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Degrees of misunderstanding

By James Wilkinson - posted Thursday, 20 July 2006


It is a curious fact that most discussions about undergraduate curricula focus almost exclusively on content. What seems to become easily lost in the debate is any real discussion about pedagogy. The assumption seems to be that if we can just get the content right, the teaching and learning will take care of themselves.

I could not possibly disagree more strongly.

Starting with content, we may distinguish between two traditional views of the proper undergraduate curriculum: one stressing the development of marketable skills, the other the development of broader capacities of critical thinking or character development.

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We might call the champions of the former the specialists, and those defending the latter the generalists. Specialist education is advocated on the grounds of practicality, as determined by the marketplace, in that it fits graduates for immediate employment. From the point of view of society or the marketplace, the resources invested in such a degree are justified by its utility to the nation’s economy.

Those in the opposite camp feel that non-specialist education is good for something that extends beyond, or above, a purely professional degree on various grounds - ethical, aesthetic, and political - that are harder to define.

The state of knowledge today is constantly changing, especially in the areas of science and technology. Disciplinary boundaries themselves reflect human convention rather than natural necessity. They, too, are currently shifting to accommodate new academic alliances in efforts to understand complex systems such as the brain or global warming.

Thus early specialisation results in learning that will soon have to be unlearned; it also robs students of an opportunity to stretch their imaginations in order to empathise and interact with other humans whose academic training differs from their own.

But the same burgeoning of fields and increasing specialisation that makes specialised curricula problematic on an undergraduate level also creates a dilemma for the generalist. Which courses should they choose among the hundreds on offer? Are some better suited to preparing students for future specialised study than others?

What good is undergraduate education?

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In the short term, an undergraduate education that trains students in a particular line of work can be defended as long as the training involves sufficient hands-on practice. But such training has an increasingly brief shelf life, and is perhaps better left to business or industry once the graduate has been hired.

Long-term, a generalist undergraduate education provides a more flexible and, ultimately, more practical type of learning. Within the framework of a moderate generalist education, it does not matter nearly as much what subject matter our undergraduates study as it does how they study it.

I believe that the best way to do this is through supervised research projects, where students go out on their own and ask questions of the world around them, the exhibits in university museums, the texts in libraries or on line, and then test their answers against the opinion and scrutiny of faculty and fellow students.

One of the most significant extensions of our knowledge over the past 30 years is our understanding of how students learn. This has increased the power of the pedagogical tools at our disposal while simultaneously revealing a far greater challenge to be met with their help than we had previously acknowledged.

Creating knowledge is often cited as a key university priority. Where is this knowledge created? The standard answer is, in laboratories and research institutes: its success crowned with peer review publications and, for a fortunate few, the Nobel Prize. That is all true. Yet it is only half or even less than half the story.

Knowledge is also created every time a student grasps an existing idea or a concept, however many others may have already reached that same point of understanding. For such knowledge is created within that one particular student for the first time, since he or she has had to assemble understanding on his or her own out of the materials made available by teachers, fellow students, or personal experience.

When we think of learning, we may think of students’ heads as empty rooms, ready to be furnished by the faculty. But it would be far more accurate to say that it is the students who must build their own furniture, perhaps with ready-made parts, à la Ikea.

Moreover, to push this analogy a bit farther, the rooms to be furnished at university are not empty but are already full and overfull, often crammed with very shoddy furniture indeed, which has to be carted off to the tip before refurnishing can begin.

Let me illustrate what we might call the “problem of prior knowledge” with an example drawn from my own university.

In 1982, a film crew hired by the staff of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics and funded by the American National Science Foundation, attended a graduation ceremony at Harvard.

At the ceremony’s conclusion they interviewed seniors, still in their academic robes, proudly holding diplomas that attested to their formal induction into the company of educated men and women, and asked them a deceptively simple question: “what causes the seasons?”

The answers are delivered with the sort of polish one would hope that a Harvard graduate could command. Yet 21 of 24, including a Harvard history professor who happened to be a parent of a graduating senior, failed to give the true reason for why it is warmer in Cambridge in July than in December.

Watching this film is an electrifying moment for anyone who believes in the importance of general education. It challenges our assumptions about how education works in a fundamental way. Viewers cannot help but be impressed with the presentation skills of these students, while lamenting how little effect their education has had on their beliefs.

Most students explain that the Earth’s orbit around the sun is an ellipse, and so in winter the Earth is farther away from the sun than in the summer. The farther away, the less heat reaches it, and hence winters in New England are colder than summers.

