Thinking of teaching and research

Sorry for the neglect of the blog over the past month; it's been a bit more hectic than anticipated, and I've done more than enough blogging for my class. At any rate, sometimes heated conversations with members of this group over the past two days on teaching have made me think about the purpose of research and teaching at a University. Here are some somewhat random thoughts and links I've found of interest (after the break).

First, "assessment." (An unlovely word - Catherine got upset about my using it to think about the evaluation of teaching today. It bespeaks a narrow, crabbed conception of education, full of metrics and numbers). Here's some context. There was a recent story in the NYTimes recently about a proposal floating around in the Bush administration to examine

whether standardized testing should be expanded into universities and colleges to prove that students are learning and to allow easier comparisons on quality.

Needless to say, the idea is to some extent absurd - for one thing, college education is specialized, not general (unlike high school education), so it would make little sense to have a single lowest common denominator test. But, as NYU Philosophy Professor David Velleman comments over at Left2Right (see related posts here and here),

The last time I wrote about accountability in higher education, I said that universities "will have to develop better methods of evaluating instruction." And then I punted: "But that's a topic for another day." I guess that "other day" has arrived.

The failure of colleges and universities to assess the effectiveness of their instruction is manifested most clearly in grade inflation, which has accelerated since 1990, after two decades of relative dormancy in the 70s and 80s. (Statistics here.) At the University of Michigan, where I have seen the statistics broken down by department, the trend is largely confined to the humanties and social sciences, and indeed to particular discplines within those divisions. Faculty in math and science believe that they have lost enrollments to the other divisions largely because they have held the line on grades.

One cause of grade inflation is the reliance of administrators on "consumer satisfaction" measures to evaluate teaching. Courses that get high scores from students on exit surveys are assumed to have been well taught, and faculty are regularly held to the standard that falling below the average or median score counts as a failure: instructors must be above average in order to be considered any good at all. Faculty cannot help believing that giving their students lower grades during the semester will result in their getting worse evaluations from the students in the end. And there is some evidence that they are right.

So, somebody is going to do assessment, and it better be you who is in control. Moreover, are we so sure that we are doing things right when we teach in the humanities that grades have gone up accross the board? (Not that grades elsewhere are always a good indicator of learning, mind you).

There is also the ethical point: what is the extent of our responsibility for student learning? Some part of the responsibility belongs to the student; but there is a sense in which the learning relationship has a contractual aspect. Ideally, the student who does everything in the syllabus, fo example, with the appropriate degree of effort should "learn" something if s/he is teachable. But this is manifestly not the case except in the most superficial of senses, and part of the problem here is not the student but the teaching. To the extent that there is some truth in this contractualist view, moreover, I would argue that we have to figure out how to measure this learning (measure it in a broad sense, not just by means of numbers: figure out what works) and incorporate the results in our own practice.

There was also another story in the Times on a more obscure topic: online colleges (I mentioned this today at our talk). Here's the new reality:

It took just a few paragraphs in a budget bill for Congress to open a new frontier in education: Colleges will no longer be required to deliver at least half their courses on a campus instead of online to qualify for federal student aid.

That change is expected to be of enormous value to the commercial education industry. Although both for-profit colleges and traditional ones have expanded their Internet and online offerings in recent years, only a few dozen universities are fully Internet-based, and most of them are for-profit ones.

Velleman again, in a different post:

The Times article cites opposition from traditional academics "saying there was no proof that online education was effective." The director of Columbia University's Center for the Study of Privatization in Education is quoted as saying, "We have not found a single rigorous study comparing online with conventional forms of instruction."

This strikes me as an unwise approach for academics to take.

