“D-minus? But I memorized EVERYTHING!”

[Catshrink]

“D-minus? But I memorized EVERYTHING!”

<ship>

Today’s 10th grade students have spent their entire schooling under the shadow of No Child Left Behind. Predictably, these students often subscribe to the notion that if good teaching is happening, then all students will score highly on exams. A bell-curve grade distribution is, to them, evidence of failed teaching.

Often, today’s teens describe good teaching as a three step process: 1) teacher tells students exactly what is on the exam; 2) students memorize everything; and 3) students regurgitate the “right” answers and everyone gets an “A”.

Many students have learned to equate learning with test preparation. To them, learning means memorizing information and parroting it back on the test. Last week’s biology exam covered cellular transport processes – diffusion, osmosis, and so forth. I know all of my students could say “osmosis is the diffusion of water across a selectively permeable membrane.” Then again, so could a parrot. And the D-minus student and the parrot would likely have equal comprehension of what they were saying.

I write exams such that about 60% of the questions fall in the “knowledge” level of cognitive function (Mr. Gates, look up “Bloom’s Taxonomy”). The remaining 40% of questions require some higher-order thinking skills, and by design appear quite mysterious to the student who simply “memorized everything.” I analyzed this particular exam and found it contained exactly 60% knowledge-level questions. 22% of the questions were “comprehension” level, 10% “application”, and the remaining 8% were “analysis” level or above.

more:

http://www.edvoices.com/blog/2010/10/12/%e2%80%9cd-minus-but-i-memorized-everything%e2%80%9d/

Bolding is mine to point out the result of excessive standardized testing on kids.

[bluestateguy]

1. They're going to find out that college is not that way

And their stogy old professors won't give a hoot about how their teachers did things in high school.

[Catshrink]

2. Meanwhile, those of us who teach high school are fighting a rising tide

of student resistance to learning. They want to memorize and regurgitate and equate that with learning.

[mike_c]

7. that tide is breaking in universities now....

Here's some correspondence I shared with some colleagues last week:

Speaking or teaching millennials, I just had a terribly frustrating experience in Principles of Ecology. For most of the last decade, I've scheduled a class discussion about two papers for mid-semester, just before the midterm exam. The papers are Garrett Hardin's The Tragedy of the Commons and Robyn Ekersley's Ecological Intervention: Prospects and Limits. The Hardin paper is an ode to cynicism that concludes that people will always cheat if they have an opportunity to pursue their own selfish interests rather than broader, more altruistic interests, and that the only way to preserve human society is to impose limits for breeding. The Eckersley paper draws parallels between genocide and "ecoside," and explores the legal and moral responsibilities of nations to intervene militarily to prevent other nations from committing certain classes of "crimes against the environment" and "crimes against other species."

You can imagine that both papers are emotionally charged. In past years the discussions have been pretty raucous at times, and have certainly engaged lots of students, especially since we start out discussing some specific questions in small groups before they have an opportunity to present their responses to the whole class. In the last few years the response has diminished steadily. This year maybe six or seven students (out of nearly 100) did all the talking, and they didn't really seem very engaged. I got the distinct impression that most folks either didn't bother to read the papers, or if they did, they didn't think about them much. How could someone NOT have an opinion about whether they should be free to have babies or not, or whether other countries should have the right to invade us to protect the environment from industry or whatever? Eliciting any response was like pulling teeth, and much of what I did get missed the point entirely.

It isn't just this semester's class. As I said, the quality of these discussions has been declining steadily for several years. I wanted to do some sort of role play or other approach this year that might have made the ideas more real to students than reading about them appears to do, but in the end I couldn't figure out how to pull that off in such a large lecture setting, so I had them discuss questions that I posed in small groups, then report their conclusions to the class. Most did not conclude anything-- or at least most had nothing to say about it. It was utterly disheartening!

[dkf]

9. Or maybe people are afraid to voice their opinions nowadays, especially if they are not anonymous.

The political debate can get so full of animus and so toxic maybe some feel it is better to stay out of it or discuss it solely in small groups that you trust.

[mike_c]

10. in any event, it's a changing student population...

...because they used to have plenty to say, LOL.

[dkf]

11. Well I've got plenty to say and I get blowback.

Earlier in my shy days I wouldn't get involved unless there was dead silence in class. Then I would feel sorry for the prof and decide to speak up, but it was an effort to do so.

