Welcome to Science with Shrike! Today we will continue discussing universities, with a focus on their teaching mission, as opposed to the research mission. We’ll discuss some of the various techniques for learning, and what is done at the university level to encourage and enhance learning.
University as teaching
Before we get into teaching techniques, a quick overview of the university’s teaching mission. The purpose is to credential you as having the knowledge and/or skills necessary for the given field of study. The decision on the courses that go into the major are decided primarily by faculty of the department, within the guidelines set forth by the state and/or accrediting agency. While courses required for majors can be revisited as needed, in practice they are modified once every 5-10+ years once set.
In general, courses fulfill one of two purposes: help credential majors, help credential non-majors. The latter may be called “service” courses. They bring money into the department, but do not directly help the majors in the department. They are usually dictated by other program needs. The set of courses offered in a given semester is decided by the department, based partly on the faculty available, the perceived need for the course, and the amount of revenue the course generates.
Teaching is delegated to tenured/tenure-track faculty, non-tenure track faculty, postdocs, grad students and occasionally a secretary or two. Those without PhDs can teach as long as they have alternative expertise that qualifies them for the course (or usually ~2 years as a grad student). Instructors often have a wide range of latitude in how the course is taught, though courses taught on a rotation (different faculty member each term) have more standardization.
Since instructors can vary widely in terms of qualifications, and have wide latitude without a lot of oversight, this leads to extremely variable teaching outcomes. Student evaluations (and less often faculty evaluations) are used to determine teaching quality. However, instructors do not get a lot of complaints if they make the course easy and hand out As and Bs like candy! It has the added bonus of not being much work for the faculty member (and fewer student emails/meetings), so more time to do anything else. So this incentivizes instructors to make the course low rigor, which in turn moves it closer to being a waste of time.
One challenge in academia is that teaching incentives are not adequately aligned with training students.
Pedagogy
Despite the incentives to make courses easy, many instructors still want to be Good Teachers™. To do this, they follow the latest teaching fads which promise the mark of being a Good Teacher™. These fads are variably grounded in research and results, though in general, just trying usually sets you apart from the faculty bleeding the university out. At least until the trying is crushed out of you, which seems to happen to most at some point or another in their careers. However, the way to avoid having the desire to try crushed out is to find a pedagogy system that works for you, and you can easily employ in the classroom.
At its most basic, pedagogy, is just the erudite manner to say ‘teaching’. There are a lot of common sense observations that go into teaching, but pedagogy aims to systematize them and help instructors be intentional about these practices. The National Science Foundation produced a document called “Vision and Change” which encompasses the “current thinking” on undergraduate biology education. Skip to page 17 of the pdf to get the overview. The information Shrike is providing here will give some background and context to the document.
Bloom’s Taxonomy
The first aspect of pedagogy is to consider Bloom’s Taxonomy. Shrike prefers to reserve the word ‘taxonomy’ for classifying organisms, but the education people have to sound smart to justify their existence, so whatever.
The idea is that the higher up you move on the pyramid, the better the students master the material. Hence, memorizing is just step 1; ideally you want the students to understand and master the material, as measured by their ability to integrate the knowledge into new systems and use the material to analyze, evaluate and create new ideas. Since the recommendation is to test at all levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, you now know why some teachers give you test questions that seem to come completely out of the blue—they’re trying to test your ability to create, evaluate and analyze concepts based on what you’ve learned. Usually, you further need to be able to accomplish the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy in order to demonstrate mastery. Thus, even though recall is not explicitly tested, you have to know the material before you can use that information to analyze other information.
Since it’s easier to test recall, and students can score higher on the exams (easier test = happier students = better evals), many instructors prefer to operate at this level. This is not optimal for learning.
Learning Styles
The second aspect of pedagogy is engaging multiple learning styles. Do you know your learning style, anon? If not, you can take the test here. Ideally when teaching to a classroom you hit multiple learning styles so that everyone can use the style that works best for them. Having visual aids, talking students through the visual aids and having a book for reference hits 3 of the 4 styles. Provide flashcards for the kinesthetic learners, and you have it all.
There’s more that you can do for each learning style, but the challenge is there is typically a mix of styles in the classroom, and you ultimately hit a point of diminishing returns.
Active Learning
The third aspect of pedagogy to consider is “active learning”. This phrase indicates that the students should all be involved in the learning process, instead of just sitting back and listening to a professor drone on and on about the topic, or solely reading the textbook in their spare time.
