Category: motivation

388. The Opposite of Cheating

Posted in academic integrity, assessment, cheating, engagement, higher education, instructional communication, learning, motivation, teaching
April 9, 2025

Student use of generative AI tools as a substitute for learning has led to increased concerns about academic dishonesty. In this episode, Tricia Bertram Gallant and David A. Rettinger join us to discuss why students might use these tools and strategies instructors can use to encourage academic integrity.

Tricia is the Director of the Academic Integrity Office at UC San Diego and Board Emeritus for the International Center for Academic Integrity. David is an Applied Professor and Undergraduate Program Director in the Psychology Department at the University of Tulsa. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Mary Washington, where he directed Academic Integrity Programs and the Center for Honor, Leadership, and Service. David is also President Emeritus of the International Center for Academic Integrity. Tricia and David are the authors or co-authors of numerous articles, books, and book chapters on academic integrity. Their most recent book, The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI, was recently released as the 4th volume in the Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed series at the University of Oklahoma Press, edited by James Lang and Michelle Miller.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Student use of generative AI tools as a substitute for learning has led to increased concerns about academic dishonesty. In this episode, we discuss why students might use these tools and strategies instructors can use to encourage academic integrity.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guests today are Tricia Bertram Gallant and David A. Rettinger. Tricia is the Director of the Academic Integrity Office at UC San Diego and Board Emeritus for the International Center for Academic Integrity. David is an Applied Professor and Undergraduate Program Director in the Psychology Department at the University of Tulsa. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Mary Washington, where he directed Academic Integrity Programs and the Center for Honor, Leadership, and Service. David is also President Emeritus of the International Center for Academic Integrity. Tricia and David are the authors or co-authors of numerous articles, books, and book chapters on academic integrity. Their most recent book, The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI, was recently released as the 4th volume in the Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed series at the University of Oklahoma Press, edited by Jim Lang and Michelle Miller. Welcome, Tricia and David.

Tricia: Thank you.

David: Thank you.

John: Our teas today are;… Tricia, are your drinking tea?

Tricia: I am, my standard tea of peppermint after lunch.

John: Very good. It’s one of my favorites. And David?

David: I’m a coffee drinker, I have to admit. But it’s a really good Sumatran.

John: Excellent.

Rebecca: Good choice.

John: And Rebecca?

Rebecca: I have Lady Grey today, John.

John: And I have an Irish Breakfast tea today.

Rebecca: Nice. So, we invited you here today to discuss the Opposite of Cheating. Could you tell us a little bit about the origin story of the book?

David: Sure. Well, Trish and I have been doing this work for a long time, both separately and together, and so as AI has really started to become a big issue, but even before that, when the pandemic hit, a lot of our colleagues have been asking us, what should we do? Oh, my goodness, our students are cheating, and Trish and I both sort of smiled separately and said, “Yeah, they’ve kind of already been cheating. You’re just kind of deciding to worry about it now.” This has been an ongoing and persistent problem for probably as far back as Plato’s Academy, if not further, because people are people and it’s a fundamental problem. So when Jim and Michelle came to us and said, “Would you consider writing a book for faculty that’s practical, that’s positive, and that really takes a keen eye on academic integrity?” we said “We’d be happy to.” So we wrote this book. We were kind of proud of it, and it was ready to go to the publisher pretty much exactly the same week the ChatGPT came out.

John: Nicely timed.

Tricia: Yeah.

David: Yeah, couldn’t have done it better if we tried. So the result of which being, we sent it to the publishers and to the editors, and instead of a two-week turnaround, there was about a six-week turnaround. And Jim broke the news to us and said, “You know, you’re probably going to have to rewrite the book,” which is, I’m sure, his favorite sentence to tell an author. But we did. We wrote the book, and as we did, AI grew faster and better and more accessible, and we learned more and more about it, and now I think we’ve got a book that can really be useful in an evergreen sort of way, because the principles we’re applying are not based on the tools that you see today. They’re based on the people who are using those tools, and the people really haven’t changed at all. And so we really hope this book will be evergreen.

John: And as you noted, students have always cheated to some extent, but there was a bit of an increase in that during the pandemic based on self-reported results from students in terms of academic integrity issues. Why did it increase so much during the pandemic?

Tricia: A simple reason. As David said, students are humans, and so if you think about a couple of things that were going on during the pandemic, if you were a student. One is, like everybody else, you were operating at Maslow’s bottom hierarchy of needs: survival, safety, security, that’s all that mattered at that time. Like integrity would be way, way, way at the top of that pyramid, so that was the first thing that was going on. The second thing was increase in temptations and opportunities. All the assessments went remote, and where before, there were proctors walking around the room, maybe checking your ID, maybe checking the authorized age you brought in, seeing if you brought something else in, all of a sudden, there was none of that. If you take our traditional age college student of 17- to 21-year old, putting them in that kind of situation, or putting any of the younger kids in that kind of situation, of course they’re going to cheat. It’s a lot to ask a student to resist those temptations, especially under times of great stress and pressure. So two things created a perfect storm.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about, you’ve hinted at this already, but why students cheat in the first place, or maybe why they act without the integrity that we’re hoping they would act with?

David: Well, it’s a how long have you got [LAUGHTER] sort of an answer? You can break it down into two parts, though, and Tricia, pretty much already did. It’s the situation that they find themselves in, and the individual differences are the nature of who we are as people, and those are going to interact to create the situation where students cheat. Well, I think to take a step backward. The first thing to say is that almost all students, just like almost all people, if you put them in the right circumstances, will make a decision that they’re not proud of later. So it’s not as if we can just weed out the few bad apples and solve the cheating problem. Having said that, there are a few bad apples, probably about eight or 10% who use what we would call cheating as a dominant strategy throughout their higher education and probably throughout their life. Those are students, yeah, we really do want to try to weed those out. But for the other 80%-ish, some percent, I’m going to guess 20%, would never do something dishonest knowingly. Some of them still will cheat because bringing us to reason one, which is they don’t really understand what we expect of them, and that’s a situation that’s growing more and more as higher education becomes more accessible to people who don’t have the same background, values, cultures and understanding. This is a good thing, that higher education is more plural and more diverse, but it does change what our strategies need to be in order to help everybody be successful. And then you have the other situational reasons, things like it’s a lot easier to cheat in a high-tech environment in a lot of cases, so students are more able to do it. They feel like they’re less likely to be caught in those situations. And then you get into the interpersonal ones that I think are the most interesting, but I’m a psychologist, so of course I do, these are things like number one on the hit parade is peer pressure. Students are very sensitive to peer pressure and to peer motivators. If students think that cheating is acceptable, they’ll be more likely to do it. If they think it’s unacceptable to their peers, they’ll be less likely to do it. If they think their peers are using it as a strategy, students don’t want to be left behind, and so they’ll be more likely to try to cheat to keep up with the Joneses. So peer pressure, peer motivation is a big deal. Then you can add in things like, how wrong do they think it is? And different kinds of behavior are quite varied. This is where AI comes into play, because we’re all in a new frontier, and none of us really understand what AI is doing. I shouldn’t say none of us, but most students don’t really understand how AI works, and so they don’t really understand whether using it is inappropriate, and almost none of our students understand why we’re asking them to do the assignments. If they knew at a deep and intuitive level why they are doing what they’re doing in the way that we do when we create the assignments, then they could make a better evaluation about whether the tools they’re using are appropriate or not, but because they don’t know, we haven’t told them, and not all students are coming from a context where it’s automatically expected that they know. We’re left in a situation where students sometimes don’t think what they’re doing is actually wrong, although as often as not they do and they’re doing it because of things like time pressure, stress, desire to be successful. And there is more, but that’s a lot.

Tricia: In other words, I’ll sum up what David just said. They cheat ‘cause they’re human. [LAUGHTER]

John: And there’s multiple reasons. And one of the things you stated in the book is that there isn’t one solution to addressing these academic integrity issues, but there’s a right approach. Could you provide just an overview of an approach to try to address this collection of challenges that may lead to academic integrity issues,

Tricia: I think we would call it a teaching and learning approach, rather than a crime and punishment approach. So a teaching and learning approach means that we’re centering the faculty and the students in the conversation, and we are centering learning and what we can do to best facilitate, which is one job of the educator, and assess learning, which is the second job of the educator. And we often forget that second part. We like to focus on helping students learn, and we forget that assessing learning is a huge reason why students come to us. They need that degree. That degree is supposed to be a culmination of the assessments of learning that represents what they now know and can do. And so the approach is: focus on teaching, focus on learning, and part of that is focusing on good assessment design. So that’s the right approach. It does a couple of things. One, it’s less emotionally draining for faculty when they feel like they have to be police officers to catch cheating and to report it. That doesn’t sound like fun, and it doesn’t sound like what they signed themselves up for. But if you have them focus on learning, that’s like, “Oh, well, yeah, that’s what I signed up for. “So it feels better for the faculty, and it’s also, of course, better for the students, because they do want to learn. Yes, there are some, as our colleagues in Australia call them, enrolled persons in our school that do not want to learn. Put them aside. Like David said for a second, the rest of the students do want to learn. We’re humans. We love learning. We loved learning as kids before we got into school. And it could be that school maybe dampened that [LAUGHTER] love of learning a little bit, but people love to learn, and so having that focus says we’re in this together. And you know what, I am going to closely observe you to make sure that you actually learned what I think you learned or what you were supposed to learn. But it’s not to catch and punish you, but it’s to validate your learning and to ensure that you are making progress that you want to make.

Rebecca: You hinted at this already a bit about a misalignment between faculty understanding of what acting with integrity might be versus what a student might think. There’s a discrepancy there. Can you talk a little bit about why there might be this discrepancy, and then also how we might address it?

David: So we’ve already talked a little bit about the discrepancy in knowledge between faculty and students, and that we are not teaching mini me’s. We are an unusual subset of university students who go on to be professors, and we sometimes forget that they are not us. It’s also the case that the student population has changed in the time that a lot of us have been doing this. So we shouldn’t teach the students we were nor the students we had. We need to teach the students who are in front of us, and sometimes that means matching our expectations to theirs. It doesn’t mean changing our expectations, but communicating what ours are in a way that they can understand. So some of it is knowledge, but some of it is also goals, as Tricia alluded to. They are there, and I’ve asked them, to get a degree, to get a diploma, to get a good job, to make money, to have a place in society, and learning is a path to do that. And so we need to leverage their desire to do these things in an authentic and meaningful way….and yes, they do have that desire, most of them… by communicating the value to them of the learning that we’re asking them to do and the assessments that we’re asking them to do. None of this involves watering them down or dumbing them down or simplifying nor justifying your existence to your students. It involves helping them bridge the gap between their experience and yours, which is, of course, learning, such that they’re doing these things in a way that will prepare them best to be successful in the future, whether as professionals or as humans or as family members or as voters, whatever. And if we can persuade them that what we’re doing is worth doing, we’re going to at least give them the opportunity to act in a way that’s in accordance with our expectations.

Rebecca: Sounds very aligned with the TILT or the transparency and learning and teaching approach.

David: We’re not inventing anything new with respect to pedagogy or teaching. And in fact, I think, going back to the origin story question, from my perspective, our first concern when we wrote this book is, is there any audience for it? Because we’re not writing anything new. But then it kind of occurred to me, and I think to Tricia as well, we’re writing about teaching and learning for academic integrity folks, and we’re writing about academic integrity for teaching and learning folks. And so we hope to introduce some of the core concepts in these fields that we bridge to folks who maybe haven’t had the opportunity to bridge it in the same way yet.

John: It sounds as if one of the strategies you’re recommending is to help students see that education is valuable because of the skills they’re developing, and that it’s more than just getting that certificate at the end that matters, that if they don’t acquire skills, they’re not going to really be all that more valuable after they graduate, and just helping to align their values with the values that we hold concerning education. Would that be part of the message we’re trying to get across to students?

Tricia: Yeah, I think so, as I’ve been telling students of late, look, no employer is going to want to hire you if the extent of your skills is you pushed a button on ChatGPT and it gave you output and you handed it in, they don’t need you for that. These things are becoming agentic, and they can operate without any human intervention. So you have to bring more value to the employer than that, and so that helps to explain to them, one the importance of developing skills, but also of why we don’t allow them to use AI for every single assignment or every single activity. We still teach students basic arithmetic, even though there’s calculators, because there’s a belief or knowledge that learning that is helpful in order to better understand more complicated math you’re doing later, or just [LAUGHTER] to understand math. And so we have to figure out the same thing for students. And then second, it’s related to one of the causes of cheating that we haven’t mentioned yet, which is the extrinsic motivation, right? If I’m only motivated by the grades and the degree, I’m more likely to cheat, and if I don’t see the point of the assignment in helping me get there. And so raising students’ intrinsic motivations means we’ve got to really seriously rethink what we do in college and university. Are these learning objectives still relevant in the age of AI, and if they’re not, what needs to be updated? Are my assessments still relevant? So many courses require students to demonstrate their knowledge in writing. Why? Is writing really something that every single class needs to use as an objective measure of a student’s knowledge and abilities? Probably not. And so we really need to rethink some of those things to make everything more authentic and meaningful to students’ lives today, which will increase their intrinsic motivation and help reduce the likelihood that they might cheat.

David: We want to make it clear that learning objectives are where things should begin. It’s that classic backwards-design approach, and so Tricia says we don’t want anyone to think that Tricia is saying that writing is not important. The question is not writing is not important, the question is, is writing important to what you do? And that’s what for instructors to determine. Sometimes it’s critically important. Sometimes it’s just really useful. But at any rate, if you design your courses from the objectives back, then you can be really thoughtful about what you’re asking your students to do in a way that can incorporate AI when it’s appropriate, ban it when it’s appropriate, and be agnostic when it’s appropriate. But to focus on the learning… It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, focusing on those learning goals and updating what you do is maybe the other key theme. It’s not all about student motivation. You can’t design cheating out of a class, as our friend Kath Ellis likes to say, you can only design it in, so that’s one, and very important component, is motivation. Another is assessment, as Tricia said, and communication.

Rebecca: This emphasis on learning is certainly aligned with one of the strategies that you suggest around growth mindset. Can you talk a little bit about how to help students develop that growth mindset in this kind of a context?

Tricia: Well, we mentioned that in the book because it’s one of the pieces, as David said, we’re not introducing anything new. And so our book really isn’t about so much of how do you create growth mindset is thinking about, if we have a growth mindset about our students, that will change the ways in which we tackle the problem of cheating, and if we have a growth mindset not just of students in my content that I’m trying to teach, but in their ethical decision making. So a lot of faculty may start off thinking, well, these students are already adults. They’re 18 years old. They should know better. My job is not to educate people on ethics and morals, and so they think of them as having fixed mindsets. If they cheat, that must mean they’re a cheater, and therefore they need to be punished. And our point about the growth mindset is, in both of those areas, consider that your student still has a lot of room to grow in making ethical decisions, especially when under stress and pressure, especially when given temptations and opportunities, and consider that they still have room to grow in skills and knowledge that is related to your classroom as well. So it’s not so much that we present strategies to help them do that as here’s another way of framing your approach to the cheating problem that you might find helpful and enlightening and empowering rather than depressing, I suppose.

Rebecca: Sometimes that seems tied to this idea of an assumption that students need to come in with certain skill sets, rather than meeting students where they’re at and recognizing where they might be at around this particular idea of academic integrity.

David: Growth mindset really is bound up with another really important psychological concept, which is self efficacy. Students are much less likely to cheat if they think they can do the assignment to their standard in an honest way. If they think it’s impossible or too time consuming or unlikely, then they’re more likely to take a risky or a dishonest approach. And of course, if they come into a class thinking they can’t do it, and they can’t ever do it, then you have low self efficacy and a fixed mindset. And those are students who are either going to fail or cheat because they don’t see any other choice.

Tricia: Fail, cheat, or drop out. We’re going to lose them one way or another.

David: So the question is, are we educators, or are we cops? And if we’re educators or are we gatekeepers? And if we’re educators, then our job is to figure out how to get them to at least engage with the material enough to have one success experience and hopefully let that build to a second success. So one might argue, yeah, our job is not to make our students feel good about themselves, and I would actually agree with that, both halves of it, but it is our job to give students tasks that they have a shot at completing, at least to start out. Because we’re not gatekeepers, at least not mostly, we’re educators,

Tricia: Because our book is focused on instructors, and when we talk about it, can sometimes feel like we’re piling on instructors, that we’re giving them all sorts of advice, and there’s so much on their shoulders. And I want to point out that in our book, we also make sure we say, “Hey, institutional leaders, if we’re going to expect faculty to do all this, to make these changes, to adapt their courses and assessments to the age of AI, they need to be given the time, training, and support to do so.” We were not taught in our PhDs how to teach. Like K through 12 teachers were taught how to teach. We were not taught how to design valid assessments. And yes, a lot of us will work at some place where there’ll be a teaching and learning center that will have maybe two instructional designers or maybe one person, and they’re often focused on helping faculty create online courses, as if teaching in person is easier and everybody just knows how to do it. So as we’re giving all this advice to instructors, we’re saying here’s a menu of things we want you to think about. Choose what gives you agency, what empowers you now to tackle this problem? Choose something that you might do next year after you do some more research and institutional leaders, you need to give your faculty, time, training, and support to deliver on this new teaching and learning imperative for the age of AI.

John: We’ve done several podcasts with Elizabeth Canning, and she’s done a fair amount of work on the importance of both instructors having a growth mindset and in building that growth mindset for students, not only does that tend to benefit all students, it tends to also reduce some of those equity gaps. So we’ll include a link to those podcasts and some of the resources there in the show notes as well. With the introduction of AI, a lot of faculty panicked, but I don’t think, from what I’ve seen of surveys, student cheating continued, but it didn’t seem to really increase. The surveys that I’ve seen have indicated that was mostly a shift in the type of cheating. Instead of subscribing to Chegg or other services, students were perhaps a little bit more likely to rely on AI to do some of that, and faculty, though, seemed to be much more concerned about this type of academic integrity issue than with previous ones. What can faculty do to address the issues with AI? You mentioned before that one issue is, some things can be done by AI. Some things can’t. What can we do to help faculty, perhaps, discourage inappropriate use of AI?

