Archive for June, 2005

640. BALANCING UNDERTEACHING AND OVERTEACHING

Thursday, June 30th, 2005

Folks:

The posting below looks at how to achieve the right balance between underteaching and overteaching in five critical areas. It is by Robert K. Noyd, Director of Faculty Development U.S. Air Force Academy and is number 28 in a series of selected excerpts from the National Teaching and Learning Forum newsletter reproduced here as part of our “Shared Mission Partnership.” NT&LF has a wealth of information on all aspects of teaching and learning. If you are not already a subscriber, you can check it out at [http://www.ntlf.com/] The on-line edition of the Forum–like the printed version – offers subscribers insight from colleagues eager to share new ways of helping students reach the highest levels of learning. National Teaching and Learning Forum Newsletter, Volume 14, Number 3, © Copyright 1996-2005. Published by James Rhem & Associates, Inc. (ISSN 1057-2880) All rights reserved worldwide. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Lessons Learned in the Assessment School of Hard Knocks

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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APPLYING ARISTOTLE’S GOLDEN MEAN TO THE CLASSROOM:
BALANCING UNDERTEACHING AND OVERTEACHING

Robert K. Noyd, Director of Faculty Development U.S. Air Force Academy

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that moral virtue and the right course of action is a “golden” mean, (aurea mediocritas) between two extremes, one involving excess and the other deficiency. The method Aristotle used to pinpoint the mean, or the virtue, was to first identify the two extremes. “Courage is a mean between cowardice and recklessness, generosity is a mean between wastefulness and stinginess.” Aristotle added that decisions of moral virtue are situational and are made within a specific context. For example, under one set of conditions running into enemy fire may be considered courageous, whereas in a different situation it may be considered reckless.

This Aristotelian perspective was brought to my attention by a colleague from our Philosophy Department in a conversation where I felt that I was more invested in my student’s achievement than they were. There seemed to be no limit to what I would do to help my students-I provided handouts that encapsulated the readings, test preparation hints, learning strategies, and lesson objectives. It seemed the pendulum had swung all the way in my teacher-centered classroom-all the way to an extreme of overteaching. From that point on I realized that I needed a framework to make teaching decisions and determine the right course of action for my teaching practice. What follows outlines my quest to find the golden mean where I strike the right balance between doing too little for my students, or underteaching, and doing too much for them, or overteaching.

How do I strike a balance? How do I decide the best course of action that promotes student learning as well as reinforces desirable student behaviors? How do I find the golden mean in a given teaching situation? Using an Aristotelian approach, I identify both extremes and then use the following question to determine the context: Am I giving the right student the right amount of assistance, at the right time, for the right reason, and in the right manner?

Let’s examine this five-part question. Because they’re ready at hand as it were, I’ll use examples from my own time in the classroom and the insights that time has brought me.

1. The right student

Knowing your responsibilities and those of your students in the teaching-learning process is the gateway criterion. If you don’t know your students and the efforts they truly bring to the process, you cannot determine the right type, amount, time, or reason to give assistance. (How to get to know who your students are is whole different matter, but you have to know them. They can’t be generic students to you or you cannot make wise-that is to say, contextually informed-teaching decisions about them.)

Underteaching is characterized by making students responsible for almost all of the learning process. The teacher’s investment in the learning outcomes is low and may communicate to students that the course is a “weed out” course and students are on their own.

Overteaching occurs when instructors shoulder too large a share of the teaching-learning process; that is, overteachers take on numerous responsibilities for learning that properly belong with the student. It is important for instructors to know who’s responsible for what in the classroom. Depending on the context, over_teaching may take the form of a last-minute review session or providing many pre-exam questions.

2. The right amount

Teachers, by nature, are generous and giving of their time, their expertise, and their emotions in an effort to help students. This fact makes many outstanding instructors prone to doing too much, rather than doing too little. We all know that our students may be at different developmental stages in terms of maturity, readiness to learn, expectations, and intellectual capabilities. Thus the appropriate amount of assistance you provide will differ among your students. The extremes here are marked by not understanding or assessing students’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Large, heterogeneous classes are the most challenging.

The amount of support you provide also depends on the degree of struggle you want _students to experience. It is important to teach and value persistence because not all learning comes easily; a lot of it requires working hard.

Underteaching is characterized by not giving students enough guidance so that they can solve a problem or complete an assignment on their own. In terms of challenge and support, underteaching emphasizes the “challenge” without the appropriate amount of “support.” The result is frustrated students who may give up.

Overteaching emphasizes the “support” over the “challenge.” In several cases, I have eliminated or reduced meaningful learning activities because in my context they represented overteaching. For example, in upper level courses I have sometimes given my students complete sets of notes and PowerPoint slides because I thought they would learn more and achieve better grades if I gave them this level of support and encouragement. But by doing too much, I created dependent students who relied on me to provide the “right answer.”

3. At the right time

This part of the question refers to the timing of assistance and communication. Do students seek help the night before the exam or the paper deadline? How do we promote planning ahead as a student behavior and discourage cramming for exams? How do we teach students to organize their time to optimize their performance?

Underteaching occurs when I have not given enough guidance on project planning and have left it all to the student-in other words, when I’ve minimized my role in the process.

Overteaching occurs when I have front-loaded information when students don’t need to know it and then kept reminding them along the way. This created students who depended on me to constantly remind them of a pending deadline.

4. For the right reason

An instructor’s motivation for providing students with an amount and type of assistance at a particular time is an important consideration because it makes teaching decisions purposeful and intentional. The reason is linked to the goal. What is the motivation for reviewing for an exam? Is it to boost the exam average to meet the expectations of the class, or is it to be more efficient in giving extra help to a large class? What motivates an instructor to post notes and PowerPoint slides for students?

Underteaching is characterized when I have not had a stake in the learning success of my students. To be charitable, underteaching can occur when one places so much value on the process that (to the students) the product just doesn’t matter.

Overteaching occurs when I closely link my teaching success to my students’ achievement. In many courses, students measure their success by the grade they earn instead of the amount they have learned or the progress they have made. When I have linked my success to class grade averages, I have been rewarded for doing more for my students and overteaching in other areas of the classroom. Their inflated grades gave me an ego boost, but it wasn’t clear they actually learned more. Over_teachers overemphasize product over process. Moreover, when the student product has not been successful, I have overtaught (or poorly taught) in another way. I have protected or tried to soften my students’ feelings of frustration, anxiety and disappointment-the genuine and appropriate feelings that often go with learning new and difficult material. In short, I robbed them of something they needed to know about the geography of learning.

5. In the right manner

This criterion refers to the process of instructional delivery, whether it is lecture, multimedia, group learning, or computer-based systems. The teaching tools you use depend on the students’ learning styles and preferences and contribute to the developmental appropriateness of the teaching behavior.

Underteaching occurs when one uses techniques that don’t properly support students’ learning styles. For example, I have lectured exclusively in a verbal style when the students in the class needed more support through diagrams and visual depictions of the concepts. In terms of lecture, I underteach when I have talked “over the heads” of my students, leaving them inattentive and unengaged in the material. I have assumed that students can fill in the gaps between concepts because I, the expert, can. In this case I emphasized the “expert” when my students were “novices.”

