Sometimes helping people understand the rationale behind the instructions helps them to pay more attention to them.
If you make a point of telling your students in class why secondary sources are important and you stress this multiple times throughout the lesson, then the instruction to use a certain number of them will more than likely stick with them. But just putting that on the assignment without any context…it’s apt to be ignored.
This is known thing with adult learners. You have to show them why if you want them to get it.
When I write up procedures, the first check is given to the most highly-technically-skilled person that’s available. They will find a way to overthink an issue, and will make you re-write your instructions to counter that.
I then give it to one of our Bless-their-little-hearts less-than-skilled people, and see how they can misunderstand the simplest of things. They make me re-write them to counter their issues.
Usually, I have about a 95% success rate after that. (mostly falls into the categories of “You said press the button on the screen! There’s only a place to click, not press! What do I do!” type of folks. )
Thanks for a lot to think about! More experiences from the “other side” would be interesting.
A few points: these are not dumb kids, and in fact they give the impression of paying attention and caring about the class. If it was only coming from the people who clearly don’t give a shit, I wouldn’t care so much.
I work at community college. I feel like the ONLY thing we are trying to teach our students (young and old alike) is how to follow directions. That’s it. Period. Do what you’re told. It will serve you well, not just here, but during your whole life.
I don’t mean that they don’t care about the class. I mean that they don’t care about following directions. They don’t see that as an important part of the class. Why should they? They have no experience teaching. They probably care about the material, but it simply won’t occur to them to care about trivial (to them) things like following directions until they have a lot more experience.
I do give a grade penalty for not following directions – especially on tests. But it is hard for me to get over the hump of “you have ONE job: following the directions” – why is this not obvious to people? The directions are, like, the whole deal.
I may be rambling at this point. But I am confronted again and again with this. The paper has a word limit (range, really, I guess) of 1800-2300 words (clearly noted! in several places!). Already i have received papers of 1200 and 2500 words. sigh
I also had a student demand that I “send some secondary sources his way” the day before the deadline. We had talked in person about the requirements for the paper. But perhaps that is a different issue.
From what I can tell, people who don’t follow directions have at least one of the following traits, if not all of them:
“I don’t have the time to read this”
“But why?”
“I’m too intimidated to think properly”
“I already know how to do this”
I’ve personally never had a problem following directions - mostly because I actually stop to read them fully and then engage my brain if it’s not totally obvious. And then I engage Google if my brain can’t do it. And I check back to the directions more than once during the duration of the project.
There are people out there who think they are bad with say, technology, so whenever they meet a problem that might possibly be technology related they just shut down and refuse to try. They’ll read the words, but before they’re fully processed their brain will just be repeating, “But this is too haaaaaard and I’m no good at stuff like this”. Sometimes you get the person who reads halfway through, says, “I know how to do this, why am I wasting my time reading directions for something I know?” and then proceeds to mess up because they didn’t read the instructions fully (this is the person who installs bundled search bars on their computer by furiously clicking “next” without reading installation prompts). And then you also get the person who read directions once, and never checks the directions again, trusting that they’re remembering correctly. Only after whatever they were doing is finished do they realize, “oops, the directions said print 20, not 10…”
Basically, it either comes down to people thinking too highly of themselves or not highly enough. And then there’s also laziness.
How to get them to care enough if they aren’t wired that way to start? Well, good luck with that. Welcome to the human condition, I guess.
Is there any way to give extra credit? Like you give instructions to read all the instructions, and the instructions include answer three of the five questions, but that you’ll also get 2 bonus points if you right Orange on the bottom left corner of your paper. From what I remember from college, people might zone out when the professor was talking about instructions, it’s like when flight attendants are talking about safety procedures, we’ve heard it all before and aren’t paying attention. But everyone’s ears would perk up if extra credit was mentioned.
I had to take a similar test in 2nd grade. We were told to read every question on the test (there were like 10) before answering any of the questions. It also said this at the top. The last question said to ignore the rest of the test, write our name on the line and turn the test in. I failed because as I was reading the questions, they were so easy that I started answering them as I read. Most of the class failed. I have never failed to fully read and follow directions on a test or assignment since.
