Archive for the 'What is Education?' Category

I am still surfing on the wave of energy I picked up from attending the Educause Learning Initiative 2010 Annual Meetings last week. As Gardner Campbell has said, faculty development is not a frill, but rather the oxygen academics need to breath. (Someone retold this quote in a session I attended though Gardner himself was elsewhere, and of course, I’d heard Gardner say it before.)  I still have much to process before I blog on the conference itself, but the energizing made me pick up something the other day that I need to just put out there.

At my institution’s State of the University address two weeks ago (another subject I need to blog about), we learned that the new watchword is productivity, as measured in particular by retention and graduation rates. I understand metrics, but I wonder if these two illuminate or obscure  problems.

As a macro economist, I am very sensitive to what we call “aggregation error.” When you look at the big picture, say by computing an average, you always lose information. Aggregation error asks: Does the average accurately characterize the group? Imagine a group consisting of half poor people and half rich people. The average suggests the group is middle income, which is completely misleading. That’s aggregation error.  If the government asked ‘Do we have a poverty problem?’ the answer based on the average income would be ‘no’.  And it would be wrong.

One key to student success in higher education appears to be engagement, and student engagement has become a big issue–look at the growing importance of the NSSE, etc.  I want to teach students who are engaged in the topic we’re studying. I would rather teach someone who cares about their learning, than one who gets good grades without caring. Perhaps I have a personal bias here. I never thought much about grades in college. I cared about learning and I worked hard and let the grades fall where they may. I was not an A student, but I learned more than many of my friends who were. (One example: I tutored friends who ended up with better grades than I, but didn’t necessarily understand more.)

Inside Higher Education recently reported on a fascinating study about the relation between grades and engagement.  It’s commonly understood that grades, engagement, and most importantly learning are positively correlated.  The study confirms that grades improve with a student’s engagement, but finds also that the result isn’t necessarily ‘high’ grades.  Engagement causes progress, better grades (and thus better “student outcomes”), but not necessarily ‘high’ grades.   Engagement is a good proxy for learning, but grades are only a weak proxy, a point I’ve stressed before.  The study points out that earning high grades doesn’t necessarily mean one is engaged.  As a consequence, using grades to measure engagement is a type of aggregation error.

While organizations necessarily look at aggregate data as metrics, we must not forget that students are individuals, and the institution needs to treat them (and provide support for them) as such.  One size doesn’t fit all.

Terry Dolson and I have been conversing about the balance between scholarship and liberal arts teaching.  This is a response to Terry’s last response, in which she says:

I believe that if faculty could see clearly that the WAY they teach may have even more impact on the majority of their  students than the CONTENT they teach, then they would feel compelled to explore new techniques.

What’s missing from both our earlier posts is the nuance that the roles a faculty member plays in scholarship and in teaching in the liberal arts are different, but equally important, equally legitimate. If one thinks that scholarship is one’s real work, but that teaching is like service, merely something that one is required to do, I think one misses the point of liberal arts teaching and is likely to fail at it.

It’s a question of audience and respect.  Successful scholarship requires “recognition in one’s field.”  Recognition  in this context is more than the accolade you receive from others.  It’s the response to the respect that you show in your work.  It’s the response to your making others think in ways they haven’t before, or in your taking them to intellectual places they haven’t been before.

Successful liberal arts teaching is the same.  You must show your audience respect for where they are in their intellectual journey, by treating what you do (as well as what they do) seriously.  The respect you receive is the response to making your students think in ways they haven’t before or in your taking them to intellectual places they haven’t been before.  But it’s also doing it explicitly in the context of liberal arts.  This is where many introductory courses fail.  They are designed only as introductions to the major, as gatekeeping courses for the select few who will be inducted into the priesthood of believers (i.e. the major).  It may be that only some students can be majors in a field, but all students should be able to understand the context and contributions of a discipline in the liberal arts.  Or to phrase it differently, anyone can teach students who have an affinity for the field, but it takes a serious teacher to be effective at teaching those students who do not, at making those students see the relevance and import of fields outside the major.   It takes a serious teacher to help all students see that courses outside their major are just as important and worthy of respect as courses in the major.  That is the liberal arts ideal.