David: I think it’s all the things we’ve already talked about. Start by making sure you understand as a faculty member why you’re banning AI or what the rules of engagement are. Is it a knee-jerk reaction. Is it fear and ignorance, or is it a principled approach based on the learning goals of your class? Then, once you’ve done that, and if you’re confident that your approach to AI is based in the learning objectives of your course, make it clear… to start within the syllabus, but I would say with each assignment that you write create some sort of meaningful engagement with AI for your students. I don’t mean have them use it, but tell them what the rules of engagement are for every assessment and every activity in the course, and why it is what it is. And I don’t mean a defensive “why,” because we ban AI when we’re asking students to do fundamental skill-building tasks that will ultimately benefit them in the future, as they try to do more complex tasks, as a general rule, and we allow AI when that AI is enabling them to demonstrate the knowledge that they have in other ways more clearly. And so I think figuring out why you’re doing what you’re doing, telling students when it’s appropriate and when it’s not and when it is appropriate, I think it’s incumbent upon us to learn how to use these tools appropriately and teach our students how to use them appropriately as well. There’s a number of really useful research tools out there, for example, that I don’t think anyone would question the ethicality of using if you use a Google search, you would probably should also be okay with using an AI-aided Google search as an example. So we should start with thinking about it and then talking about it and then doing it, I would say.

Tricia: We encourage, really in the book, communicating with your students. So that means asking them, what tools are you using? How are you using them? How are you finding them helpful? How are you not finding them helpful? Hey, you know how faculty always complain that students don’t read the syllabus right? And they complain that they don’t look ahead, they don’t plan ahead for all the assessments in their class. So let’s look at the syllabus together. Here’s all the assessments or activities we’ve got coming up. When do you think it would be ethical to use AI or in what ways? And when would you think it not be ethical? When students hear each other talk about this, whether it’s asynchronously on a Google Doc or in class, again, pure norms… they start to say, “Oh, so I’ve got my peers saying I shouldn’t write my first draft of my paper with AI, interesting.” That lands different than it does when the professor just says, “Don’t do it.” And then the second thing is, if you’re going to say, don’t do it, you better secure that assessment. So if you are on a diet and you’re trying to not eat any sugar, you do not put sugar in your kitchen. You secure, you lock that baby down, right? And you say, like, that cupboard has no sugar in it. And yet again, we tell students not to use something. And then we say, now go take your exam unproctored at home on your computer [LAUGHTER], and it’s a dereliction of duty. And so we really do have to decide. If we’re going to ban it, it needs to be a secure assessment so we can actually enforce that, and so students don’t feel like you told us not to use it, but everybody’s doing it anyway. So this is not fair. So those are two things I would add to what David said.

Rebecca: One of the things that we often find students focusing on is grades and maybe not always learning. And obviously this conversation is focused a lot on the learning aspect, and even with the idea of assessments, kind of talking about some of the values of those assessments. Are there other approaches, like alternative grading, or other things that you might recommend that might help shift that perspective?

David: No… just kidding. I’ve tried them all. I haven’t tried ungrading, but I’ve done all of them, and I love some parts of all of the different alternative grading schemes, and really don’t like some other parts. So I’m loathe to recommend anything to anybody else beyond stay open-minded and then ask what grades are really for in your context and institution. At elite institutions, I think that they really do play a different role than they do at open admissions, broadly serving institutions. And so I’m not going to sit here in my office and tell anybody how to do anything in their classes, particularly grading, but I will suggest that you rethink how important grades are in your courses, and how important you communicate about grades in your courses. When students are pitted against each other for points, when faculty talk about the points and the grades and the numbers instead of the learning and the outcomes and the processes, students internalize that, they absolutely do. I for one, have shifted away from rigidity in my courses to flexibility with all sorts of things with respect to grades. So a simple example of this is the redo. I’d call it a mulligan, but I don’t think any of my students would really understand what that means. So in one of my project-based classes, they get two redos, plus they can earn one by actually reading the syllabus and responding to an Easter egg in it. So they get three to start. And then if I need to give extra credit, I can give an opportunity to earn more redos, rather than just giving away points. Those redos do a million different things, but one of them is they build in the possibility to fail. They allow students to try something they’re not sure they can do in a way that completely crashes and burns. And I tell them, please crash and burn at least once. It means you got out of your comfort zone, and it’s free, it costs you nothing. And that gives those students who maybe are concerned about engaging and concerned that they can’t be perfect to their own standard, a chance to give it a shot. And of course, more often than not, they’re better than they think they are, and they often don’t even need those redos by the end, but they took the chance. And you can also use a redo in my class, by the way, to get an auto extension so you don’t even need to ask for it. You just can use a redo for that. And then the flexibility means that you have that student who might be failing a class after the first assignment suddenly is still in a position to get an A as long as they don’t do it again, and it just opens up a world of learning opportunities for your students, and at the same time, reduces their desperation levels. And desperation levels are completely correlated cheating. Those kinds of flexibility, whether it be in the structure of assignments like redos, or whether it be something like specs grading, where you can take a look at bundles of points and give students the opportunity to demonstrate their learning in ways that make sense to them. Ungrading has its challenges as well as a wholesale change. And I say, go for it if you have the time and the motivation to do it. But whatever you do, think about flexibility and think about ways to lower that student desperation.

Tricia: And David’s answer there, just reminds me of something that might be important to say in terms of our book. This is what our book is. Our book presents you with multiple options. So as David said, we don’t tell you you must do ungrading and that will solve the cheating problem. We say, “Think about grading. Here’s all the options.” And we use a lot of storytelling from both of our experiences and the experiences of others in the book to illustrate, to provide that anecdotal data. And that’s what this whole teaching and engaging and thriving series in higher ed is about, is these practical books full of research-backed, theory backed-strategies, along with personal stories. And it really is just a menu of things. I think we’d be really firm on a couple of things, like you have to secure assessments if you’re going to ban AI and you really need to communicate with your students. I’ve talked to hundreds of students now about Gen AI misuse, and a lot of them just said, “I just wish our professors would be more clear on what’s allowed and what isn’t. I just wish they’d be more clear.” So those might be the two things that we’re really only very firm about that you really should do everything else is a menu of options.

John: You mentioned securing assessments. The share of students taking classes remotely has grown pretty rapidly since the pandemic, which raises a lot more concerns with this. And there’s also concerns about proctoring services in terms of Fourth Amendment issues and legal issues associated with that. What sort of advice would you provide for people teaching online classes in addressing the use of AI?

Tricia: Yeah, I’ve said a few times now on LinkedIn and social media, online learning can continue. I don’t know that online assessments can continue, at least not if they have to be secure. There’s those proctoring companies that have their own concerns. We’ve got deep fake. We used to say, “Oh, just have Avixa, have an oral meeting with the student where they tell you what they know” …they could deep fake it. Or Derek Newton just showed us at the International Center for Academic Integrity conference in his keynote that there’s just even software to make it look like I’m looking at you taking my test, but I’m really looking up here at my notes. And so even doing those kinds of checks on knowledge are going to be super difficult. One thing that we’re doing here in the University of California system is we’re looking at computer-based testing facilities. Now this is not our idea. University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign started this a while ago. Faculty created an assessment platform called Prairie Learn. So the great thing about Prairie Learn is it does allow mastery-based assessment because it helps you individualize the assessments, and so students can take them over and over again until they master the learning objectives to the level they hope or that we want them to. But also, in a computer-based testing facility, we take tests or assessment administration out of the hands of faculty and TAs who, frankly, their time could be better well spent engaging with students, teaching students, coaching students, tutoring students. And the students come in, we make sure it’s the student who is enrolled in the class is the person actually taking the test, and then they have no access to anything they’re not supposed to have access to. And we’re looking at building those out across the system, and then having an agreement with the Cal State system and the community college system so that any of our, at least California, students who are taking online classes could easily still accessibly transport themselves to a local in-person assessment. Now, the other thing we wanted to make sure when we talk about this is something that another Australian colleague, Phil Dawson, talks about, is probably not every assessment in every course needs to be secure. And we got to start maybe thinking at a programmatic basis, what do students need to know and be able to do by the time they finish this program? At what points do we need secure assessments to make sure they’re hitting those benchmarks? And then, if they’re not hitting those benchmarks, how can we help them catch up? And so I think we just need to rethink how we deliver [LAUGHTER] curriculum and how we assess whether students have met those learning objectives. Another Australian colleague…. we keep always citing our Australian colleagues because they’re brilliant… but Kane Murdoch says that’s like putting a bandaid on an amputated limb. It’s just not going to work if we just try and tinker around the edges.

David: To cite another one of our Australian colleagues, you want to take a Swiss cheese approach to academic integrity, because no one thing will work. So start by building a basis of integrity, by communicating integrity, building dynamic, interesting, and relevant courses for your students, just like we’ve been talking about. But then some assessments that you give them will need to be secured, as Trish said, not all of them do. You can think of it as sort of a division between formative and summative, but it doesn’t quite necessarily have to break down exactly that way. But when you’re getting to those big summative, high-stakes assessments where you’re making sure people can actually be effective doctors or engineers or even psychologists or teachers, it doesn’t really matter what it is, everybody should be able to demonstrate those skills and knowledge. That’s when you have to start using series of other options. So that might mean a technological option, especially in online courses, technology is going to have to play some sort of role, but today, you can probably secure an online assessment at the margins, but still, anybody really motivated can probably work around it. In five years, most elementary school students will be able to work around it. So yeah, I think even if we can secure online assessments today, and that’s an if, we will not be able to secure them long term, and not even the new, clever assessments that the technology allows for. Eventually, we’ll get to a point where AI is testing AI, and people won’t be in there at all, unless we choose to make it so that we’re in there. And that means more human time for us as instructors and assessment creators, and more human time for the students as well.

Tricia: And when we think about it, what do students need us for? They need us for human-to-human interaction. They need us to develop skills and knowledge experientially in solving problems. They do not need us to deliver information. And when you think about it, online learning was really a way to deliver knowledge to people. My master’s was in rural extension studies. How do we deliver knowledge out to everybody, whether they can come to campus or not, and we’re just not in the business of delivering knowledge anymore. We’re in the business of creating knowledge. We’re in the business of co-creating knowledge. We’re in the business of human-to-human interaction. So if we want students to give us money for something other than a piece of paper they get in four years or three years, then we need to provide them with something that AI can’t and what is that one thing? It’s interaction with other humans. It’s learning with other humans. And I thought maybe this is a good time. My tea is Yogi Tea. It comes with quotes, and I just think it’s so fitting that this is the one tea bag I just pulled today. And the quote is, “we can always start again.” And really, at a higher education college, we need to start again. And that sounds very painful, but we have to start again in thinking from scratch of what are we offering, what’s our value to students and to society in the age of AI.

Rebecca: Part of that seems like we all start again as instructors as well, and make sure that we’re familiar with how AI can help us and help our students, instead of constantly fighting it, like better understand what some of the possibilities are so that we can do that redesign work.

David: I don’t think anyone said yet in this podcast, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but I think it might be time to say that. You should buy our book and you should use the techniques that we suggest, but unless post-secondary education makes some fundamental changes philosophically and practically, that’s what we’re doing. We need to recenter humans in what we do, and we need to offload the parts that we can offload. AI is going to be an incredibly powerful tool for us as teachers, just as it’s becoming for assessment takers and hopefully learners at some point as well. So we need to figure out how to deliver the value that Trish is talking about.

John: When I give workshops to faculty, I’ll often remind them that we need to teach students for their future, not for our past, things that worked for us in the past in the world before, AI may not work so well, and there are a lot of people out there trying to find ways to integrate AI into this, because students will be working with AI in the future, and they have to be able to add some value to that. And if we can somehow assess your ability to go beyond just AI, perhaps that might be a direction that’s worth exploring. And there’s a lot of people trying to work on that right now. Is that something that might be a way around some of these issues?

David: Yeah, I think it’s exactly what we’re advocating for, which is to build assessments that allow AI to be used in a way that is fair and equitable and clear and that allows us to see what students are bringing to the material over and above those same fairly used tools that everyone else. Having said that, there’s also going to be those assessments and those skills that you really need to be able to use without AI, because those are the bedrock, foundational skills, and also the things that you simply don’t want to trust AI for. Computers don’t, and probably won’t for a while, have the ability to do intentionality. They don’t understand that there’s a physical, real world out there. They are living in an electronic world, and so that means you can’t ultimately trust them with ethical choices. So that’s on us to make those ethical choices and to use machines in ways that are ethical, and that’s going to always be, at least for my lifetime, a big part of what we’re teaching our students to do.

Tricia: And I also think that when faculties play with the tools, they have to remember that they are experts in the discipline, probably in what they’re asking the AI tool to help them. And so the other thing I’ve heard, some mistaken conclusion is, “Oh well, I found it very useful for helping me write, so I’m going to let students use it to help them write.” They’re novices. They’re novice writers compared to faculty, they’re novice in your discipline, they’re novice in the content. They’re novice at a lot of skills that you may have been working on, and so how they should be using it, or how you need to scaffold or coach their use in it, is very different than how you would use it. It’s important for us to keep that in mind, that we have to think again, like you said, the future, right, for their future? Well, what does the future look like? Because right now, we only know how AI is beneficial to people with expertise who didn’t have it and developed all these knowledge and skills without it. How do we prepare them for that? If we just allow them to offload everything to AI, then will they be able to use it in any way that’s meaningful?

Rebecca: That seems like a really good note to get to our last question, which is we always end by asking: “What’s next?” [LAUGHTER]

Tricia: That’s a big question.

David: What’s next is change, that I can promise you. We’re at an inflection point, and this change has been coming for a while. COVID, we thought, was going to be the impetus for that change, and maybe it would have been without Gen AI, but there’s no doubt that Gen AI is going to be the impetus for a huge amount of change in almost any part of our lives. But I think that education is going to be the pointy end of the spear with respect to that, and you can think of it from just one little example, which is the intellectual power of writing. Writing, until now, or rhetoric, maybe more broadly, has been the way that we’ve honed our ideas as humans. It’s the way that the late, great Frank Yates, who taught me undergraduate psychology, said writing is nature’s way of telling you how unclear your ideas are. And that’s true of all rhetoric, and it’s actually a fundamental fact about our lives as intellectuals up until now, but suddenly it’s possible to create a coherently and sometimes even well written document without understanding what you’re writing. That’s what Gen AI does. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Well, hard to say, but it’s a new thing, and it is what’s next. And so the question is, what is the next generation of intellectuals look like when they don’t have to write to think? I don’t know what it’s going to be, but it’s going to be a bumpy ride getting there.

Rebecca: It’s a good thing. You said you were leaning into flexibility, huh? [LAUGHTER]

David: It’s really the only choice. It’s amazing what you can do when you have no choice. [LAUGHTER]

Tricia: I have nothing to add there. That’s a great answer, and I think I’m just gonna upvote what David said. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, thank you for joining us. We strongly recommend that people take a look at your book, because everyone in higher ed is addressing these issues, and it’s a really nice resource that’s very timely. And thank you for joining us.

Rebecca: Yeah, thank you so much.

David: You’re welcome. Thanks for having us.

Tricia: Yeah, thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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381. Transition to College

Posted in engagement, first-generation, higher education, inclusion, learning, motivation, pedagogy, teaching
February 19, 2025

Many students experience challenges transitioning from high school to college. In this episode, Beckie Supiano joins us to discuss changes in the K-12 environment that impact student preparation for college. Beckie is a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education. She began her work at The Chronicle as an intern in 2008 and is a co-author, with Beth McMurtrie of The Chronicle’s Teaching Newsletter.

Transcript

John: Many students experience challenges transitioning from high school to college. In this episode, we discuss changes in the K-12 environment that impact student preparation for college.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guest today is Beckie Supiano, a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education. She began her work at The Chronicle as an intern in 2008 and is a co-author, with Beth McMurtrie of The Chronicle’s Teaching Newsletter. Beckie’s insightful articles have been a regular source of inspiration for us as faculty and many of our past podcasts were the result of things we’ve read in your articles. Welcome.

Beckie: Thanks so much for having me.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Beckie, are you drinking any tea with us today?

Beckie: You know, I’m not really a tea drinker. I have finished my morning pot of coffee, and I’ve switched over to sparkling water over here.

Rebecca: I would say probably many of our listeners are right on team Beckie. How about you, John?

John: I am drinking a ginger peach black tea today.

Rebecca: I’m back to drinking that candy cane tea that I’ve been drinking lately. It’s really a nice blend of black and herbal mint.

John: Interesting, although that may not work so well once we hit the summer, you may want to finish it up by then. It just may seem a bit non seasonal

Rebecca: at the rate I’ve been drinking it, it may happen.

John: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss your recent article: “Some Assembly Still Required: How K-12 reforms and recent disruptions created Gen Z’s baffling habits.” College faculty have, as long as there have been records, complained that the K-12 system left a lot of students unprepared for college, but the gap between high school preparation and college expectations seem to have gotten quite a bit worse in recent years. What are some of the changes in student experiences and in the K-12 environment that have made this transition more difficult for both the students and for the faculty who will be teaching them?

Beckie: I’ll mention this article is part of a series that my colleague, Beth McMurtrie and I and another colleague have been writing for really about the past year, called “Teaching Gen Z,” which was really our attempt to describe and untangle a lot of what professors have been noticing with this group of traditional age students. And so we got to a point where we sort of thought, “Oh gosh, you know, we really do need to go look at what’s been going on in K-12.” I hear you, these complaints that “students are coming in unprepared” and “something must be up with schools” are long standing, but there are some things that really do seem to have changed that are important, and obviously that’s what the article is trying to make sense of here. I will say it’s like, “Oh, something must be going on before these students get to college.” And I think one thing I’d like to underscore is it doesn’t seem to be just one something, and I think that’s part of what makes this very complicated, but also what makes it really interesting. A lot of my article looks at the test-based accountability movement and some of its unintended consequences in terms of what is and isn’t focused on in a lot of schools, and how that sets students’ expectations for what education really is. But there are other things too. There’s been a really significant drop in reading for pleasure, which turns out to be a very important thing in terms of students’ reading ability, also the teacher shortage and what that’s meant for who’s in front of classrooms and what they’re doing. And the rise of technology to supplement classroom instruction is related with that last point on the teacher shortage, too. And then, of course, we have the pandemic, which exacerbated lots of existing trends and created some new challenges. And everyone’s still trying to make sense of how that’s all played out, unfortunately, and what some of the longer-term impacts are. And then there’s really the role that schools play in society, and how many things they’re really being asked to do beyond simply educating our country’s children. So what that means, just to take sort of one piece of it that professors are very interested in, students are not getting as much practice reading books or longer articles inside or outside of school, and so professors are noticing that students are having a harder time doing the kind of reading they’re expected to in college. And if you sort of look at what’s going on… again, both in and outside of school before students get there… you can kind of get a little bit of a better handle on why it might be that way.

