teaching – Page 3 – Ida's Blog

Students Fail Because Colleges Fail

The Spring 2011 semester begins tomorrow, Wednesday, January 19. As I review my course syllabi one more time and ponder the weights to assign various assignments, I looked at today’s issue of the Chronicle-Faculty and read a blog post titled: New Book Lays Failure to Learn on Colleges’ Doorstep by David Glenn.

In that post, Glenn summarizes the findings in the recently released book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press). The book presents evidence, based on student scores on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, that faculty do not demand enough of students and thus students are ill-prepared by the time they graduate. One of the more disturbing, but not surprising conclusions include students self-report that they study 12 hours per week (the Carnegie study recommends that students study 2 hours for every hour in class, which is a minimum of 24 hours per week for a 12 unit semester load).

That conclusion matches what I’ve found when I’ve spoken with students, especially those who are struggling. Many do not know how many hours per week to study and even more surprising, many do not know HOW to study.

During the past few semesters, I have included in the course syllabi of the undergraduate courses a recommendation that students study a certain number of hours per week and tips on how to study. Another recent change has been to spend time discussing how to take tests-as faculty we assume that students know how to prepare for and have developed strategies to take tests. Many have not.

The book’s basis, results from the Collegiate Learning Assessment, does have the limitations that are noted in the article. However, one result should be that colleges should create a required course at the beginning of a students’ career that focuses on preparation for college-so that students know what is expected and thus can be better prepared. Another result is that faculty should not be afraid to challenge students and expect that they can do the work. Although that increases faculty workload and effort, it is necessary in order to graduate students who are truly prepared.

Innovation in Academia

One of the pleasant benefits of my current position-working with faculty using technology-is that I have the opportunity to meet faculty from many academic disciplines and to discuss what they teach and how they teach it. It reinvigorates me and I learn different approaches to teaching my own subject. In addition, through this work I met a group of faculty who have worked together to write a manuscript on using videos to engage students and encourage critical thinking. The manuscript is under revision now.

I have frequently lamented universities’ lack of substantive support for cross-disciplinary collaboration and teaching. Perhaps that is because my area of expertise is legal studies-and legal studies are multi-discipinary. So, it was with interest that I read the article Communicating Across the Academic Divide in a January 2, 2011 commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In that post, the author discussed one critical issue that is a barrier to such cross-disciplinary collaboration: inability to easily communicate. The author stated, “Talking across disciplines is as difficult as talking to someone from another culture. Differences in language are the least of the problems; translations may be tedious and not entirely accurate, but they are relatively easy to accomplish. What is much more difficult is coming to understand and accept the way colleagues from different disciplines think—their assumptions and their methods of discerning, evaluating, and reporting “truth”—their disciplinary cultures and habits of mind.”

Interesting and provocative. I had always thought that significant innovation could occur through cross-disciplinary conversations and had been frustrated by the lack of consistent, sustainable University encouragement of such efforts. But the author’s point is well taken.

While writing the article on using videos, it was evident that we each had different habits of mind and approaches to what would be required for the article. We reached a rough compromise and I hope that that compromise will result in a published article (the first submission was rejected), but my experience confirmed what this author learned: the challenge may be in convincing our colleagues that each of our approaches is genuinely valuable. My experience in coordinating and co-writing the article was positive, yet there were differences in approaches that had to be resolved. And we each had an interest in engaging students and encouraging critical thinking, so our different approaches did not prevent us from reaching a mutually beneficial compromise.

Another “A” word-Course Evaluations

In a summary of a future to-be-published article, the Chronicle noted in an article titled “Students Lie on Course Evaluations” that students admitted lying in a way that harms faculty in student course evaluations. That’s the “A” word that relates to faculty promotion and evaluation-assessments students make of faculty.

Faculty who study the field know that course evaluations should be only one of many items that are considered when evaluating faculty performance for retention, tenure or promotion. Our University’s policy is that there are many factors that should be factored in to a decision about how well faculty encourage student learning. Yet, many who are on faculty committees will spend an inordinate about of time developing and applying complex formulas to incorporate the results of course evaluations in a way that makes those course evaluations the pre-eminent determinant of faculty performance.

Why is it that we are so comfortable with using course evaluation numbers as the primary factor to determine whether someone is a good teacher? Those numbers can be so easily manipulated. I know of some faculty who give students treats before the evaluations are administered. That has an impact on perception.

A couple of times I’ve returned exam results immediately before evaluations were administered. Since everyone was not happy with those results, my course evaluations declined. Although my overall course evaluation numbers have been good, I know that I have done things that have an impact on the evaluations and that those things are not directly related to teaching.

Perhaps the study referenced in the article will help us agree on the appropriate weight for student evaluations so that faculty can work on creating a learning environment instead of pleasing students.