This is a question I’ve blogged about before, here, here and here for example. I know we say college is supposed to be education (or Real School), but more often than one might like if you look at what actually happens in the classroom, it looks a lot like training to me.

Lanny Arvan touched on this critical question in his post I alluded to the other day. He observed that extrinsic motivation essentially forces students to do some minimum level of work, kind of ‘working to the teacher’—the flip side of ‘teaching to the test’ [my words, not his]. But extrinsic motivation provides little incentive to do more. After all, if there’s no credit given, what’s the point?

One problem with online quizzing is that it tends to assess lower level learning: facts and findings, rather than analytical or reflective thinking. I’m half-considering telling my intro students: “If you want a C+ in the course, do all the online quizzes, but if you want a B or better answer my study questions.”

Lanny notes:

[W]e really should be about the education of our students; training is not our primary goal. When I was about 10 and in fifth or sixth grade, two or three other students and I got to work apart from the rest of the class with a programmed book for learning grammar – first presentation of the rule, then a question on that, and then response – ring, rang rung; …………bring, brought, brought. A course based purely on quizzing conveys this notion of learning, a notion associated with training, … Education, in contrast, has as part a notion of self-directed inquiry reshaping the learner’s world view. Where is the self-direction in the quizzing?

Alan Contraras, in his recent Inside Higher Education article also addresses this question, though he comes at it from a different direction, criticizing the increasingly in vogue notion that students should complete their undergraduate studies as quickly as possible.

The second argument [others use to support this notion] is more insidious and represents a fundamentally false notion of what higher education is, or should be. That is the idea that students need to be speedy in getting into and out of college because college is job training and people should get into the workforce and start being productive. Therefore college is not a place for dalliance, casual exploration, personal discovery or, heaven forbid, changing one’s mind partway through and starting off in another direction.

Contraras further observes:

In “Our Universities,” John Jay Chapman wrote of the perils of making higher education overmechanical in its processes. He noted that colleges risk a “punching of tickets at entrances and exits” in a system “invented by persons who should have been employed in drawing up railroad timetables.” This sense that there is a timetable for learning is one of the unfortunate aspects of the way colleges fit into contemporary society.

Chapman, one of the best observers of education and the workings of politics that the U.S. has ever produced, noted that the channeling of educational energies toward the needs of business had resulted in an infection of the curriculum as well as the timetable.

What can we do to make the case for college as education rather than merely job preparation, to prospective students and also to policy makers and the public at large?

Learning only occurs at the intersection between a text and a reader, or between a lecture and an audience. In a comment on an earlier post, Shannon notes,

[T]ext is sometimes seen as a time waster if it requires a close study, “why didn’t the author just make it simpler to understand?”. Students want key concepts pulled out for them so they can pass the test, why should they bother pulling it when a prof can do it much more easily?

This is something about students’ perceptions that I didn’t fully understand, so I’m really thankful that Shannon brought it to our attention.

Students need to understand that learning isn’t something that happens to you. It’s something you have to engage with to occur. Can you become a competent athlete by merely hearing about how to do the sport, or is it necessary to practice? Can you excel at a sport without practicing it?

Learning happens only as a function of the engagement between the student and the stimulus. The stimulus could be a text, a lecture, a video, a piece of art or music or other visual image. If there’s no engagement, there will be no learning. Think: the student who sleeps thru the lecture. If there’s little engagement, there will be little learning. Think: the lecture which fails to capture the student’s attention, as in the video snippet which Gardner showed at the FSEM Faculty Development workshop last week. Just as you have to chew a scholarly text or process your lecture notes, to really learn something you have to study it closely.

If students aren’t getting this message, and it seems that they’re not, what can instructors do to change this? Could it be as simple as stating it clearly in class, for example, in a first year seminar? Would students believe it? Can anyone suggest other ideas?