Overteaching occurs when I emphasize the “novice” in the expert-novice continuum. I elaborate novice concepts, unaware that the concepts are intuitive and familiar to students. Another example: giving students lower-level recall questions that they can easily handle, keeping the course “light-weight,” or when I tell them the complete story, fill in all the gaps, weaving a highly knit fabric, and therefore leave little for their imaginations. I have learned that an important device in telling a good story is to leave something for the audience to figure out and not explicitly tell them everything. This way they stay involved with the storyline and plot.

This round robin of questioning with a set of contextual perspectives in mind, this looking for a golden mean between doing too much and doing too little has helped me adjust my teaching to the students enrolled in my classes; but, to return to the beginning, you have to have a good idea who those students are before this dialectic becomes very useful. As the renowned educator David Ausubel once said, “a person’s existing cognitive structure is the most important factor governing whether new material will be meaningful and how well it can be acquired and retained.” Thus, I’m a great believer in pre-testing and in using things like the “knowledge inventory” questionnaire already discussed in the pages of the Forum (V13N1, p. 8_11).

An Aristotelian approach can be applied to making teaching decisions. The right course of action does lie along a continuum, whether it is in the expert-novice, process-product, or challenge-support realms. The right decision depends on the specific teaching-learning situation. For me, teaching is a constant attempt to determine the right course of action within this spectrum, to find the golden mean that promotes, rather than inhibits, the learning and personal growth of my students into independent, confident adults who meet our educational outcomes.

On Knowledge Surveys see:
http://www.usafa.af.mil/dfe/educator/S01/knipp0401.htm
and
http://www.isu.edu/ctl/facultydev/KnowS_files/KnowS.htm

Contact:
Robert K. Noyd, Ph.D.
Director of Faculty Development
Professor of Biology
U.S. Air Force Academy
USAF, CO 80840
Telephone: (719) 333-2549
FAX: (719) 333-4255
Email: bob.noyd@usafa.edu

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639. TEN MYTHS THAT STUDENTS BELIEVE ABOUT COLLEGE

Tuesday, June 28th, 2005

Folks:

The posting below list ten myths that students believe about college. It is from Chapter 9, What Have We Learned, and Where Do We Go Next? by Michael W. Kirst, Andrea Venezia, and Anthony Listing Antonio in, From High School to College, Improving Opportunities for Success in Postsecondary Education by Michael W. Kirst & Andrea Venezia, Editors. Copyright © 2004 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Published by Jossey-Bass. A Wiley Imprint 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Applying Aristotle’s Golden Mean to the Classroom: Balancing Underteaching and Overteaching

Tomorrow’s Academia

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TEN MYTHS THAT STUDENTS BELIEVE ABOUT COLLEGE

Throughout the discussions with students, it became apparent that they had many misconceptions about college preparation and attending college. Table 9.2 presents ten myths that students believe about college.

Table 9.2 Ten Myths That Students Believe About College.

Common Student Beliefs (*) followed by The Truth

*I can’t afford college.

Students and parents regularly overestimate the cost of college.

*I have to be a stellar athlete or student to get financial aid.

Most students receive some form of financial aid.

*Meeting high school graduation requirements will prepare me for college.

Adequate preparation for college usually requires a more demanding curriculum than is reflected in minimum requirements for high school graduation, sometimes even if that curriculum is termed “college prep.”

*Getting into college is the hardest part.

For the majority of students, the hardest part is completing a degree.

*Community colleges don’t have academic standards.

Students must take placement tests at community colleges in order to qualify for college-level work.

*It’s better to take easier classes in high school and get better grades.

One of the best predictors of college success is taking rigorous high school classes. Getting good grades in lower-level classes will not prepare students for college-level work.

*My senior year in high school doesn’t matter.

The classes students take in senior year will often determine the classes they are able to take in college and how well prepared they are for those classes.

*I don’t have to worry about my grades, or the kind of classes I take, until my sophomore year.

Many colleges look at sophomore year grades, and in order to enroll in college-level courses, students need to prepare well for college. This means taking a well-thought-out series of courses starting no later than the ninth grade.

*I can’t start thinking about financial aid until I know where I’m going to college.

Students need to file a federal form for aid prior to when most colleges send out their acceptance letters. This applies to students who attend community colleges, too, even though they can apply and enroll in the fall of the year they wish to attend.

*I can take whatever classes I want when I get to college.

Most colleges and universities require entering students to take placement exams in core subject areas. Those tests will determine the classes students can take.

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638. WHO HAS THE LOWEST PRICES?

Thursday, June 23rd, 2005

Folks:

The posting below, by Lloyd Bond, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation, looks at the difficulty in measuring certain education outcomes. It is #15 in the monthly series called Carnegie Foundation Perspectives. These short commentaries exploring various educational issues are produced by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching . The Foundation invites your response at: CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org. Reprinted with permission

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Ten Myths That Students Believe About College.

Tomorrow’s Academia

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WHO HAS THE LOWEST PRICES?

March 2005
By Lloyd Bond

If one wished to know what knowledge or skill Johnny has acquired over the course of a semester, it would seem a straightforward matter to assess what Johnny knew at the beginning of the semester and reassess him with the same or equivalent instrument at the end of the semester. It may come as a surprise to many that measurement specialists have long advised against this eminently sensible idea. Psychometricians don’t like “change” or “difference” scores in statistical analyses because, among other things, they tend to have lower reliability than the original measures themselves. Their objection to change scores is embodied in the very title of a famous paper by Cronbach and Furby, “How should we measure change, or should we?”

Fortunately, many educators have chosen to take this advice with a grain of salt. And well they should. The logic underlying the difference between what Johnny knew before instruction and what he knows after instruction is simply too compelling to be trumped by statistical niceties.

The power of change scores to reveal important aspects of teaching and learning is best illustrated by example. I was fortunate to have had a remarkable teacher for my first statistics class. He began the class by assigning us to teams of three each. We were given a week to answer a simple question, and we had to describe and justify the things we did to arrive at an answer. The question was, “Among the three local grocery stores, Kroger, A & P, and Hi-Lo, who has the lowest prices?” How do novice statistics students go about answering such a question? My team was typical. We began in a haphazard and utterly frustrating way, proposing one inefficient strategy, then another. One member should take canned goods, another fresh fruits and vegetablesŠ. Maybe one could take aisles 1, 2, and 3, another aisles 4, 5, and 6Š. We quickly realized that no matter how we broke the task down, a census of every item in each store would take weeks. One of us had a vague notion about sampling!
, but we had no idea of how to conduct a scientific sample, let alone one weighted by purchasing patterns. We thought only of the average (arithmetic mean) price, never considering other measures of central tendency, and standard errors were not a part of our vocabulary. Nor did we consider the sampling implications of price changes from one day to the next.

Although we were initially enthusiastic about answering this simple question, by the end of the second day, we complained bitterly about the impracticality of it all. The instructor’s response was always the same, “Well, just do the best you can.”

For those of us who survived the course, the same question was assigned again toward the end of the semester. The instructor gave us minimal feedback on our responses the first time around. He simply put our reports away and they were never mentioned. Both sets of responses, along with detailed comments, were returned at the end of the semester. The difference in quality between the two sets of responses to the same question was stunning.