I think you have to pick your battles - it is more important for you to get a sense that your students understand (and can convey that understanding) of the material ? Or to follow the directions ?
I think most instructors let sly the instructions because they are more concerned about their students grasping the material. This may “feed” a mentality/culture that “content” is more important than “following the instructions”.
But, people/students learn from their mistakes. If you really want to drive home the “follow the directions” part, clearly state that the directions must be followed, and simply (outright) fail any submissions that did not follow all the directions. Doesn’t matter if the content was 100% correct. This actually does occur in real life (applying for grants often have word count limits, and failure to meet these requirements means automatic disqualification). Word will get around that at least for your class, following the directions is crucial. After the first experience of this, most students will get it.
It just comes down to what you want your students to come away with: an appreciation for following directions or the material you are teaching.
As to the OP: I (believe) I follow directions pretty well - mostly because I am so annoyed when people don’t. And I have gotten severely dinged when I failed to follow the directions. Reading threads on this board, you can easily see that “following directions” (actually addressing the OP) is the minority - most threads “morph” into variations of the theme.
That, but also: either there’s a reason they need to follow instructions so they can’t get the intended result if they don’t, or the instructions are just helpful tips that can safely be ignored. You’re not doing yourself any favors by presenting them as the former and then treating them as the latter after the fact just to be nice. People learn really quickly when an action always has a certain consequence, but they don’t learn very well when the same action can have different consequences. And of course they don’t learn at all when there are no consequences.
Get annoyed with your colleagues and their HS teachers.
I mostly follow directions. I tend to not follow directions when I don’t trust or believe the person who is giving them, either because they don’t seem to know what they’re doing or because their directions haven’t been exactly reliable in the past. The reason you’re getting 1200 & 2500 word papers is because their other teachers have accepted too long and too short papers so they’ve no real reason to believe that you won’t as well. The same is true for secondary sources. If they’ve gotten away without including them in the past or including fewer than were supposedly required they’re going ask if you really mean 2-5 or if they can just include 1 and that’ll be good enough. Their former instructors have taught them that the directions for a class or test don’t really mean anything. They need to learn that in your classes, they do.
What’s hard for me is when instructions are unintentionally ambiguous. Maybe there’s some regionalism I’m not familiar with, or a word that can be taken two very different ways. I became very aware of this kind of thing when writing instructions and then still getting questions, so I opted for over-explaining. For example, instead of “Answer THREE of these questions” I would have said “Answer ONLY THREE of these questions; do not take the time to answer all five.” Especially in a stressful test environment (more stressful for some than for others).
The key for me when writing instructions is to put myself in the mindframe of someone completely unaware of what to do. I tried to never assume that I could skip explaining X because everyone knows that, or because of course it follows naturally from U, V and W. And I appreciate those kinds of instructions myself.
On the other hand, I have no problem putting Ikea furniture together based on those pictograms.
The problem is that it’s a self-limiting skill. Suppose it’s five years’ later and these former students are interviewing for jobs. Do you really think their potential employers are looking to hire people whose main skill is that they will only do what they’re explicitly told to do?
In the real world, we value people who can take initiative and who don’t need to be told what to do. The people who sit there and wait for directions never rise far.
So the students who aren’t waiting to read the directions before jumping into the test are probably a combination of the best and the worst students in the class.
Using many words where a few also do the job makes people less likely to read everything. Case in point: manuals. Many spell everything out in so much detail that they’re unreadable so they tend to go unread.
My problem is that I am in a hurry, and I assume I am too smart to need the directions.
I am usually wrong, but it’s how I operate. This is why I wasn’t suited to work in biology laboratories. I couldn’t follow the rules for sterile technique. Corners? Cut! Shortcuts? Imagined! Cultures? Ruined!
Oh well. In everyday life, I get by well enough. I take my tagline from the pilot of Sex and the City: “The kind of deluded self-confidence that made Ross Perot run for president.”
I always add: “If you answer more than three questions, only the first three will be read or graded.” Sometimes they answer more in the hopes that if they get one or two wrong, you’ll just pick the three best answers.