The Clinton impeachment was the ridiculousness that finally got me infuriated enough to express my opinions. Now I can't turn it off when I probably ought to.

[exboyfil]

17. Not to get stoned on this board but the political leanings of

a particular teacher can suppress such discussions. This is the argument that many conservatives make about engagement in the colleges - you are punished for having a conservative viewpoint.

A couple of examples -

I have a tremendous amount of respect for my High School English teacher, but when we were discussing the Carter arms treaty on Backfire bombers everyone in the class came out one way on the treaty except one student. That student was rewarded for coming out the other way - irrespective of whether that student's essay was more logical or more convincing than the other essays. The teacher cited this contrary point for the reason for the higher grade. Now I could have argued the contrarian point as well, but I was told to answer how I actually felt.

Since I was in Engineering in college politics did not enter into the discussion much. I do feel that I might have been treated more harsely by my Berkeley trained Ethics professor because of my feelings about nuclear testing at the time. Again it was a particular stand rather than the basis of the actual argument. Now I don't want to argue the particular point, and my views have changed somewhat in this regard since then, but I still feel, based upon what was said in class, that I got a lower grade for getting the wrong answer. Loved the course and have a great deal of respect for the man, but I feel he had a blind spot in this area.

My older daughter still cannot get around the fact that she was forced by her middle school Economics teacher to share her correct answers with a lower performing peer. I begged her to speak up and give her opinion as to why she thought it was unfair, but she still needs work in challenging authority. She had a classmate that refused to participate in the exercise.

I think political debate gets shut down from both directions especially when dealing with someone in authority who controls an important aspect of your life (your GPA). We have a cut line at my company for interviews (3.0) you don't have that you don't interview no matter how hard the college you attended was or how a single professor can mess up your life.

Also many teachers just don't want to think outside the box. My daughter recently did an essay on water witching. She actually read peer reviewed papers regarding experiments in this area. She is a 9th grader reading papers that would challenge me - a PhD student in engineering. I thought she did a pretty good job summarizing the arguments from the paper, but she got absolutely no credit (or even response) for this. The teacher was looking for particular words and marking off if those words were not there. To say the least I was disapointed, and it convinced me to look at doing correspondence in Biology for my younger daughter (the budding doctor).

An example of this from my younger daughter's Life Science class. She had a test question regarding natural selection and selective breeding. The "right answer" involved seeds adjusting to different climates, but it never said anything about human intervention. The wrong answer was tuskless elephants (an example of natural selection according to the text and the test question). Tuskless elephants (coming about because of hunting for a particular phenotype) is more akin to selective breeding than natural selection. My daughter could explain her thought process in this area, but the question was still marked wrong.

I challenge my daughters to argue their points, and I will often assume a contrarian position to ensure that they are thinking for themselves. Unfortunately or High School does not have a debate team. I think my daughters would benefit greatly from debate (especially the two person Lincoln-Douglas style (Public Forum). I did Policy in High School, but I think Public Forum is better (my niece is doing it).

[mike_c]

5. unfortunately, university administrators care less about learning than they do about...

...collecting fees, so profs are being caught in the middle between the naive expectations of students and the increasingly corporate perspectives of administrators.

Believe me, it sucks. Ten years ago I regarded my students as "junior colleagues" who shared most of my academic and intellectual values and objectives. Today, I feel like I'm teaching high school plus to an increasingly disengaged and surly undergrad population. The classroom atmosphere has gone from cooperation in pursuit of mutual goals to adversarial. Takes the fun right out of teaching, frankly.

[Jackpine Radical]

6. Well, at least until the insanity spreads to the colleges.

I did a PhD in ed. psych. (research focus, not school psych) in the 70's and watched with dismay as the whole "goals & objectives" thing came in to replace real education. I think that has a lot to do with why I retreaded as a clinical psych type.

[CanonRay]

12. There's always Liberty University

:hurts:

[Angry Dragon]

3. How could you be so mean to those students expecting them

to know how to think??

That is not what arne wants



:hide:

[dkf]

4. Well he was the teacher... If they can't apply what they learned isn't that his fault?

Or is he complaining that they are complaining about their grades?

[Catshrink]

8. If you were in a classroom on a daily basis you would understand what this teacher is saying.

Read what mike_c wrote upthread. This is an endemic, cultural problem. But that won't change your mind - you're dedicated to blaming teachers for everything that goes awry in education when teachers are about 25% of the education pie:

25% students
25% parents
25% admin/school environment
25% teacher

Moreover, the national attitude toward education and intelligence has declined. Intellectuals aren't cool. Learning is for losers. Look at the messages our kids get from "society" - why would they care about learning or their futures?

