomes. Physical and mental illness take up mental bandwidth, leaving less available for everything else, such as making good choices, being effective workers or parents, and learning."

If our students are struggling with these other issues, how can they focus effectively in the classroom?  What types of interventions might help make them more successful for graduation and their careers?

• Encourage a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindest 
• Neurobics (have students try something new that is a new experience to stretch their brain, and have them report how it felt to overcome their fear (e.g. going to a yoga class with a friend or eating alone in a restaurant)
• "not yet" vs "not" -- give feedback that they can achieve learning outcomes with more effort, instead of feeling "not good enough"
• Self-esteem vs self efficacy
• high-hope syllabi (my favorite thing):  instead of one long research paper, give students steps like topic proposal due, outline due, feedback on those, first draft with feedback, then finaly draft
• Belonging
• Affirm students' values
• Pecha kucha life reports (so they get to know each other)
• relationship building in the classroom
• Helping relationships, like peer mentors
• Academic and Social counter spaces
• Institutional structures and processes
• critical mass 
• images
• financial needs
• Conversations and actions 
• (above need to reflect the student body-- students need to see images of people who look like them, and a more diverse faculty)
• GSU's interventions
• Block scheduling
• Micro-grants to help students in poverty
• pre-session before the fall (like our EOP)
• Better academic advisement, dedicated advisors, over 800 "incidents" that can be triggered as needing help in the online system.
• "Supplemental instructors" -- students who act as peer mentors, on work-study
• Student learning communities
• "meta-majors"  e.g. STEM, arts and humanities, health sciences