Some observers of the American campus might call today “The Age of the Slacker.” Higher numbers of young people than ever before attend four-year colleges, but graduation rates are low. Disengaged students seem to be everywhere: they are the ones who reject active learning, disrupt classrooms with rude behavior, and try to get the curriculum “dumbed down” by their refusal to perform to their abilities.
These disengaged students seem to care little for their education, other than to accumulate enough paper credits to receive a diploma that will permit them to gain better employment. The reasons are myriad: low expectations and a focus on self-esteem in K-12, technological distractions, and so on. And many university officials avoid dealing with them, in order to maintain high enrollments.
The Pope Center recently held a round-table conference titled “Making the Most of the Undergraduate Years,” featuring top academics and higher education critics from around the country. Three sub-topics were discussed: Incentives for Excellence in Teaching, College Athletics, and The Problem of Disengaged Students.
The following is a summary of the discussion on Disengaged Students. The topic was introduced by Paul Trout, an English professor from Montana State University, and David Mulroy, a classicist from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, who described the methods they employ to break through the wall of indifference imposed by today’s students. Both men have many years of experience teaching literature classes at mid-sized state universities without selective admissions policies—the kind of institutions most likely to have a high percentage of disengaged students.
Mulroy and Trout are polar opposites in many ways—personality and teaching philosophies included. One participant, Murray Sperber, a former professor of English and American studies at Indiana University, summed up their differences concisely: “you have to teach according to your personality.” In spite of their differences, they still use some of the same methods to gain the attention of the slackers in their midst.
Trout described his function as teaching “unglamorous topics” such as composition to “recalcitrant students.” He suggested that many of the students who take his classes are truly resistant to learning—they only seek credits in exchange for a bare minimum of effort. Many regard the campus as a resort or amusement park for their entertainment; others regard subjects outside their intended major with disdain. Some students regard rules and standards as negotiable or irrelevant. And they wield their student evaluations of instructors as a weapon, causing many professors to pander to student desires for low workloads and standards.
Administrations are also a problem, Trout said. They tend to focus on enrollment and money, and they are therefore “hostile to any changes that might be discomfiting to the students,” even if the change improves education.
In such an environment, Trout favors a strict, tough-love approach. He keeps students’ “noses to the grindstone” through frequent quizzes and assignments. He has a particular liking for writing assignments that force students to analyze text. “I have a workload that not all students can handle,” he said. “You have to let them know they’re failing.”
Some other methods he uses to shake students out of their academic lethargy are: taking regular attendance, penalizing improper or disengaged behavior, encouraging self-reliance, limiting extra-credit opportunities so that students take all assignments seriously, and encouraging small group discussions to stimulate engagement.
He said that when students suggest that they’re in charge since they pay for the class, he reminds them that the state is subsidizing most of the costs, and that he is therefore in charge.
At the start of course each he hands out a page of comments by former students to let them know what’s ahead in the coming months. These comments include warnings such as “He really means it!” and “You have to read the stuff!”
Trout doesn’t expect students to cultivate a love of literature in his classes (although he would prefer that they did). “I would rather that they develop cognitive skills… that they write better and think better.”
Mulroy on the other hand, takes a gentler approach, one more like that of a kindly, nurturing grandfather than a tough drill sergeant. He said his seminal teaching experience was as a graduate student at St. John’s University in Sante Fe, New Mexico. His classes consisted of student-centered or Socratic discussions of the great texts, and he found them to be a tremendous intellectual experience, filling him with a passion for the classics.
Once he arrived at UW-Milwaukee, however, he encountered a late twentieth-century reality: student indifference to the subject matter. “The majority of students just wanted the credit…They didn’t do the reading, or they just skimmed it.”
The deep, passionate discussions about classic texts that he hoped for turned out to be a series of one-word answers to his questions “They gave every appearance of not wanting to learn,” he said. “They seemed sullen and hostile and uninterested.”
Within time, he also discovered one solution very similar to Trout’s system of engagement—lots of short quizzes. “Students do want to learn,” he observed. “You just have to give them a reason to do so.”
He also discovered a key to unlocking their intellectual curiosity: “As I tailored my assignments and classes more and more to their actual skill levels and abilities, that appearance went away. You have to get past their wall of defensiveness if they think you’re going to demand too much of them.”
Mulroy said he felt that the lengthy reading assignments actually inhibited learning. To complete the assignments in time for class, students tended to read in “fast forward,” with little comprehension of the material discussed. In order to “recreate a situation where students get pleasure from humanistic studies,” Mulroy found he had to back off and get them to read shorter excerpts, but to read the excerpts deeply. He said this approach increased students’ engagement for all but the most challenging texts.
Mulroy also disagreed with Trout about “whether to get them to love literature. To me, that’s the essential point.”