Rebecca: One of the things that you talk about in your article is the No Child Left Behind Act and just legislation in general that’s intentions are to help our education and our society, but there are sometimes some intended consequences. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Beckie: Yeah, absolutely. So, No Child Left Behind, the federal law signed in 2002 was intended to raise the floor on student performance in school, which I think most people could agree is a good goal. It was a bipartisan effort, and the idea here was that there are groups of students, especially sub-populations, who would be more at risk, students who are members of minority groups or low-income students or in special education programs, and before it was sort of easy to mask if those students were not being well served by school, if they weren’t performing well, and the law was really designed to make it harder to have students kind of passed along through school without getting the education they were supposed to. But what happened is there needs to be some sort of way to evaluate are schools actually educating these students, and the way that that was done is standardized tests. And just like so many things, once you introduce a way to evaluate performance and make it a high-pressure thing where everyone has a lot at stake, everyone’s going to focus on how to look good in that evaluation. And part of what you see is that some of the things that schools might do to try to improve test scores in the short term might be misaligned with things you might do if your goal were longer-term learning. And there are lots of examples of that, and a lot of it’s become more clear now.

John: So, along with the No Child Left Behind Act there was this increase in standardized tests. How did the introduction of these standardized tests affect the way in which classes are taught? One of the examples you mentioned is how 10th graders were taught the Pythagorean theorem. How did that change in response to some of the standardized testing, as well as the breadth and depth of coverage on many other topics.

Beckie: Yeah, so that example about the Pythagorean theorem is one specific example from a test of 10th graders in Massachusetts that a professor I spoke with at Harvard, Dan Koretz, mentioned in our interview that I thought was just such a nice example. So basically, you can reverse engineer these tests to figure out how to help students perform well on them. So in this instance, this example that he gave me, the Princeton Review, figured out like, oh, there’s this pattern where this particular test, for this group of students in this state regularly asked a question on the Pythagorean theorem. And because students cannot use calculators on this test and the Pythagorean Theorem requires using square roots, they’re really only a few kinds of questions this could possibly be, like, if you memorize a few sets of ratios, you can pretty much get the question right, whether or not you understand algebra, and really, whether or not you understand the Pythagorean Theorem. It’s just a sort of test strategy that you could use to perform well on this item, and that’s a problem for a few reasons. I mean one, it means that the item can’t really tell us if students understand math, because they don’t have to [LAUGHTER] to get this question right. So this item, which is one of a small sample of questions used to test: “Do you understand algebra generally?” can’t really be effective at answering that question for us. But a related problem is that if you know that certain material is going to be tested on and again, if there’s a lot of pressure to shore up student performance, there’s all the incentive in the world to really focus on those aspects of a subject in your preparation for students. So lots of practice on specific parts of math, specific reading skills, lots of short passages of reading and writing, because that’s what students would be evaluated on. And so you see this reallocation that certain subjects are emphasized to the detriment of others. And then within subjects like math and reading that were really emphasized, only certain pieces of those subjects would really get attention, which could lead to nice looking test scores, but would also lead to students not having the full preparation they would need to build on those skills in future work, including at college.

Rebecca: When we’re talking about standardized testing, other systematic assessment rubrics also became increasingly common in high schools and colleges. And in your interview, one of the faculty members that you interviewed, Ethan Hutt, suggests that this has made it more difficult for students to create more interesting writing assignments. Is the increased prevalence of rubrics also an outgrowth of the nature of standardized testing?

Beckie: Yeah, so I think that’s a really good example. A rubric can be helpful if students are supposed to come up with a certain type of answer when they’re answering a question on a test. Writing can be kind of formulaic at any level, but there’s some variation in how formulaic it is, and students have been kind of conditioned to write to spec, right? I hear from professors all the time, just interviewing them in our day-in, day-out, coverage of teaching that students really seem to think they are being asked to come up with the answer, the right answer, the answer the professor has already thought of and is walking around with and expecting to hear back, even if students are being asked to share an opinion or talk about their personal experience, something that presumably the professor can’t really have a predetermined answer for. And you can kind of see how this all connects. And so what Hutt was saying is students just feel really lost when they’re asked to just write an essay on a topic. They expect a lot more granular instructions of exactly what to do to deliver the kind of product that the professor wants and will give a good grade to, and when he’ll tell them, like, “I don’t really have that, that’s not really what I do,” they don’t believe it. They think he just won’t tell them. And I’ve heard similar things from other professors as well. I think it’s long been the case that college students are asked to work at a higher level, that they have more freedom to kind of spread their wings and try things out. But it seems like professors are noticing that this group of students, rather than kind of enjoying that and running with it, feels kind of stuck or anxious or just doesn’t know how to proceed without a lot more explicit direction.

John: And that’s put a lot more pressure on college faculty also to use rubrics with assignments, which, again, can limit creativity in students’ writing. We’d like to have students develop some creativity and be able to analyze material, but if we are requiring them only to focus on a narrow subset of their disciplines, might that do some harm to their ability to be productive members of society in a world where they’re not going to be just completing assignments designed to a rubric, or where they’re not going to be getting standardized tests, but they have to deal with real-world problems.

Beckie: Yeah, I think that there’s a lot of concern about all of what you just said on the part of faculty, and it’s hard to figure out how to communicate to students what you really are trying to get them to do, and it’s hard for these reasons, and it’s hard because of generative AI. There’s a lot going on here that’s working against trying to convince students to think critically and do their own creative work, and kind of to find their voice. And that seems to be something that is a heavier lift for everyone involved, sure.

Rebecca: Along those same lines, at the college level, university level, we’re expecting students to be independent and have autonomy and really take those reins. Are there things happening in the K-12 system that are reducing student autonomy? Is that in response to the high-stakes testing and rubrics and all the standardization?

Beckie: Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I think, in terms of how to go about completing the work that does seem to be in play. And some of it, I think, is just also about the way you think about education, and what it’s for. The testing regime is performative, like you’re getting a test and you’re performing on it, and your performance is really important. That’s really different from other ways of thinking about education as being a process. And I think many people in higher education and gosh, you know, many people in K-12 too, would understand that the process thing is important. We’re supposed to be lifelong learners. This is how you go about learning anything. A lot of times, people will talk to me with illustrations of like, “How do you learn to play a sport or a musical instrument?” This is sort of how humans learn. We have better and better handle on that from research on learning, but it’s tough, I think, to get students to shift gears. And this is, I think, interrelated to something that professors also experience, where students are very grade motivated, and I think it’s easy for professors to be exasperated by that, but especially at a place with a selective admissions process like, oh gosh, you know, students have been really strongly conditioned to think about their grades, or they probably wouldn’t be in your classroom at all. And it’s hard to turn that off.

John: And much of this seems to be related to the changes in incentives that K-12 instructors and administrators face because the funding they receive may be tied to the success of students on these standardized exams, but by narrowing what students are studying, or narrowing the range of topics addressed to those things that can be captured in multiple-choice exams and standardized tests, one of the things you’re suggesting, I think, in the article, is that students are missing out on some of the wider explorations and a wider breadth of learning that perhaps might have been more common in the absence of some of the standardization. Is that correct?

Beckie: Yeah, it’s interesting. Some of the education scholars I spoke to emphasize that before all of this, if you go back pre-2002, and there were even some earlier efforts in this direction before that, you just probably had a more uneven landscape. Like a really good teacher could do some things that would be harder to get away with now. But also that isn’t to say that’s always what happened. Teaching was probably a little more uneven before, which is interesting to think about. But this narrowing, I think, is interesting. One of the things that came up again in my reporting here, I also looked a bit at the Common Core, which is designed to help students be college and career ready. Again, like really good intentions there, but there’s this idea that, okay, most of us out in the working world, most of the reading and writing we do is shorter things. It’s emails and memos and reading an article that’s kind of shorter. It’s not sit down and read this book and then write a term paper, and that’s not what most people are doing. But it seems now that there are some things about reading whole books that change the way people read. Their reading ability is different if they only read like snippets of things and don’t have to think about like, “What is this author’s argument in some sort of a context beyond just some little passage?” And another example that came up is history, if you’re reading in history, like as a subject, and then in college as a discipline that, in addition to giving you access to a different disciplinary understanding of the world, would also enhance your reading ability in ways that just doing reading drills won’t. The reading drills can maybe bring up that floor, but there’s some ceiling there that students aren’t getting the ability to work toward, and it’s interesting just thinking about how these things are interconnected. Another dimension that came up in my reporting was students reading for pleasure. And if you think about it, oh, it makes sense. If you just read more of anything, you learn more stuff, and you can make connections between the things you learn when you’re reading this book just because you’re interested in whatever to other things you’re learning at school and elsewhere, and to just take that piece away has a lot more consequences than maybe would be apparent if you’re just thinking about the basic things that everyone needs to know.

Rebecca: One of the things that came up in your article, but we’re also just observing in our landscape is not just short-form reading, but there’s a plethora of videos available, podcasts available, AI available. For example, even on The Chronicle website, [LAUGHTER], now there’s an AI tool to get information fast. It’s great. It’s helpful to be able to get information in a lot of different modalities. There’s real strength in the ability to get information in multiple modalities. There’s benefits to that, as well as maybe some detriments to not always using all the modalities available.

Beckie: I think it’s interesting, and it’s hard for professors to figure out how much reading and writing, per se, really matter as a way to get information or a way to convey what you know. But I think, for most of them, it’s hard to imagine that there isn’t something important about those skills in particular,

John: I remember when I went to high school sometime last century, a while back, but it was really common for us to be asked in English classes and in social science classes to read multiple books in the semester or in the course of the academic year, but with the introduction of the Common Core standards that you’ve mentioned, the focus on that is a bit different. One of the things you suggest is that the Common Core focus is more on close-reading skills, which encourages practice with close-reading skills. How might that be harming students’ ability or interest in engaging with larger texts.

Beckie: When I talked to a professor, James S. Kim, who studies reading and the development of that, one of the things that came up was that there was a sort of virtuous cycle with reading, like, if you read more, you get better at it, and reading at length is just different. I mean, I think close reading is an important skill, but you can work on that while you’re reading something longer, and the reverse kind of isn’t true. And I think part of what’s emerging is that there are so many different things going on with reading, and focusing just on close reading doesn’t enable students to be able to be well prepared to do all the things they need to do with it when they get to college. Reading in college does work differently. It’s supposed to. You read differently in different courses, and that’s always been a hump for students, but it again, seems to have changed. One of the education professors I interviewed for my story was describing how her students in like, not a first-year course, didn’t read the directions correctly on an assignment, and she had to kind of go back and do that with them. And her argument, this is Julie Cohen at UVA, her argument is that this illustrates to her that it’s the teacher shortage, that someone who’s gone through the right preparation to be a classroom teacher would have covered this in high school, and students just aren’t getting enough practice with it before they get to college. That’s her read on the situation. But we’ve heard this from other professors too, that some of this is even just like a simple reading comprehension issue.

Rebecca: One of the things that we haven’t quite touched on yet is the introduction of smartphones and apps. We talked a little bit about AI and video and things and how they’ve predominated our media landscape, but what about the access to smartphones and high school students and earlier having access to these.

Beckie: There’s obviously a lot of debate around this, and I’m not sure that anyone has it all completely figured out, But there are real concerns about attention and certainly time you’re spending scrolling on your phone is time you’re not spending reading for pleasure. That seems kind of obvious. Some of this is about what’s going on outside of school. And then one of the professors I talked to, Morgan Polikoff, at USC, was saying that he thinks a sort of underappreciated dimension of this is that there’s this idea now that younger students don’t read, won’t read, and sort of a hesitation to expect it of them, right? Like, oh, we have just used something that students are going to participate in. And so his argument is that there’s sort of this acceptance of like, oh, students won’t do this, so let’s not even try to make them.

Rebecca: I wonder if that’s tied to whether or not we have role models that are doing that. I’m thinking about my own daughter, who’s in second grade. We’ve instituted family reading time mostly because we want to read, so she has her own sets of books so that she’s reading, but that’s because we’re all spending time reading. And if that’s not a culture in a space where a kid is, where people aren’t reading all the time and they are on their phones, then the expectation might be to be on a phone.

Beckie: I think it’s an interesting question. There’s obviously, like, more than one way you can be using your phone, and I think a lot of us do a lot of reading [LAUGHTER] on our phones too, but from the outside, it’s not always even clear if that is actually what you’re doing. And when I talked to James Kim, he did talk about that, what parents are doing matters here too. Are you talking about school and even if you are reading, is that visible to kids? And we know a lot of adults aren’t reading either.

John: And smartphone apps are designed to get attention, there’s a large financial incentive for the developers of those apps to build apps that capture attention, and so it’s a tough competition, from a student’s perspective, between something that provides this immediate gratification and interesting content, or learning something in more depth, which may be a little bit more tedious, which was a challenge that wasn’t faced in much earlier cohorts.

Beckie: Yeah, I mean, I’ve definitely talked to some students who are aware of that problem. I did another story for this series about students struggling to work independently and just needing more support to do ambitious work in a course, like a big paper or project. And that’s something that came up talking with students about their own habits. It is hard. And I think it’s hard even for those of us who are past that part of our lives, that distraction is real. And I think there are a lot of people who don’t really have the option of just putting the phone in a drawer for large stretches of the day, because they have to be reachable. And if you’re reachable, you’re reachable. It’s definitely a hard thing for students, and I think one that I think a lot of us can sympathize with.

Rebecca: One of the conversations that I had recently with a colleague, and we were having with some kids, where the kids were like, “Well, can you just Google that for me, if you don’t know the answer, like, just look it up.” Yeah, we used to have to, like, look in an encyclopedia, go check out a book from the library, [LAUGHTER] and just like the difference in how quickly you can get an answer to a question versus having to work a little bit to get an answer to even basic questions about whatever.

Beckie: It’s really interesting. And then I think the challenge is then easier to get an answer, but harder to know if it’s a good answer, right?

Rebecca: Yeah.

Beckie: I mean, I think that’s hard for, again, lots of folks who are long past being a student and just figuring out, okay, you can search for something, but how do you evaluate the answers you’re seeing?

John: So, generative AI and hallucinations provide students with some serious challenges there, too, in interpreting or examining the accuracy of information that’s being provided.

Rebecca: There’s a long thread on blue sky recently about hallucinations related to summaries and searches about some basic science topics. So if a kid’s like looking up a basic answer to something it could be completely inaccurate. It would be a topic that would be somewhat simple to answer, but the answer that they’re getting because they’re looking at the AI summaries are just completely inaccurate.

John: Although it has been getting better…

Rebecca: Yeah, It’s getting better, but…

John:… to be fair.

Rebecca: Again, these were searches that just happened in the past.

John: So one of the other things you talk about is the impact that the pandemic has had on student preparation for college. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Beckie: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s hard to tease out exactly what’s gone on here, just from covering pandemic teaching while it was going on, I think there was a long period of just everyone kind of wishing very hard that things would go back to normal this time, like, okay, next semester, we’re gonna be back to normal. Okay, next semester, [LAUGHTER] we’re gonna be back to normal, and I can sympathize, again, with why people had that expectation, but there are some things that really do seem to have shifted. One question is, did students just not get whatever they were supposed to learn during the period of emergency remote instruction, which, of course, looked different at different schools, like, how long did that last for and how did it work, and how much instruction were students really getting during that time, and how much were they actually expected to do their work? And as time goes by, the students coming into college who have been younger and younger whenever that happened, and have had more time to kind of regroup from that and catch up in various ways. But other things change too, and part of what seems to have changed is expectations. For a while there, students in high school were given a little more ability to push back on expectations, to say, like, “We really can’t do this. You’re asking too much,” and to be listened to in a way that they probably wouldn’t normally be. And I think, even for folks who think that was the right way to proceed during that time, it’s been hard to come back from, like, this idea that deadlines and grades and you really do have to do this stuff, just haven’t come back. And someone else I spoke with, Elena Silva at New America think tank, was describing that even just the question of, like, “Why are we here at all in the first place?” I mean, before you kind of close physical schools for a stretch of time, I think for many students, it wouldn’t really occur to them, like, “Oh, why are we here at all? What could we be doing instead?” And then she pointed out, a lot of the rest of us never quite went back to working the way we normally did, but students have kind of been expected to do that, and there’s a little more pushback and like, “What is this all for?” And it’s something I hear so much, again, from my higher ed sources, from professors, from faculty developers, like giving students that “why,” that reason, is just so important. They seem to need it more now. Getting some buy-in from them that, like, this isn’t just some busy work you’re being forced to do to like kill time, but we’re actually trying to give you something valuable, and being able to really articulate what that is, is not a silver bullet, but it does seem to be a necessary first step in a lot of cases.

Rebecca: How has the pandemic affected student preparation for college?

Beckie: I think that it’s really such a mixed bag. I talked to Tim Renick, who has all this great data from higher education in Georgia looking at entry-level courses there, and he said, like, “Oh, we really saw, like, this immediate pandemic era hit in student performance in these intro courses, but we seem to have worked through that.” Like students have kind of bounced back to normal on that front. But I do think there’s more to it than just “did you kind of get the content that you can build on in this next course?”…all these other things around, like how to function as a student, the independent work, and the sort of understanding of why you’re there, and the ability to kind of forge ahead with that. Those things do seem to have taken a hit. The other article I wrote for this series about students working independently, described that, like a lot of professors, years out from pandemic teaching, have found that if they really want students to deliver some big project or paper or deliverable, if you will, from their course. If they really see that as important, they have to create more time and space for students to work on it, give them more feedback, maybe give them more class time. It seems like students are having a harder time doing work on their own outside of class, and professors have to decide, like, if they really want that work to happen, they might have to sort of change the way it gets done, including where, including it might have to happen more when the professor is available to students in class.

