September-October 2007

by Margaret A. Miller


Judging by our behavior, it looks like many of us just want our students to pass the exam or write the dissertation, and what they know or do with that knowledge after we’ve given them the grade or the sheepskin is not our affair. But like Cardinal Newman, I choose to believe, despite the evidence before my eyes. My belief is that what we really want is for our students to take away from our courses a “deep learning” that persists beyond the classroom and college.

We want them to have, in their future lives, high truth standards—so that, in the words of one Oxford don addressing the graduates of a previous generation, they’ll “know when a man is talking rot to them.” We want them to use and build on the knowledge we give them and be equipped with sophisticated resources to solve any new problems they confront. And some of us hope that these critical thinking and problem-solving abilities will go beyond simple skepticism or the ability to find technical solutions to technical problems. Our secret ambition is to produce the kind of understanding that might even, some day, turn into wisdom.

The good news is that the research on learning gives us a lot of help in how to do that (see Diane F. Halpern’s and Milton D. Hakel’s enlightening article in the July/August 2003 Change on the science of learning). The bad news is that a lot of that research runs afoul of common sense, our own experience, and our habits. For example:

• The research says, as Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman reminds us in this issue, that people can store only a few things in short-term memory. But this smacks up against our deep-seated anupholsteraphobia (I owe the term to Randy Bass, who got it from Stan Brimberg), or fear of not covering the material. That this is becoming, in every field, an increasingly hopeless endeavor doesn’t deter us. We just talk faster, use more words, and try to cram more in. On the program level this takes the form of requiring more courses—the add-a-bead curriculum-reform model.

• If we want students to store something in long-term memory, it’s a good idea to quiz them on it immediately and then at spaced intervals thereafter, preferably in varied contexts. This injunction runs up against several obstacles: our anupholsteraphobia (see above) makes us resist the use of class time for anything but lecturing; among our many obligations, facing a stack of quizzes may be the most odious; and we don’t want to be that kind of niggling teacher.

• Information presented (and re-presented by students) in various formats is more likely to be retained. Here we’re stumped by the fact that most of us are good at only one or two strategies for presenting knowledge, and we don’t want to spend precious time mastering others. Plus, we’re deeply suspicious of work done by students in formats that are not familiar to us: a Web site just doesn’t seem as serious as a paper, somehow.

• Learning builds on previous learning. But how many of us take the time to really listen to our students, to find out what they know and believe, and adjust our teaching accordingly? We’re too apt to think instead that if we give them a syllabus and simply explain the material to them, they’ll finally understand—and if they don’t, we just explain it the same way but more emphatically; and if they still don’t, we conclude that they’re dense.

• As Kant recognized long ago, “percept without precept is empty; precept without percept is blind.”

Wieman reminds us that “people learn by creating their own understanding,” and students are more apt to do that when they have a real task that requires them to “actively think about and process the important ideas of the discipline.” In a previous Listening to Students (Change, January/February 2007), Ana Lucia Hurtado told us that work connecting students’ “academic interests and real-world concerns” is “especially important to first-generation and underrepresented minority students who want to contribute to their communities.” Here we run into the differences between ourselves and our students—they are more likely to be what Charles Handy calls “concrete active learners” than a lot of us who felt supremely at home in lecture halls. We were “good students” who may very well need something different from our learning environment than average ones do. Although Wieman believes that even “good students” don’t start thinking like experts until they start putting their knowledge to work, an intriguing finding from one study of the correlations between the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) was that stronger students didn’t benefit from a lot of active and collaborative learning or student-faculty interaction, which were quite valuable to their less-able peers. In this study at least, reading and writing were the sole forms of engagement that positively correlated with high CLA scores. Worked for me, I know.

But teaching does matter. Students need, as Wieman also points out, someone to “guide their thinking” and help them develop their mental structures and metacognitive capacities. Teachers who not only do this but also praise students for their accomplishments and generate a contagious enthusiasm in their classes create what Megan Watkins calls a positive “pedagogic affect” that motivates students to learn. Many faculty think that studies showing that more enthusiastic teachers get higher student evaluations just show that students want to be entertained. And yet what other than passion for a subject, often first ignited by a fiery teacher, got us started on our decades-long pursuit of knowledge of that topic?

Why most of us pay so little attention to the discoveries our colleagues have made about how to help students achieve what we want for them is something of a mystery. I suspect that in part we’re distracted by the pursuit of other knowledge that we’ve given our lives over to and that interests us more intrinsically; in part the problem is probably due to intellectual hubris (our trial and error is bound to be better than some else’s research); some of it is undoubtedly due to the fact that none of us has the time to do everything we should; and some modicum is probably the result of sloth. But I do think that one cause is that many of the research results seem so counter-intuitive.

Nevertheless, perhaps we need to stop teaching to our younger selves and more or less ignoring the rest of the class. Instead let’s invest more time trying some of the suggested strategies in our classrooms and checking out their results, as Wieman and other scholars of teaching and learning have done in theirs. That’s the way all our students will have the best chance of achieving what we want for them—understanding that we hope will lead to wisdom.