I went into New York City Thursday afternoon to attend the last of a series of informal but quite interesting seminars on higher education that have been organized by Ellen Lagemann of Bard College and Andy Delbanco of Columbia University over the past eighteen months. The seminars have covered quite a range of topics, and have usually been led by one of the seminar members. Yesterday, however, Bob Connor of the Teagle Foundation led a discussion that asked “what have we learned about student learning?”
Bob is a distinguished classicist, the former head of the Council on the Humanities at Princeton University, and director emeritus of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. When Bob retired from the center, he took on the presidency of Teagle, a small philanthropic foundation mainly interested in the improvement of undergraduate liberal education. He has emerged as one of the country’s most impressive small foundation presidents, focusing their grants especially on data-based assessment of student learning. He has leveraged a small endowment through shrewd requests for proposals for projects on student learning, which in turn have produced interesting reports that can be found on the Teagle Web site. Disclosure: I co-directed (with Jim Grossman and for the National History Center) a project on the role of the History major in undergraduate liberal education.
Bob’s contention yesterday was that much discussion of higher education in the past has revolved about the “who” question, especially who gets access to higher education, and who succeeds. Just as frequently, higher education discourse has concerned “what,” especially relating to the content of curricula. But Bob urged us to think about the “how” question — how can we achieve our goals for student learning? The issue here is one of how to go beyond subject matter content mastery (though that is not so easily accomplished), since most institutions now profess to aspire to achieve a broad range of liberal learning goals (along the lines of those espoused by the Association of American Colleges and Universities) that include citizenship and character development in addition to traditional content knowledge.
In recent years new assessment devices such as the NSSE and CLA have been created to attempt to measure this broader range of liberal-education goals. Bob is pleased that increasing numbers of institutions are using these new measures, but he challenged us to think harder about how actually to use such instruments formatively. He also shared with us some empirical results of learning-outcome measurements produced in response to Teagle grants that put into doubt whether institutions were in fact improving learning over the four year span of college. The data were pretty unclear and noisy, but they do make one wonder. Some members of the seminar questioned whether any significant learning was going on within the walls of the college, suggesting, for instance, that Twitter and other electronic stimuli might be more important than what goes on in the classroom. I would not go that far, but I think that Bob is right to ask us to determine empirically what (if anything) our students are learning, and thus to be able to reframe our learning strategies in the context of what we actually know about why they are succeeding — or not. The question is whether our institutions know how to respond to this challenge, assuming (as I do not) that they will accept it.
7 Responses to Can We Improve Learning Outcomes?
goxewu - December 13, 2009 at 8:36 am
I would like to suggest that Stan Katz at long last be put out to pasture. Whatever the nominal content of his posts, they’re really announcements of conferences he went to, flights he took, who he had lunch with, and speeches he was invited to give. When he does present something resembling an idea, it’s usually somebody else’s and the reader gets to it only by enduring a recital of the c.v. of the “distinguished” friend (has Prof. Katz any other kind?) whose thought it is.In this case, it’s in the mild and woolly subject of “learning outcomes.” We’ve talked about the “who” and the “what” of learning outcomes, the idea goes, so now it’s time to talk about the…[drum roll]…”how.” This airport bookstore management chestnut inspires Prof. Katz to the electrifying conclusion, “I think that Bob is right to ask us to determine empirically what (if anything) our students are learning, and thus to be able to reframe our learning strategies in the context of what we actually know about why they are succeeding — or not.” (The second half of that sentence is nearly perfect in its meaninglessness.) But, of course with Prof. Katz, things have to end with a gaseous, pseudo-profound question: “…whether our institutions know how to respond to this challenge, assuming (as I do not) that they will accept it.” Actually, four questions lurk therein; we don’t know how “our institutions” (talk about specificity!) will respond because we have to know first whether they know how to respond, and we don’t know that because we don’t know whether they’ll “accept” having to respond in the first place. Oh, and yes, “What is the meaning of life?”Enough of this academic rubber-chicken-circuit twaddle. Give Prof. Katz a gold laser pointer, an even fancier title, a farewell dinner with “distinguished” guests, and bid him adieu.