John: Along with the changes in the way students were learning during the pandemic, there were also some pretty substantial learning losses that were shared fairly unequally across the population. All the students who were in elementary or high school during that period ended up being quite a bit behind the usual rate of progression. International standardized test scores like the PISA have been steadily declining, but there was a precipitous drop during the pandemic where students are about anywhere from six months to a year behind in terms of where they would have been in terms of math scores and reading scores, but those gaps are pretty unequally shared. There’s a pretty high variance in that, which again, presents some problems. What sort of things might college faculty do in addressing those learning losses and also the disparity in those losses that occurred across our student populations?

Beckie: I think this is a huge challenge. And again, it’s something that predates the pandemic, but was magnified by it. I mean, students are not getting the same kind of preparation for college. A lot depends on where you went to school and what resources you have available in your school and at home, and that’s long been true, but it’s, I think, kind of easy to pretend that it isn’t, that students are coming in and they’re all kind of expected to sort of do the same thing wherever they’re coming from. I hear a lot of debate among faculty about whether it’s on them to help students do things like learn how to study, learn how to read the directions. Know that you can’t just sit there with your textbook and a highlighter at the library, and then do well on your STEM exam in college. And on the one hand, professors are in their role because of their subject matter expertise… that’s very important to them, and in a lot of courses, making sure that students have a handle on certain material for specific reasons for the future is really the name of the game, and I can understand why people really center that. But I’m hearing a lot of other professors say, like, “Well, if students come in and they don’t know how to do something, even if it’s something kind of basic we all think they should be able to do, we have to teach them now, like they can’t do the work of the course if they don’t know how to study, or they don’t know how to read the way we expect them to read, or they don’t know how to write the way we expect them to write. And even if that doesn’t seem like it’s within the parameters of your job, if students haven’t gotten this somewhere else by the time they get to you, they’re not gonna be able to do well in your course without it, then you do have some responsibility to help them figure that out, and it’s really a lot to ask of professors. It’s not like there’s extra time for that, and also it’s not something that professors necessarily know how to teach students. They don’t have the same kind of training as a K-12 teacher. Some professors really don’t have much training at all in teaching, and it’s really complicated to figure out why people are missing something that they’re missing, and what they need to kind of get there, and if you’re seeing different kinds of misunderstandings or mistakes or gaps than in the past, like that does really put a lot more work on faculty. But what’s going to happen if they don’t try? Like, what’s going to happen to those students?

John: The No Child Left Behind Act was put together to try to make sure that the quality of education was raised for all students so that we weren’t losing more students along the way. And it’s resulted in some changes that probably help students at the bottom a little bit more, but it also may limit the range of topics that students learn and the depth of topics. But in terms of colleges, one of the things that we encourage faculty to do in terms of creating an inclusive teaching environment is to provide more structure on assignments, to use rubrics to make expectations more transparent. That has been shown to reduce some of those equity gaps in outcomes, but it might also tend to reduce the time that students spend on developing critical thinking skills. So that’s a trade off that I think is at the heart of some of this discussion, both in K-12 and also in college discussions. We want to make sure that all students have equal opportunities, but perhaps some of the strategies we’re using to do that might limit learning for all students to those things that we’re focusing on in our rubrics or a test. Do you see any way of resolving that, other than continually experimenting to come up with the best balance?

Beckie: Yeah, I don’t think I have the answer there. It’s hard, and I think it’s hard to ask anyone teaching, meet students where they are and then get them where they’re supposed to be. That’s a tall order, always, and it seems especially hard now. It reminds me a bit of the pandemic era debate on how much flexibility to give students and how much structure, which kind of cuts similarly, like, Okay, it’s a crisis. Students need flexibility. They don’t have time, they can’t meet these deadlines. And then it kind of turns out as time goes on, like, oh, the same students whose lives beyond the classroom really require them to have flexibility also really need structure, because they haven’t gotten the same opportunities to figure out how to build it for themselves. And so how do you support both of those things? It’s hard, and I think like figuring out how to create more equitable conditions, I don’t think you can create equitable conditions, given the very different background students are coming from. But to move toward that and also really support learning is hard, and I think there are things that professors are doing to try to help students that end up not helping all of them or not working out as intended. And yeah, I think there is constant experimentation with that. I think it’s kind of hard to overstate how difficult all of this is if you really care about it and try hard to make it better, as many of the people I talk to in my job are oriented to.

Rebecca: As you were asking your question, John, I was thinking, it’s not just like critical thinking, it’s like creativity, there’s just a lot of space there, I don’t know if balance is the right word either, right if we can find a balance, it’s just like, how do you keep all of those things in the kitchen [LAUGHTER] while you’re cooking as ingredients? So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Beckie: Yeah, that’s a hard question, isn’t it? One of the thoughts I had as I was working on this K-12 story is just how hard it is to remember what it was like for there to be this bipartisan education effort. Consensus is too strong, but like, just sort of this shared understanding, even of like, what are the problems and how might they be tackled? That feels just very unfamiliar right now, [LAUGHTER] even though I was there writing about some of this as it was happening. So that’s just sort of wild to think about. I think for colleges and professors, what’s next, I think, is partly just recognizing there does seem to be something that isn’t just a short-term shift in play here, and just kind of accepting that, I guess, and figuring out some way to try to hold things together in light of that. There’s sort of this crisis approach that everyone was in for a while, and that’s faded. But. It does seem that student work habits and expectations really have changed, and figuring out how to move forward with that is going to continue to be important. Again, one thing I have been thinking about is, is there some shift in what happens in class, and what does that look like? I’ve talked to a lot of individual professors who are rethinking that, both because of these student preparation issues and also because of AI and the possibility that students will turn in work that they haven’t really done work on themselves, would obviously be enormously complicated to expect students to be in class more during college, but that’s one of the things I’ve started wondering about. I mean, this sort of expectation that you spend a couple hours on your own doing this independent work for every hour you’re in the room seems like it’s kind of broken down. And so what do you do with that? I think there’s an answer there for professors, and then there’s the much harder kind of system level answer to that.

John: Well, thank you. It’s been great talking to you. And we’d also like to put in a plug for The Chronicle’s podcast. Could you talk just a little bit about that?

Beckie: Sure, The Chronicle has a fairly new podcast called College Matters, which is hosted by my colleague Jack Stripling, and it’s a great way for people inside and outside of higher ed to kind of follow along with some of the big issues of the day. Jack features Chronicle journalists and also some of the people we write about, expert sources, policy makers, folks who work on campuses. And it’s a really fun listen, because he’s a really good interviewer, and I would encourage folks to check that out.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for joining us. I know that you’ll continue being an inspiration for our podcast and always a good read.

Beckie: Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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379. Mentor Mindset

Posted in emotion, engagement, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, learning, motivation, pedagogy, randomized controlled trial, teaching
February 5, 2025

Many attempts at influencing adolescent behavior fail. In this episode, David S. Yeager joins us to the use of a mentor mindset by faculty members can  increase student motivation and academic success.

David is the Raymond Dixon Centennial Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and a co-founder of the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute. He is best known for his research with Carol Dweck, Angela Duckworth and Greg Walton on interventions that influence adolescent behaviors. David has served as a consultant for Google, Microsoft, Disney and the World Bank, and is the recipient of over 15 awards for his work in social, developmental, and educational psychology. He has published extensively in scholarly publications, and his research has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and many, many other places. David and Carol Dweck and others have also created a MasterClass on The Power of Mindset. His most recent book is 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Many attempts at influencing adolescent behavior fail. In this episode, we examine how a mentor mindset may be used to increase student motivation and academic success.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guest today is David S. Yeager. David is the Raymond Dixon Centennial professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and a co-founder of the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute. He is best known for his research with Carol Dweck, Angela Duckworth and Greg Walton on interventions that influence adolescent behaviors. David has served as a consultant for Google, Microsoft, Disney and the World Bank, and is the recipient of over 15 awards for his work in social, developmental, and educational psychology. He has published extensively in scholarly publications, and his research has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and many, many other places. David and Carol Dweck and others have also created a MasterClass on The Power of Mindset. His most recent book is 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People. Welcome, David.

David: Thanks for having me.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… David? Are you drinking any tea with us today?

David: Uh…. No, I am not. I read a short story about tea recently, so that’s the closest tea story that I have for you.

Rebecca: Alright, we’ll count it, we’ll count it, we’ll count it. [LAUGHTER] I know you have water with you, which is, as we know, the foundation of tea.

David:It’s pre tea.

Rebecca: It’s pre tea. [LAUGHTER] How about you, John,

John: I am drinking a spring cherry green tea, continuing the trend of cherry-based teas. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yes, the theme continues. I’ve reverted back to the blue sapphire tea.

John: And I thought the spring cherry tea was particularly good with a couple feet of snow that we’ve had in the last few days here.

Rebecca: And it is currently snowing very hard out my window, John.

John: I don’t have windows here, so it’s perfectly nice here until I leave. So we’ve invited you here today to discuss 10 to 25 which brings together a large volume of research findings concerning student motivation in a very accessible manner. Educators at all levels have been raising growing concerns about student motivation. That’s always been there, but it seems to be a little bit more serious in the last few years, while many students report that educators seem to be out of touch with their lives and their experiences, so this book is extremely well timed. How did this book project come about?

David: Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s kind of a convergence of a few different things. So one was just my observation over years that as a society we are so bad at changing and influencing adolescents. One program after another seems to not work, and probably the impetus for that was I was asked to write a paper for the special issue of something called the future of children, like 2017, it’s on social and emotional learning, and it’s an awesome group of scholars and led by Stephanie Jones, who I admire very deeply, and I was asked to write the chapter on adolescents. So what works for social and emotional learning for adolescents? And tell you what, like I kept looking in the literature, and nothing really worked. And then when you look at the meta analyses, it seemed like there was this negative trend where the older the kids in the study, the less effective the program. And the programs that did seem to work weren’t social and emotional learning programs, they were something else that later somebody labeled social and emotional learning. It was like Facing History and Ourselves, which is like a history curriculum. And the side effect of good history education was some better social and emotional outcome. But it wasn’t like they were teaching you square breathing or meditation or something. And I just wanted to get to the bottom of it and I was like, why is it the case that we’ve got all these things that seem to work with younger kids? Because SEL programs did have pretty good results, third, fourth, fifth grade, maybe even younger. So like, what’s going on, seventh grade to 12th grade? And what I discovered was that in general, we kind of have the wrong view of young people, and therefore we keep defaulting to the same kinds of wrong programs, and then we’re shocked that they don’t work, but it’s because they come out of a particular mental model. So everything from DARE to Just Say No to anti-bullying programs, and the list goes on, and I went on sabbatical at Stanford about 10 years ago to try to get to the bottom of this and figure it out. And this book involved a lot more than that, but that’s what started it. And so it’s really been kind of 10 years of work to expand on that idea.

Rebecca: So you just mentioned DARE, and you talk about this and many other educational interventions in your introductory chapter. And similarly, college faculty who give students detailed feedback on their writing often see little feedback being implemented in follow-up submissions. Can you talk a little bit about why many interventions that are designed to improve the lives of adolescents are just so unsuccessful?

David: The first kind of passive insight was that there’s two things: One is that what the programs are trying to change, like the basic hypothesis they’re going after wasn’t the right thing to be changing. And the second is that even if they were targeting the right thing, they didn’t say it in the right way. So just take anti-bullying. The most common way to reduce bullying is to teach kids social skills. It’s like, “Well, the reason why you’re bullying is you don’t have a way of dealing with social conflict that is productive, that you have an unproductive habit.” And the research ended up suggesting that actually, for young kids like third, fourth, fifth, sixth grade, bullying is associated with poor social skills. It’s kids like some of my kids, where they’re ADHD and they just kind of get a rise out of bothering people and saying things repetitively, or getting a rise out of somebody. But for middle school and high school, often bullying is associated with better social skills, because the kind of bullying you’re doing is strategically destroying someone else’s reputation while maintaining plausible deniability, so the adults can’t get you in trouble, but then all of your friends see it, so that way you gain status and you look powerful, and that’s actually very sophisticated to do that. Real world bullying is more sophisticated than what you see in Mean Girls. And it’s not the case that kids need more social skills, because, in fact, the more social skills they had, maybe the better they would be at bullying. So what you often saw actually was an increase in bullying as a result of middle school or high school anti-bullying programs. So that was one big issue. And the second big issue is that even if you were working on the right stuff, and the right stuff, by the way, would be something about trying to maintain your reputation and gain status in a productive way, rather than by destroying others, would be an alternative, for example. But the way the programs are often framed is super lame. I mean, it’s like, DARE is like someone with a neon fanny pack throwing out headbands, like wearing socks and sandals and like, 0% of kids are like, “Oh yeah, you’re right. Next time someone I have a crush on offers me a cigarette, I’m gonna be like, ‘no, because I dare to resist drugs.’” No one’s gonna say that. And in fact, like, if you think back on DARE, they teach skills through scenarios, but like, what are the scenarios? It’s like, you do a skit in front of the class, and like, one kid stands up and they offer the other kid drugs, like, “Hey, man, you want some cocaine?” And then the other kid’s supposed to be like, “No way, dude.” And in every case, the kid offering the drugs looks way cooler than the nerd who says no, and all you’ve done is prove in front of everyone that awesome people offer everyone drugs. And so again, like drug use, on average, goes up in response to DARE and similar programs. So the way to summarize this is that you have to be attuned to the adolescent desire for status and respect, their desire to maintain a good reputation in the eyes of people whose opinions they care about, and if you don’t, then you might just push them away, or you might even make the bad behavior more enticing. And so that’s a launching off point for this book, where I try to suggest better approaches.

John: One of the other things you talk about and you’ve written about is how to provide feedback effectively to students. And one thing that many people have been taught for a very long time and still are is to use that compliment sandwich where you put some critique in between two positive comments. And it turns out that that’s not very effective. One of the things you suggest is that a wise feedback strategy may be more effective. Could you talk a little bit about why the compliment sandwich doesn’t work and why wise feedback may be a more effective way of providing feedback that students will respond to?

David: Yeah, so I’m starting from this premise that young people are like exquisitely sophisticated in they’re thinking about their reputations and how others are perceiving them socially, and given that, when they’re critiqued by a teacher or a coach or a manager or anyone who has power over them, then they’re not just processing it as information to include in their mental model of perfecting a skill, there’s a social implication: “Who is this person who’s implying that I’m not good enough yet? And why do they feel entitled to very publicly say that I’m inadequate? And furthermore, do they think I’ll ever be not inadequate? Like, is there any possibility that I could grow and improve?” So they’re asking these big, existential questions that have their roots in concerns about their status and reputation. What is the adult thinking? Well, they’re thinking, I don’t have to give you any feedback at all, like you’re lucky that I’m even spending any time on you, and don’t complain, stop whining, and the least I’ll do will be to try to soften the blow by being a little nice, but if you don’t like that, then you’re entitled, and you’re a wimp. That’s kind of a lot of adults’ approach. And so what occurs to them is to be like, Alright, well, I don’t want you to cry, so I’m gonna do the compliment sandwich. And the compliment sandwich is something like, “Look, I love your enthusiasm.” It’s a nice thing. And then it’s a negative thing, like,”All of your work is terrible and has to change.” And then there’s the nice thing, like, “Thanks for turning it in on time.” And we do our mental math. It’s like we’re balancing a stoichiometric equation. And then we say “Net positive. So you should thank me for this feedback.” But again, you haven’t addressed the core question in the young person’s mind about their status and their worthiness in our eyes. And so the alternative is to directly address the concern that young people have no value, that they have no potential, they have no future, et cetera, by using something that Geoff Cohen, a Stanford professor, one of my mentors, has called wise feedback. And wise feedback is very simply saying, I’m giving you these comments because I have very high standards, and I know that you can meet them. So it’s first an appeal to a high standard, and second an offer of support so that way they can meet it. And it turns out that that comes across as a very respectful thing to say, and therefore it builds trust, and it puts the young person in a place in which they’re open to criticism, because you’ve addressed their main fear, which is that we view them as incompetent.

Rebecca: So in 2014 you were the first author on an experiment involving wise feedback. Can you talk a little bit about this study?

David: Yeah, so in one experiment that, again, was led initially by Geoff Cohen, my collaborator, and other great people like Valerie Purdie-Vaughns at Columbia, we partnered with a school in the East Coast, and we had teachers assign their seventh grade students an essay to write. So kids write a standard five-paragraph essay, and then the teachers cover them in comments so they do whatever the six plus one writing tactics are, and they kind of do their worst, and then the kids have a chance to revise the essay or not. And the question is, when do kids get their essays back, covered in red ink and say, “This is great. I’m really happy for all of these ways in which I can improve. So thanks for pointing out my flaws, and I’m excited to fix them. So here we go.” When did they say that? And when do they say, “My teacher is such a jerk that he spent his whole weekend trashing the essay in the ego of a seventh grader.” And we found that in the default control group, where we didn’t do any wise feedback, only about 40% of kids even turned in their essays. But we also had teachers append handwritten notes on the essays that said, “I’m giving you these comments because they have high standards, and I know that you can meet them.” And then they sealed the essays in an envelope and handed them back, so that way kids didn’t know which got that note or which got a control group note that didn’t convey any new information. And then a week later, kids had the chance to revise, and what we found is that 80% of kids revised their essay in the wise feedback group. And for me as a parent, you know, I have four kids, and so if twice as many of my kids listened to the things I told them to do, then at least two of my four kids would have pants on by the time it’s time to go to school, and my life would be better. And I was a middle school teacher, and I remember spending all weekend grading essays and thinking, “Oh man, they’re going to be so grateful for all this feedback. They’re gonna carry me on their shoulders like Robin Williams at the end of Dead Poets Society and be a hero.” And instead, they were just like, “Why is this guy such a jerk?” And my life would have been a lot better if I knew about this research at the time. But I will say it’s been interesting since we published that study. There’s a tendency to over claim how important it is. Obviously this is just one assignment one time. I’m not claiming this is a magic bullet. The author, Dan Coyle, in his book The Culture Code, called it magic feedback. And I don’t like that. I don’t think it’s magic. To be honest, what I think the magic is is the feeling of dignity and respect when you’re in a vulnerable position and someone is looking down on you, and they instead assure you that you are a person of worth and value, that, I think is magical. It might happen to the post it note might not. There’s a lot of other ways you can show that, but I think when you do that, then you start tapping into what’s going to motivate adolescents to change. And the more we do that in schools, I think the better off they would be.

John: Is this something that cuts off once you pass adolescence? Could this also refer to the feedback from reviewer two [LAUGHTER] on that paper?