Our responses to the question did not figure in our final grade. Grades were awarded on the basis of other quizzes, examinations, and projects. The instructor used the results to grade his own teaching. (In retrospect, one would think that such effort expended on an activity that had no immediate grade payoff would have been resented. To my knowledge there was not a single complaint.) The instructor told me years later that that simple question, “who has the lowest prices?”, was in the back of his mind during the entire portion of the course devoted to inferential statistics. It brought a certain coherence to the way he sequenced successive ideas central to the novice student’s understanding of what is required when making statistical inferences.

In passing, it is noted that the grocery store question is a powerful example of what cognitive psychologists call “ill-structured” problems: problems that can rarely be solved quickly, that may have more than one defensible solution, that may have multiple routes to a single solution, and that may have many sub-problems that must be solved before arriving at an answer. By contrast, “well-structured” problems (e.g., solve for x in the equation 3x + 2 = 17) have a unique answer, can usually be solved quickly, and have a very limited number of ways to a solution. The grocery store question also has enormous “pulling power.” It evokes a variety of different answers and different approaches to the answers, and it provides deep insight into students’ thinking, into how they organize what they know into a coherent argument.

For years I have argued that measurement and assessment should have a more prominent place in teacher education curricula. I still believe that. But beyond a good knowledge of the essentials, teachers need not be assessment experts. Nor need they fret over measurement specialists’ admonitions about measuring change. Rather, teachers could spend their time more productively by concentrating on what they want their students to know and be able to do at the end of the year. Often this implies something as simple as asking the right question of their own teaching.

………………………………………………………………………………………..

Lloyd Bond, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation, has extensive experience in the construction, validation, and scoring of performance measures of teaching. He was a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the University of Pittsburgh before joining Carnegie.

Carnegie Perspectives is a series of commentaries that explore different ways to think about educational issues. These pieces are presented with the hope that they contribute to the conversation. You can respond directly to the author at CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org or you can join a public discussion at Carnegie Conversations.

Join the Carnegie Perspectives email list by sending an email to CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org with “Subscribe” as the subject line.

© 1997-2005 The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 51 Vista Lane, Stanford, CA 94305, 650-566-5100

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637. THE GLOBALIZATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION

Tuesday, June 21st, 2005

Folks:

The posting below addresses some interesting factors influencing movement toward the globalization of higher education. It is from Chapter Two: The New Competition, in The Future of Higher Education: Rhetoric, Reality, and the Risks of the Market by Frank Newman, Lara Couturier, & Jamie Scurry. Copyright © 2004 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Published by Jossey-Bass. A Wiley Imprint
989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 [www.josseybass.com].

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Who Has the Lowest Prices?

Tomorrow’s Academia

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THE GLOBALIZATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION

Recently a new phenomenon has emerged: the globalization of higher education (see, for example, Green, Eckel, and Barblan, 2002; Altbach, 2003). We mean here the emergence of global rather than international institutions. International institutions have foreign students enrolled; their domestic students often spend some time studying abroad. Similarly, faculty come from other countries to study, teach, or do research, and the home institution faculty frequently go abroad. All of these activities have become routine for the best-known universities in the United States and increasingly so for all types of institutions, including American community colleges. It is common in other countries as well. In Canada, for example, 84 percent of universities report that “internationalization” is included in their institutional strategies (Green, Eckel, and Barblan, 2002). The British have stepped up their efforts at attracting more international students, with an increase of almos!
t 20 percent in 2002 compared to 2001, becoming a formidable rival to the United States. The number of American students accepted into undergraduate programs in Britain rose by 17 percent in 2002 (Galbraith, 2003).

Global institutions, on the other hand, conduct operations (educate students, do research, generate revenue) in multiple countries. This may be accomplished by establishing campuses (for instance, Monash University in Malaysia and South Africa), by creating learning centers (the British Open University throughout Europe and in more than thirty non-European Union countries), of forming alliances with local institutions (as with the Singapore-MIT Alliance; “Global Development,” 2003). Any virtual (online) program is by its nature global, and a number of global online consortia are popping up as well (such as Cardean University and Universitas 21). Technology makes content delivery increasingly a global enterprise. What is appearing more and more are mixtures-programs that use intense short trips to the home university campus or to nearby learning centers to supplement a base of virtual course work. Several business schools have begun to offer executive education this way !
(Duke University, for example). Australian universities with strong financial support from their government are using all of these methods, in one way or another, to create a higher education presence across Asia that generates a sizable balance of trade.

American academics tend to believe the globalization of higher education presents only opportunity, not risk. To date, the total enrollment in global academic programs is still small. Far more programs are under discussion than under way. What is important to recognize is that the barriers to global higher education enterprises are falling, and the trend is up. Beyond this, the conditions favoring more intense competition from the universities of other countries are growing.

In an important but generally overlooked development, the World Trade Organization (WTO) is now proposing to regulate higher education as part of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), as it would any other form of trade-by removing barriers to its traffic. The goal of GATS is gradual liberalization of the trade in services, which is likely to have a broad and troubling impact on the nature of higher education by affecting such issues as subsidization of higher education, quality assurance, financial aid for certain students, and the ability to gear teaching and research to local culture and needs (GATS-Fact and Fiction, 2002). The U.S. delegation has already proposed inclusion of for-profit higher education and all testing materials and services, and it has announced that it expects soon to propose inclusion of all of higher education, despite the fact that there has been almost no debate within the academy about the impact of this on higher education. This f!
orm of rapid and potentially harmful globalization is an example of how higher education is drifting into a market-oriented system without adequate debate and planning-here and abroad.

An advance look at how some aspects of globalization may affect the way higher education functions can be seen in the workings of the European Union, the one place where a great deal of planning has taken place. The development of the Common Market led to a strong interest in facilitating the movement of professionals across country borders. This has led in turn to a joint effort to increase the number of students from other Common Market countries at each EU university, with a target of 10 percent of total enrollment. To help reach this target, the European Union created a range of programs that encouraged and subsidized such “study abroad.” One of them, the Erasmus Program, uses financial aid and promotes collaboration between universities to encourage mobility of students and faculty members. Since its establishment, more than one million people have taken advantage of the opportunities it offers, with some twenty-five hundred universities from twenty-nine European co!
untries involved.

In time, it became evident to the Europeans that more than access was involved-that Europe needed to compete for the best students, many of whom head to the United States or Britain. Among other concerns, the Europeans felt they needed to reduce the confusion over different types of degrees (and the unwillingness of universities to accept each other’s degrees) and to improve the attractiveness of their universities. In 1999, in Bologna, a European Higher Education Area was formed. Among other steps, the Bologna Accord called for standardization on a three-year bachelor’s degree and a two-year master’s by 2010. (The Netherlands, Italy, and Spain have already begun implementing the change.) A new quality agency, the European Network for Quality Assurance in Higher Education, has been established to ensure standards. The Europeans also moved to teach some programs in English, which is fast becoming the international language of business. Thirty percent of universities in!
continental Europe-even some French universities-now offer programs in English, almost all of which were established since 1990 (Rocca, 2003). Recruitment, advertising, and marketing campaigns have been launched. Frans Zwarts, the rector of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, summed up this activity: “Traditionally, European educational systems focused on accessibility. Now they are realizing that they have to compete for top talent on a global level” (Riding, 2003). The EU has also established a substantial fund (about $20 billion yearly) for the support of European research (a sum roughly comparable to the U.S. investment in university research). In meeting after meeting, the Futures Project has heard the determination of European leaders, political and academic, to compete with the United States. Unnoticed by most American academics, this country has been surpassed on a number of educational measures. OECD comparisons rank the United States tenth for !
high school graduation, thirteenth for entry rate to a four-year (bacc
alaureate) education, and tenth for entry to a two-year (associate’s) education (Mortenson, 2003).

