"One problem is that students just aren't asked to do much, according to findings in a new book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses." Half of students did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/18/45-of-students-dont-learn_n_810224.html
How does this relate to what we are trying to accomplish with the hybrid class?
This doesn't surpirse me. I have had quite a few classes in college where the class is based on lecture and the only assignments we have are tests. I don't remember half of the information we discussed in class.
I think this relates to the hybrid class because in this class, we're required to do quite a bit of reading from the textbook but to also do research of our own that takes the information from the book and solidifies it. Although it takes more time and effort, I'm glad that I have to do it because what's the point in going to classes if you're not going to retain any of the information?
I saw this article on Yahoo and I have a lot of problems with it. First, I do not see how writing a 20 page paper is a better evaluation of learning than testing. I have heard a lot of people say that if a paper is longer than 10 pages that they add in a lot of filler information which is useless and often redundant. I also do not like how this article is generalizing to all students. This line "The research of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years." The part that is bothering me is the sophomore year statement. Most people are still working on liberal arts and general education courses at the end of their sophomore year. Personally I did not have the classes that really challenged me until my Junior year which is how I think it works in most universities. I have not seen the actual study but why were they testing sophomores and not seniors? Most colleges are 4 year colleges and it seems to me that the oversight might have been a bias.
The title especially bothers me because they only surveyed 2300 students. I know that is a larger sample size than most studies but there are almost 20 million people enrolled in college (in 2007) according to the National Center for Educational Statistics http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98. 2300 is only 1/10000 of the enrolled population. So overall this article upsets me because I feel I have learned far more in college than I would have if I had just gone straight into the workforce after high school. I'm not sure if the writer of this article has an agenda or not but I cannot see this article as being good journalism. As far as the hybrid class I think by having us intergrate information and go out and find topics that relate will help us remember and process the information better. I know that especially Ch. 2, with all of its complex processes, that it helped me understand the topics by searching for information that related to it.
They did study seniors but this is all they said "Overall, the picture doesn't brighten much over four years. After four years, 36 percent of students did not demonstrate significant improvement, compared to 45 percent after two."
I disagree with the quote above, “One problem is that students…”. I disagree with it because this is not the reason students don’t learn much in college. I believe the reason students don’t learn much in college is because they are stripped of autonomy. We have very little to no choice on subjects that we want to learn on. I believe this is how it ties into the hybrid class. In a hybrid class such as this one, we are given some autonomy. We aren’t just asked to learn everything in the book. We are asked to pick subjects in the book that interest us, things that we have a genuine interest in learning more about. The format of most college classes are a joke. Sit through a lecture, read what you know what will be on the test, memorize the night before the test, take the test, and then forget everything. Nowhere in there are we applying anything to life. We are simply wasting four years of our lives and a lot of money to get a piece of paper that says we learned. I wish all of my classes would have been hybrid style, because this actually makes me learn about how these subjects apply to things I care and want to learn about. No matter how much more reading you give students, we are doing it merely to pass the test, not to learn.
With a hybrid class such as this one, we are encouraged to use the material that we learn in class. We are allowed to research topics that we are interested in, instead of being told what we are supposed to write about. The article leads the reader to believe that classes need to assign more readings and then people would learn more. I do not agree with this, I have had classes where there was way to much reading and I know several people in the class only read what they needed to to pass the test. If classes were to focus less on testing, i think students may learn more because they are not focused on what they are going to need to know to pass the test.
I agree with the importance of critical thinking and I honestly think I have improved my ability in college thus far. However, I have several problems with the study at hand. First I think it is a mistake to generalize and use critical thinking ability for what it means to be a successful student. Every major is different and has different goals for what they consider to be a successful graduate. The fact that the authors of the study did not take into consideration what the students learned in their respective majors concerns me. Some majors focus more on critical thinking (i.e. sciences, mathematics and especially philosophy) but others focus less on critical thinking. A music major that becomes a successful musician but doesn't improve his critical thinking skills is still successful in my opinion. The Wall Street Journal also published this study and it said "the authors say their findings are corroborated by their survey of test takers that found a lack of academic rigor in most students' schedules" How is that surprising? What I get from that is that a correlation between the difficulty of classes you take and how much you improve your "critical thinking skills" exists. The WSJ article talks about some additional problems that other researchers had with this particular study. With that all being said I do believe there are better ways to learn than some of the classes I have taken. I think that a hybrid course addresses one of the biggest problems I have had with some courses. Some courses simply test your ability to memorize. Although, memorization is unavoidable to a certain extent I think it will be nice to expand upon things in the class with things that are happening today in our blogposts. I think a lot of times when we learn primarily out of textbooks it is easy to forget that scientific ideas and theories are always accumulating new evidence. I think this type of course will help to cement ideas learned in the textbook so that we don't just forget them right after the test by allowing us some choices as to what we want to learn.
1. WSJ: College Test Leaves Questions Unanswered http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704754304576095912537891034.html#articleTabs%3Darticle
I agree. Most of the stuff I already had in high school. The system is good for not so ambitious people... its enough to know the basic to get an A or B. Yet, comparing to my country school system I think here, in U.S. is beeter just because actually teachers push you to look at some other materials , not only books or want you to find something in internet, trying to make it interesting and what it goes with that you will not forget that fast. In my country is like, they give soooooo much stuff to learn that we not able to study this (thats why cheating is very popular) and of course we easily forget what we just learned.
