More pragmatically, here are ten conclusions (some of them counterintuitive?) that could be drawn from the book.
1) Academic rigor is the key to student learning, and that means, more than anything else, time on task. Our JBU data would indicate that we’re requiring more work on average than many institutions do, but still not nearly as much as the authors would recommend. Would we as a campus community be interested in moving more toward some of the minimums that they suggest (at least 40 pages of reading per week, at least 20 pages of writing per semester, at least 2 hours and preferably 3 hours of assigned work “out” for every hour “in”), especially for our Core courses? (Oh, and by implication, our semesters should be as long as we can make them? )
2) Faculty scholarship and teaching are inversely correlated, at least at the national level, and especially at R1 schools. That doesn’t seem to fit the general patterns here at JBU (our “best scholars” tend to be our “best teachers” as well), but might this general conclusion be another reason to consider allowing more flexibility in our evaluation system for those who want to put more time into teaching, service, and spiritual mentoring instead of scholarship?
3) The clear implication of the book is that “difficulty” and “rigor” should be emphasized more than “engagement.” This is easier said than done, of course. I’ve yet to see a college that has created a successful “learning focused” assessment process at the individual course level. Also, I’ve made money available to divisions to pilot “learning outcomes oriented” assessments at the individual course level that might replace some of our existing instruments. I’ve had very few takers and none of them “successful.” But the door is certainly open to more of these types of efforts (that’s an invitation to talk to your division chair and then to me). We might also consider weighting even more heavily than we already do the “difficulty” and “rigor” elements of our evaluation and ancillary budget systems.
4) Studying alone is superior to studying in groups. The authors explain that collaborative learning can indeed be a better way to educate students, but that most faculty members don’t know how to run such collaborative processes well enough to leverage their potential. As a consequence, group activities in and out of the classroom do foster engagement and retention, but they on average hinder the development of the types of skills that CLA tests for.
5) The Collegiate Learning Assessment is the best instrument available to assess student learning. In the past, we’ve skipped the CLA because of the cost and time involved and the questions about its accuracy at the individual student level. But CLA has clearly garnered some momentum, and this book will likely further that momentum.
6) Living and working on campus may foster both learning and retention. At worst, they don’t undermine learning. Not so living and working off campus. Those clearly undermine both retention and student learning. Being a residential institution certainly helps us in all sorts of ways.
7) High expectations from faculty members are crucial (this is the main argument from Teach for America as well). Medium or low expectations aren’t much different from each other in their effects, and they both clearly limit student learning.
8) Which institution you attend matters in fostering student learning. Which professors you take within that institution, however, matters even more. Teach for America and other groups have been making the same argument.
9) If you want to learn critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing (i.e. what CLA tests for), get a degree in the Sciences, Social Sciences, or Humanities. If you want to be challenged to read at least 40 pages a week and write at least 20 pages a semester in a course, get a degree in the Social Sciences or the Humanities. The more academically prepared you are entering college, the more likely you are to major in exactly these “challenging” areas.
10) Capitalism is evil! (Thought I’d throw in that subtext conclusion from the book for those of you so inclined.)
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Review of "Academically Adrift"
I wrote this for the CCCU Advance magazine.
Sometimes a book comes along that crystallizes much of what people have intuited to be true but that they haven’t yet been able to substantiate or put into words. This is such a book. Most of us in higher education have this innate sense that something is amiss in our ivory towers. We’re just not sure what that “something” is. Sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa do us the great service of bringing together disparate pieces of evidence that have been accumulating over the years and combining it with their own painstaking research in order to give us a much clearer picture of some of the problems confronting us.
And problems there are aplenty, as the title would imply. The authors are circumspect, however, in not criticizing the entire higher education apparatus. In fact, they repeatedly argue that the current system “works” quite well. Just not for the reasons, or the people, that most of us typically imagine. Students are mostly happy with their college experiences, faculty are mostly satisfied with their academic pursuits, and various external constituents are mostly content with what they see being accomplished.
But amidst this general approval, are students actually learning? For the vast majority, the answer appears to be “no.” The authors rely heavily on the results of the Collegiate Learning Assessment to argue their case, and there are potential problems with putting so much weight on a single assessment instrument, especially one that focuses only on critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills. College is certainly about more than just these things, and the CLA data does not provide definite answers on even this narrow range of learning outcomes.
Nevertheless, the CLA is probably the best we have, and the results the authors cull from this data are both compelling and corroborated by other evidence that they have amassed. Furthermore, all colleges and universities would say that critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills are at the heart of the higher education enterprise.
So what went wrong to sideline in practice what in theory should be our main endeavors? From my perspective, the authors are dead on when it comes to the proximate cause and completely off the mark when it comes to the ultimate cause for our having gone “adrift.” The short term culprit is clearly a lack of academic rigor, which by all accounts has declined precipitously in recent decades, especially in comparison to developments in other countries and especially outside of the rarified air of the elite liberal arts institutions.
• “College students on average report spending only twenty-seven hours per week on academic activities.”
• “Only one in five full-time college students report devoting more than twenty hours per week on studying.”