Now, this does not mean textbooks and lectures are useless, just that they should engage the student, and even when engaging the student, more is necessary than just droning on and asking ‘do you have any questions?’ Typically, the textbook or lecture serves as the foundation. The more professors fall down the pedagogy rabbit-hole, the more they expect the textbook to be read before class, or the recorded lecture observed in advance. This is called ‘flipping the classroom’, and the idea is that class time is reserved entirely for active learning and questions about the material.
The pro of this model is that it allows the instructor to focus on students making connections so that they learn the material better, and have improved grounding. In theory, since they are reading the book/watching the lecture outside of class, they are also spending more time on the material, which helps comprehension. Ideally the students are engaged in the classroom, so they’re excited to learn, and do the work in advance. This leads to more learning plus happier students, so good evaluations.
The con is that this model usually teaches to the median. Since many students don’t even bother reading the assignments or watching the lecture in advance, they’re only really getting the information presented in the classroom, which is one or two exercises. Then when they get tested on material they should have learned, but wasn’t reinforced in the classroom, they don’t know it and cry a lot about it being unfair. If you are smart, this ends up being a very easy teaching style to deal with. Chances are you learned it the first time watching the lecture at 2x, and if not, class time will still be an easy set of activities. Or more likely, you will not need to do the readings at all, and just wing it from the lecture. Also, when the exam focuses more on analysis and evaluation at the cost of recall, it becomes a lot easier to bullshit the generic answers.
Since flipping the classroom has a high upfront cost to the instructor (especially if recording the lectures to be watched in advance), it is less likely instructors will go this route. Though with lockdowns forcing remote everything, this cost is a lot less if you record the remote sessions as you make them.
The other aspect to active learning is the various tricks, approaches and games used to help drive home learning. These work to varying degrees, and also depend on the individual. Active learning can include multiple choice or other quizzing during the lecture, or working full-blown activities, possibly in groups. Reflective writing afterwards is also intended to help students connect concepts.
There are many pros to active learning. Students are more engaged, and typically perform at a higher level. Instructors can get feedback in real-time, and reinforce concepts that the students have missed (eg review question at the beginning of class from last lecture, and go over what students missed). If the students are engaged, harder material can be covered without students crying a lot about it (ie evaluations stay high or improve).
The cons to active learning are the time cost, and efficiency. Spending lots of time on a topic does help reinforce the concept, but the smart students get bored quickly. There is also a finite amount of class-time to cover a never-ending amount of material.
The trade-off between time and material covered is one of the major educational dilemmas. Some sacrifice material covered for spending more time on a subject. Others sacrifice time to cover a huge breadth of material. Shrike prefers the latter because it gets the smart people further ahead. However, this is a balancing act that also has to take into account how fast the class can move along. In Shrike’s opinion this potentially compounds. If students don’t learn enough material well to start, more time in advanced classes is spent reviewing, which puts them even further behind.
Now, did the student forget everything because they studied a mess of stuff for the exam and then forgot it all? Or did the student never learn it because only the most general concepts were drilled into the student? Finding the Goldilocks point for an entire class is challenging.
If you checked the Visions and Change pdf, you’ll note they strongly prefer depth to breadth.
One special case for ‘active learning’ is research/labs/hands-on activities. Everyone agrees students benefit from engaging in these activities. The challenges are scale and training. The attempted solution is a CURE: “Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience”. They work to varying degrees.
Instructor Talk
One final aspect to pedagogy is “instructor-talk”. This is a catch-all term to describe everything the instructor says that is not shoving content into your brains. The political commentary, description of vacations, stories about their glory days, warnings about the upcoming exam, statements of class performance… everything that isn’t course content. It turns out that students often remember these statements far better than the instructor who made them…. and sometimes better than the content!
In practice, this is the instructor’s ability to control the frame of the class and instill the right mindset in the students. Students perform better when they believe they can get something worthwhile out of the class—not just knowledge, but also status. Positive statements on the students’ abilities—‘I believe you can do this’ helps reinforce that idea, especially when combined with high status—‘I have high expectations for you’. The challenge is managing the mindset of the students so that they learn to push through the challenges you put in front of them. Reinforcing this during lectures helps—Shrike reminds students that there is ‘No negative self-talk’ on subjects Shrike is teaching.
From an instructor standpoint, the ‘instructor-talk’ is a lot like coaching a team. You have to provide them with the training so that they can excel, which includes building the self-confidence needed to fail and learn. Especially when it comes to deprogramming neurotic pre-meds who think failing is death.
Did your college instructors hit any of these techniques?