As part of the student success trainings, I’m studying the reasons why students do poorly in their studies. One such reason, which isn’t obvious and which students don’t talk about, is that students don’t understand the language.

I’m not talking about Russian, which all our university lectures are given in. I’m talking about the specialized terminology used in lectures and lab work.

An example from personal experience. In cloud technologies labs, a lot of actions have to be done in the command line and the Python interpreter. When I ask them to add the path to Python in the environment variables, change the working directory, specify command-line arguments, then in a group of 20 students only one understands what I’m talking about. The others sit there staring at the monitor as if they’re seeing a computer for the first time in their lives.

Another example. Students may show a compilation error, and I can suggest a solution: "Implement such-and-such protocol method in this class."

Students hear it as: “blah blah blah method blah blah blah class,” like the cat in the Whiskas commercial:

On the other hand, this turns into students being unable to give normal definitions of basic terms, and in one-on-one conversations and during lab defenses they use little words like: “thingamajig,” “crap,” “whatchamacallit,” “thing,” “well, you know, what’s-it-called,” and so on. Obviously, without precise definitions at a lab defense, a student cannot expect an “excellent” grade. Some students end up dissatisfied: “But I did do it, I know it, I just couldn’t say it.”

As a result, there is no dialogue at all. Students are ashamed to admit that they don’t understand; they don’t ask any follow-up questions, and the lab work doesn’t move forward.

And what happens in a lecture when a student runs into an unknown term? If a student doesn’t understand some term, then that lecture is over for them. They won’t understand anything after that. First, the context of the narrative is lost, and without context, information that isn’t connected to anything doesn’t stick. Second, the brain spends fuel and time trying to understand that term, to remember it; the student gets distracted and also loses the thread of the lecturer’s narrative.

Recommendations for instructors: 

  1. At the beginning of each lecture, spend a few minutes on definitions of the most important terms used in the lecture.
  2. Strictly monitor the terminology students use in their speech.

Recommendations for students:

  1. Work through professional terminology in advance.
  2. Keep glossaries of terms; these glossaries should always be at hand so that, even in a lecture when time is short, you can quickly peek at them.
  3. Don’t be shy about asking the instructor or classmates to clarify terms, if time allows. For example, in labs.
  4. At home, independently work through the terms and the parts of the lecture that fell out of the narrative.
  5. In oral and written speech, give precise definitions of concepts; get rid of abstract definitions: “crap,” “thingamajig,” “thing,” and so on.

In 2000, at the first physics lecture, Anatoly Ivanovich Kozar said: “You don’t yet have anything to understand with.” What he meant was precisely that before studying physics, you need to learn the terminology so that there is “something to understand with.”