These Harvard students are obviously reasoning about the solar system by means of an analogy derived from their own repeated personal experience, namely that approaching a heat source makes you warmer. That is true of a stove, heat vent, or fireplace; and it would be true of the planet we live on if, indeed, the Earth’s orbit was elliptical. But it is not.

Moreover, none of these students pauses to reflect, or uses other data to check what they know about stoves and heat vents and fireplaces. Not a single one questions their assumption that climate on Earth is uniform. Not one wonders why Americans import grapes from Chile in March, or why some Australians spend Christmas at the beach.

The first and most obvious lessons to be drawn from this display of eloquent misunderstanding is that Harvard students are good at pretending to knowledge they do not possess. The second and more important is that students are not necessarily learning what they or we think they are. Just because they pass courses and get a degree does not necessarily guarantee anything except that they are good at taking examinations.

I believe that most faculties at Harvard and elsewhere are genuinely unaware of how little their students are learning. But I also suspect that at least some of them do not want to find out. They do not want to test their students’ learning in ways other than the traditional papers and written examinations for fear of what they might discover - that high grades do not necessarily signal deep understanding.

In a university community where no-one - neither the faculties nor administrators nor students - has enough time, an arrangement that makes minimal academic demands satisfies all parties. I believe this to be the fundamental problem facing the undergraduate curriculum, and that recognising how little our students are learning is the prerequisite for making changes that create an education that is actually good for something.

Choosing an appropriate content is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for getting anyone to learn anything. The sufficient condition is for it to be taught well - and I do not mean “taught well” so that students receive high marks, but that they are capable of understanding and applying what they claim to know.

Yet if we face a too frequently unacknowledged problem, the tools to remedy this situation are also at hand. These are the tools of research.

If there is one thing that the great universities of the world can do, it is engage in inquiry on a broad scale. There are sophisticated and even not-so-sophisticated procedures that would allow research universities to engage in what we might term a process of pedagogical self-examination.

At Harvard virtually no faculty pre-tests their students at the beginning of the semester; and yet without this, how can they possibly tell what the students have learned during their course. Very few experiment with different types of teaching to see which is the most effective. Even fewer try to reshape their courses to respond to deficits in student learning.

But there is a second and even more important reason to devote attention to teaching as part of a generalist undergraduate curriculum. What we are teaching is not so much about content as a process of inquiry: not French history or invertebrate biology or the poetry of William Butler Yeats, but ways of asking questions and exploring hypotheses and coming to conclusions.

These things cannot be taught in the absence of content, yet they are the skills that students will bring to an advanced degree or to careers in business and industry, much as medieval students brought skills in grammar and rhetoric and logic to the study of law, medicine, and theology.

For many students, what the university offers is a series of answers to questions they have never learned to ask, generated by a research process they have never been encouraged to understand. So if we want students to understand what we are doing, we need to introduce them to the process as well as the results of research. We need to take them into our laboratories and libraries, either directly or virtually.

The argument against showing students what is behind the scenes is that this is inefficient. Surely it makes more sense to present the conclusions of research in a succinct and orderly manner than to confuse them with blind alleys and current debates.

My counterargument is that undergraduate education is condemned by its very nature to be inefficient: efficiency is a mirage, or worse, an excuse. Students who are given the task of generating questions on their own go through a long apprenticeship and may experience frustrating failures before grasping that being puzzled is a gift rather than a sign of ignorance.

Those students who answered so confidently about the cause of the seasons were in many ways the products of a university system that privileges answers over questions, certainty over puzzlement, even when that certainty is fake and in error.

Students need an atmosphere in which they can stumble occasionally and not pay a penalty, in which they can return to a question again and again, searching for answers that get more solid with each iteration, and can even ultimately relish the messiness and inefficiency that are the handmaidens of creativity.

If the graduating Harvard seniors had not felt obliged to offer an instant answer for the benefit of the movie cameras, perhaps they might have paused to consider whether the state of Victoria has seasons identical to those in Massachusetts, or even admit what few Harvard students ever bring themselves to say: “I don’t know.”

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Article edited by Allan Sharp.
If you'd like to be a volunteer editor too, click here.

This is an edited extract from the Menzies Oration given by Professor Wilkinson at the University of Melbourne on July 11, 2006. Read the full speech



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About the Author

Professor James Wilkinson is the Director of the Derek Bok Centre for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University.

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