editorially speaking Different Students, Different Needs Students today have an easier time of it than students in the past had. At least that's what the old saw would have us believe. In the "eood old davs" science students were better prepared and-more dedicked, and they spent more time a t their studies. In short, yesterdays' students are also commonly perceived to have been better studeuts than today's. A more-realistic assessment is that students today exhibit sidficantlv different characteristics from a number of critical viewpoints, all of which often come down to a matter of time. For example, more undergraduate students are older and have family responsibilities than in the ~ a s tMore . come with very s~ecificgoals in mind, oRen involving a career change. More come with severe time and financial constraints. Afew systematic studies and a large amount of anecdotal information indicate that today's undergraduates, as a group, work longer hours a t paid jobs than their predecessors did. Although a number of interesting speculations have been offered to explain the latter phenomenon, the f a d of its existence is important here. Increasing the amount of time devoted to providing the basic human needs for food and shelter clearly means that there is less time available for other things in a student's life such as academics. Students with familial obligations have less flexibility in their schedules as well as less time to devote to their studies. Thus, although the fraction of students in each of these loosely defined groups-working, family responsibilities, or both-may be small individually, the number of students who today have less time to spend on academics for valid human reasons is sizable. This population is not well-served by the traditional instructional methods that ~ e r v a d ecurrent teaching Dractices. Further, attempts toAaddressthe needs of t h i i &owing n inevitably affect the way in which we - ~.o.~ u l a t i owill teach and as well as expand