(Perhaps, in the best of all possible worlds, students would take both professors’ classes—Trout to get them up to speed academically, and Mulroy to introduce them to the contemplative life.)
The question of whether to encourage learning by having students “push to the point of failure,” as Bill Allen, a political scientist at Michigan State University called it, drew considerable debate. Dirk Mateer, a specialist in teaching large economics classes at Penn State University, said that he has discovered that if he backs off from high expectations and covers less material in class, he can cover it better.
David Nelson, the senior vice president for academic administration at Southeast Baptist College, described an informal experiment he conducted over a five-year period. For “lower-level courses,” by “lowering reading assignments close to 40 percent, I found that student learning increased proportionately…I think that I was assigning too much for them to assimilate it.” He then offered a caveat to that conclusion: “That changes for upper level courses.”
On the other hand, Stephanie Crofton, an economics professor at High Point University, made a contrasting observation. She teaches a course in free enterprise sponsored by BB&T Bank, in which students must not only read selections from Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, and Milton Friedman, but the one-thousand-plus-page novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. What she discovered is that “this class, with the most reading, does the most reading,” and “the classes where I have the fewest reading assignments complain the most and do the least reading as a percentage of the assignments.”
“It’s almost like, once that bar has been raised, they live up to it and will meet the challenge,” Crofton surmised.
Bob Martin, an emeritus economics professor at Centre College in Kentucky, sided with Crofton. In thirty years of teaching, he said he found that “classes tend to rise or fall according to your expectations of that class…At least, in economics, it’s not so much the length of the reading list but the density of the material—how much algebra was in it, how much calculus was in it, how much abstract reasoning and modeling.” He said he teaches “to the upper half of the class and try to make everybody reach…and then make special efforts with those that I knew were struggling individually.” He added that this methodology “seemed to work—I always got very good teaching evaluations.”
He recalled one student’s evaluation: “This class is so hard it’s impossible for the average student to get an ‘A’.” With a laugh, he added, “I always felt really good about that. To me, that sounded just about right.”
Harry Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College who teaches computer science, brought up another problem: while many individual teachers are personally motivated to try to break through the barriers of disengagement, the system as a whole seems to discourage the attempt.
This sentiment was echoed by Roger Meiners, a professor of economics and law at the University of Texas at Arlington. He said that there’s “a tremendous disconnect between the average student and quality teaching.” There are no rewards for the professor to “extend” him or herself beyond what students expect—“the rewards are strictly personal; you know you’re doing the right thing.”
Allen said that the act of teaching is the formation of a relationship, “with the knowledge, in advance,” that not every attempt to teach is going to “result in learning.” “Our role is to make certain that the failure is not our responsibility,” he concluded.
Meiners provided a “bit of evidence that there’s not much learning going on.” Nationwide, only about 20 percent of students enrolled in classes actually buy the assigned textbooks. “Some of the others share, but most of them find ‘I can get away without buying the book or even looking at it.’” He said a “reasonably diligent” student can “schlep through and probably get a B.”
He added that instructors are increasingly using pre-packaged lecture notes and tests provided by the textbook publishers, and are putting tests online—“the machine grades them and spits them out—that’s becoming the dominant model, and the students know how to game that system.”
Attempts to measure teaching, or the lack of them, drew fire from several panelists. Allen indicated that simplistic attempts to quantify successful teaching fell short of the mark. “I don’t get good teaching evaluations,” he said. “But I’m one year shy of forty in this business, and I still correspond with someone who studied with me for every one of those years. To me, that says I did what I had to do.”
Martin said he had never worked for an institution that was “deadly serious about measuring good teaching.” The reason for this, he explained, “is the median voter problem—[in which] the median faculty voter has nothing to gain by having superior teaching identified and rewarded.” He suggested that the technology exists to create better measurements, from “entry-and-exit testing” to “recording every lecture,” but these innovations are unlikely to be widely implemented as long as faculty can vote them down.
Peter Wood, the executive director of the National Association of Scholars, said that the complicity between the system and the disengaged students “was so institutionalized” that “nothing is going to change by improving the practice of individual teachers.” He suggested another way to encourage learning, and therefore teaching—trying to end the “disconnect between the credentialing function and the learning function.” He continued:
“The credentialing function is paramount—as long as it is the driving force behind institutional decision-making there is no basic incentive to engage in good teaching. There is only the incentive to pushing the students through, collect the tuition dollars, and hand them something that the market is more or less going to going to accept as proof that they at least have the capacity to sit through four boring years.”
What Wood suggested was a new credential that “sits on top of a college degree.” He said that students would still get their degree upon graduation, but they would also have the option to sit for a test that would “prove that they actually know something.” He said he preferred a more general exam than a subject-specific CPA or bar exam that would prove a student’s ability to read closely, “understand a rhetorical argument,” write and speak well.