Creating Significant Learning Experiences

An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses

L. Dee Fink

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118416327
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Études supérieures

"Dee Fink challenges our conventional assumptions and practices and offers an insightful approach to expanding our learning goals, making higher education more meaningful. This is a gem of a book that every college teacher should read."
— Ken Bain, author, What the Best College Students Do

Since the original publication of L. Dee Fink's Creating Significant Learning Experiences, higher education has continued to move in two opposite directions: more institutions encourage faculty to focus on research, obtaining grants, and publishing, while accreditation agencies, policy-makers, and students themselves emphasize the need for greater attention to the quality of teaching and learning.

Now the author has updated his bestselling classic, providing busy faculty with invaluable conceptual and procedural tools for instructional design. Step by step, Fink shows how to use a taxonomy of significant learning and systematically combine the best research-based practices for learning-centered teaching with a teaching strategy in a way that results in powerful learning experiences.

This edition addresses new research on how people learn, active learning, and student engagement; includes illustrative examples from online teaching; and reports on the effectiveness of Fink's time-tested model. Fink also explores recent changes in higher education nationally and internationally and offers more proven strategies for dealing with student resistance to innovative teaching.

Tapping into the knowledge, tools, and strategies in Creating Significant Learning Experiences empowers educators to creatively design courses that will result in significant learning for their students.

"As thought-provoking and inspiring today as it was when it was first published, it is a 'must' for anyone serious about creating courses that challenge students to learn deeply."
— Elizabeth F. Barkley, author, Student Engagement Techniques

CHAPTER ONE

CREATING SIGNIFICANT LEARNING EXPERIENCES

The Key to Quality in Educational Programs

We won’t meet the needs for more and better higher education until professors become designers of learning experiences and not teachers.

—Larry Spence (2001)

Every year, in the United States alone, more than one million college teachers prepare to teach classes, and more than twenty million students come to learn. Most of us teach four to eight courses a year. As we engage in this task, we have two options. We can continue to follow traditional ways of teaching, repeating the same practices that we and others in our disciplines have used for years. Or we can dare to dream about doing something different, something special in our courses that would significantly improve the quality of student learning. This option leads to the question faced by teachers everywhere and at all levels of education: Should we make the effort to change or not?

Given the scale of education and its significance for individual lives and society at large, the response of teachers to this enduring question is of immense importance. What are the factors affecting our response? This chapter and this book will present some ideas about this question. As Spence asserts in the chapter-opening epigraph, I, too, will argue that college teachers need to learn how to design courses more effectively for higher education to significantly improve the quality of its educational programs.

The primary intent of this opening chapter is to describe the unusual and exciting situation in higher education at the present time. A variety of developments have created an extremely strong need to improve the quality of our educational programs. At the same time a wealth of new ideas on teaching have emerged since the 1990s that offer college teachers unusual opportunities to make a creative response to this situation. Near the end of this chapter I will present the reasons why course design, in my view, is the right place to integrate several of these new ideas and, at the same time, constitutes the single most significant change most teachers can make to improve the quality of their teaching and of student learning.

How Satisfactory Are Current Forms of Instruction?

When examined from outside the academy, our present teaching practices appear to be not only adequate but even quite good. The demand for our services remains high. The percentage of graduating high school students who choose to come to college is nearly 70 percent and continues to rise. The percentage of adults enrolling in some kind of higher education program also remains strong and growing. And American higher education continues to be very attractive to students from around the world.

But when we examine the situation from inside the academy and look at the quality of student learning, we find a more disturbing picture. How well are college students learning what they should be learning? People obviously have different views about what they think students ought to be learning in college but many people have shown some concern about the results of some recent studies. In 2006, Derek Bok, former president of Harvard, published a book called Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More. He conducted a meta-analysis of studies examining how well students in American universities achieved eight different kinds of learning, for example, how to communicate, how to think, preparing for citizenship, and so on. With all eight kinds of learning, his conclusion was the same: Students are achieving some level of learning—but nowhere near what they could be learning and should be learning. More recently, Arum and Roksa (2011) raised many eyebrows with the conclusion that 45 percent of the 2,300 students assessed in twenty-four institutions showed no statistically significant improvement in their critical thinking skills during the first year and a half of college.

Similarly, an expanding study of liberal arts education in a sample of institutional types currently involves over seventeen thousand students in forty-nine institutions (Blaich and Wise, 2011). They are studying seven outcomes: critical thinking, need for cognition, interest in diversity, attitudes toward diversity, moral reasoning, leadership, and well-being. Their data so far indicate that although a majority of students show “moderate” improvement in some thinking skills, more than a third demonstrate a decline in these same skills. Of more concern is the data that the majority of seniors actually graduate with less academic motivation and openness to diversity than when they started. Of special concern to this study is the conclusion by the authors that “we also identified a set of teaching practices and conditions that predict student growth on a wide variety of outcomes. This would seem to suggest that across the institutions in the study, these effective teaching practices and institutional conditions are not prevalent enough to produce widespread change (www.liberalarts.wabash.edu/study-research). In other words, when the institution and the professors practice what we know to be good educational practice, students show growth. But these practices are hardly being used at all!