• “Fifty percent of students in our [representative] sample reported that they had not taken a single course during the prior semester that required more than twenty pages of writing, and one third had not taken one that required even forty pages of reading per week.”
In other words, if there is one thing that we as educators can do to provide better direction to this “adrift” academic culture, it would be to provide more impetus for a challenging curriculum.
So why don’t we? Here’s where I believe the authors themselves are adrift in their analysis. They astutely, and understandably given their backgrounds as sociologists, focus on a change in “culture” as the problem. They even note that there used to be both a moral and academic function in higher education, but that once the moral function was discarded, the remaining academic function was fragmented into whatever served the needs of each constituent. A “disengagement compact” took over in which each party wanted more or less to be left alone.
While recognizing and bemoaning the loss of central moral authority that has resulted in this “adrift” culture, the authors clearly don’t share our Christian understanding of how the integration of faith and learning can help restore that sense of order. Their proposed solution, therefore, is to substitute “moral” force with “political” force, i.e. to have the federal government impose testing and accountability standards for higher education along the lines of what “No Child Left Behind” has done for K-12 education. A worse and more unlikely prescription would be hard to imagine.
The sour ending of this book, however, should not put us off to the fruits of the main arguments about the ways in which our higher education culture has become “adrift.” This is an important book that should provoke some valuable conversations at the local and national levels.
Sometimes a book comes along that crystallizes much of what people have intuited to be true but that they haven’t yet been able to substantiate or put into words. This is such a book. Most of us in higher education have this innate sense that something is amiss in our ivory towers. We’re just not sure what that “something” is. Sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa do us the great service of bringing together disparate pieces of evidence that have been accumulating over the years and combining it with their own painstaking research in order to give us a much clearer picture of some of the problems confronting us.
And problems there are aplenty, as the title would imply. The authors are circumspect, however, in not criticizing the entire higher education apparatus. In fact, they repeatedly argue that the current system “works” quite well. Just not for the reasons, or the people, that most of us typically imagine. Students are mostly happy with their college experiences, faculty are mostly satisfied with their academic pursuits, and various external constituents are mostly content with what they see being accomplished.
But amidst this general approval, are students actually learning? For the vast majority, the answer appears to be “no.” The authors rely heavily on the results of the Collegiate Learning Assessment to argue their case, and there are potential problems with putting so much weight on a single assessment instrument, especially one that focuses only on critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills. College is certainly about more than just these things, and the CLA data does not provide definite answers on even this narrow range of learning outcomes.
Nevertheless, the CLA is probably the best we have, and the results the authors cull from this data are both compelling and corroborated by other evidence that they have amassed. Furthermore, all colleges and universities would say that critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills are at the heart of the higher education enterprise.
So what went wrong to sideline in practice what in theory should be our main endeavors? From my perspective, the authors are dead on when it comes to the proximate cause and completely off the mark when it comes to the ultimate cause for our having gone “adrift.” The short term culprit is clearly a lack of academic rigor, which by all accounts has declined precipitously in recent decades, especially in comparison to developments in other countries and especially outside of the rarified air of the elite liberal arts institutions.
• “College students on average report spending only twenty-seven hours per week on academic activities.”
• “Only one in five full-time college students report devoting more than twenty hours per week on studying.”
• “Fifty percent of students in our [representative] sample reported that they had not taken a single course during the prior semester that required more than twenty pages of writing, and one third had not taken one that required even forty pages of reading per week.”
In other words, if there is one thing that we as educators can do to provide better direction to this “adrift” academic culture, it would be to provide more impetus for a challenging curriculum.
So why don’t we? Here’s where I believe the authors themselves are adrift in their analysis. They astutely, and understandably given their backgrounds as sociologists, focus on a change in “culture” as the problem. They even note that there used to be both a moral and academic function in higher education, but that once the moral function was discarded, the remaining academic function was fragmented into whatever served the needs of each constituent. A “disengagement compact” took over in which each party wanted more or less to be left alone.
While recognizing and bemoaning the loss of central moral authority that has resulted in this “adrift” culture, the authors clearly don’t share our Christian understanding of how the integration of faith and learning can help restore that sense of order. Their proposed solution, therefore, is to substitute “moral” force with “political” force, i.e. to have the federal government impose testing and accountability standards for higher education along the lines of what “No Child Left Behind” has done for K-12 education. A worse and more unlikely prescription would be hard to imagine.
The sour ending of this book, however, should not put us off to the fruits of the main arguments about the ways in which our higher education culture has become “adrift.” This is an important book that should provoke some valuable conversations at the local and national levels.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Building a Better Boss?
Interesting analysis by the management team at Google. The basic argument appears to be that you don't hire as the boss the person with the best technical skills. You hire the "people person." I guess most of us knew that intuitively, but it's nice to have that conclusion confirmed with more data. And for a technical type like myself, that's a bit of a challenge to me to figure out what changes I might want to make as a leader and how.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/business/13hire.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&hp
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/business/13hire.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&hp
Weapons "cause" the development of civilization?
As a military historian, I had to include this one. Reminds me of that opening scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/science/15humans.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/science/15humans.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
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