Faculty Don’t Think Students Spend as Much Time Studying as They Say They Do

Kids these days….

A) are we counting on self-reporting to present an accurate picture? and B) I’m betting (based on my own experience as first undergraduate and later faculty) that there’s a significant disconnect between what undergrads consider effective studying and what faculty members know to be effective learning strategies.

Do faculty members really know what effective learning strategies are? Unfortunately, I think far too many don’t, and just as unfortunate, I think far too many are unaware of what effective teaching strategies are – they just teach the way they were taught and assume it must be effective.

Most members of the general public think faculty only work 10 hours a week. Faculty assume students spend less than 10 hours a week studying. I guess it’s a stalemate.

Sure, believe the children, when we know their week ends after lunch Thursday so they can begin drinking and can’t show up for class on Friday.  Then they can’t make Monday morning classes, either, because they’re not back from their weekends.  Are you in Student Development or something? 

To Tere North:
Like many others, I have borrowed many teaching techniques from my former professors because they were the most effective for me when I was a student.  Not surprisingly, these were my favorite professors, the ones who not only taught me the most, but inspired me the most and the ones I worked hardest to please.  I have also borrowed techniques from colleagues over the years that suit my style, but those models from my undergraduate and graduate years are still what have influenced me the most.  I do NOT assume that such techniques are the best for every student (or for every professor).  On the contrary, I don’t believe that any such universal techniques exist.  There are are, as my own experience has shown, many styles of effective teaching and students should engage those many styles to see what works best for them.

It seems to me that those of us who are concerned about underperformance in undergraduate education often fall into one of two camps: those who believe that students are the ones underperforming and those who believe that instructors are underperforming (and, of course, I realize that many believe that it is both parties). I like to hypothesize counterfactuals as a way of clarifying my thinking about such issues. For any given aspect of the course, would improved “learning” occur if the instructors change their methods (to account for differences in learning styles of students, etc.), or if the students changed their methods (editing and re-writing of lecture notes within 24 hours, not browsing the web during the lectures, getting a sufficient amount of sleep at night, etc.)?

For example, one of the things I notice in my class is that students that struggle with the course content often don’t do well in understanding basic material such as the difference between homologous chromosomes and sister chromatids. If they don’t get this straight, then a lot of the remaining course content—the importance of meiosis to evolution in vertebrates, the mechanisms of these evolutionary processes, the occurrence of  chromosomal abnormalities, the whole phenomenon of sexual reproduction, etc.—won’t really make sense and, if it doesn’t make sense, then it won’t be easy to learn. A minority of my students don’t learn this difference when it’s taught early in the course and therefore struggle throughout the course and sometimes fail the course. I’ve taught this course over the years and have tried various ways of getting this information into the students’ heads so that they won’t struggle so much later on. It’s not difficult material, but it requires that they 1) get the material down accurately in the first place, 2) digest it over a period of time (requiring perhaps an hour or more of uninterrupted concentration) so that they will be able to understand it, and 3) remember it for future reference. Only then will they start to recognize it’s importance to the rest of the course. I’ve learned to expect that the number of students who fail to grasp this simple difference over the years will fluctuate only slightly from year to year, even though I’ve tried pretty much everything I can think of to help them. I now use a variety of graphics and I even provide them with a set of written materials beforehand so that they can learn the difference before we discuss the topic in class, but the number of students who simply never really learn the difference between homologous chromosomes and sister chromatids stays about the same each year. Thinking counterfactually, however, I wonder if the problem isn’t really that I haven’t found that one way of teaching it that’s going to reach them. What if the answer is something else? What if the answer lies in forbidding the use of laptops in class? What if the answer lies in mandatory attendance. What if the answer lies in holding these students in a room with the course materials and not letting them out until they’ve learned what they’re supposed to learn. What if none of it works, and the problem lies in our even thinking that we can, somehow, turn these students into “learners”?

They are not children.