David: It’s funny, I’ve grown less patient as a reviewer over my time as a reviewer. I’m only mean to a specific kind of author. I lose my patience if you’re like, at the University of Chicago, and you have every resource at your fingertips and you still wrote a lazy paper, then I’m like, “I don’t have time for you.” Anybody else, I’m wise feedbacking away. But anyway, I guess I would say that I’m not arguing there’s a magical cutoff of 10 years old, all of a sudden you need wise feedback at 25 you need it, in 25.1 day you don’t it’s really more that the window of 10 to 25 is like the onset of puberty until the adoption of an adult-like role. And that just tends to be a period where your status is very precarious and ambiguous and it’s uncertain to you if you’re going to be taken seriously, if you’re going to be afforded the rights and privileges that you think you deserve. Like a good example is this wonderful study I love from 1998 nobody cites by Ruck and colleagues, and it’s on self-determination needs. And it’s very simple idea. They ask kids at what age do you think you should have a certain right or privilege? And then they ask adults, at what age should kids have it? So an example is being able to write a letter that’s critical of the principal and publish it in the school paper. So seventh graders are like, “Yeah, I should totally be able to do that.” And adults are like, “Not till 11th grade.” So you’ve got this gap. [LAUGHTER] So you got, like, four years or more, depending on the measure, there’s variation in that outcome. But like, you’ve got 1, 2, 3, 4 years where a young person is ready for some right and privilege and society’s saying, “No way.” That’s what I call the adolescent predicament, that your status and respect is in question because of that gap and mismatch, and I think you could experience that later in life. This one interesting guy read my book and emailed me. He’s a general counsel for a large like Fortune 100 company, and he’s like, “Man, I really have to worry about giving feedback to my junior associates, like when they write a brief.” So he’s thinking of himself as the mentor. And then it came out that he’s actually doing a master’s in education because he’s about to retire from being a lawyer, and he’s going to go be a classroom teacher for the sunset of his career. And I was like, as a 60 year old, but first- year teacher, if there’s a principal in the back of the room sitting there with a clipboard making notes on every single thing you’re doing in the classroom, are you going to feel nervous and worried? He’s like, “Oh, absolutely.” So he’s gonna feel back again like a 13-year old getting his essay criticized. So I really think that the operational definition of adolescents, at some level, is this adolescent predicament, this mismatch between the status and respect you think you’re ready for, that you desire, and then what you’re afforded by your context.

John: Beginning early in your book, and through much of it, you talk about the mentor’s dilemma. Could you talk a little bit about what that is and how we can address that?

David: Yeah, the mentor’s dilemma is, again, something coined by Geoff Cohen. It’s the simple idea that it’s very hard to simultaneously criticize someone and motivate them. And the reason why it’s a dilemma is because it feels like you have two bad choices, like one choice is “I’m going to be really honest and tough and impossible to please and tell you all your flaws, but sacrifice your motivation and crush your spirit.” Or the alternative is “I’m going to be nice and friendly and supportive, but I’m not going to tell you the truth. I’m going to withhold feedback.” And neither of those really feels satisfying. It feels like they’re not what you’re supposed to be doing. And what we’ve found, and what we’ve proposed, is that the solution to the mentor’s dilemma is something we call the mentor mindset, and that’s kind of being the walking, talking embodiment of the wise feedback note, where in all your interactions with young people, you’re neither too harsh nor too much of a pushover. You are very tough, you have high standards, but your supports are as high as your demands. So that way young people can meet that demanding standard.

Rebecca: Can you give us some examples of how this mindset might be implemented in a day-to-day student interaction?

David: Yeah, so mentor mindset is something that comes up a lot in let’s just say, how you deal with a student mistake. So in our work, we have this fellowship program for math teachers. Carol Dweck and I and several others developed a new program called FUSE, Fellowship Using the Science of Engagement. And the idea is that the culture teachers create in the classroom can influence whether students benefit from our instruction. So I get to spend all day giving you illustrative math or Eureka math, and correcting all your math misconceptions. But if, fundamentally, the kid thinks that the reason why they made a mistake is because they’re a lazy slacker that the teacher is looking down on, because the teacher explained it clearly and you didn’t do it, and therefore you weren’t paying attention, if that’s your default, then you’re not going to engage with this conceptually demanding, cognitively sophisticated curriculum. You’d be like “No way, because if it’s not clear to me right away, then it’s a threat.” So as a teacher, you need to have a culture in which mistakes are your friend. Otherwise you’re stuck doing a curriculum in which students only ever master things at 100% and they’re never confused, they’re never lost. Therefore, in order to create that culture, you have to have good routines for troubleshooting mistakes with students, because you can’t just blame and shame them or yell at them for making mistakes, nor can you avoid the mistakes altogether. And so I spent some time observing great mentor mindset teachers, teachers who had very high standards and were very supportive, and they make students own their thinking, and they ask tons of open-ended questions, and the students squirm sometimes. And a normal novice teacher, like I would have done, they feel uncomfortable. They think the student’s head’s gonna explode, that they’re sitting there not knowing the answer, but their wait time is unbelievable for these great teachers. And there’s a routine that I call collaborative troubleshooting, and there’s three steps. One is validating what the student has done, so like finding something right about the student’s answer. Next is asking questions to understand: so where did this come from? What was your reasoning? And that ends up being super important, because a lot of teachers immediately jump in and presume they understand the student’s mistake. Oh, you forgot to carry the two. So next time, carry the two. But sometimes we’re wrong, and what teenagers hate is when adults make assumptions about them. And furthermore, when you make assumptions and you’re not right, you end up telling them solutions that were already obvious to them, and then that’s also insulting, like imagine you were lost and you pulled over to ask someone for advice on where to go, and then they’re like, “Did you think about checking Google Maps?” You’re like, “Yes, I thought about checking Google Maps.” It’s a very insulting thing to say, like it’s the most obvious thing. So a lot of times when students come to teachers, that’s how they react, is they tell them to do something obvious that the students already tried. So great mentor mindset teachers don’t do that. They ask questions to understand before they tell and then, last, they kind of ask leading questions to build a bridge to a better understanding, and they wait for the student to piece it together in their minds. Novice teachers don’t do that because they feel anxious that the student is stressed, and then they rush in to tell the answer. This goes back to classic research from Mark Lepper on expert tutors in the mid 90s. Mark Lepper, a Stanford psychologist who coined the term intrinsic motivation initially. He spent years just watching great tutors and found that over 90% of what they say is a question. They’re not sitting there telling you what to think. They’re like, “Huh? Where did that answer come from?” or “Is that right?” And then the student has to have a coach in the head to try to solve the problems. There’s a lot of other examples, but I love that one, both because it’s intuitive once you get it. It’s also not obvious when you’re a novice teacher,

Rebecca: I feel like those same three steps would be great in the healthcare industry.

David: Any industry. You don’t think people like doctors talking down to them for making such idiotic health choices?

Rebecca: I was thinking that might be a great place for teachers to get some empathy. Like, “Where have you been talked down to recently?” Or tech, or any of these places.

David: Well, the interesting thing is, we have this fellowship program for teachers, and their empathy is not hard to get. Just ask them about a time they talk to an instructional coach. Instructional coaches, ideally, are these endlessly empathetic listeners. But that’s not often how it works. It’s like they race in, they tell you what to do. You’re doing everything wrong, and I’m going to check your test scores next week. And I have compassion for the coaches too, because a lot of districts, especially poor districts, use instructional coaches like backup admins, so they’re pushing paper three fourths of the day. They hardly ever get to actually coach. So without blaming any individuals in the system, most teachers almost immediately have access to this idea of everyone making an assumption about your limitations and then telling you obvious things and then making you feel like an idiot. So even though they know that, that’s still often teachers’ default when they talk to kids.

John: As part of this whole mentor mindset, the goal is to treat students with respect and to let them know that you think they’re capable. But a lot of students come in with stereotype threat, a lot of students come in with perhaps some imposter syndrome that they don’t feel they’re going to be successful to begin with. How can we help build that growth mindset in students who may have some doubts about their own ability to thrive?

David: Well, I’d just say that stereotype threat often is more of a situational predicament. It’s more like they’re aware that other people could judge them, even if they don’t personally believe the stereotypes. But I think that for students who are used to adults using something I call an enforcer mindset, which is kind of all standards, no support, or as someone I interview in the book calls it: “Yell, tell, blame and shame.” If that’s what you’re expecting, then it’s very hard for students to see the teacher’s growth mindset and be like, “Yeah, that’s great. I love it,” because all they see is the standard, and they think, “Oh, here we go again, another grown up is going to yell at me for not being good enough.” So I spent a long time interviewing this great teacher who’s kind of like the best growth mindset teacher in Texas. His name is Sergio Estrada. He’s at Riverside High School in El Paso Texas, and Carol Dweck and I interviewed him a lot, like every Friday for months. And every once in a while, some kid would wander in his class during his off period, when we’re talking to him. And I would be like, “Hey, who’s the opposite of Mr. Estrada?” And, I tell you what, I’ve heard some stories. And one kid, Emiliano, told me a story about his English teacher, and his English teacher assigned some essay where they had to write the pro and con or side one/side two, and then he could only come up with one of the two. So he went to the teacher after class to ask for help. He’s like, “I have the assignment. I can only figure out half the assignment.” And then the teacher said, “Tú no lo entendiste porque no quisiste,” which is you didn’t understand it because you didn’t want to. And he was crushed by this, and came back to me and was like, “Dr, Yeager, it’s so unfair.” And I was like, “What do you mean? It’s unfair?” He’s like, “Well, I have ADHD, I only understand half of what anybody tells me,” like, “this is how I get the other half. I can’t imagine wanting the other half anymore than coming after school to come talk to this teacher to try to get it and yet she’s assuming that I was screwing around in class, that I don’t care, I don’t care about my education, don’t care about learning, and then I’m trying to, like, ruin her lesson plan by making everybody be behind and asking questions.” And like, Sergio would never do that, but he also knows when students come in his class that that’s what they’re used to. So he has learned he has to give a speech at the beginning of class explaining that this is a new culture. Say, for example, this idea of questioning, Sergio, like a great tutor asks questions way more than he tells. So if a student is doing a problem set and they’re like, “Mr. Estrada, is this right?” He’ll say, “Well, I don’t know. Do you think it’s right?” So there’s a way of doing that that does not go over well, it goes over like a lead balloon. There’s a way of doing it where you look like the jerk law school professor cold calling people and forcing them to explain their thinking, and you’re trying to humiliate them. And adults do often ask questions of kids in public to humiliate them. I mean, as a parent like, I do that sometimes, even though I don’t want to, I’m like, “what were you thinking?” Or like, “Is that the right way to put your chair away?” Or like, “Should you be grabbing that cookie?” Like, it’s not an authentic question. It’s a question meant to shame and humiliate. So that’s what kids are used to. And so Sergio, before he does his old questioning routine and his collaborative troubleshooting, he’s like, “Alright, guys, I care deeply that you are good at physics after this class. And in fact, everyone who passes this class eventually deeply understands physics, and I don’t want to deprive you of the chance to know that you can do it, so I’m not going to tell you answers, but it’s not because I’m being unhelpful. It’s because I want you to own the thinking. And every year, students eventually get it, and every year students don’t like it at the beginning. So I just want you to know that I’m not trying to shame you, not trying to embarrass you. I’m trying to honor and respect you and make you know that I think you can think, and I want you to build that muscle” or something like that. And then he’ll print it out and he’s got it on the wall. So the next time students are mad or offended and they’re thinking, “Oh, here we go, another enforcer mindset, he’s going to yell at me.” It’s like on the wall, it’s crystal clear. And then by the end of the year, these are students who say, “Mr. Estrada changed my life. He believed in me.” They’re like the first in their family to go to college. They’re getting internships at NASA. I’m not exaggerating, like every summer, students get internships at NASA, but it takes that transparency. You can’t just show up and do mentor mindset if students have that enforcer mindset baggage that they’ve experienced.

Rebecca: So I can imagine that some folks might be thinking adopting a mentor mindset might increase their workload somehow. Is that true?

David: Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s one of the first things I worried about writing this book. I was like, “Oh, am I writing an impossible to accomplish self-help book?” I mean, it would be like, grabbing a diet book where like, “The best way to lose weight is to never eat anything that you enjoy.” Well like, “Yeah, I knew that. The hard part is to eat what I enjoy and still not gain weight.” So I’m not saying the best way to be a teacher is to do it 120 hours a week. And there are things that Sergio does where he’s like, “I don’t recommend anyone do this. It’s like a lot of work.” But I will say two things. One, every great mentor mindset teacher I saw had procedures and policies that they set up early on in the term, and that often involved getting peers to look at each other’s work and having a good culture of peer feedback. It’s kind of a “ask two before me” situation, and they’re not doing that to dismiss kids like gnats. They’re doing it to give them a sense of agency and teach a skill of collaboration. But that, by the way, saves them tons of time, because 80, 90% of errors, like some really high percentage of errors, are things where the minute the kid tries to explain it to their peer, they’re like, “Oh my god, I see it now.” So they actually didn’t need the teacher, like, you just need another human being when they’re explaining. So one thing is, you can still do a lot of this stuff and save time if you just have good procedures for peer collaboration and feedback, it saves you tons of time. The second is, there’s often a short-term, long-term trade off. It does take a little more time to set up procedures and create a relationship of respect, but then the whole second semester, you’ve got independent, autonomous students that are working hard. You don’t even have to like mess with them. So I remembered we interviewed Sergio during COVID, and it was like, April of 2020, and everyone’s on lockdown or whatever. And I was like, Sergio, how’s it going? He’s like, “I feel really bad.” Like, “why do you feel bad?” He’s like, “I’m bored and I feel guilty.” Like, “Why are you bored? Why do you feel guilty?” He’s like, “because I don’t do anything.” “What do you mean, you don’t do anything?” He’s like, “I post the problem sets, then students meet in groups, and they talk about physics all day. Maybe they ask me a question, but otherwise they just work diligently and then learn physics.” And he had the highest rates of passing college level physics that year in his whole district during COVID. And he like was on Tiktok all day, not because he was goofing off, but because students were so self sufficient, and I think that’s the payoff, is you use a mentor mindset, and then you get people where their work is like kind of area under the curve, leading to greater growth and learning, because you’ve created independent, agentic young people.

John: So, it sounds like giving students more agency, perhaps an autonomy-supportive instructional approach and using peers for feedback could be a really effective way of helping improve motivation and maybe some authentic assessments where students see that the work they’re doing has some intrinsic value beyond just a series of hoops they have to jump through, that the instructor is kind of imposing on them to get away from that enforcer mindset and giving students more control over the learning process, it sounds like would be really helpful.

David: Yeah. I mean, I think that there are curricular changes and pedagogical changes that are well known in the literature to be good for student learning and make them agentic or whatever. And I’m not pretending like I’m inventing constructivism or anything like that. It’s more this idea that there’s an unspoken conversation between a student and their past that is present anytime a teacher is pushing them, challenging them, using this maybe more progressive curriculum. And if you’re not attuned to that conversation, and if you’re not able to help a student see that this is different, then they’re going to be wearing a set of lenses that ’s going to cause them to interpret what we’re doing in the worst possible light. And that’s not because Gen Z is too wimpy or too woke or too entitled or whatever it is. It’s because they’re legitimately responding to prior experiences that they’ve had, and they’ve made sense of those, and they’ve allowed that sense making to influence them in the future. That’s just how human thinking works. We form little lay theories of the world based on our experience. So we kind of need to be agents of change, of giving them a new theory that when a teacher is pushing you and challenging you, it’s because they believe in you, and they’re often going to offer you support, and if they don’t, then the support is what you need to find in order to meet that standard.

Rebecca: Transparency can be really transformative and it sounds like that’s something that you’re really advocating for, is being really transparent about [LAUGHTER] doing things that’s respectful.

David: Yeah, like I’ve been saying, you can’t just presume that they will interpret your actions in the best possible light. So a good example that helps, it’s kind of an analogy to teaching, is a study led by Kyle Dobson, who’s a University of Virginia professor, and previously was my postdoc, and we did an experiment where we looked at the context of police officers approaching civilians on the street, and typically, what happens if a police officer comes up and asks you a bunch of questions, is people feel threatened, and we know why. It’s because there are all kinds of stories of arrests and police brutality and things like that. But police officers are baffled by this, because they’re like, “Well, my badge says serve and protect, and why would you not think I’m here to serve and protect? Of course, it’s what I’m doing.” And so there’s this mismatch between the intentions of the officer usually, and then the responses of the civilians. And so we did a study where we had people sitting in desks all around this downtown Austin, and then we had real on-duty police officers, wearing guns and badges, go approach people and ask them a bunch of questions, and they either launched into the questions in a control group, and there, people felt super stressed about it. They had short, kind of curt replies. Their stress physiology didn’t look good when we measured it, implicitly using a PPG monitor on their wrist, and in general, there was very poor rapport. But when the officer started the interaction with a simple transparency statement, when they just said, “Hey, I’m walking around trying to get to know the community, would you mind if I ask you some questions?” When that happened, then people were really open to the conversation. They were kind of into it, and they formed a rapport. And what that suggests is that even in a context where the institutional authority should, in their minds, be viewed as positive, but in civilians’ minds, there’s this history of distrust. And we can look, we see trust going down every single year on major metrics for police and other institutions, you can kind of create a bubble where trust can be restored if you begin with a transparency statement. Now I did a workshop one time for a bunch of principals and superintendents on transparency statements, and I gave the example of, “Hey, imagine you’re a school leader, and there’s a teacher who’s brand new, and you went and set in the back of their class and you took a bunch of notes, and you were giving them feedback. How could you use the transparency statement so that way they didn’t view your feedback in the worst possible light.” And one superintendent was like, “Oh, very easy. I would go up to him and say, ‘hey, look, just want you to know the reason why I’m observing your class is because I think you’re the worst teacher and you need to be monitored.’” And I was like, “You should not be transparent about that. Keep that to yourself, like because that is the main worry that was in their mind already, so do not say that.” So I’m not saying you should be transparent in that way. What I’m saying is [LAUGHTER] be transparent in dispelling the most negative possible interpretations and instead replacing them with better ones. I appreciate the sound of your forehead being slapped [LAUGHTER] as I told that story. That’s a real story. And they were very earnest. They’re like, this is the first person to raise their hand, like, “Oh, this is easy.” I was like, “Really, in a workshop of 100 school leaders, that’s your answer?”

