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The scenario is familiar to us all: A college is conscientiously trying to improve its performance on the array of challenges that go by terms such as “assessment,” “retention,” “accountability,” and “general education.” The president of the college appoints a task force to address these many interrelated issues, the third or fourth such group on the campus over a period of 20 years. The general-education program has been revised twice. The college had offered departments a series of grants to develop assessment plans for the better part of a decade, but these disappeared in a year of cutbacks. It had offered several learning-community courses, which also disappeared when the faculty involved retired—although the college continues to offer a first-year program and an honors program. In short, the task force discovers that most of the ideas proposed in their first brainstorming session have already been tried on that campus.
However, the task-force members also discover that there has been no systematic attempt to track the results of these various experiments. In some cases, no data were gathered. In a few, studies were conducted for a year or so, then were discontinued once the program assumed permanent status. Overall, the institution has no evidence about what students learn in their courses or how long that learning lasts.
After two hours’ discussion at their fifth meeting, a chemistry professor summarizes the situation as he sees it: “We’re running in place. We take two steps forward, then slide back. Nothing we do makes any demonstrable difference.”
“But if that’s true,” says the director of information technology, “then how do we even know if we’re doing a better or a worse job? We don’t.” The task force adjourns until the next week with the following question echoing in members’ minds: Does anything we do make a difference?
The Learning Gap
The most fundamental problem of colleges is that, in some respects, the people within them don’t learn very well. That is largely true of the students, to be sure. College students who do well on tests of short-term recall may quickly forget what they have supposedly learned. Students who don’t get the grades they want may “study harder” and, as a result, improve their grades. But whether this effort has any long-term benefit depends on how they were studying in the first place and whether they study differently or just more. If “study” means trying to commit to memory discrete items of information that might appear on a test, then doing more of it will lead both to remembering more in the short term and forgetting more in the long term. Doing more is not doing better unless what you are doing makes an important difference.
Colleges have a similar problem. Dissatisfied with their completion rates, they may “study” how to improve the situation. The results of these efforts, however, will usually be like those of the student who spends extra hours cramming for the test.
Most faculty, staff, and administrators in higher education genuinely believe in the importance of undergraduate learning and want to improve it. And many colleges innovate a lot, frequently in an effort to make those improvements. But in the domain of its core activities, the college doesn’t learn easily. While faculty may innovate in their disciplinary research and may expand courses to cover new material or decide to offer new courses, when it comes to changing the basic pedagogy or the framework for student learning, faculty seem to have a learning disability. Diane Halpern, professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College, and Milton Hakel of Bowling Green State University have studied the application of contemporary cognitive science to college teaching. “We have found precious little evidence,” they report, “that content experts in the learning sciences actually apply the principles they teach in their own classrooms. Like virtually all college faculty, they teach the way they were taught.” Even experts in learning can’t learn in their role as agents of the college. Even the young dogs can’t seem to learn new tricks. Why?
John Tagg is a professor of English at Palomar College in San Marcos, California. In 1995 he co-authored, with Robert Barr, the influential Change article “From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education.” In 2003 he published The Learning Paradigm College (Anker Publications).
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