But go on, make your snarky comment about how I'm supposed to overcome 15 years of programming and constant reinforcement of that by media and peers in the 50 minutes I have each day.

[proud2BlibKansan]

13. The first week of school I did a critical thinking exercise with 6th graders

They were lost. It was incredibly sad. And it just proved to me that we have really dumbed down our schools.

The exercise I did was one I have done for 20+ years now. It's called Concept Formation. This was the first time I have ever used this technique and the kids just didn't get it. They were given a list of vocabulary words and told to group them. As long as there were at least two words in a group and they could state a rule for the group, it was a group. For example, you can put longitude and latitude in the same group because they both begin with L or because they are both words describing location on a map or globe.

The kids were lost. Several asked could they just put the words in ABC order. Another couple wanted to know if they could just write the words three times each like they had always done last year. There were two of us teachers in this class and we were just blown away. The other teacher looked at me and whispered "Thank you NCLB for leaving these children behind."

[LWolf]

14. Not only do students come into 6th grade without ANY critical thinking skills,

they resist every attempt to develop them. I had 2nd and 3rd graders, when I taught 2nd and 3rd grade, who were better thinkers than my 6th - 8th graders. By the time they reach middle school, they resent, and resist, expectations that they will think differently, or do things differently, than they have for the last 6 years. It's an uphill fight for 3 full years. I hope they have developed some critical thinking skills by the time they leave me.

I clicked on your link; "Concept Formation" is what I learned as Hilda Taba's "concept development" lesson when I was taking classes on gifted education from UCSD a couple of decades ago. I've been trying to find a used copy of Taba's books for years; they are hard to come by. She had several models for teaching thinking skills.

[Catshrink]

15. How about this?

Thinking Through Class Discussion: The Hilda Taba Approach
by Mary C. Durkin

http://cgi.ebay.com/Thinking-Through-Class-Discussion-Hilda-Taba-Appro-/130395787911?pt=AU_Books_Textbooks&hash=item1e5c31d287

Curriculum Development by Hilda Taba ($40)

http://cgi.ebay.com/Curriculum-Development-Hilda-Taba-/380197522014?pt=US_Nonfiction_Book&hash=item588589ca5e

also from the UK (but $7 UD)

http://cgi.ebay.com/Curriculum-Development-Theory-and-Practice-Hilda-Taba-/390246151374?pt=Fiction&hash=item5adc7bb4ce

Amazon has several titles also - I'm not sure what you're looking for.

[LWolf]

18. I didn't think about looking for her work under a different author.

Good idea.

Or looking on ebay. I've had her on a "wishlist" with several large used book sellers for years.

Obviously, I'm not looking in the right place; thanks!

[txlibdem]

24. This needs to be an OP, you've nailed the dirty little secret of education in America

There is no educating going on! Keep up the good work and I hope one day you WILL see evidence of widespread ability to think critically.

[eppur_se_muova]

16. My only regret is that I have but one rec to give for this thread.

Bookmarking the whole thread for the discussion. It's amazing what comes out when educators discuss what they do, and what they witness. You'd think someone, say a national leader, would get educators together in a meeting or something and hear what they have to say ...

[Starry Messenger]

19. +1

[adnelson60087]

20. We don't tell them what they want to hear

or have endless millions of dollars to feed their campaigns.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

21. +1!

I watched my son's public education disintegrate in front of my eyes, from getting rid of phonics for my oldest in 2nd grade to the no homework/teaching to the test model that my youngest two dealt with.

[maryf]

22. Memorizing vs. thinking...

There's a difference?? whoda thunk? (guess not many) K&R

[Boojatta]

23. What if a student memorizes NOTHING? Would an F grade be surprising?

If it wouldn't be surprising, then schools should teach techniques for memorizing. However, to suddenly teach something is to alter the status quo and draw attention to what the grading system actually rewards. Some people prefer a pleasant but false picture of reality to the revelation of unpleasant facts. Instead of upsetting people, schools can reward students who have somehow already learned techniques for memorizing, and fail students who haven't, and we can all pretend that this isn't happening.

[Taitertots]

25. Also known as "I'll test 60% on material I cover and 40% on material I don't"

It is not good enough to know all the answers. You have to answer nebulous questions that you can never study for, based on material not covered during the class.