Rebecca: We all know that person.

David: Yeah, they were very confident.

John: In terms of knowing that person… You talked a little bit about the importance of helping students develop that growth mindset and so forth, but there was that study by Elizabeth Canning and others that talk about the importance of faculty having a growth mindset. Both Rebecca and I at various times in various ways do work with professional development. How can we help faculty recognize that maybe having an expectation that students could grow and could become more successful in learning? How can we spread this, other than encouraging people to read your book and other resources, how can we get faculty to recognize that students can become more proficient as they work and develop skills?

David: Yeah. I mean, I think that the beautiful work by Mary Murphy on fixed mindset cultures and Elizabeth Canning is a collaborator, has suggested that what faculty believe can dramatically influence the decisions that they make and what makes sense to them from their perspective. The question of how to change faculty is a little different. So I don’t think that you can just give K-12 teachers or college professors the student growth mindset intervention, like, “Hey, here’s this stuff about the brain.” And a big reason why, we’ve learned, and I write about this in our PNAS article last year, led by my postdoc, Cameron Hecht, growth mindset is really good news to students. It’s like, “Oh, awesome. I don’t have to feel dumb anymore when I make a mistake.” It’s not good news to teachers sometimes, because they’re like, “Wait a second, if mistakes are learning opportunities, then it sounds like I have to re-teach you stuff after you make a mistake, and then I have to regrade it after you try it again, and that sounds like more work.” And as I’ve said, that’s not always the case, but that’s like people’s first interpretation. And so you can’t use that same argument. What we found is you need to use something called a values-aligned argument. And this is a framework developed by Chris Bryan and me. Chris is a business school professor at UT, but he’s a social psychologist by training, and values alignment is very simple the idea that if you want to change someone’s beliefs or attitudes or behavior is easier to align the targeted attitude, behavior, belief, with what they already care about than it is to try to convince them to care about something new. And in the case of teaching, for college professors like we’re very rarely held accountable for what we do, and very few people are ever told even how to backwards plan, let alone teach. And for K-12, they do obviously care a lot about instruction. And obviously college professors do care, but like, in my experience, often the best college professors know about as much about teaching as like, the middle of the road K-12 teacher, because we’re just not given much pedagogical instruction. So for professors, like it’s very hard for your culture of learning and creating growth mindset culture to get to the front of the list. For K-12, it’s also hard because you’re given an endless number of things you’re supposed to be changing and fixing at all times, and you’re going to three PDs a year and there’s three new binders you’re going to put on yourself. It’s going to make you feel guilty that you never implemented them. And so the way we think to cut in line, to get to the front of the line of your motivational priorities, so that a growth mindset culture, or what I call a mentor mindset, is what you want to prioritize, is to align it with what people already care about. And what people already care about often is having the kind of classroom where, when you walk in, students are tracking what you’re doing. They’re motivated, they’re engaged, they’re curious. They ask you questions about your content area. They care more about the learning than the grade. You don’t have this constantly threaten them or blame them or console them to do the minimum. It’s really motivating to have that kind of better motivated classroom culture. And so we say, “Look, if you believe that no one can grow and learn and that it’s all or nothing, that your first grade will be your last grade, then students will pick up on that as disrespectful, because you’re basically telling them that their efforts are wasted and that there’s no point in trying, because if you got an A, well then you’re going to get an A at the end. If you got a C, you’re going to get a C in the end. So what’s the point of doing anything?” That’s a disrespectful way to run your class. And if within 10 to 25 young people are sensitive to disrespect, then they’re going to be disengaged, if that’s how they feel. But if you want to engage them, they need to feel respected. And the way to respect them is to make them feel like they can grow and learn even when they struggle. So we frame growth mindset not as like you should do this, like eating your broccoli kind of thing. It’s more like, maybe there’s some broccoli lovers out there. I don’t there’s an alternative. I don’t want to offend any broccoli eaters. So brussels sprouts…

Rebecca: I like both of those.

David: …specifically brussels sprouts covered in bacon as an appetizer, is mine… But anyway, let’s just pick a food that people kind of have to hold their nose and eat for any objecting broccoli or Brussels sprout eaters and like, that’s not gonna work. But what will work is saying this is a way to be the kind of person you always want it to be, and that, I think, is motivating and exciting for people. And so mentor mindset, framed as a way of respecting young people, and therefore as a way of engaging them, is, I think, more effective.

Rebecca: I think that’s a good pro tip [LAUGHTER] to wrap up on. So I want to be cognizant of our time, so we always wrap up by asking: “what’s next?”

David: Our big initiative right now is basically taking the mentor mindset ideas from the book, and spreading them to educators. So we have a fellowship called the Fellowship Using the Science of Engagement or FUSE that Carol Dweck and I and our collaborators, we personally wrote all the materials and are very excited about them and the results look really good. So in a large randomized trial that’ll be coming out this year later, we find that teachers, if they change their mindsets, they change their behavior. Students, then, when they get the mentor mindset classrooms, they view the classroom as more respectful and more motivating. They feel comfortable raising their hand and asking questions, making mistakes, and then they learn more. And the effects, well, I don’t know if they’ll always be this big, but they look pretty big right now, of .4 standard deviations, which is pretty large in education. And then teacher attrition is down by half, and so is burnout. So the mentor mindset stuff ends up being the only educational intervention that we know of that, in a rigorous randomized trial, changes teachers, changes students’ perceptions, changes students’ grades, and improve teacher well being, and it does so for like $23 a kid, so it’s like 10 times more effective than individualized tutoring at scale for like, 1/100 the cost. So that’s coming, and we’re thinking about how to expand that, scale it and make it better. I will say we hired Sergio Estrada as one of the facilitators for FUSE, and so it’s a real treat for them.

Rebecca: …some really exciting stuff.

John: It sounds like a wonderful program, and we encourage everyone to consider picking up a copy of your book. We’re going to be using it as a reading group on our campus, so we’re really looking forward to it, and we will include links to all the studies that you’ve referenced in the show notes.

David: Great.

John: So thank you, although I do have to say one other thing, that putting bacon around brussels sprouts sounds a lot like a compliment sandwich [LAUGHTER] in some way.

David: I mainly just listened to the Jim Gaffigan bit on bacon and so that was fresh in my mind.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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378. Cure for Engagement

Posted in active learning, engagement, higher education, learning, motivation, pedagogy, project based learning, STEM education, teaching
January 29, 2025

Authentic learning experiences help to create intrinsic motivation for students. In this episode, Julia Koeppe, Bonnie Hall, Paul Craig, and Rebecca Roberts join us to discuss BASIL, a course-based undergraduate research experience in Chemistry that has been implemented in many institutions.

Julia is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Chemistry Department here at SUNY-Oswego. Bonnie is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Chemistry & Physics Department at Grand View University. Paul is a Professor in the School of Chemistry and Material Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Rebecca is a Professor in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Program in the Department of Biology at Ursinus College.

Transcript

John:Authentic learning experiences help to create intrinsic motivation for students. In this episode, we discuss a course-based undergraduate research experience in Chemistry that has been implemented in many institutions.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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Rebecca: Our guests today are Julia Koeppe, Bonnie Hall, Paul Craig, and Rebecca Roberts. Julia is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Chemistry Department here at SUNY-Oswego. Bonnie is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Chemistry & Physics Department at Grand View University. Paul is a Professor in the School of Chemistry and Material Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Rebecca is a Professor in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Program in the Department of Biology at Ursinus College. Welcome Julia, Bonnie, Paul, and Rebecca.

John: Today’s teas are:… Julia, what tea are you drinking today?

Julia: I have a wild raspberry hibiscus tea.

John: Very nice. Bonnie?

Bonnie: I have an iced tea because it is quite warm at our location today.

John: And where is your location today?

Bonnie: We are currently in San Juan, Puerto Rico, doing some workshops to support universities here in Puerto Rico.

John: Excellent. And Paul?

Paul: I like Irish Breakfast tea.

Rebecca: That’s a favorite of mine, too.

John: And Rebecca?

Rebecca R.: Like Bonnie, I’m doing the sweetened iced tea because it is warm here in San Juan. And the other Rebecca?

Rebecca: John, I have a new tea that I got this holiday season. It’s called Blue Lady. It’s a flavored black tea, and it’s very tasty.

John: Very good.

Rebecca: Maybe I’ll share with you next time I see you.

John: Usually that only happens when you don’t like the tea.

Rebecca: I know, [LAUGHTER] I know. Usually I give them the stuff I don’t like. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I’m drinking some of the last of the Christmas tea left over from our celebrations several weeks back. It’s not quite as warm here in Oswego right now. I think it’s about 15 degrees, 20 degrees, something like that.

Rebecca: Not if you figure in the wind chill. John, really…

John: Yeah, it’s cool.

Rebecca: Well, we wish we were in Puerto Rico with you, but we’re not. So we’ve invited you here today, virtually, [LAUGHTER] to discuss the biochemistry authentic scientific inquiry laboratory community. Can you give us an overview of this project?

Paul: Sure, the BASIL project is a CURE. CURE stands for course-based undergraduate research experience. And what that means is that we teach a course, a laboratory course, but instead of being a traditional cookbook lab where the instructor knows exactly what’s happening, the students are given directions, and they follow directions and complete their assignments, in a CURE, students actually engage in research. Neither the students nor the instructors know the answer to the question, and so this is open-ended basic research, where discovery actually happens in the course. Our course is focused on predicting protein function. We begin with computational methods, computational tools, these are all web based resources that our students use, and then once they have a prediction, they go in the wet lab, they express and purify the protein, and then they run some assays to see if their prediction is correct. And our overwhelming goal in this process is that we want to transform our students from thinking of themselves as students to thinking of themselves as scientists.

John: So if someone were to visit one of your classrooms, what would it look like? What would be taking place? What would students be doing? What would you be doing?

Rebecca R.: This is Rebecca. It would basically look like a research lab, but going on with a lot of people in the room doing their experiments, and they might be doing different things at different times. So it’s quite an exciting place to be. We have designed BASIL with a flexible structure. So it’s modular, it’s adaptable, and faculty can choose to take as much or as little as they’d like. So we have some faculty that might do only the computational modules with our students, and others might do all of it, or some might choose one module and do it more as a one time in the lab, let’s introduce you to a computational tool. And because of that, it’s been really nice to see how different faculty have chosen to run BASIL at their institutions, depending on their own learning outcomes and student population and the resources that they have at their disposal. We’ve mostly designed it to be at the undergraduate level, but it’s been used at the master’s level. Julia uses it at Oswego in one of her master’s level computational chemistry courses. And we’ve even had some high school faculty take it on for their advanced students at the high school level. The great thing about this flexible structure is it’s what we started with, and it’s what we’ve really maintained a passion for, so that people can use it how they want to use it, and it’s accessible, so it’s open access; all of the computational modules are free web based modules to, again, improve student accessibility and flexibility for the instructors.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how this differs from traditional instructional approaches in biochemistry?

Julia: So in a traditional biochemistry lab, you might do what’s called, often, a cookbook experiment, where we give you some specific instructions to follow, to learn a particular technique with and then to achieve a known outcome. And in our approach, again, we’re looking at doing some more authentic inquiry and research-based experiments. And so one of the things that is very different from some of the traditional biochemistry lab is the inclusion of the computational tools that we use, and these tools help us to study protein structures in order to predict a function, and then students can use more traditional wet lab techniques in biochemistry to then create their protein sample and do some analysis of that protein to confirm the function. And so there’s a lot more research going on, as far as the instructor doesn’t know the outcome, the student doesn’t know the outcome. The students are really having to come up with a hypothesis based on their initial computational analysis and then design the experiments to test that hypothesis, and when I say they have to do that, it’s because the instructor also doesn’t know what we’re looking for, except that you have the same data the students have already collected computationally. And one of the reasons that I do this in the biochemistry lab is because I like the idea that the students are driving the project, and I also see the students are engaged with the project because they have connections. So they’re learning the different biochemistry lab techniques because they need to use them to solve a problem, rather than just learning techniques, because techniques are important. And I’ll throw it over to Bonnie and Rebecca to talk some about why they’re using the project as well.

Bonnie: So I chose to adopt BASIL because we have a pretty diverse group of students on our campus. We have traditional students coming in at 18. We have a lot of retired military that come in, so veterans, international students, immigrants, and they really go into a wide variety of career options after: some go into industry, some go into sales, some go to graduate programs. And the one thing that we know that every employer, graduate program, whatever it’s going to be, wants them to be able to do, is to learn how to get stuck, which happens in real research, and how to figure out how to get unstuck, how to move forward when you run into a barrier. How do you problem solve and how do you motivate yourself to get through that? And so that’s an experience we really want every student in our program to have.

Rebecca R.: And at Ursinus, I was really interested in the idea of interdisciplinary learning. And again, that’s a tool that students need to be able to have the ability to talk to others in a different field when they’re out of school. And so at Ursinus we leverage the flexible nature of BASIL in that I teach a course in structural biology, and we do all the computational work, the students there, and they then go to the students enrolled in biochemistry and tell them about what they’ve learned, what their hypothesis is, and then the biochemistry students kind of roll with it from there, and they have to talk to each other, and that’s engineered into the syllabus. And they end their semester with a joint poster presentation to the entire campus community during our celebration of student achievement day. And it really forces them to learn from each other and talk to each other, and that is a model that I’ve used to try to engage students in this idea of interdisciplinary conversations across disciplines.

Rebecca: I imagine that the prep for faculty is a little bit different in a course like this than maybe a traditional bio chem class. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Julia: Yeah. And so as far as the computational analysis, that is going to be something that many instructors are not familiar with. And so one of the things that we have done as the developers of the curriculum is try to make these things accessible to the instructors as well as to the students. So one of the reasons we’re here in Puerto Rico right now is that we regularly run workshops to help train instructors how to take on this project and to help them to design their curriculum, to use our modules. And then we also regularly run instructor support workshops, where we will go through how the computational modules work and what you can learn from them, and the kind of data you get, how to analyze those data. As far as the wet lab goes, many of the wet lab experiments, students do follow more traditional labs. It’s just that the focus for each one is a little bit different. Rather than give students a mixture of proteins and ask them to separate that mixture, just to teach them a separation technique, the students have a mixture of proteins because they express a sample using E. coli, and now they need to separate that mixture to isolate their protein of interest, the same as you would do in a research lab. And so many of the wet lab techniques are the same as we would see in a traditional biochemistry lab. And so planning for that is very similar to what you would do for the traditional lab. It’s just your starting material might change from semester to semester, and then the end point for how you test your predictions can change from semester to semester, so that can require the instructor to do a little extra work ahead of the semester, to pick the targets, so that you know what you might need to test, and be able to order your supplies ahead of time, so that you’re not running into difficulties mid semester: I need this thing because these students predicted this function, but the wait time from the company is going to be six weeks, and then graduation will have already happened. So there is some prep time that you have to do ahead. And then there’s also some training. We provide support for that.

Bonnie: For my course, I have my students do a lot of the prep work. When they graduate, if they go into a work or industry environment or an academic environment, there’s going to be the expectation that they can run experiments without a prep person making all their solutions and finding all the reagents. So mine get protocols that look like they do when they come out of the literature. This is what you need to make. How do you take what you took from literature and translate that into steps that you take in the lab? So in fact, we don’t do a lot of prep in advance for my course. I need to know what they’re doing so I can guide them in the right direction, but they’re doing the actual prep work, because that’s experience that’s really valuable for them after they graduate.

John: You’ve all addressed this to some extent, but could you talk a little bit more about the student reaction to this type of instruction? Because it seems like this is providing a really authentic learning experience, which is different from the type of cookbook type approach that was mentioned earlier. And I would think that would make students much more excited, much more curious about the outcomes and so forth, than just doing something that everyone else has done in the past.

Rebecca R.: Students do get excited and when the beginning of the semester starts and I’m explaining what we’ll be doing for the semester, you can see some of the students’ eyes just light up at the thought of doing some real research. One of the powers of course-based undergraduate research experience in general is that you can engage more students in the research better than in the one-on-one mentoring model. And the data in the literature shows that experiences with CUREs do improve the student’s identity as a scientist. They feel more project ownership. They begin to appreciate the reasons behind why they’re doing a certain method. And so that is all really exciting for the students. What was mentioned earlier is this idea of failing, and that happens a lot, and that could be really scary for an instructor who’s taking on a CURE for the first time, because you do lose a little bit of the power and control, because you don’t really know what might happen that day in the lab. And I’ve really embraced that idea of having the students do research, take the risk, experience the failure that was mentioned before, and pushing through it, not taking it personally, learning how to troubleshoot, learning how to celebrate the little things in research that actually do go well and not to get so frustrated by failure. So I like doing a CURE in my courses, because it allows for a safe space, a slightly more controlled space, for students to engage with failure and get the experience of overcoming that.

Julia: Yeah, and I can add that there are students who get very excited that I don’t know what the answer is, so I cannot gauge their ability to do this based on whether they got the correct answer. However, there are also students that are very frustrated by the fact that we don’t know what the answer is, so I cannot tell you if you are correct. And so you see both sides of that, but there’s some students that are very happy to hear: “I don’t know.” I can’t grade them on whether they are correct or not. I can grade them on what they learned, and I really emphasize that as well. I’m gonna see that you can tell me something that you learned and show me that you have some understanding of what you’re doing, but even I don’t know if you’ve got the right answer.

Rebecca: Can you talk a bit about how this project got started? I mean, there’s four of you. You’re together, you’re in Puerto Rico, and you’re doing a lot of work together. How did this all get started in the first place?

