The CHASS Education Pond

Pathologies of Learning

Lee Shulman identified three pathologies of learning.  The first is amnesia, or the forgetting of knowledge quickly after exposure.  The second is fantasia, or thinking that one knows something that in fact has been incompletely or improperly learned.  The third is inertia, or knowledge that sits idly in the brain and cannot be used to inform practice or judgment.  Non-passing students suffer from fantasia, when they have engaged in the work at all.  But the other two forms are more important in the case of passing students.  Because of the lecture system and the heightened significance of multiple choice examinations in large lecture classes, the typical passing student in many university courses crams ideas and concepts into his brain for the examination, and then repeats this knowledge on the examination, with as much fidelity as possible to the professor’s presentation.  However, the students do not own the knowledge enough to apply it to an unfamiliar situation or problem.  At the end of the examination, the knowledge evaporates. 

Among the goals of university education should be to fight these pathologies of learning.

Lee Shulman’s “Pedagogy of Understanding”

Educational thought has long been divided between progressives and traditionalists.  To simplify greatly, progressives favor pedagogies of engagement, while traditionalists favor pedagogies of rigor and high standards.  Lee Shulman pioneered a new path through this log jam by helping to create and promote a pedagogy of understanding. 

Shulman’s background is largely in the progressive tradition.  His first work focused on project-based learning, and he has continued to consider pedagogies of engagement an important part of teaching and learning.   However, he came to feel that engagement is not enough.  “Understanding,” he wrote, “is not independent (of engagement), but is an additional standard.”  He writes that understanding is different from knowledge or information, in so far as it connotes ownership.  Students who understand are not limited to repeating verbatim what they have heard in lecture, but can use knowledge in new situations.

What exactly is a pedagogy of understanding?  We can piece it together from Shulman’s writings. 

First, learning goals are specified and assessments keyed to learning goals are developed before class begins.   Assessments require students to apply what they have learned in class to instances or problems they have not encountered in class.  Teachers measure the state of students’ current understanding through diagnostic examinations and discussions at the beginning of term.  The replacement of past, less satisfactory representations with new, more satisfactory representations is the goal of teaching.  To do this a pedagogy of understanding builds on what students already know and do not know.  Teachers focus during the first week of term on a relatively small number of key terms and concepts.  Shulman’s followers use the term “uncoverage,“ because these terms and concepts are uncovered at the beginning of class through a variety of means; they are the building blocks on which all else develops.  (Following the example of Asian pedagogy, Shulman favors teaching a small number of central topics deeply rather than a large number of topics at a rapid clip.)  Teachers make intermediate processes visible to students.  These are processes of thinking that teachers often take for granted, but students need to know in order to become more expert learners.  They include, for example, explicit discussions of the flow of an argument, the translation of terms no longer in wide use, or what every element in a statistical table means.   Teacher provide many opportunities to make both knowledge and lack of knowledge visible.  These can occur through “difficulty papers” in which students describe their difficulties understanding a particular passage, text, or idea.  They can also include “think alouds” in which students discuss, in a step by step way, how they are thinking about a particular problem.  Teachers also provide many opportunities for public performance of understanding.  As Shulman writes, requirements to perform what one knows “in the presence of peers and others, raises the stakes, sharpens the attention, and, yes, deepens the learning.”   These can occur through oral presentations, debates, design competitions, or board work.  Teachers post and discuss examples of work at beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels so that students can see what is required to make progress in their level of thinking and expression.   Teachers work to create a class climate in which students feel safe to take risks.  Learning requires working through mistakes and students must feel safe to take the risks of making mistakes in front of their peers.

The keynotes, then, are estabilishing goals, assessment in relation to goals, measuring existing knowledge, making knowledge visible, providing performance opportunities, sharing examples of levels of proficiency, and supporting risk taking.

 My only major hesitation has to do with Lee Shulman’s apparent assumption of strong, if often latent, motivations to learn, which can be activated in the right settings.  Surely this is true for many students, but we must also frankly face the fact that we are battling a student culture built on the assumptions of sufficiency in classroom performance, the over-riding importance of credentials rather than learning, and higher priority on social than academic engagements.  For these reasons, universities like ours will have to work on creating an academic ethos on campus, and motivating commitment to this ethos, as well as building on Shulman’s pedagogy of understanding.

The Dimensions of Campus Climate

New research on UCUES 2008 by Steve Chatman indicates that campus climate is multi-dimensional.   Overall, UC students find their campuses to be welcoming environments.  But feelings about campus climates vary by student characteristics.  Low-income students are most likely to cite issues having to do with sense of belonging and campus respect for students.  Students from minority racial-ethnic backgrounds and ethnic studies majors are most likely to cite issues having to do with cultural appreciation and social awareness.   LBGT students are most likely to cite issues having to do with climate of respect for personal characteristics, personal beliefs, and campus respect for students.  Conservative students are most likely to cite issues having to do with freedom to express beliefs and faculty and instructor political prejudices.   This study shows that we really should not think about campus climate as a one-dimensional phenomenon.  Not only are there many forms of diversity, but issues students face vary by specific forms of diversity.

Active Modes of Learning

From *Involvement In Learning* (1984):

We have examined a variety of approaches to active modes of learning and recommend that college faculty increase their use of the following:

*faculty research projects and classes held in the field

*internships and other forms of carefully monitored experiential learning

*small discussion groups

*in-class presentations and debates

*use of practitioners as visiting teachers

*individual learning projects and supervised independent study

To do a discipline means to speak it, to work with its primary materials, to follow its processes, and to adopt its perspectives.  Active modes of teaching require that students be inquirers — creators, as well as receivers of knowledge.”

pp. 27-8

_________

These recommendations from 1984 still rings true.    Later reports of important national Commissions focused on more macro-level changes, such as making research-based learning standard in every course and introducing writing and oral presentation challenges throughout the curriculum (see, e.g., the Boyer Report of 1998).  But these recommendations about active learning related to discipline-specific forms of knowledge remain incompletely incorporated into the curriculum.   Another form of active learning is to bring students to the front of the class for “think-alouds” about how they respond to key passages of the reading and solve problems.   Reinventing the research university means, mainly, reinventing the large lecture course.

The Importance of Academically-Oriented Student Activities

From *Involvement in Learning* (1984):

“When we look around (in higher education), we see student activities that are, in effect, latent communities.  We recommend strengthening those existing activities that have academic functions or academic overtones.  Examples include debate teams, language clubs, publications, performance groups, political clubs, and international exchange groups.  Research has adequately demonstrated that, when they are strong and well supported, these associations of peers…have strong holding power.”

_______

This passage is very important, because many educators believe that ALL student activities and organizations are equally important.  Research that I have conducted with Allison Cantwell on UC students suggests that, overall, hours spent on student organizations has a net negative impact on grades.  But the data does not distinguish between student organizations with “academic overtones” and those without.   We have not yet uncovered great comparative studies of this question, but I believe when we do they will show that student organizations with clear academic overtones (clubs related to majors, literary journals, newspapers, debating societies, playwrighting competitions, classical musical groups, and others) show positive associations with academic success, while others do not.  My guess is that most student organizations have no net association with academic success, and some (like the more strictly social fraternities and sororities) have a net negative impact.  College is definitely about more than academics, but academics is central.  If we follow this simple proposition rigorously (as we should), this implies differential support for academically beneficial student organizations as opposed to those that have no or negative academic impact.