Given the right circumstances, societies can gain from the entry of global higher education institutions are set in their ways and outmoded in their approach, new institutions are bringing a breath of fresh air, pushing the older institutions to new action. In many settings, new institutions are needed to keep up with demand. The number of tertiary students worldwide doubled in size in just twenty years, growing from 40.3 million students in 1975 to 80.5 million students in 1995, and the growth is continuing (Task Force on Higher Education and Society, 2000). Where existing access and funding is limited, new institutions from abroad are expanding opportunity. New institutions may also bring needed diversity to the type of experience available to students. For example, programs taught in English are permitting students broad access to the global workplace and the worldwide network of academia.

At the same time, there are dangers. Cross-border initiatives are subject to the vagaries of political changes, as MIT recently learned when its collaboration with India’s information technology ministry, called Media Lab Asia, fell apart after the appointment of a new minister (Rai, 2003). A foreign institution may be insensitive to the local culture and students’ needs. Criticism has already arisen that the quality of some overseas programs is less than that at the home campus and that universities from developed countries have not focused on local concerns in developing nations. The use of English raises for some people questions about cultural imperialism and homogenization. Developing countries would surely be ill-served if universities from the outside replaced local universities rather than supplementing them.

There are other profound changes in progress that deserve greater attention. One is the aggressive growth of for-profit global institutions. For example, the parent corporation of the University of Phoenix has begun operations in Brazil, Mexico, India, and the Netherlands and is eyeing several other countries (Jorge Klor de Alva, personal communication, Mar. 2004). Sylvan Learning has been acquiring small private universities (the eighth was just announced) around the world (Blumenstyk, 2003). The goal is to build a worldwide network that shares curricular materials and other resources. If, over the next decade, a global higher education sector led by for-profit institutions emerges, what are the concerns for the public purposes of higher education?

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636. THE CHALLENGES OF TEACHING WITH OTHERS

Thursday, June 16th, 2005

Folks:

The posting below looks at some of the challenges present when two or more faculty work in a team to develop and teach a course. It is from Chapter Four, Pedagogy That Builds Community by Jodi Levine Laufgraben and Daniel Tompkins in, Sustaining and Improving Learning Communities by Jody Levine Laufgraben, Nancy S. Shapiro and Associates. Published by Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741. [www.josseybass.com] Copyright © 2004 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: The Globalization of Higher Education

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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THE CHALLENGES OF TEACHING WITH OTHERS

The pedagogical approaches described in this chapter may involve a different type of teaching for some faculty members. As described by Jean MacGregor (2000), in learning communities, teams of individuals need to sail a single vessel. “For a sustained period of time-a quarter or a semester or even a year-teaching teams commit themselves to a course or program with a common group of students. Sailing together requires teamwork, collaborative skills, and collective responsibility that are less familiar to those of us in the habit of sailing solo” (http://learningcommons.evergreen.edu/pdf/ spring2000b.pdf, p. 1).

Teaching in a learning community requires faculty members to change how they teach. “The first step in interdisciplinary collaboration, whether in teaching or research, is accepting the different practices and beliefs of others” (Cornwell and Stoddard, 2001, p. 162). Teaching is no longer an isolated activity but rather a community commitment. By design, learning communities promote transformations. In addition to transforming courses to programs and disciplinary perspectives to interdisciplinary contexts, good pedagogy in learning communities requires moving from teaching alone to teaching with others. Team teaching requires team building, collaborative skills, and collective responsibility.

Team Building and Teamwork

Faculty development activities should include discussion and activities that promote positive teamwork. The biggest challenge is time-finding time to bring already busy people together to function as a team. Sustaining teamwork is also a challenge. Commitments to the learning community are challenged when other realities set in. “Our individual units and home departments continuously reel us back in. our competitive and individualistic training has often not prepared us for the public nature and give-and-take of collaborative teaching” (MacGregor, 2000, p. 2). Some strategies for promoting teamwork across learning communities teaching teams include

* Clearly articulate expectations for the teaching team.
* Recognize and reward planning efforts (planning lunches for teachers, stipends for summer planning time, professional development funds for travel to conferences).
* Be flexible when scheduling team planning events (a one-shot deal workshop only works if all members of a team can be present). Set aside several dates and times for planning sessions and require teaching teams to participate as a group.
* Provide examples of successful teamwork in learning communities.
* Avoid (whenever possible) changes in teaching assignments once a team has formed and started its work.
* Suggest that teaching teams set meeting schedules well in advance, particularly days and times to meet once the semester begins.
* Create or suggest space where teaching teams can meet. Space that is away from individual offices or departments may allow for more focused, less interrupted team planning time.

Collaborative Skills

In addition to teamwork, teaching in a learning community requires important social skills, including trust, mutual understanding, communication, and conflict management. Traditionally, teaching is a private activity; in learning communities, it is public. Individuals need to share information about their courses and teaching with others in their program or community. A supportive context for discussion teaching and providing feedback is important to collaboration. Each team member must take care and responsibility for building and respecting this context.

Collective Responsibility

The success of the learning community depends on students’ and teachers’ experiences across the community and not just in one or the other course. From presemester planning to reinforcement of the curricular theme to assessing student learning, teaching in learning communities is a collective responsibility. At the program level, faculty development and teacher materials should outline the expectations for teaching teams; individual teaching teams should then reach consensus on shared responsibilities for community planning, assignments, class activities, assessment, and so on.

Faculty in learning communities share responsibility for becoming a teaching team. Problems arise when a teaching teams fails to gel. This may happen for a variety of reasons: varied levels of interest in the goals and expectations for learning communities, different teaching and learning styles, conflicting priorities, competing schedules. Level of commitment is another potential problem. After strong initial interst, one or some members of a teaching team may fail to carry their load or may stop attending planning meetings. Once the semester gets under way, faculty are busy with course management, department obligations, and off-campus commitments. “The best-laid plansŠ” becomes a reality, and the full potential for the learning community may not be realized. Program leadership plays an important role in helping teaching teams come together and stay on task. Schedule opportunities for all learning community faculty to come together to share successes and frustratio!
ns, be a facilitator to help teams stay focused and functioning, acknowledge up front that problems arise, and offer steps that other teaching teams took to move beyond barriers and function as a team.

Teachers in learning communities also have a collective responsibility to articulate the community or program theme. Do not assume that students are as aware of the curricular theme as you believe. Constant references to the theme will reinforce expectations for deeper learning and curricular integration. Communicate often with teaching partners. Share “hits” as well as “misses” in terms of instructional goals. Talk about student performance and ways to improve the community. Ask, How are we doing as a community of teachers? For faculty, regardless of the model of learning community, satisfaction with the learning communities teaching experience often depends on the shared responsibility for the curriculum, teaching, and learning. According to one experienced learning communities teacher: “For me, the satisfaction comes from the degree of integration and collaboration, no matter which of the two models I’m teaching in” (L. Dunlap, personal communication, September 20!
02).

