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About the Author
Bob Zemsky describes himself as being old and round enough to be mistaken for a pooh-bah. He was a member of the Spellings Commission and, as an author and researcher, has focused on making colleges and universities mission-centered and market-smart. He has focused on what globalism might really mean for higher education, on what technology has not accomplished, and how to make learning important to the higher education market. Bob currently serves as professor and chair of The Learning Alliance at the University of Pennsylvania.
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More Research Can't Always Be The Answer
The news last week should remind us of why it is all too easy to parody higher education. An august group, the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, announced that there was not enough consistent and validated research telling us how best to fix math education in the K-12 arena. It is the same old answer. We will be glad to help just as soon as we get enough research under our belt to know what to do. In the field of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education it is also an answer that is wearing thin with those who believe dramatic improvement is actually possible — provided higher education faculty, in particular, take full advantage of what has been learned over the last decade about how students learn. The National Science Foundation, for one, is beginning to ask, Why won’t faculty use the research to change how they teach? Another question worth asking.
Posted at 10:44:39 AM on March 21, 2008 | All postings by Bob ZemskyComments
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The public doesn’t support education. The result is underpaid, overworked, and underqualified teachers. Asking them to teach better doesn’t get us very far.
— Bob Futrelle · Mar 24, 04:13 AM · #
Leaders of education in the United States of America must be among the most badly brain damanged leaders in the entire history of civilization. Glad I did not teach any of them.
It could not be more obvious or easier. I teach at a mid-rank Japanese college that accepts as input slightly about average (60th percentile) high school grads from Japanese high schools. THE AVERAGE GRE MATH score of my students is 800, without any math at all in undergraduate school.
Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Finland, and lots of other places are better or near this in accomplishment—all immensely superior to the US. Of course US scores are a mixture of elite white ones (and eliter asian ones) that are comparable with the best in Japan etc. and the crummy denigated 1/3 of the US population that US elites take no care of and responsiblity for—whose tens of millions run down the nice elite white scores. So the US can be seen—by its blinder elites—as superior after all, just tainted by those dummies in the lower 1/3 of the population that no one cares about.
What a disgusting nation—what disgusting meetings and discussions—fix the damn math by learning from Japan, Finland, etc. and get over this idea that US uniqueness makes math impossible there—George Washington had a gene for math dumbness.
— Richard Tabor Greene · Mar 24, 06:18 AM · #
The problem is, as others have stated, our nation does not support education enough in the first place. Moreover, the research that has been done gets ignored by the public school system. They’re teaching 20-yr old theory, even though new methods are recommended by scientists all of the time.
— Elizabeth · Mar 24, 06:57 AM · #
One problem is that they are trying to find “one right way”. As the first commentor said, we know a lot about how students learn. If we got away from the reliance on frequent standardized tests to measure outcomes and started respecting the knowledge teachers have of the kids in front of them and providing them with a range of approaches that might work for some of those kids, we’d get a lot farther.
— JoVE · Mar 24, 07:26 AM · #
Do the previous four posts know what the heck you’re talking about?
— Larry Gould · Mar 24, 07:35 AM · #
Math is not sexy, does not satisfy our young people’s obsessions with being “cool”, and requires a degree of self regulation to master. In addition, both math and science have been attacked by feminists, afrocentrists, and other postmodern mentailities as political tools for disenfranchising women and minorities, so what is happening is not as mysterious as some folks seem to think it is.
There are too many forces at work (including our propensity for over-entertaining young folks from the earliest ages) that are undermining the discipline and commitment that it takes to be proficient in those things signified by the STEM acronym for us to expect much more than what we are seeing. America is seems to be initiating some kind of self destruct sequence, and teachers probably have less potential for salvaging the system than we’d like them to.
— Ken · Mar 24, 08:05 AM · #
Interesting string of posts, perhaps unintentionally. To address the actual question posed by the author — why won’t faculty use research to change the way they teach? — large constituencies seem to be using the sterile debate about standardized testing primarily to make points in a kind of “epic culture war.” While this may be fun for the cognoscenti, the end result from a consumer perspective is that it lets both sides avoid responsibility (accountability?) for implementing real improvements in the educational system.
Perhaps a better question would be what is going to happen if the educational establishment continues to refuse to use research to improve teaching methods? Could the continuing refusal to engage in real debate over teaching in the US have something to do with the proliferation of alternative educational systems?
