How Colleges Are Failing Students

Because I am still in the process of paying college tuition, I was interested to read an article about the learning that goes on in college. The news isn't good. According to a new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, written by two sociologists, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, 45 percent of 2,300 undergraduate students surveyed showed "no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years." This is probably not surprising, because "Not much is asked of students ... . Half 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." No wonder they get to law school and are overwhelmed by the amount of reading assigned. I was at a new students' orientation event last week, and when I told the students that they should plan on reading each assigned case at least three--and probably more--times in order to understand and outline the issues it presented, they looked at me as if I were crazy! If Arum and Roksa's findings are accurate, students are simply not prepared for the close reading, intense analysis, and lengthy writing assignments that law school requires. Law-school orientation events should underscore the level of work required in order to master the material.

What else did the study show? "Students who study alone and have heavier reading and writing loads do well." In other words, taking courses perceived as easy or undemanding is counterproductive when it comes to learning, as is what the authors call "social engagement," such as fraternity or sorority membership. This seems intuitive to me. Students at "more selective schools" and majors in traditional academic disciplines such as arts and sciences tend to have "greater learning gains" than do students who major in business, education, or social work. "Working off campus, participating in campus clubs and volunteering did not impact learning." It was disheartening to read that "Black students improve their assessment scores at lower levels than whites" while at the same time "students from families with different levels of parental education enter college with different learning levels but learn at about the same rates while attending college."

There is an excellent article about the study at Inside Higher Ed, which points out that what students learn at college comes down to what goes on in the classroom and the expectations that schools have of their students. The harder students work, the more they will learn.

Learning Styles Questioned

It is almost an article of faith among educators today that law students have different learning styles that should be accommodated in the classrom in order to maximize engagement and learning. A leading article on this subject is Robin A. Doyle and Rita Dunn, Teaching Law Students Through Individual Learning Styles, 62 Albany Law Review 213 (1998), which is available through SSRN. The Doyle and Dunn article, by the way, is cited in the valuable Annotated Bibliography on Law Teaching, which appears in the Fall 2009 issue of Perspectives: Teaching Legal Research and Writing. A new study published last month in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest is calling into question the theory underlying "matching" students' learning styles with professors' teaching styles. An abstract of the study is here, and an article about the study appears on page one of the January 8, 2010 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. An subscription is required to access the article.

The authors, four psychologists, state that there is "no strong scientific evidence to support the 'matching' idea."

"We were startled to find that there is so much research published on learning styles, but that so little of the research used experimental designs that had the potential to provide decisive evidence," says Harold E. Pashler, a professor of psychology at the University of California at San Diego and the paper's lead author.

"Lots of people are selling tests and programs for customizing education that completely lack the kind of experimental evidence that you would expect for a drug ... Now, maybe the FDA model isn't always appropriate for education--but that's a conversation we need to have."

The authors do not dispute that different learning styles exist; they argue, however, that there is no proof that "any particular style of instruction simultaneously helps students who have one learning style while also harming students who have a different learning style." Furthermore, instead of trying to figure out whether a particular classroom contains visual learners, kinesthetic learners, or auditory learners, they content that it would make more sense for professors to match "their instruction to the content they are teaching. Some concepts are best taught through hands-on work, some are best taught through lectures, and some are best taught through group discussion." In my own teaching, I prefer to use a combination of methods in order to reinforce the concepts I introduce through lectures and assigned readings. Indeed, it's hard to imagine how one would teach legal research without a hands-on component. As might be expected, the study is very controversial, with critics contending that the four authors did not do a thorough review of the literature that supports "matching" students and professors. Professor Pashler and his colleagues respond, however, they "are still open to the idea that some kinds of matching are actually effective. 'Most of what we're pointing to in this paper is an absence of evidence ... Here's what you have to show--and they aren't showing it. But there may yet be better studies in the future.'"

The Old Brain

There has been a lot of information published about how students in their teens and twenties learn as well as strategies that instructors can adopt to increase their pedagogical effectiveness. Certainly this is important information--I know how much I have benefited as a teacher from these insights. Nonetheless, it was interesting for me to read this article from today's New York Times Education Life section on how older people learn. I must confess that I have a personal interest in this subject, not only because I occasionally have students who are not of traditional law-school age, but also because I often need to learn new things and sometimes find that to be a bit of a challenge. Is it fair to blame this difficulty on the fact that I am getting older?

According to the article,

Brains in middle age, which, with increased life spans, now stretches from the 40s to the late 60s, [...] get more easily distracted. ...