As I noted in a recent post, traditional colleges and universities are generally lax about measuring the effectiveness of their instruction, relying instead on consumer-satisfaction surveys. Internet colleges are in a position — and have an incentive — to collect far better consumer-satisfaction data for purposes of market research. And there is some reason to worry that their consumers may be more satisfied than ours. The operations that are seriously trying to teach (rather than sell diplomas) cater to highly motivated clientele, quite unlike the 18-year-olds for whom college is just the next stop on the main route to adulthood. Internet courses require their students to log on regularly, participate in online activities, and complete assignments on time. These students are likely to be more engaged, on average, than traditional college students, many of whom skip class and just cram for the final. We shouldn't be too confident that we will fare better than Internet colleges on our own chosen measure of quality.

More importantly, we need to avail ourselves of distance learning where we can, even if the distance involved is only that between the professor's office and the dorm. For some courses, online instruction may be successful, freeing faculty for courses where personal interaction is essential. We need to explore those possibilities with open minds, not rule them out from fear of commercial competition. We should also be exploring the use of online instruction for outreach to high-school students preparing for college, especially those from underserved populations attending sub-standard schools. Here again, a public posture of skepticism about online instruction will be counterproductive.

Finally, we need to broaden public understanding of what is valuable in a traditional college education, by dissolving the perceived conflict between research and teaching, not only in the public's mind but also in our own. A traditional student learns where knowledge is being created, from the people who are creating it, in a community dedicated to unfettered inquiry — a kind of frontier community, whose ethos is infused with a spirit of intellectual adventure and risk. We should explain why the value of a sojourn on this frontier cannot be measured with standardized tests.

We are entitled to make this argument, of course, only so long as we keep the relevant academic values alive, by infusing our instruction with the spirit of our research and by resisting the forces of mediocrity and conformism. So if competition from Internet colleges forces us to reaffirm these academic values, then I say: Bring it on.

The problem is that often traditionally educated college students don't seem to learn all that much better than students educated in some other way. Again, the point is: how do we know that we are making any kind of difference? I can keep my students engaged, or bored, sometimes both in the same period; I can give them tests and papers to write, make them play interesting games, but can I teach them? Or even help them learn, if the word "teaching" is too pretentious here?

I could quote from a more exalted source: Pierre Bourdieu's Academic Discourse, but I have to say that I don't have the energy to find a relevant quote and type it here. Bourdieu approaches the problem from the sociological standpoint and says it's the social structure of the university that makes it (university teaching) all hopeless. But I summarize much too simplistically, and anyway Bourdieu is thinking too much of the French system.

At a personal level, this is something I think about all the time as I'm teaching: is what I'm doing working at all? Of course, I've barely started, so this is to some degree unwarranted angst. I'll figure something out, I suppose. But it's a nagging thought as I go on day by day.

Then there is the more general question: is what I'm teaching really all that important to be taught? Who cares? Here's Timothy Burke, a Professor of History at Swarthmore college (whose weblog is well worth reading):

What I was thinking about is the extent to which even in a teaching-centered institution that promotes a pretty healthy degree of connection between the faculty, we mostly teach courses that narrowly service departmental curricula deriving from a state-of-the-art sense of what a given specific discipline entails. Broader, connective, integrative courses, or material that doesn’t belong to a conventional discipline, often falls out of view.

This has been on my mind a lot this academic year for various reasons. I spoke along with a colleague to our Alumni Council early this year on this problem, that the faculty don’t ask ourselves enough what it is that 18-22 year olds who are not going to be academics themselves really need to learn or would benefit from knowing, preferring instead to ask, “What’s the proper sequence of courses for this discipline”, or “what’s in the scholarly literature on this topic?” as if the discipline or literature’s benefits are self-evident. We review interdisciplinary minors here every five years, and sometimes do external reviews of departments, but we don’t really expect departments and disciplines to provide an ongoing, renewable and contestable sense of their relevance to the students, the college, the curriculum.

We have many ready justifications to the "so what" question, but unfortunately they are not always all that credible. I am borrowing other people's thoughts for this somewhat rambling and incoherent post; perhaps you might want to consider it an exercise in venting frustrations. (The part on research, following on the conversation with Jeremy, will have to wait a bit).