— joe · Mar 24, 09:44 AM · #
I agree with post #5. I wonder how many of us have discussed this with actual public school teachers in the U.S.? The ones I know are hard-working, professional, well-qualified teachers who have completed ESL certification (more or less a necessity in schools nowadays), have a Master’s degree or its equivalent, and participate in yearly training sessions sponsored by the district. They are not recent grads but have been teaching in the public school system 10 years or more. The problem, they say, is not so much a lack of research as the school district’s constantly shifting educational priorities, frequent changes in its recommended teaching methodology, the gap between what teachers are supposed to teach and what is in the textbooks they’re supposed to teach from, as well as the challenges of managing a class that could include literally anybody. A typical class of 18 kids at their school may include at least one student with a physical or learning disability (deafness, blindness, Down’s), another one or two with a less severe learning disability, and maybe two or three ESL students. The rest of the kids would range from low to high ability. Based on my conversations with them, what I think would help them teach math and science better would include keeping class sizes relatively small (it’s now about 24 kids before 3rd grade and 34 from 3rd grade on), consistency between textbooks and learning goals, and better trained or more experienced support staff (none of the so-called “math coaches” sent to the school by the district have been helpful).
— madamesmartypants · Mar 24, 10:09 AM · #
Though anecdotes are suspect, here are two:
My husband (formerly a certified teacher for all social studies subjects (including history, sociology and economics) for high school) was a substitute teacher one day in 8th grade. Given his field of study, my husband is not a math genius, but was able to notice that the kids in the class were having a lot of trouble doing the lessons. The trouble, as it turned out, was that the kids did not know the fundamental principle that you had to work the problems inside the parentheses before working the functions outside the parentheses. Once he demonstrated this to the kids, they quickly and dramatically improved. The next day he was at the school subbing for another class and met the math teacher—telling her that the students hadn’t understood the importance of the order of operations and what a parenthesis meant. The “certified math teacher” told my husband that the parentheses “DIDN’T MATTER” and noted that the answers in the answer key of the teacher’s book were “often wrong”. Note which one of these teachers had a permanent job and which was subbing.
Second anecdote: our son attends a good private school (one reason we chose a private school was all the dismal stories my husband brought home from publics). He is in first grade, but is very advanced in both reading (6th grade level) and math. However, when we went over his workbook with the teacher we saw that he often was not starting addition or subtraction from the ones and then moving to tens, hundreds, etc. The teacher was not concerned, as our son, as part of his calculations, then went back and “corrected” work so that he did get to the right number. Somehow, his teacher failed to realize that if kids don’t know to start with the ones every time, reflexively, they will never be able to move to advanced math, as it quickly gets too complicated (and too frustrating for the student) to try to “fix” in mid calculation.
My bottom line—we have lousy math students because we do not demand excellence in math teachers (and ignore what excellence in math teaching is).
Susan
— Susan · Mar 24, 11:12 AM · #
To my old friend Bob: Yes, it is the same old answer. It is the same because we academics by and large have done very little over the past century to change the circumstances about which the question was asked.
An important part of the problem is that we have failed to create the comprehensive research-based knowledge foundation for teaching and learning (education) that every other profession has. I find that amazing, and shocking. We are the intellectual lords of the world. We think profound thoughts and conduct path-breaking research on everyone else’s professional fields of practice — but not our own. (I concede, there are exceptions, but they’re quite rare.)
Another important part of the problem is that what research there is is ignored by most of our profession. You posed the right question here at the end of your paragraph, “Why won’t faculty use research to change the way they teach?”
Consider the following imaginary interview conversation with an applicant for a position as Assistant Professor of Physics at a major research university. Well, Dr. Newton, your doctoral dissertation is very impressive. You have discovered a major flaw in Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and totally transformed our understanding of the Big Bang. Now let’s turn to teaching. Here at Elite U. we view teaching as a part, but not a very important part, of a professor’s job. Have you ever taught? NOPE! Why not? HAD AN RA. Ever taken a course in how humans learn? NOPE. Ever read a research paper about how physics students learn physics? NOPE. Well that’s okay. In your first semester, you’ll be teaching physics to 200 engineering students. Just go into that lecture hall and do whatever you want. It’s just common sense.
Now shift across campus to the university hospital, where the new surgery interns are being told, “We know you’ve never taken a course in human anatomy, but all you need to do is to go into that operating room and replace that patient’s heart with somebody else’s heart. It’s only common sense.
DUH!
Some of those who posted above make the common assumption that what we’re talking about here is the failures of K-12 teachers. We need to understand that their failures are replicated by us higher education gurus, many fold. Lately, I’ve interacted a lot with high school science teachers. The best of them have a lot to teach us college professors, who generally don’t know squat about teaching.
— Don Langenberg · Mar 24, 05:00 PM · #
We Americans spend more than a trillion dollars a year on education, all levels combined. Cries of poverty ring false.
— Marvin McConoughey · Mar 27, 08:24 AM · #