Earl Hunt

The importance of building knowledge on knowledge.  It is a fact that different people  have different beliefs, even students that have passed through the same class. The diversity of beliefs creates a situation where individualizing instruction so that it is geared to address students’ different beliefs can be much more effective than the standard “stand and deliver” lecture.  We now have the technological means to create an individualization of instruction.  We have an opportunity to react to the students’ individual state of knowledge, as opposed to just lecturing to the group norm.

Differences in states of knowledge are qualitative differences, rather than just quantitative. This is not to say that all people’s knowledge is equal, but rather to say that people have different approaches to looking at a problem that are not necessarily right or wrong.  Knowing how a person is approaching the problem and then tailoring instruction to fit the different approach that a person is taking to the problem will greatly improve the outcome of the instruction. Good instruction should engage a student and identify a student’s individual beliefs.  This comes right out of schema theory and any theory on the organization of knowledge.

Use of Technology in the Classroom.  We have designed a diagnostic project that can write diagnostic assessment programs.  We can have continual self-assessment programs that can monitor the understanding of the students, and we can put these on the web.  Instructors can get weekly reports, students can discuss their understandings with each other in chat rooms, and instructors can monitor these discussions and then modify the lectures and work with TAs to tailor the instruction to the students in the class.  This is a great improvement over the pre-prepared lecture that does not adjust to the differences in individual classes.  The horror of it was that you used to be considered a good instructor if all of your lectures were prepared before the start of the quarter; teaching this way is analogous to a ballistic missile, the lectures do not adapt to the new class of students nor to the new ideas that may develop through the course of the semester. 

Additionally, academia is the only place where we have a system of assessment that Bob Inslay (?) once called “drop in from the sky assessment.”  A typical course has a mid-term and a final.  This form of assessment is terrible.  The final is of no use as a teaching device; it is strictly a grading device.  Most students don’t even come to pick up their finals.  A mid-term is somewhat less useless as a guide for learning, but it is more often used as a device for students to monitor their progress.  How often do instructors modify their instruction based on the results of the mid-term?  Instead we should be doing continuous assessments, self-assessments that are built right into the instruction of the course.  We have the ability to do this.  Right now a student should not be told that on a 100 question multiple choice exam that they got 78 right and not given any further discussion as to what was right or wrong of why a problem was graded as right or wrong.  Students will rarely go back to find out what they missed and why.  I would really like to see education come to the point where there were no midterms and finals.  I am not saying that we would get away from grading, but we could begin using more frequent self-assessments that provide feedback to the student and the instructor.

We should be assessing base knowledge consistently.  In general, I think that we put too much effort in a single report.  There are huge amounts of forgetting by students.  In psychology, we know ways to help with this.  One way is by building on levels of knowledge and by connecting the different pieces of knowledge. In mathematics, one course builds on the other—stabilizing your knowledge.  In most of the other disciplines, educators take a very disjointed approach.  Psychology, for example, is a very poorly designed curriculum.  It jumps from one topic to the next—personality one day and history and systems the next.  We do not build on the knowledge that the students are gaining.

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

In order to see what I want done, it is necessary to have a substantial background of knowledge about how people think about this or that topic.  What views are people likely to have?  The diagnostic and assessment programs that I have discussed exist in areas such as physics and statistics, but they do not exist in many other areas because we have not done the research to see what it is that students’ know and don’t know in these areas. 

We need to have psychologists and subject matter experts working together to determine the sorts of problems and misconceptions people have in these areas.  The problem is that this is not exciting research, but we need to have an understanding of how student’s understand all of the academic subject areas in order to make continuous assessment work.

Another important area of research is in convincing people that learning is an active process, and at the same time making them realize that active learning does not always mean it will be fun.  Some people believe that active learning means that you get to play a game, and game playing leads to learning.  Americans tend to have the attitude that learning is either “easy” or “I can’t do it at all.” People often claim that they can’t do 8^th grade algebra, something that is generally within most people’s range of abilities.  The truth of the matter is that people often don’t want to put in the time and work that it would take to be able to do algebra.  We also need to get rid of the attitude that it is not okay to ask questions or in any way to demonstrate that you don’t know something.

One of the problems in applying what psychologists know about the science of learning to education is related to the image of psychologists as clinicians.  Psychologists are not seen as being relevant to the discussion of education.

I feel that some our biggest problems for redesign of higher education are not related to research, but are instead issues related to the institution.  There is not a lot of motivation for professors to change their teaching methods.  What is the incentive for a professor to do the things that I have suggested for a class?

Another problem is that students come with a certain set of expectations; it is almost an unwritten contract that the professors’ job is to tell them what will be on the final and that the students’ job is to memorize this information.  The students have become accustomed to the memorization game, if you change the rules of the game by using methods such as continual assessment of learning; students are most likely going to be upset.  It is going to make these students very nervous to have the rules changed.  In a system where we rely on students’ evaluations of the professors, innovative teaching techniques might not be thought of well.

What prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the science of learning are already being applied?

David Maddigan’s work at University of Washington used exactly the types of methods that I have been talking about.  I also point to Peter Falk’s work in New Mexico with computer-graded and latent indexing methods to improve students’ essays.  

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