In addition to the interpersonal challenges, those teaching in learning communities may encounter structural barriers to forming and participating on teaching teams. Systems for calculating workloads, release time, and rewards may not recognize or properly value team teaching. Conflicts may arise between the goals for learning communities and department objectives or institutional priorities. A department may discourage junior faculty members from teaching in learning communities to allow professors on the tenure track time for research and scholarship. A college or university may consider teaching a one-credit seminar linked to a learning community as voluntary overload. However, when teachers come together to teach in learning communities and the program steadily expands across campus, there is a tremendous potential for change. Additional challenges, strategies, and benefits specific to teaching in the different models of learning communities are described in the next section.

Posted in Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning | No Comments »

635. THE VIRTUAL STUDENT – CULTURAL ISSUES

Tuesday, June 14th, 2005

Folks:

The posting below looks at ways to take into consideration variations in the cultural backgrounds of students when designing and presenting material in online courses. It is from Chapter Four: Gender, Culture, Lifestyle, and Geography in, The Virtual Student: A Profile and Guide to Working with Online Learners by Rena M. Palloff & Keith Pratt. Published by Jossey-Bass. A Wiley Imprint – 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 [www.josseybass.com]. Copyright © 2003 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: The Challenges of Teaching With Others

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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THE VIRTUAL STUDENT – CULTURAL ISSUES

The use of the Internet in teaching and learning has increased the array of educational practices available to instructors. They can offer quality instruction to remote students, reach underserved populations, respond to the diverse learning styles o,f and paces at which, students learn, break down barriers of time and space, and give access to students of different languages and cultures (Joo, 1999). Yet, despite all this, there are cultural issues at play that can affect online classes. McLoughlin (1999) notes that technology is not neutral and that when culture and technology interact, either harmony or tension can be the result.

What are some of the cultural issues that may emerge in an online class and how can an instructor plan for and deal with them? Joo (1999) identifies a number of areas where cultural issues may come into play: content, multimedia, writing style, writing structure, and web design. In addition, the roles of the students and instructor in an online course may also raise some cultural issues. Here is a more detailed description of each of these areas:

* Content: Some content may be sensitive, in some contexts, particularly with subjects such as political science, history, and religion. An instructor may design a course that is considered politically correct in Western culture but offensive in another culture.

* Multimedia: Although graphic material can help bring some courses alive, the instructor needs to be careful when incorporating graphic material, audio, and video to be sure not to use material that reinforces cultural stereotypes.

* Writing styles: in many languages, words and grammar are used to convey different levels of politeness. Some students may be uncomfortable with informal language that students use in the lounge area of an online course or with the ways in which questions are asked and answered. In addition, submitting assignments in English may pose significant problems for non-native English speakers taking a course from an American institution; they may lack written English skills.

* Writing structures: The ways in which ideas are presented and arguments are constructed can also be concerns in some cultures. Translated texts may seem obscure or the translations may not be accurate. If the text is in English, non-native English speakers may have difficulty understanding concepts presents. They may need extra time to compose responses to discussion questions.

* Web design: Access to and reading of websites can also be problematic for non-native English speakers. For example, Arab-language speakers generally read from right to left; Hebrew is also read from right to left. These students may have the same tendency when reading material on a website.

* The role of the student and instructor. In some cultures it is considered inappropriate for students to question the instructor or the knowledge being conveyed in the course. The co-creation of knowledge and meaning in an online course, coupled with the instructor’s role as an equal player in the process, may be uncomfortable for a student from this type of culture. Conversely, a student whose culture is more communal, and where group process is valued, may feel uncomfortable in a course where independent learning is the primary mode of instruction.

How, then, can an instructor be culturally sensitive when designing an online course and avoid some of these problems and concerns? Instructors cannot be expected to become knowledgeable about the cultures of every student who is likely to take the class. However, recognizing that instructional design cannot be culturally neutral is a first step in the process of becoming more culturally competent. Henderson (1996) has identified three main approaches to dealing with cultural issues in instructional design. The first is the inclusive or perspectives paradigm. This paradigm takes into account the social, cultural, and historical perspectives of minority groups but does so without challenging the dominant culture; thus, it pays lip service to cultural sensitivity. The second paradigm is the inverted curriculum paradigm, in which the instructor makes a greater attempt to design components of modules of the course from the minority’s perspective. This paradigm does a bett!
er job of providing learners with an educationally valid experience from a cultural perspective, but because the focus is on only one module or component of the course, it provides an incomplete or potentially inaccurate view. The third paradigm is the culturally unidimensional paradigm, in which the instructor makes no attempt to include cultural difference at all and assumes that the worldviews and educational experiences of all learners are the same.

Clearly, Henderson believes that each paradigm comes up short; none is truly culturally sensitive. Thus, he promotes what he calls an eclectic paradigm, which entails designing learning experiences that are flexible and allow students to interact with materials that reflect multiple cultural values and perspectives. McLoughlin (1999) applies this notion to the online classroom by stating that if instructors are able to recognize the capability of students to construct their own knowledge and apply prior experience and their own culturally preferred ways of knowing to the task, then it is likely that a more culturally sensitive online classroom will be created.

The instructor’s job, then, in responding to the cultural needs of the virtual student is to seek out, to whatever degree possible, materials that represent more than one cultural viewpoint. When this is not possible, the instructor should encourage students to bring such resources to the online group. Creating flexible assignments and task completion structures can also assist with this process. Asking students to share from their cultural perspectives not only helps students but also increases the cultural sensitivity of the group. Recognizing the different ways in which students might respond to instructional techniques online and being sensitive to potential cultural barriers and obstacles is yet another means by which the online classroom can become more culturally sensitive.

Posted in Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning | 3 Comments »

634. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS, INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY AND THE FREEDOM OF KNOWLEDGE

Thursday, June 9th, 2005

Folks:

The posting below considers some important matters relating to intellectual property and copyright issues of relevance to online postings in academia. It is a report of a study of a European project on the filtering of online knowledge entitled FILTER. [See WWW.FILTERNETWORK.ORG]. The copyright remains with the editors, Dr Sylvia van de Bunt-Kokhuis and Kalin Atanassov Anev and reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: The Virtual Student – Cultural Issues

Tomorrow’s Research

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INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS, INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY
AND THE FREEDOM OF KNOWLEDGE

Dr Sylvia van de Bunt-Kokhuis
Assistant professor Department of Management and Organisation
Faculty of Economics and Business Administration
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
sbunt@feweb.vu.nl

Kalin Atanassov Anev
Research assistant
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Kaanev@yahoo.com

Introduction

In modern societies the sharing of knowledge in the public domain is challenged by the Internet and the protection of knowledge through Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). IPR is a core issue at the virtual workplace of universities. IPR is intertwined with the issue of easy online access. Not only, easy online access to valuable knowledge has become a precondition for economic success. Intellectual property protection at the virtual workplace also became a key factor for academic success. The following analysis identifies some of the IPR barriers to easy, fair and affordable online knowledge access. This article originated from the European FILTER project, focused on the different filters changing, blocking and modifying the information and knowledge students are looking for. FILTER, see www.filternetwork.org with partners in 12 European countries, studies the filtering of internet content and its consequences for e-learning. Initially a conceptual framework with filter cat!
egories at six levels was developed and tested in a pilot study. Interviews were conducted with key persons in seven countries. The conceptual framework was refined and developed according to a literature review. The study revealed a lot of common problems and strategies as well as cultural differences in awareness and interpretation of IPR and content filtering online.