beaugard - December 15, 2009 at 12:42 am
To goxewu,Your comment is extremely unkind and uncalled for. Prof. Katz isn’t harming anyone, and I enjoy the civilized tone of his writing.However, I’d have to agree with the substance of what your wrote. The sprinkling of jargon throughout this post by Mr. Katz, “liberal learning goals”, “learning strategies”, ‘data that’s both noisy and unclear’, as if it could be noisy and clear, or not noisy and unclear(that does seem a little more reasonable). The real point is not Mr. Katz’s usefulness or not, but the whole approach to the (drumroll), life of the mind that’s shown in the post. Mr. Katz’s approach is, to not put too fine a point on it, completely lifeless, dessicated. Using the pseudo-science of the so-called social sciences to figure out these kinds of questions is really deplorable. But that is the dominant way of viewing education, unfortunately. The absurdity of importing technical words from physics or electronics, “signals”, for example, into a discussion about this topic should really be apparent to all. Time to brush up on the old Wittgenstein.
goxewu - December 15, 2009 at 7:55 am
“…life of the mind that’s shown in the post. Mr. Katz’s approach is, to not put too fine a point on it, completely lifeless, dessicated. Using the pseudo-science of the so-called social sciences to figure out these kinds of questions is really deplorable.”And MY comment “is extremely unkind and uncalled for”?C’mon, we both agree that Prof. Katz contributes little more than the academic equivalent of hail-fellow-well-met, recycled bromides to “Brainstorm” and that it might be time for him to follow in the footsteps of Graham Spanier. Either that, or time to start putting a little more meat and a lot less résumé and invitation-parading into his posts.
beaugard - December 15, 2009 at 8:28 am
goxewu,Okay, I have to laugh, you’re right. I apologize to Mr. Katz for the harshness of what I wrote. I do think however that what I said was correct, but I certainly could have found a nicer way of saying it.But really, what does he care what we think? Mr. Katz is on top of the world, and most likely couldn’t care less.
jffoster - December 15, 2009 at 9:33 am
One comment, re Mr. beaugard’s phrase…”Using the pseudo-science of the so-called social sciences …”I agree that the gooier end of the social sciences do have a lot of jargon that does no usefule work for us at best and is at worst what the real anthropologist Marvin Harris called “obscuratanist social science”, but Mr. Katz jargon such as the kind you cite comes mostly from educationism, not the social sciences. Not even the gooey social sciences. And, Mr. goxewu, you might want to rethink your position. Although I might have put it more kindly had mine been the initial comment, you and I have found something we agree on!
suomynona - December 15, 2009 at 11:39 am
beaugard,A CHE forum thread not long ago devolved into quibbling about the mis/use of the word ‘theory,’ mainly because a scientist was trying to pluck that word out of the colloquial stratosphere and claim it exclusively for her narrow, discipline-specific purposes. Now you want to do the same with ‘signals’? Good lord man (I know I can safely use ‘lord’ around scientists without fear of expropriation), ‘signals’? Scientists and social scientists have no exclusive rights to terms, jargon or not. It many cases with Prof. Katz’s entries, these ‘jargon’ terms are still pretty transparent. A reasonable person should be able to understand what he’s getting at (though the passage that goxewu cites is an exception). As for the content of Prof. Katz’s posts, it just seems like he’s at the stage in his career (lucky him, really) where hobnobbing and thinking about meta-issues is the primary function (here I’m not talking about set theory, FYI).Like I tell my scientist friends (which abound): I’ll lay off the jaron when you become literate. Still waiting.
goxewu - December 15, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Re #5:There was a method in my meanness. One of the untoward subtexts of many of Prof. Katz’s posts is argument by pseudo-authority. Which is to say that Prof. Katz tries to dress up a lot of his borrowed, or thinly argued, or simply dubious points by telling the reader that the point was made by a distinguished friend of his, with an equally distinguished title, at a function to which the average academic punter was not privy, and maybe even in a distinguished-person-to-distinguished-person side comment. I find this at best tiresome, and at worst a mild species of intellectual dishonesty. Some commenters, such as the thoughtful suomynona, however, find this to be merely “hobnobbing and thinking about meta-issues” in the golden-days stage of Prof. Katz’s career. Could be, but I doubt it.