J Scott Hill's List: class3

• The research of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.
• Half of students did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.
• • talk about this in class
• Students who studied alone, read and wrote more, attended more selective schools and majored in traditional arts and sciences majors posted greater learning gains.
• _Social engagement generally does not help student performance. Students who spent more time studying with peers showed diminishing growth and students who spent more time in the Greek system had decreased rates of learning, while activities such as working off campus, participating in campus clubs and volunteering did not impact learning.

3 more annotations...

• For many undergraduates, they write, "drifting through college without a clear sense of purpose is readily apparent."
• is a lack of rigor.
• The research then goes on to find a direct relationship between rigor and gains in learning:
• • Students who study by themselves for more hours each week gain more knowledge -- while those who spend more time studying in peer groups see diminishing gains.
    
  • Students whose classes reflect high expectations (more than 40 pages of reading a week and more than 20 pages of writing a semester) gained more than other students.
    
  • Students who spend more time in fraternities and sororities show smaller gains than other students.
    
  • Students who engage in off-campus or extracurricular activities (including clubs and volunteer opportunities) have no notable gains or losses in learning.
    
  • Students majoring in liberal arts fields see "significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study." Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the smallest gains. (The authors note that this could be more a reflection of more-demanding reading and writing assignments, on average, in the liberal arts courses than of the substance of the material.)
• "You need an internal culture that values learning," he said. "You have to have departments agree that they aren't handing out easy grades."
• Further, he said that colleges need to shift attention away from measures of "social engagement" (everything that's not academic) and toward academic engagement, even if some of those measures of non-academic engagement help keep students engaged and enrolled. "It's a question of what outcome you want," he said. "If the outcome is student retention and student satisfaction, then engagement is a great strategy. If, however, you want to improve learning and enhance the academic substance of what you are up to, it is not necessarily a good strategy."
• leading them to cut down on the ambition of student assignments simply to keep up with grading. With fewer full-time positions, professors at many institutions "are overwhelmed," he said. But Arum challenged faculty members to be creative in finding ways to assign more writing and reading to students.
• It is important, she said, "not to lump together activities such as being in a fraternity or just hanging out with friends" with activities such as extracurricular activities that may in fact be quite educational and important, even if not linked to a specific course.
• "I don't think we are doing well enough at helping them understand that choices matter," she said. "Choices in the academic courses they take, how much they are working outside the classroom, how much they are studying, how much they are partying -- that balance is important."
• Also, the professor who makes a student uncomfortable by demanding too much, by moving them out of personal, not collective, comfort zones risks reprimand. This environment generates anonymous threats against faculty, denigrates the academic process, holds academic freedom hostage, and generates a sense that to invite rigor is to invite career disaster. The heads count, not the minds. A sad state of affairs.
• The good news is that the lack of academic rigor can be remedied. I noticed the lack of time-on-task over a decade ago, and our program took action. The faculty committed to academic rigor, and we began to collect data on student time-on-task. Over 60% of the students in our program meet the Carnegie norm of two hours per work out of class for every hour in class. (This in an institution where the average student spends less than an hour on study for every hour in class). Both faculty and students take pride in the program's academic rigor. And the program is growing - we have twice as many undergraduate majors as we had a decade ago. Nor do professors get killed on student evaluations. So I can tell you from experience that this is a problem that can be fixed.
• One way to reverse this dismal trend is to reintroduce grading on the curve, as was common before the 1960s. If mediocre work merited a "C" grade, and flunking was the consequence of skipping classes or slipshod performance, there is no doubt in my mind that students would study more and learn more. Of course, professors who enforced this grading standard would have to have the support of department chairs and deans, who would undoubtedly face an onslaught of complaints from parents and aggrieved students.
• "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" . . . Learning what? The CLA does not measure any domain-specific content. Do people seriously think that a freshman engineering student does not learn anything regarding engineering by the time they graduate? At best, the CLA measures general, problem solving heuristics. Primary message is, don't put too much stock in CLA.
• Parents of high school students want them in 57 activities, so they don't have time for homework.
  
• For too many years we have ridden on our reputation as the greatest nation in the world in all things. Well, that isn't the case any longer. Other countries have caught up to us, and in some cases surpassed us, in other areas. We have gotten lazy and complacent. Until we decide, as a nation, that this is not an acceptable attitude, nothing will change.
• This past semester, I had 170 students in my Introduction to Literature class, and two graders. It is simply not possible to ask these kids to write a 10-15 page paper and grade it within a reasonable amount of time. Third, forgive the generalization, but in my experience, students either cannot or will not do the reading.
• I look forward to reading this study, and I hope that it takes rising class sizes, student evaluations, and the decline of reading into account. If not, then it seems to me that the authors have missed the three elephants in the room.
• • What academic Rigor 
   
  •   Posted  by College Professor  , Easy A  at Hamburger U  on January 18, 2011 at 12:30pm EST 
     
  •    As a college professor I am judged by student evaluations. Although our Dept. "looks at" other aspects of teaching, there is a cut off point for student evaluations for which nothing else matters. If the overwhelming majority of students do not give me A or B ratings on feel good kinds of questions, I am judged to be ineffective. When I have held them accountability for the grunt work required to develop solid critical thinking skills, I was called in by my Dean and told I was essentially an ineffective educator. Even though more students than not rate me favorably (e.g., 67%) what matters is some arbitrary number (e.g., 75%). Therefore I have watered down my curriculum to feed them academic candy. Then my ratings were great and students even commented on how much they learned.
• • Group work 
   
  •   Posted  by George Purcell  on January 18, 2011 at 1:30pm EST 
     
  •    Hopefully this is the first nail in the coffin for the fetishization of group work in higher education.
• Ipods in all the ears even when doing homework or supposedly reading. Texting under desks during class. Practically zero knowledge of current events because today's diverse media makes it possible to never access a news program or newspaper. It's a rare student who actually reads books. I've heard young people brag about making it through college without ever having read one. AND students have told me they are no longer learning to handwrite in cursive, and consequently can't read it either. Contemplative time with papers and pens is all but lost; word processing is another animal entirely.

18 more annotations...

• Anthropology lies at the intersection of the multiple approaches to the study of humankind that characterize other disciplines–biological, social, cultural, historical, linguistic, cognitive, material, technological, and aesthetic–because of its unique holistic perspective. 
• Anthropologists typically engage in particularistic research (devoted to specific topics, regions, theoretical, and methodological concerns) that ultimately contributes to the “big questions” about human experience.
• The department fosters the development of regional expertise in the culture, history, or language of a specific area.  Traditional regional strengths are Latin America, Africa, and North America, with the more recent addition of faculty specializing in Asia and Europe.

1 more annotation...

• To determine how many hours you need to study each week to get  A's, use the following guideline rule of thumb: study 2 hours per hour in class  for an easy class, 3 hours per hour in class for an average class, and 4 hours  per hour in class for a difficult class. Use this worksheet to calculate the number  of hours you should try to study each week.