Franca Agnoli

I teach statistics and experimental design as a member of a psychology faculty in Italy. My areas of expertise are primarily in human reasoning, problem solving, and related developmental issues.

What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that we could apply to higher education?

There is a large literature of theories and findings in human reasoning and problem solving that could be applied to higher education. Much of the research has focused on the shortcomings or failures of human reasoning. Some work, including my own, has shown that some simple training sessions can improve reasoning in these situations. For example, training with Venn diagrams helps people avoid the conjunction fallacy (this has been done with paper and pencil as well as computerized sessions).

What are the most important unsolved problems? What should be included in an agenda for research?

One of the major problems is that what is known is not transferred into the teaching curriculum, in part because university professors may not know the relevant findings. Consider, for example, university statistics courses. We know that people are better able to deal with frequencies than probabilities (very large differences in correct solution to problems dealing with conditional probabilities according to whether they were presented in a frequency format or in a probability format). I doubt that many statistics teachers (or statistics book writers) know about this result.

Even though we know a fair amount about statistical reasoning (what are the difficulties, etc), very little has trickled down to teachers of college students (or pre-college students). This is true in both the US and Europe (I can talk about Italy, but also there is recent evidence from Germany).

The same must be true for teaching many other subjects. Professors of physics, chemistry, mathematics, history, and economics are experts in their domains, but they are not experts in the factors that enable students to learn most effectively. Transferring that knowledge so that it can be used to make education more effective in all fields is a major problem.

A second problem is that even those things that are widely known and accepted are not consistently applied. For example, it is well known that people will not learn a problem solving method by watching or listening to someone else applying the method. People learn by applying the methods themselves. This is called learning by doing.

Training effects are quite large when “learning by doing” training is used in teaching statistical reasoning. For example, students have a lot of difficulty understanding probability distributions and sampling distributions. Suppose that they actually removed balls from urns or rolled dice instead of just reading about these events. They would understand these concepts much better.

The benefits of learning by doing are well established. So why do we still teach 300 students at a time in large classrooms? (At least in Europe this is the case, and at large US Universities the same). In smaller classes, students could have more hands-on experiences, either with physical objects or through use of computer simulations.

A third major problem is that we don’t teach students how to approach or solve problems like those experienced in the real world. In university classes we generally focus on controlled situations and problems that have a single correct answer. Real world problems are vastly more complex and may require making tradeoffs among many ambiguous alternatives. Solving these problems requires skills having to do with planning, scheduling and coordinating. And large real-world problems are solved by teams. But at the University rarely students learn to collaborate on a team.

If people do not learn how to collaborate in college, why do we expect them to do it effectively in the workplace? Possibly the emphasis on grades and fairness in grading among university students in the US works against collaboration in the classroom. One colleague who has taught in both Denmark and the US noted that students in Denmark preferred to work on group computer science assignments, while students in the same class in the US strongly resisted group assignments.

That brings me to note the increasing diversity of the workforce and the need to prepare students to work in that kind of environment. People from different cultural backgrounds will have to solve problems working together in a team (one in 10 US residents is foreign born). We know that women experience difficulties when entering professions viewed as culturally appropriate to men; maybe university educational programs can change this. The acceptance of different perspectives in the workforce should start at the University.

What are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher education? Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?

 In Europe some major revisions are in progress of the higher education system at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The primary motivation for these revisions is to create a more uniform system across Europe that will make it easier for graduates of a university in one country to work or continue their studies in another country. With so much emphasis on this major restructuring, there may be little near term interest in improving educational practices.