Paul: Well, I’m a computational biochemist, and if I never go into another wet lab again or touch a test tube or make up a buffer or grow E coli again, I’ll be perfectly happy when that will be fulfilled. If I’ll never run another gel, I’ll be very happy. And so I had students working with me, and they designed some stuff. And the software they designed, you could feed it protein structure and would give you information back about what that protein probably did. So we developed this original software, and that was fun. But what I found as they developed the software is they would predict the function. Well, they wanted to go in the wet lab and find out what it was. So they started doing that. And then what we found… this is in my research lab, and I was sharing this with a couple other professors… and what we found was that they started acting like scientists. They started looking in the literature to find a better assay to use, they started walking up to me and saying, “You know, Dr. Craig, we think that’s not a good idea. We should do it this way instead.” They came up with alternative proposals. So we talk about experimental design as scientists and part of that is making something that’s going to be statistically robust, but part of the experimental design is choosing the tools. And they started choosing the tools. One of my students actually called up the Head of Research at Argonne National Lab and talked to him for an hour about our project, and never even asked my permission. And that was fantastic. So they’re collaborating with each other. They’re going to people in other departments and saying, “We tried to do this, it didn’t work. Can you help?” As I said, I’m a computational biochemist, if something wasn’t working in the lab, I wasn’t the guy to ask. They asked the other faculty in chemistry and biology and biomedical sciences. And so we saw that, we started to incorporate additional tools. About the time this project really started working well in our research lab, we had funding from the National Institute of Health, and they decided to go a different direction. And so our funding dried up, but our program officer was very supportive at NIH, and she recommended we contact NSF and go through their program. They have a program called Improving Undergraduate STEM Education. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math. So we approach them, and at the same time, our first round of money was unsuccessful, but I presented a poster at a conference, and at that conference, I met Rebecca, and I also met Mike Pikaart, who’s another member of the team, a couple other folks who had joined the BASIL project at that point, and we’ve had new people join us since then. And so Rebecca went back to Ursinus all excited, and presented it to Julia, who was at Ursinus at the time, and Julia signed up. Rebecca was attending a conference hosted by another organization that they’re all affiliated with, called BioMolViz, which is focused on molecular visualization of biological molecules. And that’s where she met Bonnie. And so Bonnie joined the team, and she was, as far as I could tell, it was like the day she joined the team, she’d been there all along. It was a very smooth fit. One of our other team members was doing some stuff very much like what we do, and one of his colleagues at the University of Richmond said, “You know, there’s some people doing this called BASIL. You should contact them.” And so now he’s part of our team. And so we have other people that attend our presentations at conferences, and they join the team. And so there have been ongoing themes. We want to have continuing use computational tools and building for the future, I think. We also want to have authentic science, they really do get into the wet lab and do stuff. We want to share what we’re doing at conferences. We want to write papers about it, and we want to act like scientists. We want to model that behavior for our students.

Julia: So I’ll just add that Paul gave a very good introduction to how we got started, and we’ve been working together on this for 10 years now. So we started in 2015, so this is a very timely podcast, in that we are in our 10th anniversary.

Rebecca R.: Yay, BASIL.

John: So, how many faculty are involved in the project overall? You’ve mentioned a few people in addition to those of you on the podcast.

Bonnie: So we have a core team, and that varies between about 8 and 10 instructors. So there were the original folks who were involved with the project. People retire. They find other projects they’re even more passionate about, new people come into BASIL, but that core team sits at about 8 to 10 people, and there’s a variety of roles. As the number of users of the material has grown, we’ve had to be more organized about how we keep ourselves, as the community, organized. So we are all members of the steering committee, so we’re responsible for high-level things, thinking about funding, thinking about how the different subcommittees work together, about how to let folks know we exist. We also have an instructor recruitment onboarding committee, so they help show new users what our curriculum looks like and support them as they start to adopt that curriculum, or think about how they can adopt it on their campus. We also have an instructor support committee that’s focused less on new folks and more on supporting the folks that are already using BASIL. So as we update modules or find new tools, offering workshops about how to use those and supporting people when they look at things like promotion and tenure: how can faculty use this as part of their natural professional development cycle? We also have an assessment committee that looks at both how do you as an individual instructor assess the work your students are doing in class, but also on a larger scale, how do we assess that this curriculum is achieving educational goals that we want it to achieve. There’s also just some housekeeping. We have a website and data management team. We do collect data. We run a website. So there’s just some logistical support that has to be provided. Another key part is keeping modules updated. So some of that happens organically as we use them in our courses and we say, “Oh, in our instructions, we say, you will see a button to click on the right hand side. It’s no longer a button. Here’s a different workflow.” Sometimes the online tools that we use get a complete redo, and we don’t know when that’s coming. We don’t run those tools. That happened with our SwissDock module, we had great instructions, and then they did an update, and none of our instructions were relevant really anymore. So we had to go in and do a major update on that one so that it would be usable for faculty again. There’s also tools that get retired and new tools that we discover. Probably the last thing that drives those changes in modules are pedagogical demands. Certainly, the pandemic is a good example of how you need to adapt suddenly. And so the computational modules were really great for transitioning to a remote model. But we also had a faculty member develop some Choose Your Own Adventure wet lab substitutes, where the students come into a Google form, they have to choose what they want to use, and if they make the wrong choice, it routes them back and says, “That’s not right. Try again.” And so they couldn’t be in the wet lab at that point, but they were able online to kind of step through that whole lab experience and really get a sense of what it would have been like had they been able to be in person.

Rebecca R.: If I can jump in… And a great thing that happened during that time is, because we are a community, we were sharing data so if one of us had gotten far enough with our students that we had some data, we were sharing that with other BASIL users so that their students could, even if they couldn’t be in the lab anymore to actually collect their own data, they had data to analyze. So that’s how some of the community can help each other out too.

Paul: I think the original question was, how many people are involved? And so we have our core team, but then we have a lot of other people who have attended our workshops, or are using our stuff. Whenever I go to a conference, I search the abstracts in the conference to see if anybody mentions BASIL, and inevitably we find one or two folks who are doing stuff that we’ve never met before, and we talk to them and we offer them our support, and we have a Slack channel for BASIL participants, and we have, what, 200 people there?

Julia: Yeah. So we just checked the numbers yesterday, where over 200 people are connected to us on Slack, and we estimate that we have at least 50 campuses using the curriculum in some form or another. And as Paul said, part of that estimate comes from conferences, the people who reach out to us, the people who are attending any of our workshops. So most of our instructor support workshops are virtual, and we have gotten much better at record keeping to keep track of who is attending, where the people are that are using things. And like I said, we’re in Puerto Rico right now, running a couple workshops. We did a workshop here in San Juan yesterday, and we’ll be traveling to Mayagüez this afternoon and running a workshop tomorrow. We’ve done a number of other in-person workshops, new adopters, the community, and we’ve done even more virtual workshops to recruit new adopters to the community. We also give presentations at conferences, so there are lots of people. There is broad interest. And so I think Paul mentioned that we regularly attend ASBMB meetings, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, but members of our core team have also been invited to speak at American Chemical Society meetings, at biophysical society meetings. Schrodinger is a software developer, and they’ve invited us to speak during their educators’ week. And this is driven by the community often, that people hear about us, they talk about us, and more people come in.

Rebecca: With a project that seems to be scaling up and up and up, I’m sure sustainability and scale and thinking at scale is always at the front of your mind; these things aren’t free. [LAUGHTER] So what’s on your mind related to these issues?

Paul: I do think about costs. So it costs about as much to run BASIL on a campus as it costs to run a traditional biochemistry lab. So the expenses for BASIL are not unusual. The equipment that we use is not unusual. All of our software is free, and it all works through a browser, and so that’s very sustainable. Now, the people are really, really important, and we really like working together. It’s a very cohesive group, good friends. We work together, we socialize, we stay in each other’s houses, whatever, when we’re in town, and that kind of stuff. And so there’s a very positive reaction and relationships that exist here. I think that’s an important part of sustainability. Also talk about making it work on our campuses, and there’s something called the four frames model and thinking about the factors and effective process. And there’s also, what are the barriers to getting people involved and try to identify and overcome those barriers? Our current grant funding is actually focused on those barriers.

Julia: So, as Paul said, our current grant funding is focusing on identifying barriers, and especially barriers that might exist at different institution types. So one of the things we’re doing in our current workshop, is really exploring that with the attendees and the barriers that we identify, of course, are time and expertise, and those seem to be common across all institution types, because this sounds like it could require some different things than a traditional biochemistry lab and so for sustainability and trying to overcome that barrier of time, that’s where our core team has really tried to do a lot of the work to make the curriculum something that you can adopt without having to put in as much of the time to create all the materials that you might have to do if you’re just creating a new curriculum on your own. As for cost, we’ve really tried to keep the cost down as well, so we use web-based computational tools, so that there’s no requirement to purchase software or software licenses. It makes it more accessible to students who have different devices. So you need a device that connects to the internet, but you don’t need to have a laptop with a certain processor speed or capacity to install software. You can work from a tablet or a Chromebook, and we’ve also tried to use the traditional wet lab method, so that the cost of the wet lab is not any more than a traditional biochemistry lab might cost, and we may even be able to have it cost less than a traditional lab, because half of the work is using free computational tools, which means, if you used to purchase materials for 14 weeks worth of experiments, now you’re purchasing materials for maybe seven weeks worth of wet lab experiments.

Rebecca R.: I’d like to talk just a little bit about this idea of CURES as a pedagogy, and part of the excitement that I find being involved in BASIL is introducing this pedagogy to faculty around the country, and whether they’re choosing to use BASIL or not, just opening their eyes to a different way of teaching biochemistry, or whatever it is that they happen to be teaching, and that is really an exciting place for me, personally, to be. I’ve seen the power of it. I’ve seen how scary it can be from an instructor point of view. And I get scared every time I’m about to start my BASIL curriculum, which will start in a week for me, but I know that I have the support, and I know that it’s so important and so effective for these students that spreading the word is really satisfying to me.

Bonnie: I think another issue that comes up in terms of sustainability is that at one point, BASIL was small enough that everybody doing it could hop into a online meeting room together and have sort of a town hall meeting format and just talk about things. Now with over 50 campuses and all the different time zones that are represented, that’s not a supportable model, and so we’ve had to do things like create the Slack channel, where we can have asynchronous communication and figure out ways to offer virtual workshops. And we also now have begun offering something called BASIL week, where it’s a full week of workshops about all of the different kinds of topics that users of the material might be interested in. So some walkthroughs of computational material, some conversations about how to assess student work, conversations about how to leverage the work that you do with BASIL in terms of required professional activities that your institution asks you to do. So really thinking about how to build that community and how to sustain that community as it grows is another part that we focused on.

John: Is this something you’d recommend to other STEM disciplines, because we do know that we lose a lot of students in the STEM pipeline, and maybe this way, we’d get more people intrigued by the process of being a scientist or becoming more engaged with science as a potential career.

Julia: Yes. So we ran a workshop about a year and a half ago at Prairie View A&M University, outside Houston, Texas, and they had encouraged people from across the sciences to attend our workshop. So we had attendees from biology and chemistry, as we expected, but also from physics, math, computer science, the School of Education, and they even had a couple Deans come to our workshop to see what was going on, and that was a very useful space for them, but also for us to see how others might be inspired by what we’ve put together and looking for ways that they could use our curriculum as a model for creating some additional kinds of experiments, some more research-based things in the labs across the disciplines. And the person who was there from education was also very interested to know that this was happening, because there seems to be a disconnect in those who are training in education departments and schools and those who are in STEM departments and divisions. We don’t necessarily talk to each other, so we don’t know that we’re all thinking about student assessment to some extent and student learning and what the outcomes are. And so I think that this is a good way to engage students in science. And I use it in my courses for Chemistry and Biochemistry majors, but also in my courses for non majors.

Rebecca R.:I think additionally, one of the drivers for other STEM disciplines using a CURE is that the research shows that it engages students. Students are retained, they’re excited. It’s increasing the number of students who have a research experience under their belt, especially underrepresented students in that field, and that, in and of itself, is going to increase the pipeline of students moving through to the next level of their careers. Anecdotally, I have students always coming back to tell me that when they were on a job interview or a graduate program interview or a medical school interview, that they talked about their experience with BASIL and that it made a difference, and people were really excited to talk with them about their experiences.

Julia: Yes, and I think we did mention earlier, but I’ll just re-emphasize that the CURE model, the course-based undergraduate research experience model, is a way to engage more students in authentic research experiences. So many of us are familiar, especially in the STEM fields, with the one-on-one research model, where a student approaches me to join my research lab. But there’s a limit to how many individual students I can take into my research lab, due to the space in the lab, my capacity to mentor each one of them and the resources to support their projects. But if we can do some level of research in the courses that we teach, then that really gives every student some amount of research experience. And the studies show that whether it’s a week or a couple weeks, even, you are going to gain some more identity as a scientist and project ownership than in a traditional lab setting or a traditional lab course and a semester-long project can be even better for that science identity and project ownership.

Rebecca R.: It also is a way of reducing the barrier for those students who might not know or be brave enough to approach a faculty member to ask about individual research. If they’re enrolled in your course, they’re doing it, and so it lowers that barrier, and may be attracting and retaining some students who otherwise might drop out of the pipeline of STEM.

Rebecca: So, we always wrap up by asking: “what’s next?”

Bonnie: So part of what we’ll keep doing as we go into the future is to maintain the baseline that we have: keep updating modules, keep looking at new tools, replacing tools that get deprecated. We’ll also focus on maintaining community. We’re also beginning to have collaborations with other active learning communities, so communities that are not the BASIL CURE, but that provide active learning opportunities to embed in your campus curriculum and trying to see how we can all work together to improve biochemistry and STEM education collectively. So to put all our efforts together and pull in one direction together. We’re also especially interested in BASIL in computational tools. So a big breakthrough in biochemistry in the last couple of years is the ability to use computation to fold proteins and determine their structures. So when we started with BASIL, there were about somewhere between a hundred and 150,000 protein structures. That had been solved with the computational tools available now, there are over 700 million folded protein structures, structures that anyone could use to do research. So we’re interested in adapting BASIL to, first of all, work with data sets that are so large now, every year they’ve grown tenfold. So how do we keep up with data sets that are so large, and there’s also a lot of new tools coming out? So how do we keep our curriculum up to date and relevant? But a really great thing about this is that before there were 150,000 proteins, many of which already had assigned function, now, with 700 million protein structures, most of those don’t have a verified function. So there’s an opportunity for anybody who wants to do BASIL to keep as many undergraduates as they have engaged in research for as long as they wish. So it’s a very exciting time for BASIL and for the biochemistry community.

Julia: Yeah, we’re hoping that the outcome of our research on barriers will lead us to be able to aid in overcoming those barriers to CURE adoption and implementation. Are there ways that we can address that? So I think that’s another future goal for us is really looking at not just adoption of BASIL but adoption of CUREs in general. And as Bonnie said, we’re working with some active learning communities, and if we can identify what the barriers are, that’s the first step in being able to overcome those barriers.

Paul: We’ve been using these computational methods and emphasizing them and it’s really about that, which is probably the most of any CURE that’s out there, and we’re hoping to have an impact, at least to help other people who are doing course-based undergraduate research experience with their students, to identify and implement those tools. And based on our experience with getting these tools into our teaching labs, I think we could probably provide helpful insight to any group that wants to introduce computational tools into their teaching lab, even if it’s botany or nutrition, whatever is out there. I think we could do that.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us. There’s lots of great information that you’ve shared. I think no matter what discipline one might be in, there’s lots of rich information. Thank you so much.

Julia: Thank you.

Bonnie: You’re welcome.

Rebecca R.: Thank you.

John: Thank you.

Paul: Yeah, thanks a lot. This was great.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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374. The Disengaged Teen

Posted in authentic learning, engagement, higher education, learning, motivation, teaching
January 1, 2025

Educators at all levels have raised concerns about growing student disengagement. In this episode, Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson join us to discuss their new book, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better, which examines the causes of, and possible solutions, to this problem.

Rebecca is the Director of the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, where she leads global studies on how to better support children’s learning, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. Jenny is an award-winning journalist who spent over a decade at The New York Times before pioneering coverage on the science of learning at Quartz. She now writes a column on education in Time.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Educators at all levels have raised concerns about growing student disengagement. In this episode, we discuss research on the causes of, and possible solutions, to this growing problem.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guests today are Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson. Rebecca is the Director of the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, where she leads global studies on how to better support children’s learning, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. Jenny is an award-winning journalist who spent over a decade at The New York Times before pioneering coverage on the science of learning at Quartz. She now writes a column on education in Time. Rebecca and Jenny are the authors of The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better which will be released in January 2025 by Penguin Random House. Welcome Rebecca and Jenny.

Rebecca W.: So nice to be here.

Jenny: Thanks for having us.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are: Rebecca, are you drinking tea today?

Rebecca W.: I sure am. I’m drinking Earl Grey, which I drink most mornings.

Rebecca: And how about you, Jenny?

Jenny: I am drinking chamomile because it is my afternoon and I have to ease up a bit on the caffeine.

John: And I am drinking a black raspberry green tea today.

Rebecca: Oh, that sounds nice. John, I have a London Strand breakfast from when I was in London earlier this year from the Twinings flagship store.

Rebecca W.: That sounds delicious. [LAUGHTER]

John: Very nice. So, we’ve invited you here to discuss The Disengaged Teen. Can you tell us a bit about the origin of this book?

Rebecca W.: Yeah, I can start. It’s Rebecca. I was very shocked during COVID. I have two adolescent boys, one was in third grade, one was in sixth grade, and I was shocked to discover that I had misjudged which of my boys was really engaged and which one wasn’t. And as someone who’s worked in education her whole career, for several decades, I thought, “Gosh, this does not bode well for other parents who don’t have this set of expertise,” and knowing how important student engagement is in children’s achievement and developing learning skills and mental health, and all the good things, that was what really motivated me to reach out to Jenny and say, “Hey, let’s partner up.” So Jenny has her own reasons, I’m sure, for saying yes. [LAUGHTER]

Jenny: Well, the timing was perfect. I was a financial journalist for almost 20 years before I switched to education. And I switched because I had my own kids, and I felt I wanted to better understand how they learn and how to support their learning. And I was shocked at how little there was on that topic in the mediums that I’m used to in journalism. So education was traditionally covered very much in a sort of siloed political, charter/non-charter, standards, changing standards, teachers unions. Those were the topics, which are very important topics, but it is one of many, and having covered finance for so long, and seeing how sophisticated it is in terms of way we organize the coverage, the number of people we put on it, and the sort of intensity of the coverage, I was really very disappointed to see how little attention was spent on teaching and learning and understanding learning as a process better, and as a parent, understanding how to support a child’s learning better. So instead of complain about it, I decided to do something about it. And Rebecca asked me to write a book. So we dove in together.

Rebecca: You begin the first chapter with a discussion on the results from the program for international assessment, an international test administered to 15 year olds. What happened to the scores about a decade ago?