[C]an an old brain learn, and then remember what it learns? Put another way, is this a brain that should be in school?

As it happens, yes. While it's tempting to focus on the flaws in older brains, that inducement overlooks how capable they've become. Over the past several years, scientists have looked deeper into how brains age and confirmed that they continue to develop through and beyond middle age.

Many longheld views, including the one that 40 percent of brain cells are lost, have been overturned. What is stuffed into your head may not have vanished but has simply been squirreled away in the folds of your neurons.

[This can make it difficult to retrieve information because] neural connections, which receive, process and transmit information, can weaken with disuse or age.

The article offers some specific recommendations for adults to employ to make it easier to retrieve information, connect new information with what is already known, and keep our brains in shape. For one thing, we can actively seek out ideas and thoughts that are contrary to what we believe.

Teaching new facts should not be the focus of adult education ... Instead, continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you 'bump up against people and ideas' that are different. In a history class, that might mean reading multiple viewpoints, and then prying open brain networks by reflecting on how what was learned has changed your view of the world.

Learning a foreign language, taking a different route to work, doing anything that causes the brain to stretch is how we nourish our brains and keep them young.

Educational Entrepreneurship

My husband pointed out this article in yesterday's New York Times. There are many teachers in his family, and he thought it was interesting to learn that

[T]thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises ... While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies in a time of tight budgets, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, leading some school officials to raise questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms.

There are philosophical issues as well as ownership issues. One professor of education quoted in the article feels that "online selling cheapens what teachers do and undermines efforts to build sites where educators freely exchange ideas and lesson plans."

The article doesn't explicitly raise the issue of work for hire, but I think it should have been mentioned. Teachers are employees, and one could argue that the work they do in the course of their employment belongs to their employers. The Copyright Office has a useful circular on work for hire, but it doesn't mention teachers, and one can also refer to section 101 of the Copyright Act for a definition of work for hire. It's a slippery concept, however, and the law is by no means settled. I have always believed that I hold the copyright in the original materials I have created for my Advanced Legal Research course (topic outlines, exercises, etc.). I am happy to share my materials with others, but I like to be credited. Does my university believe that it holds the copyright to my course materials? I don't know, because the question has never come up. When I started teaching, I solicited syllabi from other legal research instructors and built upon them. Would I have paid for them? I'm not sure, but it wasn't an option in those days. One of my colleagues suggested that she could envision a situation where one had to subscribe to get updated course materials, but where older materials were available for free.

Celebrate Knowledge Day

This morning, I received a beautiful bouquet of flowers from one of my students. She was born and raised in Russia, and is a dedicated, committed student. She will make a great attorney. She explained to me that flowers are traditionally given to teachers on Knowledge Day, which is celebrated on September 1 in Russia and other former Soviet republics. September 1 is when school traditionally starts and, according to Wikipedia, "marks the end of summer and the beginning of autumn." The illustration also comes from the Wikipedia article on Knowledge Day. There are many rituals associated with this special day, including celebratory assemblies and the ringing of the first bell of the school year. My student told me that the fact that the first day of school is celebrated with such joy is an indication of the importance of education to the Russian people.

In doing some research on this topic, I discovered that this year Knowledge Day marks the official opening to the public of Russia's new digital library. According to this article, the "library provides access to almost 40,000 books and more than 43 million documents ...concern[ing] Russian history." It is the largest digitization project to be undertaken so far in Russia. There will be unique documents, such as orders from Czar Peter the Great and letters from Empress Catherine the Great to the French philosopher Voltaire.

Digital materials: restoring natural learning?

Trent Batson of Campus Technology posted an interesting article last week entitled Paper-Based Materials Distorted Ways of Learning that argues that digital materials, as they disrupt previous models of teaching and learning, are actually restoring older, more organic ways of learning, including the original concept of the Socratic method:

Why did we develop a default learning model and beliefs so contrary to current reality? We had adapted to what we could do over the whole time that we had only analog materials to work with. A student writing a paper on paper had a hard time showing that paper to the rest of the class, so, over time the natural collaborative learning style popularly known as Socratic became distorted by the limitations of analog materials. Collaboration was no longer the norm. Humans had lost something.

There's a lot of food for thought and fodder for debate (including ye olde laptops-in-classrooms debate) in the article, as well as some questions for educators to ask themselves to help evaluate whether analog or digital methods are more appropriate and effective at achieving the goals they have for their students.