Learning and Motivation, part III: "The illusion of comprehension"

(This is the third post on Marilia Svinicki's Learning and Motivation in the Postsecondary Classroom. Here are part I, on how learners come to question or abandon their existing beliefs., and part II, on how to get students to feel comfortable with intellectual risk taking.)

Svinicki's sixth chapter addresses what I suspect is a fairly common phenomenon in philosophy classrooms: "the illusion of comprehension," i.e., when students believe they have mastered some skill, body of knowledge, etc., only to witness themselves failing to demonstrate their mastery in subsequent learning tasks. It's the "I understood when you explained it in class" phenomenon. Svinicki traces this illusion to various factors:

• Students confuse superficial familiarity with deep knowledge. I suppose an example of this might be the student who can recite the definition of argumentative validity but cannot recognize it in arguments.
• Students study in ways that reinforce this illusion. Introductory students who study by memorizing material from flashcards are likely to be surprised come test time when they are asked to analyze evidence, extend their knowledge to new problems, defend claims, and the like.
  
• Students listen to expert depictions of knowledge and assume that their comprehension is like that of the experts.

Svinicki's chapter describes ways in which we instructors can unwittingly encourage or consciously counteract this illusion via the sort of feedback we provide. In other words, she pursues this question: How can we provide feedback that encourages students to accurately self-monitor their learning (instead of ending up with the illusion of understanding)? This seems like a crucial question inasmuch as students who succumb to this illusion are likely to experience academic life as a series of frustrations or failures: They may study ardently, etc. — probably using methods inappropriate to the material they're trying to master — and end up falling short of their expectations. And my experience has been that students often do repeat the same mistakes again and again, somehow expecting that their existing learning strategies will work better than they have in the past.

I won't say much about Svinicki's particular suggestions for encouraging accurate self-monitoring. But I was struck by this passage:

Students must learn better way to monitor their own understanding while they're learning, and we must structure our class time so that these false senses of understanding will not survive. The first step in combating students' illusion of knowing is to confront them on a regular basis with evidence of their knowing or lack of it. (120)

This relates to our earlier discussion about students' "falling without getting hurt." How can we get students to confront the gaps in their knowledge in positive ways, ways that aren't discouraging or humiliating? For one, I've become a big fan of ungraded quizzes, allowing students to get a bead on the state of their own knowledge without it counting against the bottom line grade.

But does anyone out there have other ideas as to how to confront students with evidence of their not knowing in ways that help students and motivate them?

Teaching Necessary and Sufficient Conditions and Others with Examples

I came across this post at Show-Me the Argument, the blog of Mizzou philosophy grad students. I often find that it can take a while for some of these things to click in the minds of my students. Offering a variety of examples is one good way to get the desired result. Apart from the ones at the Mizzou blog, does anyone have some especially effective examples in this area that you'd like to share?

The Reading Brain

Do our students have radically different cognitive structures than ourselves?

The December 24th issue of the New Yorker contained a 'Critic at Large,' piece by Caleb Crain, 'Twilight of the Books." I've been haunted by it. The principal point is not that the newer generations are reading less, which we already knew. It is that they are reading differently. The truly frightening suggestion is that such differences make a difference at the cognitive level for developmental reasons. From a young age, people are encouraged to hone the skills required for, say, reading a technical manual, while the skills required for reading a novel or a piece of philosophy (e.g., imaginative capacities) are left undeveloped. We know that some cognitive functions - language use in particular - has a "window" beyond which the capacity for engaging and strengthening that capacity is lost. It's presumably a function of the plasticity of mind.

In my introduction to philosophy course I do some basic formal and informal logic for the first few weeks. I have been surprised to find that the one skill they truly struggle with is finding counterexamples to claims. So, for example, I will give them a claim such as "All art is beautiful," or "If something is alive and capable of motion, then it is an animal." They really struggle to find counterexamples to these sorts of claims. I'm not surprised when introductory students find philosophy or even basic formal logic alien. I am surprised when they find it difficult to do something which I thought would be relatively second nature. Evidence for the possibilities raised in "Twilight of the Books,"?

Perhaps. There is also the well known psychological bias that when a human recognizes some previously unnoticed phenomenon, she begins to see it everywhere. I hope that this more optimistic reading is the case.

But it highlights a further thought, for me: we are often asked to conform our teaching to the "learning styles" of our students and to their "learning differences." I should hope that there are some limits to this. I would not like to conform my teaching to accommodate this particular learning style. In addition, to take the not-so-optimistic view, the empirical evidence may show that an eighteen-year-old whose imaginative and analytical capacities have, so to speak ossified, may never be able to recover them so matter how skillful her teachers are.

Recommending students do what they shouldn't do

Is it ever ethically defensible for an instructor to decline a student's request to write a letter of recommendation? I don't have in mind two common situations where it's probably defensible to decline because you'd write a 'bad' letter: either you don't know the student well enough to write a credible or well-informed letter, or you know the student too well and the only letter you could honestly write would be sufficiently negative that it would hurt the student's chances. I have in mind situations where you might decline for paternalistic reasons.


Let me describe two such situations I recently faced:

1. A student asked me to write a letter of recommendation so that she could transfer to a local private college. She is an above average but not great student, so I'd put her chances of admission at 50-50. But I have very little respect for the college she's considering and would not recommend students attend there: Its reputation is as a playground for bored, well-to-do southern California kids; its faculty is rather undistinguished; and it costs five times as much as the public university where I teach. The student is under the impression that a degree from this college will prove more prestigious or lucrative.
2. A talented student who had long been considering graduate study in philosophy or religious studies unexpectedly asked me to write a letter in support of applications to law school. This student has a very scholarly demeanor and would probably have a rewarding academic career. It emerged in conversation that his parents don't support his pursuing the academic path and are pushing him toward a legal career. I honestly believe that he'd be unhappy as a lawyer and that path would be time and money ill used.