I do and I don't agree. For one yeah freshman year everyones taking liberal arts classes which are pointless for our careers and don't require studying for the most part and so forth. But depending on your major it depends on how much reading and papers you have to do. I for one don't fit with this article. I am a psychology major which requires a lot of reading, research and papers. I had to do a 30 page paper split up into two sections for the semester last fall and I have an overwhelming amount of reading to do which is usually 30-40 pages a chapter but it doesn't matter the length of the pages required to read because 30 pages will take me two hours to read which is very time consuming if you think about it on top of all your other classes you have to keep up on as well. In addition, this hybrid class does require time to read and research for our blogs, therefore it is time consuming and hard to make a good post when you try to cram it together at the last possible second.
I definitely agree with what has been said above. Most of my classes are based on lecture and maybe only include a few assignments. Yes, the teachers do try and incorporate what they are teaching to our lives, but unless we are doing things hands-on, chances are it's not going to stick. With the class, we are getting to not only read the chapter and hear the lecture, but we also get to incorporate what we hear and read into our blogs. We get to choose the topics we want to discuss so that it lets us discover what we find interesting instead of just being assigned topics that we do not want to hear anything about. Most of the time when I read a textbook I get to the point where I'm reading but cannot stay concentrated to absorb the material. This is because a lot of the time the information isn't applied to me and uses large terms that I do not understand. That is why I enjoy the hybrid class. It gives us freedom to learn without relying solely on the textbook and lectures. It has been a great experience so far!
It may be somewhat true that college students aren't learning much in college, but the article seems to rest much of the blame on the shoulders of the institutions and professors. Like anything else in life, you get out of a college education what you put into it. The responsibility to better oneself and make sure you understand the subject matter is the almost solely the student's. Professors assigning students hours and hours of writing and reading wouldn't better the overall average of test scores because the average students would perform average on these tasks, the students that excel would excel at them, etc. Intelligence remains relatively stable throughout life, so the reason China produces thousands of engineers a year is because their students apply themselves completely. In China, students don't have any other jobs and are not allowed to marry or have children until graduating. I'm not saying it is bad if a student is under these circumstances, but I am pointing out how much more emphasis they put on the importance of education.
I definitely agree with your statement "you get out of a college education what you put into it." I definitley think there are students in college who put in a lot of effort and also contribute to the college community beyond their test taking abilities.
The concept of college today is bogus. It's like a movie franchise now. You come to part one, give them your money and then proceed to sit through the worst piece of crap you've ever experienced. Then at the end on the way out you are told that to be able to appreciate part one you have to come back later, PAY AGAIN, and then experience part 2. Then you'll have what you wanted. A BA, especially in Psych doesnt, mean anything. Woo hoo i went to 4 years of college I'm gonna go manage a restaurant or be Dwight from the office, forget the entire field that we were taught to think in, there is only one place that training is usefull. Academia; so just go to more school.
I believe the findings of the research are probably and even likely correct. Though i don't know that all the blame should be placed on the institution or even the professors, there should be more accountability placed on the person who is there and paying money to learn. I think that is how this article ties into the concept of a hybrid class, much of the learning is placed on the student as opposed to the professor as in a standard class, and the added responsiblity that it places on the student means one thing, either you are really going to learn it or you're going to fail. In a standard class you can skate by without every really learning and pass.
I feel that further research would be needed to verify these findings because they picked the first two years when students are taking mostly general education classes that often dont require much of students. I would like to see this study to be conducted in the last two years and take into account major.
I seem to be a little late commenting on this and everyone else seems to have already voiced my opinions. The first part of the article that really hit me was when it talked about how so many students didn’t have to write a 20 page paper or read 40 pages per week in most of their classes. My thought is who cares. First off, a 20 page paper is really maybe only a 7-10 page paper with a lot of added bullshit in it. And 40 pages a week per class would be a hell of a lot of reading. Imagine if you had to read 40 pages for each class and you were taking 5 classes. That’s 200 pages of reading plus you would need to find the time to write a 20 page research paper. When I started in school I was taking 15-18 credits and having to work 40 hours a week to live. I would have had a mental breakdown and failed all of my classes if this was the requirement for all of them. I don’t believe either of these 2 things mean you learn more. I actually have found that I often learn better in classes that are discussion based rather than reading and writing.
Another thing that bothered me was that they were looking more at sophomores in the article than at seniors. My first 2 years of college I had to take a lot of classes that were of absolutely no interest to me. All I wanted to do was pass and then forget the information. So that’s what I did. I have learned a lot more since I started taking major specific classes. (I know they mentioned that 36% of seniors didn’t do much better either). Did they look at the grades of the individuals? I bet the people who didn’t do much better as seniors don’t have a great GPA.
I think we need to look at an individuals ambition to learn. There are countless resources at a college where you can learn as much as you want. If you want to learn you can, the problem is that there are so many people who don’t care. They want to get done with just passing grades and move on. I unfortunately fall into this category sometimes. However, for people who love learning it is possible. Maybe what needs to change is how children are raised. So many kids lose their love for learning at a young age. Maybe if this wasn’t the case they would want to try harder in college and do better on the tests.
I found an article that went along with this study so I thought I would share it.
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/james-altucher's-8-alternatives-to-college-535903.html?tickers=COCO,APOL,ESI,DV,EDMC,STRA,^DJI