The flava: a study published by the American Psychological Association has determined that cultural beliefs that equate "academic success with a high level of competence and failure with intellectual inferiority" cause a "vicious cycle" where "students are afraid to fail, so they are reluctant to take steps to master new material" and "difficulty creates feelings of incompetence that in turn disrupts learning."You don't say?!
Now could someone please tell all the fuckwits in admin everywhere that "students will benefit from education that gives them room to struggle with difficulty"? And get them to leave us the hell alone when we submit grades that accurately reflect the quality of the work submitted instead of conforming to a pretty retention pattern?
In related news, guess what's going to be required reading for my classes for the foreseeable future?
Failure corresponding to inferiority? Excuse me while I go get a mop to wipe of the remnants from my mind being blown.
ReplyDeleteYou are the problem, SS. You are the prevailing mindset that not mastering something on the first try means that you are a hopeless idiot. You are the damned fool idea that if you can't do it perfectly right away, you shouldn't try because you are destined for failure.
DeleteDon't feed the trolls, please, or RGM's head might explode.
DeleteModeration note: When a comment gets deleted, the replies get deleted as well. There's no control over that.
DeleteWhen you fail, it's because you're inferior. When I fail, it's because I didn't try hard enough, or I had better things to do, or the task was beneath me and not worth doing.
DeleteHow about we give them all A's so that they will feel free to try things that are hard, that they might not master immediately?
ReplyDeleteOh wait... we tried that, didn't we?
Wow. I'm really going to use this, both by emailing it to the Dean of Faculty AND by putting it in my folder of course policies (that no one ever reads)
ReplyDeleteThis is less about how hard learning is than it is about priming the students for the test. Other studies have shown that the set-up for the test can alter the results in a wide variety of ways. This test seems to indicate that a particular kind of priming can change the outcome of a particular test. It doesn't show the students learning improves (although that seems to be implied). How do those abilities change after, say, 4 years of schooling in the different environments?
ReplyDeleteNot to belittle priming, it is demonstrably real and scary in its sociological and psychological implications.
In addition to what Alan from Apex says, I've noticed that if I prime a grade, they also respond differently. If I write "good" next to a 17/20 grade, no one complains about getting 17/20. If I don't write "good" or "well done," at least three grade grubbers remain behind to ask why they only got 17/20.
DeleteI had a student grade grub over 2 points (out of 100) on a homework worth 2% of the final grade. Yeah I don't think your final grade is going to come down to .0002%.
DeleteI like the profs who say "you can ask for a regrade...but if you do I'll regrade the WHOLE assignment and you can end up with a lower grade than you started".
James Paul Gee, of What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, has long argued that we need to give students safe spaces to fail in--just like games do. You die, you try again. College today has no safety net, and isn't a very nice place to learn in. People don't want to try again and again to get something right not only because they think that makes them dumb, but because their debts are rising and it could easily cost them admission to limited enrollment programs or graduate school.
ReplyDeleteAnd, before anyone says that these students shouldn't get into those schools, I ask you to quietly reconsider. Today's nursing programs let in very few students that don't have a perfect 4.0 GPA. Some of the best nurses I've known, however, didn't have a perfect GPA in school. Instead, their ability to advocate for patients and learn the stuff they really needed to in order to do that was nearly unbounded. Nothing about someone's GPA controls how good they are in dealing with people, caring for them, and making sure they get the care they need. Of course, that's hard to assess or measure I suppose. Blah.
This is a very real part of the picture, I think. We're in the middle (perhaps approaching the tail end?) of the baby boom echo kids reaching college age, and many institutions in the high- to mid-selective range have (wisely, I think) not increased the size of their student bodies proportionately. It's simply a lot harder to get into college, or into any one program within a college, or into grad school, than it was when I was in college (in the trough in between the boomers and their kids). And, of course, a larger proportion of the population, including women and people of color, is fully eligible for those higher-ed/grad slots, and for the jobs that follow. And some of the high-skilled jobs have gone overseas, and an awful lot of the ones that are being created in this country are low-paid, low skilled (at least when it comes to the kind of skills you acquire in college; many of them, too, require very good people skills) jobs that, among other things, are replacing the kinds of family/home work that even college-educated women spent a considerable proportion of their lives performing without (direct) pay.
DeleteBut the other side of the coin is that even very able people do need challenge, and the experience of dealing with failure, and that the population conditions described above make it even more important for colleges to perform their sorting/gatekeeping functions well. In fact, I question whether any core curriculum in which more than a very few exceptionally bright students (say no more than 2-5% of the student body) end up with the highest grade possible in all or most of their classes is challenging enough. Of course, the danger of making the curriculum more demanding is that you would almost certainly end up selecting *against* students with less money and/or greater family responsibilities (and so less time to spend on course work), and *for* those who are, in addition to being very bright, both hard-working (not a problem) and relatively privileged (problem).
I'm not sure what the answer is, but I do think some combination of a rigorous, nobody-gets-100%-all-the-time curriculum and giving as many people as possible the chance to try that curriculum, even for a short time (and, if necessary, at different levels of maturity -- not every year, but perhaps every 3-5 years), under conditions that allow them to concentrate fully on it, and using those results to determine eligibility for experiences which provide more of the same, would be a good approach.
Maybe some sort of post-high-school, pre-college "boot camp," in which students are taken out of their usual environments, provided the basics -- food, shelter, clothing, etc. -- for 3 months or so while dealing with a rigorous curriculum, then channeled into some sort of national service program for the next 9 months while a college admissions process based on the results was underway? Anybody who wanted to try the college route would be eligible to select that, and anybody who didn't succeed in it would be eligible to repeat the experience in 3-5 years, but there could also be parallel, equally rigorous and equally voluntary tracks that led to work based on other sorts of skills and/or training, and which would be open to all on the same once-every-3-to-5-years basis.
DeleteFar too much social engineering for the U.S., I'm sure, but the results might be interesting.
College today has no safety net, and isn't a very nice place to learn in.
DeleteRight. And at Big Online U, they keep reducing semester lengths making it more likely that everything you do is high stakes. And then retention requirements make the grading easy. The results are predictable.