Monday, 18 September 2006|
On encouraging surface learning. I'm bemused! On 3 May I posted about the Cambridge University Extension Course I am taking at the local Retirement Education Centre, the content of which continues to be stimulating and enjoyable. By james@doceo.co.uk (James Atherton). [Recent Reflection]But last week I was slightly surprised that the lecturer introduced the session by telling us how to write an essay on the material covered to date (the tri-partite nature of knowledge). He explained that as it had to be 1500 words, it would consist of seven (or perhaps eight) paragraphs, and then summarised on the whiteboard what each paragraph should contain. Odd, I thought. One does not expect this kind of thing on a course such as this. Today, after the coffee break, he raised the assessment issue again. It is important, he explained, because the funding of the course, and hence that of the Centre, is affected by the number of people passing the course. A discussion ensued, of course. If this were an Oxford course, he told us, we could have passed by merely producing a two-paragraph proposal, but under current Cambridge regulations we do actually have to write the essay, and it needs to be at least 1300 words. I asked whether we were confined to the set titles. Absolutely, he replied; after, all they did between them "cover the whole syllabus". Did it matter, then, since the assessment was merely to secure the funding stream, whether we passed or not? He was surprised but then explained about the sheer hassle which would be created if anyone submitted and failed. But there was no reason to fail, he said, because he would explain exactly what was required... Cambridge University is one of the great universities of the world. It is a bastion of liberal, if sometimes antiquated, educational values. The very idea of teaching a course on epistemology to a bunch of retired people who can only be expressively motivated is a wonderful remnant of liberal education in an increasingly instrumental world. What has it come to, then, when they are apparently forced to adopt an assessment regime which is both inherently anti-andragogic (sorry for the jargon[~]it's just shorthand) and even anti-humanistic, in one of the great traditional humanities disciplines? It is, moreover, the kind of assessment which is almost forced to promote surface learning, in a group of students who would naturally tend towards deep learning. It virtually rules out engaging in the higher levels of the SOLO taxonomy, and indeed I would tell my students that it pitches at the lower levels of Bloom (or Krathwohl and Anderson) Interested as I am in the notion of hidden and unintended curricula , (and especially given that the course is about the nature of knowledge), I am bemused by these contradictory messages. Apparently only one person has ever submitted and failed (and he was a former Fellow of an Oxford College). Sorry, there may be another on the way! 10:48:36 PM 
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Aesop tells a story about a fox that tried in vain to reach a cluster of grapes that dangled from a vine above his head. The fox leapt high to grasp the grapes, but the delicious-looking fruit remained just out of reach of his snapping jaws. After a few attempts the fox gave up and said to himself, [OE][OE]These grapes are sour, and if I had some I would not eat them."1 Dissonance: Discord Between Behavior and Belief Aesop[base ']s fable is the source of the phrase [OE][OE]sour grapes." The story illustrates what former Stanford University social psychologist Leon Festinger called cognitive dissonance. It is the distressing mental state in which people feel they "find themselves doing things that don[base ']t fit with what they know, or having opinions that do not fit with other opinions they hold."2 The fox[base ']s retreat from the grape arbor clashed with his knowledge that the grapes were tasty. By changing his attitude toward the grapes, he provided an acceptable explanation for his behavior.
Festinger considered the human need to avoid dissonance as basic as the need for safety or the need to satisfy hunger. It is an aversive drive that goads us to be consistent. The tension of dissonance motivates us to change either our behavior or our belief in an effort to avoid a distressing feeling. The more important the issue and the greater the discrepancy between behavior and belief, the higher the magnitude of dissonance that we will feel. In extreme cases cognitive dissonance is like our cringing response to fingernails being scraped on a blackboard[~]we[base ']ll do anything to get away from the awful sound. |
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First and most obvious, setting up schools requires that learning take place in a defined place at a defined time. It brings together a group of people who do not necessarily have anything in common apart from their ignorance, and requires them to learn a subject through a sequence of arbitrarily defined attendance slots in a physical setting selected for the convenience of time-table administration rather than any but token consideration of how people naturally learn. The experience of schooling throughout their childhood has usually taught students not only what to expect in practical terms, but also created a emotional mind-set towards the learning environment, for better or for worse. The last thing many people want to feel is that "I have to learn this...". They would rather feel they were doing something, and "learning as I go along". But the former message is the one which is received most strongly.
Source: ATHERTON J S (2003) Doceo: Against formal education [On-line] UK: Available: http://www.doceo.co.uk/heterodoxy/education.htm Accessed: 18 September 2006 |
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Moral Conclusion
For the moment Rosenthal will venture only one conclusion of a prescriptive nature from his decades of research: "Superb teachers can teach the "unteachable"; we know that. So, what I think this research shows is that there's a moral obligation for a teacher: if the teacher knows that certain students can't learn, that teacher should get out of that classroom." |
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Last update: 2/10/06; 10:48:07 PM .
