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Derek Bok's new book
David Horowitz's The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America has set the tone for recent debate about the state of higher education. But it's worth noting that Horowitz is not the only public figure offering explanations for the problems that plague academe. Former Harvard president Derek Bok's December 2005 study, Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More, has gotten a bit lost in the shuffle -- but it should not have.
Bok summarized some of his arguments in a Boston Globe piece last December:
It is unfortunate that college professors pay so little heed to the research about undergraduate education. If they did, they might encounter some provocative findings, such as the following.-Despite the hours spent debating different models of general education, the choices faculties make rarely lead to any significant difference in the cognitive development of undergraduates.
-Most college seniors do not think that they have made substantial progress in improving their competence in writing or quantitative methods, and some assessments have found that many students actually regress.
-Students who start college with average critical thinking skills only tend to progress over the next four years from the 50th percentile of their class to approximately the 69th percentile. Most undergraduates leave college still inclined to approach unstructured ''real life" problems with a form of primitive relativism, believing that there are no firm grounds for preferring one conclusion over another.
-Although most colleges require students to take classes in another language, fewer than 10 percent of seniors believe that they have substantially improved their foreign language skills, and fewer than 15 percent are enrolled in an advanced class.
-Substantial groups of students, including African-Americans, Hispanics, and recruited athletes in major sports, perform well below the levels one would expect based on their high school grades and SAT scores. Although a few colleges have developed successful programs to overcome such underperformance, most do not even try, despite the commitment expressed in many college brochures to ''help each student develop to his or her full potential."
Further studies indicate that problem-based discussion, group study, and other forms of active learning produce greater gains in critical thinking than lectures, yet the lecture format is still the standard in most college classes, especially in large universities. Other research has documented the widespread use of other practices that impede effective learning, such as the lack of prompt and adequate feedback on student work, the prevalence of tests that call for memory rather than critical thinking, and the reliance on teaching methods that allow students to do well in science courses by banking on memory rather than truly understanding the basic underlying concepts.
Critics of American colleges typically attribute the failings of undergraduate education to a tendency on the part of professors to neglect their teaching to concentrate on research. In fact, the evidence does not support this thesis, except perhaps in major research universities. Surveys show that most faculty members prefer teaching to research and spend much more time at it. The problem is not that faculty are uninterested in their students but that they do too little to explore new and possibly more effective ways of teaching and learning.
Bok's article does not discuss the culture wars, nor does it address the work of organizations such as FIRE and ACTA, whose missions center on ensuring that the political agendas of professors or administrators do not limit students' expressive freedoms and educational opportunities. But it's not hard to guess that one reason at least some college professors and administrators are not as focussed on educational outcomes as they might be is that they are more concerned with ideological outcomes.
Debates about the actual effectiveness of higher education have become strangely divorced from debates about the political climate of the contemporary college classroom. Critics who deplore academe for its ideological slant tend not to concern themselves with questions about what college students actually learn, or about whether they graduate with the knowledge and the skills they need to become functional adults. Conversely, critics who are concerned by, say, the disturbingly high attrition rates among college students, or by studies showing that a significant majority of college graduates lack essential literacy skills, tend not to ask whether these phenomena owe anything to political correctness.
These issues are connected, however. To focus exclusively on academic politics, as if the only significant problem in American higher education is ideological, is to collude with higher ed's failure to ensure the literacy and numeracy of a vast number of its students. Likewise, it's not possible to grasp fully how it is that so many college students don't manage to graduate with even baseline knowledge and skills without taking into account how doctrinaire pedagogy and policy shape college students' experiences. These issues are intertwined. They should be studied as such.
Posted by acta online on February 13, 2006 at February 13, 2006 08:59 PM
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Comments
Excellent synapsis of a study that should prove to be an interesting read. Thank you. Having spent a few years teaching undergraduate education as an adjunct instructor in mathematics, I served a broad cross section of university students and have at least a modest exposure to these issues.
I found many of the comments included in the article to resonate with my experience. Institutions of higher education have failed their obligation to guarantee that a degree dependably represents the mastery of a set of skills or a body of knowledge. This is, however unfortunate, only one of the bottom lines.
Students have not met their obligations to be active and independent learners, either. At some point we have to simply admit that standards are not held because we'd have to fail half the class and nobody is willing to go out on that limb - especially a part-time instructor on a thin line of survival (and who are, incidentally, used quite often in crucial freshmen classes).
Also, while students often do not perform, they are increasingly aware that academic capital can easily be replaced by social and network capital. The college experience for many students is in the advertised 'social' realms - the sacrifice required to pursue true academic growth is not a 'competitive brand image' in the integrated marketing plans of increasingly growth-oriented institutions. And quite frankly, they are correct. A competitive market system and a increasingly competitive job market reward 'connectedness' far more than 'resourcefulness'. Students will always gravitate to the greatest rewards for their efforts. The relationships they form in what would be viewed academically to be leisure-time tend to 'pay off'. Despite being under-educated and poorly disciplined in intellectual pursuit, they are still very intelligent people and make conscious choices about where their efforts are placed. They have to be understood as accountable participants and not just consumers or bi-products of a system. Any true measurement has to take this into account.
It is correct to say that far too little emphasis has been placed on the professional development of an empowered pedagogy that engages students more than a traditional lecture ever will. And as a former 'lecturer', I realize now how often it failed to provide an effective atmosphere for learning.
However, if universities are going to get serious, educating has to be seen as a professional occupation and not just a 'piece' of a job description that largely goes unmeasured. To truly build a dynamic and innovative classroom environment where real relationships are built with students through a systemized process of thorough and quick feedback mechanisms for hundreds of people in different classes is an incredible task. It is truly an amazing accomplishment when done well. Any nobel prizes for educating?
I adjuncted at three different colleges, part-time teaching 18 credits hours with no benefits. There was no plan in place for me to achieve full-time, stable work with benefits based on 'excellent performance' or any other standard. I was never published or included in a study, but was fascinated by the learning styles of students and was constantly innovating new ways of reaching them. I was really beginning to see some progress in my ability to be effective in the classroom after a couple of years 'in the trenches' and was proud of my work. I made $18,000 in my last year of work as an instructor.
I quit because I needed to get a job where I could get my teeth cleaned or see a doctor about my migraines. Or raise children in something other than poverty.
That memory makes a lot of this discussion, while interesting and well-thought out, seem silly. As only a former instructor can say...A+ for effort - which gives you just enough to pass.
Posted by: Jonathan Hebert at April 3, 2006 05:06 PM
Perhaps if PhD programs spent more time discussing how to teach we might make real progress in improving student learning. "The problem is not that faculty are uninterested in their students but that they do too little to explore new and possibly more effective ways of teaching and learning." On what basis are faculty to build this exploration? There years of study in a discipline leave them narrowly focused on what to teach, not how.
If one looks at rates of progression and graduation from college entry to completion of the PhD, it is easy to see that these are people who did well in the current system...why should they feel compelled to change it?
Posted by: Tod Massa at April 5, 2006 09:35 AM