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



Begin forwarded message:

From: Benjamin Kuipers <kuipers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: December 21, 2005 11:03:16 AM EST
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Cc: ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx, derek_bok@xxxxxxxxxxx
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@xxxxxxxxxx>
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@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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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