Conformity and Education
pursuit of excellence is weird
Rigorous education is far less popular on the ground than many policy wonks believe. …
…Everyone mouths support for academic excellence but not what it actually requires: tough curriculum, enforced behavioral codes, hard choices, demanding leadership, and retained students.
What parents really want from K-12 is babysitting, conformity, and being nice to their kids.
Turning to college, John Tagg writes,
Most teaching follows a demonstrably bad model: the teacher tells the students what he wants them to know and then tests their ability to recall the information he has provided. This is one of the worst possible ways to get anyone to learn anything. Students don’t learn much even from excellent lecturers and remember very little from being told something once.
The problem is that professors are not under pressure to teach better.
almost all the information that colleges and universities collect and pay attention to in recruiting, hiring, promoting, and rewarding their faculty has little or nothing to do with teaching performance. The reason for that is quite straightforward: there is no credible evidence of the quality of teaching performance. Nobody measures it, and at most institutions, nobody even describes or defines excellent teaching.
The evaluation of professors is skewed toward publication records. But
John Hattie and Herbert Marsh conducted a meta-analysis of the best studies of the relationship between teaching and research. “The evidence,” they concluded, “suggests a zero relationship.” So then why do so many brilliant scholars believe otherwise? “We must conclude,” Hattie and Marsh write, “that the common belief that research and teaching are inextricably entwined is an enduring myth. At best, research and teaching are very loosely coupled.”
Student evaluations of professors are nearly worthless. I believe that all you need to do to get good ratings is to hand out lots of A’s. Reporting on one study, Tagg writes,
Students got high grades from the professors they rated highly in the introductory classes, but they performed worse in subsequent classes.
I think that the basic model in college is “We pretend to teach, and they pretend to learn.” This works well, because parents do not care whether their children learn at college or not. They treat college education for their children as a status/conformity issue. If your kid is content with the college and its status is high enough that you are not embarrassed to say “My child is attending ____,” then you do not probe further.
Tagg claims that we know that active learning works better than lecturing and other methods that do not provide students with the opportunity to participate and obtain feedback. As he points out, we have known this for years, and yet colleges do not implement it. Why not?
In general, what people value when it comes to education is conformity. Returning to the review of the Alpha School, that becomes clear in the K-12 realm.
Incidentally, the next function that I am thinking of adding to The Social Code is a self-assessment function. The AI professor would interview the user to give the user an idea of how well he or she has understood key concepts in the seminar.
The links today seem to leave a few pieces out of the puzzle: (1) self study (homework/reading) expectations and execution; (2) textbook quality; and (3) quality of learning assessment.
With respect to self study, the typical expectation at universities is that the student will spend two to three hours studying outside of the classroom for every hour spent in the classroom. This is where the bulk of learning should be expected to take place, yet it seems no one pays much attention to the potential for improving the return on this time investment. I would suspect that merely handing out reading lists for each lesson is a low return practice and including problems to be solved or writing exercises to go with the reading probably improves the learning yield. I suspect that over the years the MOOCs that I got the most from were the ones where the lectures were followed up by comprehension quizzes. This gets at the “active learning” bit but extends to the greater amount of study time spent outside of the classroom.
Which gets us to textbook quality. I learned back in my stint in the military when I earned over 100 college credits taking Department of Defense Standardized Tests that a good textbook was infinitely more valuable than any professor. Well organized textbooks with plenty of reading comprehension reviews and self-grading exercises to test learning were really the best preparation for taking a comprehensive examination. And those who actually benefit from lectures should be able to watch them online given by the best lecturers. I completed two graduate degree programs and I never had an instructor who was as good as your average Great Courses lecturer.
Which gets us to the mystery why professors continue to be entrusted with the testing/learning assessment function. Testing should be standardized across universities and made the responsibility of external subject matter experts, independently developed, reviewed and validated. Outcomes on such examinations would be the best possible measure of educator classroom performance.
I was sitting in my advisor's office my first year of grad school, back in 1991. One of Willis Lamb's (Nobel laureate in Physics) post-docs poked her head in. She said, "I've been offered a tenure track position at XYZ university, but I'll be required to teach. I've never taught a class before in my life. What do I do?"
My advisor calmly looked at her and said in full seriousness, "It doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is how much money you bring into the University."
That was the day I decided to leave academia and look for a role in industry.