Are You Enabling ‘Academic Entitlement’ in Students?

Education Week:

Does this scenario sound familiar? After test results come out, a student approaches the teacher after class, arguing, “I come to class every day; I deserve at least a B!”

Students’ sense of academic entitlement can reduce their effort in class and lead to irritating (or even aggressive) confrontations with teachers, according to research by Tracey E. Zinn, a psychology associate professor at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. Moreover, teachers may be unintentionally feeding that sense of entitlement, she said at the Association for Psychological Science conference here this weekend.

Zinn and James Madison colleagues Jason P. Kopp, Sara J. Finney and Daniel P. Jurich are researching ways to measure academic entitlement and how it develops. Perhaps not surprisingly, the researchers found the college students they studied were most likely to show “serious instances of incivility” right after academic assessments, be they test results or mid-term grades.

Read the whole story: Education Week

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