In both cases, I ended up writing the letters but wonder if it's permissible for me to say no: My reasons are obviously paternalistic. I ought to promote my students' well-being and respect their autonomous choices (though in situation 2, those choices aren't so obviously autonomous) so long as those choices do not themselves involve or support unethical conduct. But in writing students these letters I'm more than not interfering with those choices; I'm actually promoting the ends they have chosen. And am I obligated to do so even when, in my considered professional judgment, those ends are not the best ends for them to pursue? I think of letter writing as part of an imperfect duty of beneficence, but isn't that duty best fulfilled by my assisting students in ways that will actually prove beneficial to them? Certain analogous situations come to mind: I've dissuaded students from becoming philosophy majors on paternalistic grounds and I've refused to admit students to my overenrolled courses because the course would simply be too difficult for them. I feel fairly confident that those are justified instances of paternalism. Does declining to write recommendation letters in these situations fall into a similar ethical category?

Death to the syllabus?

A number of my colleagues (mostly non-philosophers) had a provocative discussion last week of Mano Singham's article "Death to the syllabus" (Liberal Education, fall 2007) The article is facially a call

to declare war on the traditional course syllabus. If there is one single artifact that pinpoints the degradation of liberal education, it is the rule-infested, punitive, controlling syllabus that is handed out to students on the first day of class.

However, I think Singham's concerns about the syllabus are proxies for deeper issues (similar to Chris' concerns about who's in control in the classroom) about the balance of power in the classroom and the role instructors play in creating a climate conducive to learning.


Singham's main point seems to be that contemporary rule-infested syllabi, with their legalistic maze of rules and policies designed to cover every conceivable contingency, omit

any mention of learning. They list the assigned readings but not reasons why the subject is worth studying or important or interesting or deep, or the learning strategies that will be used in the course. The typical syllabus gives little indication that the students and teacher are embarking on an exciting learning adventure together, and its tone is more akin to something that might be handed to a prisoner on the first day of incarceration.

In short, the legalistic syllabus is an intrinsic motivation killer: Whatever excitement the subject might generate is swamped by minutiae about how grades are calculated, the policy for coming to class late, and so on. In the frenzy to honor the notion of syllabi as "legally enforceable contracts" between instructors and students, we have (Singham claims) become victims of administrator-driven "syllabus creep."

I find some truth both in Singham's observations and his worries: I've seen 15-20 page syllabi that lay out, in absurd detail, the answers to every conceivable question one might have about the course content, requirements, policies, and the like. What seems right to me about Singham's article is that we faculty produce the syllabus and it's typically the first 'official' communicative act toward the students in a course, and because of this, it has significant impact on the tone of our interactions with them. The messages of the legalistic syllabus that Singham parodies? That we, the faculty, are in charge. That these intricate rules and policies are what will chiefly govern our interactions with the students. That our interaction is a kind of contrived game where we make the rules and they figure either how best to satisfy them or how to exploit the loopholes in them. In my estimation, Singham is probably correct that the legalistic syllabus is received (even if not intended) as an instrumental of control, which is diametrically opposed to what we know about how people, especially late- or post-adolescent age college students, respond to controlling environments:

a detailed legalistic syllabus is diametrically opposed to what makes students want to learn. There is a vast research literature on the topic of motivation to learn, and one finding screams out loud and clear: controlling environments have been shown consistently to reduce people’s interest in whatever they are doing, even when they are doing things that would be highly motivating in other contexts.

So ironically, the legalistic syllabus creates the conditions where students respond to our authority with disengagement, defiance, even subtle antagonism. Faculty have

assumed that we have to teach in an authoritarian manner because of the way students are. However, all the literature on student motivation has convinced me that the opposite is likely to be true: students act the way they do because we treat them the way we do.

All that being said, I don't think Singham's reaction to all this is entirely on target. First off, my own syllabi are reasonably detailed and rarely run longer than six pages. But that aside, his own strategy, to ditch the traditional syllabus in favor of a general outline of readings and writing assignments later augmented by grading standards decided upon collectively, strikes me as an overreaction (though I should say that giving students some autonomy can be a good thing). For one, some 'legalistic' aspects of the syllabus are ways of respecting students' right to make educational and personal choices. Many of my students have jobs and families and have an understandable expectation that they should know what's expected of them in my course (and when). Second, I think the context in which the syllabus is presented matters. To start off on the first day of class by distributing a lengthy syllabus probably does send the counterproductive messages Singham identifies. That's why I wait until near the end of the first class meeting, or even until the second class meeting, to distribute the syllabus. Those first moments should be about, well, philosophy: what makes the particular topics invigorating, why they interest me, why they should interest students. Learning, in a word.

Teaching News

Too many doctorates chase too few jobs
Recent report also shows colleges have themselves to blame

Justin Pope, Associated Press

Sunday, January 27, 2008

"College students are getting a raw deal, a recent New York report asserted. The problem is they're taking too many classes from part-time, or adjunct, professors."

International SOTL journal

A note to draw people's attention to what looks like a very nice scholarly journal on teaching, the International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. They've published but two issues so far, and it happens to be free and online. Here are some titles of papers to whet your appetite:

• K. Horsnby "Developing and Assessing Undergraduate Students’ Moral Reasoning Skills"
• P. March, "What is Known about Student Learning Outcomes and How does it relate to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning?"
• T. Coalter et al, "A Study on Faculty Responses to Academic Dishonesty"