more on Bok: Are colleges failing? / Higher ed needs new lesson plans

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Benjamin Kuipers <kuipers () cs utexas edu>
Date: December 21, 2005 11:03:16 AM EST
To: dave () farber net
Cc: ip () v2 listbox com, derek_bok () harvard edu
Subject: Re: [IP] Bok: Are colleges failing? / Higher ed needs new  
lesson plans

Dave,

Derek Bok says that this growing body of research should be helpful  
to me in improving the way I teach my students.  If so, I would  
expect him to cherry-pick from that body of research a few items that  
would really get me excited about how to improve my teaching, and  
excited about looking more deeply into that research for more helpful  
ideas.

Instead, he provides five bullet points, each of which says that  
college education is failing some or all of its students. Immediately  
after the extract provided here (in paragraph 9 of the entire essay),  
one fragment of one sentence provides actual advice, albeit at a very  
abstract level:  "Further studies indicate that problem-based  
discussion, group study, and other forms of active learning produce  
greater gains in critical thinking than lectures ...".

That's it.  Nothing more, except more discussion of the problem.  
Frankly, we already knew about the problem, and many of us are  
developing and applying our own approaches to solving it.  What would  
be genuinely helpful is a deep and thoughtful synthesis of all this  
research Bok praises.  If the above quote is the basic lesson from  
all this research, then show how it can be applied across varied  
disciplines.

Derek Bok was president of Harvard; he was a law school professor;  
and now he writes books on higher education.  He knows how to provide  
evidence to support a claim, and how to craft an essay to achieve a  
goal in his audience.  But not here.  Whether colleges are failing or  
not, this essay has failed.

Ben Kuipers


At 8:39 AM -0500 12/21/05, David Farber wrote:
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Monty Solomon <monty () roscom com>
> Date: December 18, 2005 5:14:31 PM EST
> To: undisclosed-recipient:;
> Subject: Bok: Are colleges failing? / Higher ed needs new lesson plans
>
>
> Are colleges failing?
> Higher ed needs new lesson plans
>
> By Derek Bok  |  December 18, 2005
>
> A remarkable feature of American colleges is the lack of attention
> that most faculties pay to the growing body of research about how
> much students are learning and how they could be taught to learn
> more. Hundreds of studies have accumulated on how undergraduates
> develop during college and what effects different methods of teaching
> have on improving critical thinking, moral reasoning, quantitative
> literacy, and other skills vital to undergraduate education. One
> would think faculties would receive these findings eagerly. Yet one
> investigator has found that fewer than 10 percent of college
> professors pay any attention to such work when they prepare for their
> classes. Most faculties seem equally uninterested in research when
> they review the curriculum.
>
> Apparently, empirical studies command respect only when they are used
> to investigate institutions and professions other than those to which
> professors themselves belong.
>
> It is unfortunate that college professors pay so little heed to the
> research about undergraduate education. If they did, they might
> encounter some provocative findings, such as the following.
>
> -Despite the hours spent debating different models of general
> education, the choices faculties make rarely lead to any significant
> difference in the cognitive development of undergraduates.
>
> -Most college seniors do not think that they have made substantial
> progress in improving their competence in writing or quantitative
> methods, and some assessments have found that many students actually
> regress.
>
> -Students who start college with average critical thinking skills
> only tend to progress over the next four years from the 50th
> percentile of their class to approximately the 69th percentile. Most
> undergraduates leave college still inclined to approach unstructured
> ''real life" problems with a form of primitive relativism, believing
> that there are no firm grounds for preferring one conclusion over
> another.
>
> -Although most colleges require students to take classes in another
> language, fewer than 10 percent of seniors believe that they have
> substantially improved their foreign language skills, and fewer than
> 15 percent are enrolled in an advanced class.
>
> -Substantial groups of students, including African-Americans,
> Hispanics, and recruited athletes in major sports, perform well below
> the levels one would expect based on their high school grades and SAT
> scores. Although a few colleges have developed successful programs to
> overcome such underperformance, most do not even try, despite the
> commitment expressed in many college brochures to ''help each student
> develop to his or her full potential."
>
> ...
>
> http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/ 
> 2005/12/18/are_colleges_failing/
>
>
>
>
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--

Benjamin Kuipers, Professor         email:  kuipers () cs utexas edu
Computer Sciences Department        tel:    1-512-471-9561
University of Texas at Austin       fax:    1-512-471-8885
Austin, Texas 78712 USA             http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~kuipers


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