Faculty Attitudes toward Adult Students.

Abstract

We recently conducted a study of the attitudes of faculty at the University of Texas at Dallas toward the adult students in their undergraduate classes. Our hypothesis was that there would be a difference in the way faculty perceive and treat adult students in the classroom when those students are integrated in the same classroom with traditional-aged students. We were trying to discover whether faculty handle older students differently from their younger counterparts, whether faculty make any distinction among students based on age, whether they like teaching older students better than younger students, whether they prefer a mix ture of ages in the same classroom and whether the response they get from students makes a difference in how they perceive or teach their students. UTD seemed to us a very appropriate institution for such a study because it is an urban, graduate, and upper-level undergraduate commuter university where the average age of undergraduate students is 29 years. Since it first accepted undergraduates in 1975, UTD has enrolled large numbers of adult students in regular degree programs, and these students have been in the same classes with younger students. Therefore, we thought it would be interesting to learn what the attitude of the faculty was toward these "non-traditional" students they suddenly found in their classrooms, in tegrated with younger students. The faculty are a research-oriented group, graduates of prestigious tradi tional institutions. Although 46 percent of UTD's enrollment is graduate students, all faculty are required to teach at least one undergraduate course per year.