Keywords: Internet, filtering of knowledge, open source, copyrighted courseware, the future of intellectual property rights, online content, universities.

History of Intellectual Property

Science and intellectual property are getting very much interlinked. According to Kelty ( 2001) science remains ‘public’ in the sense of ‘not secret’. Science also enters a stage of being private intellectual property first, and public scientific research second. This development has been accompanied by a massive expansion of the actual existing intellectual property regimes to cover matters that scientists previously did not seek to protect, such as algorithms, genes, processes and tools. Noble (1998) describes the major change at the university campus over the last two decades. A systematic conversion of knowledge took place from intellectual activity into intellectual capital and, hence, intellectual property. This process took place in two phases. Firstly in the mid 1970s, the research function of the university was made a commodity. Scientific and engineering knowledge was converted into commercial products, patents and licences to be bought and sold in the market. Bala!
ncing the freedom and protection of knowledge are matters of concern to the European Commission. The objective of the European Union policy Act is to compete with Japan and the USA and to facilitate an easy application procedure for researchers. From 2005 onwards a patent will be applicable for 25 European countries for the total price of 25.000 euro. It is uncertain how many researchers will use this new procedure. Nevertheless, the current number of patent applications at universities is still relatively low. It would probably be higher if an application would still be possible after publication of the findings. Different from Europe, in the USA a researcher can apply for a patent until one year after publication of his findings.

Legal Protection of Educational Websites

What are the Intellectual Property Rights of teachers, staff and students who have authored materials that they make available for others to share via the website? According to Wells (2001) copyright can potentially be breached through the school website. He gives the example of staff and pupils producing wonderful artwork which is downloaded elsewhere and used in a publication without the authors’ permission. Alternatively a student may submit materials from another source to be published on the university website. Subsequently the university or local authority may be exposed to court action. A university therefore needs to be provided with information, control, monitoring, legal protection and insurance against such problems.

Copyrighted Courseware

Increasingly courses are transformed in courseware and are converted into commercial products to be bought and sold in the market. Universities become producers of as well as a major market for copyrighted videos, CD-ROMs, websites and courseware. Paradoxically, very little criticism is formulated on national and European policy level. On the contrary, in the European political debate the knowledge economy and the valorisation of university knowledge is encouraged (Beynum, G. van, 2002).

Content and Publisher

Over the last decades, textbook publishers have been very successful in the higher education market. In the Internet age the intensity and impact of the publisher’s involvement in higher education such as Prentice-Hall and Elsevier Reed increased rapidly. Publishers have a serious market share in the development of online content of courses. They may offer universities exclusive contracts to use (exclusively) the publisher’s online textbooks, journals or databases. In the Internet age, there should be a good balance and interaction with the producers of knowledge, the authors, teachers and students themselves about their intellectual work posted online. Otherwise, the range of available knowledge may be limited to a menu provided by the preferred publishers. Pietrykowski (2001) considers the possible control over textbook choice as a determinant of academic deskilling. He shows how the interests of cost-conscious administrators of universities and publishers may intersect. !
At the same time there is a source of conflict between the faculty members and the university administrators. Faculty members may complain because the publisher menu may lock in their online educational choices and thus the freedom of knowledge gathering. If a critical mass of faculty members adopt a certain menu provided by the publisher, this may lock in universities to resource commitments, e.g. decisions on ICT support and computer expenditures. Similar ‘lock in’ effects can be observed in the printer industry, where users are obliged to buy very expensive cartridges. Alternative and often cheaper applications are blocked due to different standards.

Patents on Software

With respect to the open source movement it is interesting to see how the operating system Linux gained market share from Microsoft. The operating system of Linux is part of the so called open source movement and is considered anarchistic by some critical voices. Linux offers products to servers, databases and mail programs. Companies and programmers can download, copy or change whatever they like. A precondition is that any change in the software is announced in the open source network. This guarantees that in the end improvements are given to the open community. Privatisation or filtering of knowledge is prevented. Linux has a good reputation due to its flexibility and user- and cost friendliness.

The whole idea of Open Source software development is extending in many areas of work.. The latest threat for Linux might come from the patent on software. In the USA it is possible to get patent on software. For example, America Online has patent on the phenomenon instant messaging, which is also used by its competitors Microsoft and Yahoo!. However, AOL did not make a court case of this matter so far. Why may strict patents on software limit the innovative power of a company or even a whole group of nations? If Tim Berners in 1989 would have patented his by that time unknown software HTML and HTTP, the world wide web would now be non-existent. However, the current trend towards patents on software seems to be irreversible. American software developers, in particular the smaller companies, encounter legal obstacles if they want to launch new innovative software on a competitive market with more than thirty thousand software patents. Innovations and free knowledge flows are !
limited through these obstacles. To overcome these obstacles Open Source is growing in popularity. This growth of popularity, however, creates threats to the largest software developers. According to Blind and Edler (2003) the negative impacts on the short run may be small, but on the long run the process of Open Source as a kind of public good, will be seriously harmed. The authors argue that it is an interdisciplinary challenge (law, economics and technology) for the future to find a proper, effective and efficient way of protection. They propose one solution: “the introduction of a reward system, under which innovators are paid for innovations directly by the government and the innovations pass immediately into public domain, since obligatory licensing may obstruct the incentives of innovators or lead to other even more destructive protection strategies.”

The Future of Intellectual Property

Spinello (2003) discusses in his essay The Future of Intellectual Property the contours of intellectual property protection. He refers to two papers: The Future of Ideas (2001) by Lessig who argues that the expanding scope of intellectual property protection threatens the Internet as an innovational playing field. This is in line with the statement made by Roger Clarke (2001): that in the next decades new technologies of identification and tracking will destroy individual freedom. Litman (2001) argues that copyright law is too complicated and too restrictive. Both authors agree that the overprotecting intellectual rights nowadays cause blocked creativity. The vitality of the intellectual playing field is in danger. ICT created new opportunities to expend information and knowledge in our society. However, this break through is hindered by legal and authoritarian protections of intellectual property. Social and technological opportunities created by ICT are threatened by far !
reaching IPR protections and may slow down the overall creation of knowledge in society. The overall objective of sharing information and knowledge to enhance knowledge growth of mankind might be hindered by far reaching protection methods of intellectual property. A balance is needed between these individual interests and the societal needs towards knowledge growth. Broad restrictions and property controls on the Internet hinder the public interest and the public domain. The more the public domain is constrained, the greater negative effects it will have on future creativity. On the long run Spinello (2003) argues that the cost of innovation may be substantial. Intellectual property is developing into very complex legislation. On the other hand there are significant disadvantages to bring down the intellectual rights to a minimum, in case the importance of the worker who deserves credits for his creative work is undervalued. How to find an appropriate award in granting pr!
operty right of a creative idea or product? According to Spinello this
award is possible, as long as the granting doesn’t negatively influence the intellectual play ground for future creators.