These studies suggest that current practices in higher education are not succeeding in generating the kind of learning among graduates that societal leaders believe are important for individuals and for society in the twenty-first century. Why might this be?

Cause of These Shortcomings

The basic problem is that, although faculty members want their students to achieve higher kinds of learning, they continue to use teaching practices that are not effective at promoting such learning. When interviewed, faculty often make reference to higher-level learning goals such as critical thinking but they have traditionally relied heavily on lecturing as their main form of teaching. In a study in 1980 of eighteen hundred faculty in five different types of institutions (including small private colleges), 73 to 83 percent chose lectures as their primary method of instruction (Blackburn and others, 1980). A survey nearly two decades later involving nearly a third of all US faculty, found the same results: 76 percent identified lecture as their primary instructional method (Finkelstein, Seal, and Schuster, 1998). Although those percentages may have dropped slightly since that second report, my interactions with faculty suggest that lecturing is still by far the dominant mode of teaching.

What kinds of results does lecturing, even good lecturing, produce? A long history of research indicates lecturing has limited effectiveness in helping students

• Retain information after a course is over.
• Develop an ability to transfer knowledge to novel situations.
• Develop skill in thinking or problem solving.
• Achieve affective outcomes, such as motivation for additional learning or a change in attitude.

Although the following two studies were conducted some years ago, there is no reason to believe that the impact of lecturing demonstrated by them has changed. In the first, a carefully designed test at Norwich University in England, teachers gave a lecture specifically designed to be effective (McLeish, 1968). Students were given a test on their recall of facts, theory, and application of the content. They were allowed to use their own lecture notes and even a printed summary of the lecture. At the end of the lecture, the average level of the students’ recall of information was 42 percent. One week later, even with the benefit of taking the same test a second time, students’ recall had dropped to 20 percent—a drop of over 50 percent in one week!

In another study, in the United States, students who took a year-long, two-semester course on introductory economics were compared with students who had never had the course at all (Saunders, 1980). More than twelve hundred students in the two groups were given a test on the content of the course.

At the end of the course, students who took the course scored only 20 percent higher than students who had never had the course. Two years later, the difference was 15 percent. Seven years later, the difference was only 10 percent.

Collectively the results from these and other studies (many of which are summarized in an excellent study by Lion Gardiner, 1994) suggest that our current instructional procedures are not working very well. Students are not learning even basic general knowledge, they are not developing higher-level cognitive skills, and they are not retaining their knowledge very well. In fact, there is no significant difference between students who take courses and students who do not.

Are People Concerned About These Problems?

Clearly not everyone is concerned about the results of present forms of instructional practice; otherwise, there would be greater pressure to make substantial changes. However, when one looks carefully at the reactions of many faculty, students, and the public to the quality of student learning, one finds an awareness, perhaps even a growing awareness, that something is not right.

Faculty Concerns

When I talk with faculty, many say their biggest concern is low student attendance in class. Many see daily class attendance running around 50 percent by mid-semester in their lower division courses. And they report other problems as well. Many of the students who do attend spend much of their class time checking their phone message and so on. Students do not complete reading assignments. The energy level in class discussions is low. Students focus on grades rather than on learning. Textbooks keep getting larger and larger, which means teachers have to work harder and harder to cover the material. Many say they have lost the joy in their teaching. And when they try to change, they often feel unsupported by students, colleagues, and their institution.

Student Concerns

Students, for their part, have similar concerns. They often complain about courses not being very interesting, that they just sit and take notes and then cram for exam after exam. They have difficulty seeing the value or significance of what they are learning. They, too, see the textbooks getting larger and larger; for them this means greater cost as well as more material that they have to learn, master, or memorize for the test.

In one extensive study of student reaction to their instruction (summarized in Courts and McInerney, 1993, pp. 33–38), students’ most common criticism was focused on the quality of their overall education, the way teachers teach, and the level of performance expected of the students. By far the most common concern was directed specifically at the tendency of teachers to rely primarily on lectures and workbook exercises to transmit information, on the absence of interaction, and on the lack of what student after student referred to as “hands-on learning.” Additional conclusions included the following:

• Students were not self-directed learners. They were not confident in their ability to approach a problem and figure it out on their own.
• The students evidenced a powerful sense that they were not learning as much as they could or should be.
• Many of the students voiced a belief that their college teachers do not really care much about them or about promoting their learning or interacting with them.
• The result? Students do not engage fully or energetically in learning something they do not want to learn or see no reason for learning.

My conversations with students on my own campus and elsewhere indicate that they also are feeling very fragmented and isolated. The fragmented feeling comes from their observation that their courses do not connect to each other; there is “this course” and “that course” but no coherent education. Their feelings of isolation come from not having much interaction with other students, either in class or out of class, about course-related matters. The net result? Low intellectual effort by students. Although most college teachers say they expect two hours of out-of-class study time for each hour of class, students are spending much less than that. Teachers’ expectations would mean that a full-time student who is enrolled in five three-credit-hour courses would need to study thirty hours ...