mathwonk said:
heres another conundrum to muddy the water: suppose you find that your students never do anything you recommend unless you take it up and grade it, prefacing the assignment by saying "this is due thursday, and will count in your grade".
I.e. if on the other hand you say, "I will not take this up, but it is absolutely essential to understanding the topic for you to work through these problems on your own, and they will be tested on the exam", you find that most people do not do them.
What to do? You notice that those teachers who function essentially as personal trainers, making certain things "due", and worth "points", are more successful at getting their charges to hand in the work, than you are by simply telling them what is essential, and testing it on tests.
Now here is the puzzle: it seems that those teachers who get performance by "requiring" it rather than recommending it, are treating the students like high schoolers and little children. As a result, although their students may score higher on short term tests in that course, but afterwards they cannot function on their own, after leaving the environment where useful work is enforced. Is that good survival behavior in life?
Yes, it feels like treating them like little children, but some really are still at that level of maturity. Some of it is also that they are trying to prioritize the workload of all their courses. Most of my students will eventually get to those exercises they are told will help but that are not collected, pretty much the day or two before the exam. Of course, if they worked on it when it was recommended, everything else afterward would have been easier for them to learn. This is all part of the problem of study skills, and perhaps time management...their inefficiency makes it more of a struggle than if they just studied a little bit at a time efficiently.
On the other hand, for the vast majority of jobs, this is perfectly fine survival behavior. If you're the boss or a project manager, yes, you need to have the work ethic to look into every aspect of a project if you're going to do well, but if you're just the employee, then all you need to be able to do is what your boss tells you to get done by the deadline they set. When you see a student going the extra mile on their own, they are the ones to encourage to consider grad school. For those heading out into industry, doing what needs to be done "to count" and by a deadline is really all they'll ever need to do.
So what is better goal for a college course? to enforce participation in drills so as to get a higher score on a narrowly based test? or treat students as adults, to help them learn the consequences of self motivated and self disciplined learning?
I prefer to enforce participation on things that will teach them the bigger picture. If they can grasp a few major concepts, even if it's through persuasion, trickery and bribery, then they will walk out of my classroom with the minimum skill set needed to go back and learn the details on their own later when they need them.
If acquiring maturity is desirable, how does one encourage this, so as few as possible fail out before taking charge of their own learning? I am interested in how to produce more people with a desire and willingness to do what they know will help them, without it being enforced by artificial means like meaningless "points".
If you can show your students how a particular topic is relevant to their goals beyond just passing your course, then it's easier to "hook" them into learning out of self-interest. This is why in a nursing course, I use clinical cases to reinforce major concepts. Whenever possible, I try to adapt real cases involving situations that they might encounter outside the narrow confines of whichever doctor's practice they end up working in. For example, I used one of someone stumbling and vomiting at a conference at a hotel to illustrate how their knowledge of nervous system anatomy would help them realize this person was NOT just drunk, but having a stroke, and that they could even figure out where that stroke was happening by his behaviors. So, even if they end up working in a podiatrist's office, they see the relevance of understanding what's happening in the brain to know better than the average person when to call an ambulance rather than telling someone to "sleep it off."
If you can relate the subject to their interests in life, you'll have them hooked. Heck, sometimes I just point out things like, "...and you should be sure to understand this well and remember it, because most of your physiology course next semester will be based on this part of the nervous system." Now they know they need to do more than remember it long enough to take my exam, but also need to remember it to do well in another entire course coming soon.
This is partly because I do not believe it is possible to make anyone think deeply, or understand something they refuse to try to understand.
You can make someone think deeply. You can't make someone understand what they refuse to understand. I don't worry a lot about those who make no effort whatsoever. If they have no interest at all in learning the subject, the best thing that could happen to them is they fail the course and wake up to the fact that they have chosen the wrong major. But, for those who are simply not yet sophisticated learners, we can challenge their thought process.
So how do we get our charges to begin asking themselves, not "have I got all the points available here?", but "have I really understood this? could I answer other different questions using this same idea?"
This is what I use the group exercises at the end of class to do. In fact, in my very last lecture, I gave them a case that had no answer (or at least not a complete answer until additional diagnostic tests are added that would go beyond my course content). This is much more the reality they will see in the working world. They may not have all the answers, but they need to know enough to recognize there's a problem and the general system being affected so they know when to call the doctor in, and what to do while waiting for the doctor to return their call, etc. I told them if they could answer all the questions I asked related to that case, they were ready for the final exam, because it made them use everything they had covered not only in the lectures included on this exam, but even topics that were covered in their very first lecture of the course. A few students grasped it well and showed they really understood what was going on. More of them realized how little they still understood about putting the concepts together, and that case prompted a lot of emails and office appointments. A few walked out with no interest in learning about the case...they are the ones who have been consistently doing poorly in the course and I'll probably see again next year.
Sometimes, I catch a few more students during exam review sessions. My format this time around was to first let them ask any questions they had. Then when they had no more to ask, I started asking them questions. Again, some students had grasped the concepts and were able to answer my questions readily, while others could do it with some thinking, and then there were some still sitting there just trying to write it all down because they were realizing they still had a lot to learn. I then let them ask questions again, in case my questioning prompted them to think of something else that had them confused. I've gotten yet another round of emails and requests for office appointments after the review session. It may have taken me until the very last day of class to finally get through to them what they need to learn and how they need to approach learning, but while it would have been nice for them to come in able to do this, I feel satisfied that I've done my job well if they at least walk out of the class with that knowledge in hand.
When I ask a student why he/she thinks a certain argument is a proof, I often get the answer "that's what you said" or "that's what it said in the book".
I get that too. In my review session, when I asked a student to give an answer and then asked them why they chose that answer, they said, "Because that's what's in your notes." So, I simply just don't let them off the hook at that point. I ask them why they should believe my notes, or why I would write that in my notes.
They've heard me repeat a phrase in many, many, many of my lectures. "You shouldn't believe me." This is the key to critical thinking. They should not take what I tell them on faith, they should prove it to themselves. If they can prove it to themselves, THEN they understand it. This is sophisticated learning, and fairly advanced expectations. I don't expect all of my undergraduate students will attain this level, but I want them to start having that seed planted so that by the time they're reaching their senior year, or considering graduate or professional schools, that seed has finally grown into understanding. Someone needs to plant the seed, but then I have to put faith in the other faculty they have after me that they will continue to water and nurture that seed or seedling until those students fully blossom into mature thinkers. This isn't a process that happens overnight.