In summary, a balance is needed between overprotecting and under protecting. The both extremes are undesirable and in some way unreasonable in real life. Looking at the protection of intellectual property a continuum can be designed (figure 1), which represents on the one side the extreme under protection of intellectual property, supported by the Open Source movement and the freedom of information. On the other side the overprotection of intellectual property, advocated by interest groups supporting the idea that the creator of knowledge deserves full protection and rights on his creation of mind. In the western world we see a tendency moving to overprotection of IPR. A balance is needed between overprotection and under protection of Intellectual Property. The desired range of intellectual property protection isn’t one exact point in the continuum, but it is a range. This range is influenced by a lot of external filtering issues, like the characteristics of the products/se!
rvices, the culture(s) of the country, legal systems, ideologies, political and societal systems, and others. In this range the balance should be defined best between these individual interests and reward fore mind-creations and the needs of mankind to extend knowledge.

FIGURE 1 Intellectual Property Protection Continuum

See WWW.FILTERNETWORK.ORG for complete article including illustration

References

Beynum, G. van (2002), ‘Kennisinstituten maken nog geen kenniseconomie’, In: Het Financieele Dagblad, 15 August

Blind, K and Edler, J (2003), “Idiosyncrasies of the software development process and their relation to software patents: theoretical consideration and empirical evidence”, In: Netnomics, number 5, Kluwer Academic Publisher, The Netherlands, pp. 71-96

Buckingham Shum, S., E. Motta en J. Domingue (2000), ‘ScholOnto: An Ontology-Based Digital Library Server for Research Documents and Discourse’, In: International Journal on Digital Libraries, Volume 3, no. 3, pp. 237-248

Clarke, R (2001), ‘Paradise Gained, Paradise Re-lost: How the Internet is being Changed from a Means of Liberation to a Tool of Authoritarianism’, In: Mots Pluriels, Special Issue on ‘The Net: New Apprentices and Old Masters’, No 18, August

Cullen, K (2002), ‘PHP: An open source solution for Web programming and Dynamic content’, In: Information Technology and Libraries, September

Hippel, E (2001), Innovation by user communities: Learning from Open Source Software, MIT Sloan Management Review, Cambridge: Summer. Vol. 42, Issue 4; pp. 82-87

Kelty, C.M. (2001), ‘Free Software/Free Science’, In: First Monday, Issue 6, no 12

Lessig, L (2001), The Future of Ideas, Random House, New York

Litman, J, (2001), Digital copyright, Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York

Lougee-Heimer, R (2003), ‘The Common Optimization Interface for Operation research: promoting open-source software in the operations research community”,In: IBM Journal Research and Development, Volume 47, Number 1

Noble, D.F. (1998), Digital diploma Mills: Automation of higher education, In: First Monday, issue 3, no.1

Pietrykowski, B. (2001), Information technology and commercialization of knowledge: corporate universities and class dynamics in an era of technological restructuring, In: Journal of Economic Issues, Lincoln, Volume 35, Issue 2, pp.299-306

Spinello, R (2003), The Future of Intellectual Property, In: Ethics and Information Technology, Number 5: 1-16

Wells, A. (2001), Creating and maintaining the school website, In: Issues in teaching using ICT, M. Leask (Ed.), Routledge Falmer, pp. 130-142

Posted in Tomorrow's Research | 4 Comments »

633. STUDYING IN SEVERAL COUNTRIES

Tuesday, June 7th, 2005

Folks:

Along with the National Teaching and Learning Forum [http://www.ntlf.com/] and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching [http://www.carnegiefoundation.org}, the Tomorrow's Professor Mailing List is partnered with the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), [http://www.aahe.org/] to bring you selected periodic postings from the NT&LF newsletter, the CFAT Carnegie Perspectives and now the AAHE periodic Letter from the President by Clara M. Lovett, AAHE president. The posting below looks at the importance of being informed about the motivations various students have to undertake higher education when it is available on a global scale.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu.
UP NEXT: Intellectual Property Rights

Tomorrow’s Academy

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STUDYING IN SEVERAL COUNTRIES
Clara M. Lovett
AAHE President
Letter from the President
March 14, 2005

Dear Colleague,

From time to time, I review my notes of conversations with reporters who call AAHE for information on or comments about stories they are preparing. The callers range from student reporters, regulars like the University of North Carolina’s Daily Tar Heel, and the staff of specialized publications like Education Week and The Chronicle of Higher Education to Fox News and The Wall Street Journal.

Sometimes the calls are about issues and developments of national significance such as the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965. But much more often, reporters are working on stories of local or regional interest, for instance, the resignation of a high-profile president, the opening of a new campus, or the impact of higher education on the economy of a particular region or state. They ask for help from a national association like ours to place their stories in a larger context.

Since fall 2003, I have logged about 270 conversations, mostly with reporters from mainstream print and electronic media. Because I believe that the media reflect their readers’ and viewers’ interests, concerns, and biases as much as they shape them, I have looked for patterns in my log.

With the notable exception of one major network, the reporters I have talked with have been thoughtful, respectful, even deferential, toward higher education. They respect our institutions and our leaders, be they presidents, world-renowned scholars, or football coaches, as much or more than the health-care system or the judicial system. When reporting on local or regional matters, most of them really try to understand the broader national and international context.

What I find interesting, and somewhat troubling, when I review my log, however, is the obvious disconnect between the reporters who try to place our enterprise in a larger context and the conversations I hear every day within the academy, including our own AAHE family. Our conversations tend to be about improving educational practices and organizational arrangements we have inherited from earlier generations, or they are about the need to enlighten the barbarians at our gates (if we can’t keep them out) about the value and importance of what we do. As the late Frank Newman and his associates in The Futures Project pointed out, this disconnect shortchanges reporters and the public they serve. And it bodes ill for the higher education enterprise itself. Over time, it will weaken our credibility and diminish the respect we enjoy.

Let us consider, for example, the issue of declining enrollments of international students in the graduate programs of our strongest research universities. What is the proper context in which reporters should understand the issue? From the 1960s to the 1990s, especially in the STEM disciplines, brain-drain flowed in one direction: toward the United States; and many international graduate students remained in the United States after graduation.

But, in the 1990s, the situation began to change. Visiting Australia in 1997, for example, I noticed that several universities there had already put in place aggressive strategies to recruit East Asian students. At the same time, highly mobile, polyglot Generation Xers in Europe were putting pressure on their universities, their elected officials, and the notoriously slow European Union bureaucracy to recognize that they were already studying in several countries. And, in developing countries as different from one another as China, India, Malaysia, and Ghana, educators and political leaders looked for ways to provide access to higher education for burgeoning student populations and geographically remote communities. Those leaders understood that the needs of their countries could not be met in the long run by sending small groups of students abroad for study.

It appears that in the 1990s we did not pay much attention to these trends. Currently, in American academic circles, we continue to focus on more recent and specific causes of declining enrollments: the impact of the 9/11 attack, of course, and the tightening of immigration policies and procedures that followed the attack. The negative consequences of such traumatic and unpredictable developments need to be addressed and ameliorated when possible. But, more importantly, we need to be much more sensitive to and better-informed about the choices that billions of individuals and thousands of institutions around the globe are making even while, like Candide, we tend to our gardens. The more we learn, the better able we will be to put issues in context for callers from the media and for anyone else who looks to higher education for help to make sense of a complex world.

Clara M. Lovett
AAHE President

email: president@aahe.org
(202) 293-6440
http://www.aahe.org

Posted in Tomorrow's Academia | No Comments »

632. LEFT-BRAINED VERSUS RIGHT-BRAINED: WHICH IS THE BETTER FOR LEARNING?

Thursday, June 2nd, 2005

Folks:

The posting below looks at left-brain, right-brain implications for teaching and learning. It is by Sharyn Hardy Gallagher, University of Massachusetts, and is number 27 in a series of selected excerpts from the National Teaching and Learning Forum newsletter reproduced here as part of our “Shared Mission Partnership.” NT&LF has a wealth of information on all aspects of teaching and learning. If you are not already a subscriber, you can check it out at [http://www.ntlf.com/] The on-line edition of the Forum–like the printed version – offers subscribers insight from colleagues eager to share new ways of helping students reach the highest levels of learning. National Teaching and Learning Forum Newsletter, FEBRUARY, 2005, Volume 14, Number 2, © Copyright 1996-2005. Published by James Rhem & Associates, Inc. (ISSN 1057-2880) All rights reserved worldwide. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Studying in Several Countries

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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LEFT-BRAINED VERSUS RIGHT-BRAINED: WHICH IS THE BETTER FOR LEARNING?

By Sharyn Hardy Gallagher, University of Massachusetts

As educators, we present vast amounts of information to our students. We try to have interesting lectures and relevant projects but students’ performance on exams frequently suggests what we’ve presented hasn’t stuck. We know we covered material adequately, yet students struggle with memorizing everything that we impart in time for the exam.

The past 30 years have seen a great deal of research on learning and memorization. One area of research has looked at the two hemispheres of the brain and the activities performed by each side. The left side of the brain performs the more logical functions, which deal with verbal and analytical processes. The right side performs activities thought of as more creative, those dealing with patterns and relationships. By understanding how the brain works, researchers hoped to be able to figure out optimal ways for learning.

Traditional instruction in higher education has long been about words: the professor’s lecture, the textbook descriptions, the writing assignments and the examinations. These activities make use of the left side of the brain. If student performance has room for improvement, do we need to do more with the “left brain” or should we focus on the “right brain”? The answer is “both,” for the functions of each hemisphere are complementary, and when tapping into both sides of the brain, the mind is at its greatest power and flexibility (Williams, 1983).

Almost everyone has heard about this research on learning, memory and hemispheric specialization in a general way, but reviewing it in a bit more than the usual level of detail may enhance its value to our teaching.

Learning

Learning is the process through which experience causes permanent change in behavior or knowledge (Woolfolk, 1993). There are two primary schools of thought regarding how people learn, the behavioral and cognitive schools, each of which encompasses many individual theories and principles. Cognitive theory focuses on the internal mental activities that bring about a change in knowledge. They focus on mental activities such as thinking, remembering, creating and problem-solving. Behavioral theory focuses on the effects of external events on the person. Scientists, like Pavlov and Skinner, looked at how external stimuli could produce observable responses.

Memory

According to Woolfolk (1993), memory has three components: the sensory register, short-term memory and long-term memory. The sensory register is the original source of input to the memory. It constantly receives input from all senses and retains all of this information briefly. It encodes what it perceives to be important and passes it along to short-term memory. Much of what we perceive is related to how we give meaning to sensory input. Many theories, such as Gestalt, bottom-up processing and top-down processing, indicate that people tend to organize sensory information into patterns and relationships for enhanced learning and storage.

The short-term memory can retain five to nine separate items at a time that will last approximately 20-30 seconds. Long-term memory holds information that has been learned well. It has unlimited capacity and duration, although information can take some time to be learned well enough to be stored here. The brain is capable of absorbing more than 36,000 images per hour (Hyerle, 2000).

Woolfolk (1993) cites Paivio, who suggests that information is stored in long-term memory as a visual image, verbal unit or both; information that is coded both visually and verbally, as a “course graphic” attempts to do, is easiest to remember. Woolfolk also cites Craik and Lockart, who have an alternative view of memory from the three component model above. Craik and Lockart suggest that what is remembered is related to how the information is analyzed and connected with other information; the more the person processes the information, the better the recall of it.

Using graphics in presenting material to students can provide the framework to help them analyze the key topics in the course and interconnect them. Careful design of a course graphic and periodic review of it by the students create the familiar image that organizes information and becomes memorable.

Hemispheric Specialization

For decades, scientists have studied the brain to understand how it functions with respect to processing information. As technology has advanced, scientists have been able to do more sophisticated research. We know that certain areas of the brain control various processes in the body.

Buzan cites many research studies conducted in the 1960’s and 1970’s, especially work done by Nobel prize winner Roger Sperry, Robert Ornstein and Eran Zaidel. In summary, the brain has two halves that are connected by a complex network of nerve fibers. Initial research concluded that each hemisphere specialized in different types of mental activity. In most people, the left cortex deals with logic, words, numbers and reasoning, “the so-called academic activities” (Buzan, p. 17). The right cortex deals with images, imagination and patterns. While one side is actively processing information, the other side tends to rest. Research showed that when people worked to develop weak mental areas, all mental performance seemed to improve.

Further research has discovered that each side of the brain actually replicates to a large degree the other side’s abilities. Each hemisphere is capable of wider and subtler mental activities than previously thought. Both Perecman (1983) and Springer and Deutsch (1998) find no evidence that only one side of the brain is involved in a given cognitive task. Instead, both sides are engaged during mental processes, even though one hemisphere might be more dominant in a particular process.

Implication for Instruction

The key implication of this research for teaching is that use of a variety of techniques that appeal to both areas of brain function will improve student learning. For example, enhancing lectures with graphical aids or using color, music or other sensory experiences with a presentation or assignment will touch both logical and creative brain processes. As with a muscle, the more the brain is exercised, the more it develops, leading to an increase in the capability to learn and remember. If we educators can exercise the entire brain, the student should be able to learn and remember more. Hence the need for a variety of stimuli-aural, visual, tactile-has a scientific basis, just as the findings of behavioral psychology support the need for activities in addition to other means of presenting information. Learning, after all, isn’t just about information; it’s about understanding.

Contact:
Sharyn Gallagher
Visiting Professor
University of Massachusetts Lowell
1 University Ave
Lowell, MA 01854
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References:

* Buzan, T. 1991. Using Both Sides of Your Brain (3rd ed.). New York: Penguin Books.
* Hyerle, D. 2000. “The Organizing Mind.” Chapter 4 in A Field Guide to Using Visual Tools (pp. 59-79). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
* McMillan, J. H. and Forsyth, D. R. 1991. “What Theories of Motivation Say about Why Learners Learn.” New Directions for Teaching and Learning 45: 39-51.
* Paivio, Allan. 1979. Imagery and Verbal Processes. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
* Perecman, E. 1983. Cognitive Processing in the Right Hemisphere. New York: Academic Press, Inc.
* Springer, S. and Deutsch, G. 1998. Left Brain, Right Brain: Perspectives from Cognitive Neuroscience. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company.
* Williams, L.V. 1983. Teaching for the Two-Sided Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc.
* Woolfolk, A. E. 1993. Educational Psychology. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

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