Jenny: We started to see the scores in reading and science start to go down in about 2010 and in math, about eight years later they caught up, at which point they had gone from declining gently to kind of falling off a cliff. So there was a very precipitous and alarming decline in these PISA scores. And that’s not what we should see. What we should see, as systems invest more in education, we should see those scores climbing, and we know more about how kids learn and we implement those practices in classrooms. So this was not the expected trajectory. Rebecca, do you want to add anything to that?

Rebecca W.: I think you nailed it. The thing that was particularly worrisome is how, across the board it was, across so many different countries.

John: That decline is rather dramatic, and it was interesting to see that it had begun before COVID, because often this type of discussion takes place within the context of COVID, but that certainly accelerated things. But the issue was already beginning before that. Could you talk a little bit about some of the harm that results to societies when we see this sort of decline in the cognitive skills of students?

Jenny: Well-educated scientists cure diseases and ease discomfort. Well-educated knowledgeable entrepreneurs drive innovation. Well-trained engineers create bridges and make sure they don’t fall down. Really, at the center of everything we want in a society is a well-educated citizenry. There’s sort of multiple layers, but we have tremendous problems [LAUGHTER] in the world, and we need people to be educated to solve these, both in the content of science, math, English language arts, but also in skills, really kind of critical thinking skills, and interdisciplnary skills and tying together things and working with other people, and communicating well and listening to others. So I think when you see those scores falling off a cliff, we’re only measuring one very narrow subset of skills, and those are declining, and they’re very important skills. We’re not even measuring a lot of the other ones. But there’s a lot of evidence that we’re not doing a particularly good job on those either.

Rebecca W.: The only thing I would add to that is how critical these skills are today, but especially over certainly the next decade, given the rapid increase of generative artificial intelligence. So we’re particularly concerned about the fact that so many young people seem to not be able to think critically enough around texts that they read, or how to think about using and applying math. You’re much more susceptible to manipulation, fake news, this infodemic that is spreading around the world, as the UN Secretary General calls it. So to us, that’s also incredibly concerning.

John: Not everyone prefers having low-information voters, for example. [LAUGHTER]

Jenny: Yeah. and I’d love to build on that, and Rebecca, I want to kind of give this one to you, because you know so much about it and have done some deep work in this. But I also just think, and we haven’t sort of said it outright, but we should, which is, for a democratic society, you need educated citizens, and data suggests we’re less educated in a moment where we really need to be building, weaving, civic society together and not tearing it apart. That is another reason we should be very, very concerned about this decline in skills and decline in knowledge.

Rebecca W.: Well said.

Rebecca: The book relies on data from large data sets. Can you tell us a bit about the data that you relied on?

Rebecca W.: Sure, we culled from a lot of different sources, but largely four [LAUGHTER] main bodies of data. First, we did a massive literature review around student engagement in the US, but elsewhere, we looked at studies around the globe, and so that was from all types of disciplines. The second, we did a lot of qualitative research, where we interviewed almost 100 young people, largely between the ages of 10 to 18 and often their family members and often their teachers, to really start getting a vision of their experiences in school. And then we partnered with an organization called Transcend, which is a nonprofit in the US, working in the K through 12 space, and did research that included a nationally representative survey of over 65,000 students and a sort of similar survey of almost 2000 parents. And in those surveys, we were asking questions around students’ schooling experiences. So what were they experiencing when they were at school? Did they have any choice around how to do their work? Did they feel they belonged? Do they feel like there was someone they could go to if they had fallen behind and needed academic supports? A whole bunch of those types of questions. And then we asked… it wasn’t matched parents to the exact students, because there was way more students than parents… but then we just asked parents of that same age group what their perceptions were of students’ schooling experiences. Did they think [LAUGHTER] students felt like they belonged and had friends. Did they think students had supports to catch up if they were behind or had choices over how to do their work in school, et cetera, things like that. So that’s sort of primarily the sets of data that we used.

John: What did the data tell you about the status of students in terms of their perceptions of well being, etc.?

Jenny: We found what others have found, which is that the kids are not alright. There were sort of really alarming levels of apathy and stress. And when you dig into that combination, it’s particularly toxic to think about that, that so many kids feel both overwhelmed and extremely disengaged, extremely apathetic, so kind of bored and overwhelmed at the same time. And I think at a moment in their lives where they feel kind of primed to do stuff and to be part of something. I’m like, how did we pull this off? How have we managed to both bore them and overwhelm them at the same time? I mean, [LAUGHTER] it seems like kind of an epic feat, not one that we really want to repeat. Terms that we heard over and over again from these interviews with young people: unseen, very unprepared for the world in front of them, a little bit hopeless about the state of affairs in the world, and a little bit helpless to change things, bored and overwhelmed I mentioned. So just you kind of put all of these feelings of their experience in school, and it doesn’t translate to motivation. That doesn’t translate to: gosh, I really want to go to school tomorrow. And so that was very telling.

Rebecca W.: One thing I would add to that, which Jenny and I were both really concerned about, was, in addition to everything, she just said, there was a real sense among many students that they couldn’t change things, that they didn’t really have the power, or they didn’t see the possibility of how they could make school more interesting to themselves, or change things in their lives, and it can be very defeating when you feel done too and like you don’t have an opportunity to have volition in your life around things you care about. So that was very concerning for us.

Rebecca: Having no agency at all, or feeling like you have no agency, is certainly not something that’s motivating, that’s for sure. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca W.: Exactly. It’s totally demotivating. If you feel like you have no opportunity to actually have a voice or change things in your daily life that you might be able to do, have a different tactic, do better, if you only could shift something.

Jenny: They’re feeling this lack of agency at a moment where developmentally, it is crucial to the formation of their identity. So the timing of this is just particularly tragic, because when you think about what adolescence is, it’s separating from a caregiver and finding your own tribe and finding your way to live in the world. To do that, you need the experiences which give you the information to form the kind of person you want to be and the sort of tribe you want to join, and the partner with whom you’re going to mate with later on and in this moment, developmentally, where they want to be, craving doing and being and trying, they feel, like I said, helpless and hopeless and without agency. And that is not ideal for adolescent development.

Rebecca: One of the things our colleagues often talk about, and we see in reports pretty consistently, is the lack of student motivation. And educators have reported these concerns consistently for a very long time. What is different in this moment? What’s changed?

Rebecca W.: We really puzzled with this. We really puzzled with this question. Because if you look at the data on student disengagement, kids have been disengaged. It’s gone down a little bit, especially because of COVID, but basically at high levels for a long time. Kids have said that the things that most bother them is school-related pressure for a long time, and this is before the advent of cell phones. So you have kids who are disengaged, especially as they get older, that has existed for a long time. And then we think what’s going on is you’ve got disengaged kids in school. You’ve got the advent of technology like social media and cell phones that are really fun distractions, and the skills that young people really need to thrive in work and life are getting farther and farther away from the normal academic teaching of what’s going on in school. So 50 years ago, most employers were really prioritizing good literacy and numeracy in the US, those were sort of the most requisite skills, and those are needed, but they’re necessary, but not sufficient. Colleges want young people to have invented or patented something… I’m exaggerating, but not totally… to get into competitive schools, [LAUGHTER] and there’s increasing pressure for honors classes and AP classes, and what we’re asking kids to be able to do has sort of gotten out of hand in some ways, and gotten farther away from what this reality looks like when they leave the school walls. So this combination of sort of feeling it’s irrelevant inside school and technology being very distracting, and I would say there’s also been well documented less choice and decision making that young people have over the last couple decades, this sort of sense of not being in control over much of their lives. Those sort of three things, I think, has kind of created a toxic combination all really leading to unmotivated young people.

Jenny: Yeah, I would just build on that a tiny bit and say, as you all point out, and as Rebecca points out, there’s always been a gap between what happens in school and what happens in the real world, that that gap is like a chasm. It’s just much, much bigger, and kids are much more aware of what the world will demand of them because of smartphones. They see what the world is out there. They were a little bit protected before [LAUGHTER]. You saw in your community or in your school what that world was and now, they sort of see it a lot, and I think that feeling of unprepared for the world that’s coming is much more profound.

John: This seems to extend into older age groups as well. We see a decline in fertility, more people are choosing not to bring children into the world, and a lot of it seems to be tied to this same sort of environment where people are not very optimistic about the future and they do feel this lack of control.

Jenny: Absolutely.

Rebecca W.: I think that a lot of the sort of things that people talk about in terms of personal self improvement and, in adults, whether it’s mindfulness and/or developing friendships and connections or finding meaningful work and interests, or, you know, there’s a whole industry to help adults [LAUGHTER] sort of get out of their funk and improve their lives. And I think a lot of these things are sowed in school where young people don’t have a lot of chances inside school to really pursue their interests. They aren’t developing what the folks at CASEL talk about as confident self awareness, where they have a sense of who they are and what path they might like to start on, and if they want to change paths, they’re confident enough to try to figure out how to do that as they go, and all of that is needed to be the author of your own life, which is affirming and creates optimism. And without that feeling, it is hard to move through the world.

Rebecca: You note that more engaged kids learn better, perform better, feel better, and live better. And you describe four modes of engagement, resisting, coasting, achieving and exploring. What types of behavior would we observe for students in each of these modes?

Rebecca W.: So the passenger mode is where kids are coasting, and these are kids who are showing up to school, not disrupting class, but putting in minimal effort, zooming through homework as quickly as they can. They may enjoy school because they have friends, but they don’t necessarily see the relevance of what they’re learning to the real world, to their daily life, and they’re doing what we would call surface learning. They’re not going deep [LAUGHTER] and they may be getting good grades. Some of them may be struggling, so it’s often because school’s either too hard or too easy that kids decide to coast. So that’s passenger mode, and that’s most kids. In middle school and high school, we found that about 50% of kids said that their schooling experiences were sort of “meh,” ones that were not inspiring or terrible, either way, they were sort of coasting along. So that’s the first mode. The second mode is achiever mode. And these are kids who are trying to be perfect and trying to be excellent and get top marks and excel in extracurriculars. And teachers and parents love achievers. Society loves achievers, and achievers can be very happy because they’re doing very well, but there is a dark side. We talk about the achiever conundrum, where a lot of kids who spent a lot of time in achiever mode tip into unhappy achiever mode, where they replace their performance with their sense of mattering, so they feel that they only matter if they do well, so getting a bad grade is sort of the end of the world for them. These kids often have quite a bit of anxiety and mental health challenges, and they’re often very fragile learners in that they don’t really want to take risks. One of the quotes that I think about a lot when we talk about this mode was a kid who was really in achiever mode for a long time saying the thing that she hated most about school that drove her crazy is when teachers didn’t tell her exactly what to do to get an A, a good score, because that’s the sort of mindset [LAUGHTER] of achiever mode. Tell me exactly what to do and I’m gonna go get it. It also limits creativity being in achiever mode too often. So in middle school, high school, that’s about 30% of kids. And then you’ve got the third mode, which is kids in resister mode. These are kids who actually do have a fair bit of agency. It’s just not pointed towards the learning in school that parents and teachers and adults want them to be doing, and they’re using their voice in whichever way they can to say school isn’t working for me. So they are the classic quote, unquote problem children disrupting class, class clowns, not doing homework, skipping school, or leaving school altogether, ultimately, if you can’t re-engage them. So, they often need a wide range of supports to bring them back, because they’re often resisting for different things. It could be they’re deeply overwhelmed, they’ve gotten behind in work. It could be a family issue, and they need extra support. But we found that if you can remove some of the barriers and give them, actually, more autonomy and freedom to pursue their interests or take on responsibility, they do have agency, and they quickly can move to explorer mode, which is the fourth mode. And explorer mode is what we talk about as agentic engagement, which is the term in the academic literature, and that’s where kids are getting good grades, they are happy and they’re developing the resilience, the learning to learn skills needed for an AI world. So it’s the trifecta that you want. It’s just that less than 10% of kids grades 3 through 12, and less than 5% of kids in middle school and high school say they have the regular opportunity to explore in school, and this is where kids’ agency meets their engagement levels, and they are able to ask for things or make suggestions, or find creative solutions to make their learning environment more interesting to themselves and more supportive regardless of the context they’re in.

John: Preschool kids are very much engaged in that exploring mode, and as they enter schools that seems to fade a little bit with each year of schooling. Why is this breaking down? We bring in kids who are intrinsically motivated to learn more and curious. Why is that fading so rapidly in the early years of schooling and continuing through the schooling process?

Jenny: There’s the real intersection of development and sort of what we do to them. So a lot of it is the environment we put kids in, which does seem to dampen curiosity. There’s not as many opportunities to ask questions, or for a teacher with a big class to answer every kid’s questions, a toddler asking sort of 60 to 100 questions a minute, [LAUGHTER] it feels like as a parent. Obviously, that’s not possible. So there are a lot of reasons that in that trajectory from sort of primary elementary school up until middle and high school you see kids disengaged. The top reasons are it’s too easy or too hard. They’re not in their zone of proximal development. They’re either bored or overwhelmed, and so they check out. That’s the easiest approach to that. Mental health problems is increasingly a reason. It’s very hard to engage if you’re anxious or depressed or neuro-divergent. There are a lot of neuro-divergent kids, and that needs to be recognized and diagnosed so that you can put in place the supports to make learning more accessible. A lot of kids experience bullying or discrimination. That would be a very important reason that kids disengage. A lot of kids don’t feel they belong, and belonging plays an essential role in learning. We have a whole chapter on this that… I really love this phrase: “belonging uncertainty,” when you feel you don’t belong, you are looking for evidence to confirm that you don’t belong, and you are very unwilling to do the things that you need to do to learn. In a moment where you don’t feel you belong, you are not going to ask for help and confess to an entire class that you don’t get it. That’s a very brave act. I don’t understand, could we slow down? Could you repeat that? That’s hard to do in college, much less in middle school, when you’re really kind of in the throes of that identity development. And as we’ve talked about in this conversation, this lack of choice is a profound reason that kids disengage. They don’t feel that they have an opportunity to put themselves out there in any significant way, so why try? So we don’t give them limited opportunities. We’re not saying, choose your own adventure in school. That’s one dramatic approach. But another is, you have a homework assignment that you’re going to assign. Let’s offer three ways to do it. That little bit of choice really resonates, because you start to feel a little bit in control, and so you feel a little bit more motivated to do it. It’s very similar to offering a toddler: peas, corn, or carrots. You’re not saying, “Do you want vegetables or don’t you?” You’re saying, here are the three vegetables, which one do you want? And suddenly they feel I get to make this decision, I’m going to eat carrots versus I don’t want any vegetables. So scale that up. And when you get in middle and high school and in college, that’s why so many kids actually can get re-engaged in college, because they can start to exercise a little bit more choice and agency over their schedule. Whether they’ve developed the sort of learning to learn skills and study skills to be successful is a different story. But I do think that you see a number of kids sort of get to college and find a thing. A couple kids in our book, they got to college and the combination of feeling less controlled and having some choice over what they could pick in terms of classes and how structured their days allowed them to re-engage in a way that they were unable to do in high school.

Rebecca W.: I would also chime in and add that the structure and design of schooling, I think, really impacts this downward slide of disengagement, because we see a huge dip from elementary school to middle school. That’s really where, all of a sudden, you get kids reporting many more passenger and resister experiences than achiever and explorer experiences is that switch from upper elementary to middle school. And some of the design features are having multiple classes, not having one teacher who is sort of your go to, who knows you very well, and that continues. So it’s important for educators to have subject matter expertise, of course, so they can teach well. But the entire sort of design of having siloed, not necessarily connected different subjects can be quite mind numbing to kids, plus they feel a little bit lost in the shuffle. They don’t necessarily have a place to belong in traditional schools, in traditional design of schools. Now, lots of folks are playing with how to redesign middle school and high school, but I think that has a big role to play.

Rebecca: You’ve hinted towards some changes that K-12 could promote, where they could promote student agency and engagement. Can you elaborate a little bit more on what some of those design changes could be to maybe improve engagement?

Rebecca W.: Yes, I think we have a whole section towards the end of the book suggesting organizations that are doing this work, if readers want to go be champions in their communities or in their institutions, and there is a spectrum. So on the one hand, you could really work with teachers themselves to use autonomy-supportive teaching practices. This work comes out of Johnmarshall Reeve and his colleagues, so 20 years of research on this, which really is shifts in style. You don’t have to shift your curriculum or your lesson, a bit of tweaks on the lesson plans or your disciplinary approaches as an educator. But it is things like Jenny said, offering choice on homework. It is things like being vulnerable enough to ask students at the end of a lesson, and if you have a large class, you can give everybody either an electronic exit ticket or a sticky note to say, what’s one question you want to explore tomorrow or you didn’t understand, and then taking that feedback and shifting it. So there’s small things like that that actually engage them and give them more agency. There’s also more profound design changes. We interviewed a number of students for the book who are in big picture learning schools, which basically take the traditional school day in their high schools and three days a week they’re in class doing their courses, and two days a week they are in internships in the workplace where they are developing all sorts of life skills and collaborative problem solving skills and critical thinking skills. And then every week their entire high school career, they meet with an advisor, the same advisor and the same small group of kids in their advisory across all four years. If done well, of course, they become like a little family, and it’s a go to person, and they debrief on their internship experiences and what they’re learning from them. Because, of course, you can learn a lot of these quote, unquote, 21st Century Skills anywhere in life actually, it doesn’t have to be inside a classroom around academic subjects.

Jenny: I would add two things. I would say a K-12 timetable is a zero-sum game. And I think we’ve been willing to push more content in because we’ve decided what we care about, and let’s do more of that. And I think Rebecca and I would say that agency is the skill that needs to be developed, and it needs to be developed through the ability to make choices and to exercise that. And so I would argue that that skill actually is worthy of cutting up some time and that it will help with everything else. It can help with the other academics, but take away a little of the content and put in its place an ability for kids to make some choices. So I’ll give you an example. In a lot of countries around the world, you can do something called an extended project qualification in your final couple of years of schooling. Y ou pick a subject, and it’s very carefully designed such that you have to go find your advisor, you have to design a timetable. 20% of your grade is your ability to manage a project over a year. It’s a time management skill, and another 30% is the quality of the sources you choose. So at 50% you are not assessing the content of that project. You are assessing some skills we know are going to be incredibly important in college or in the workplace, the ability to manage multiple demands, to ask for help, to know when you’re falling behind, to change your mind, and all of that. So I can really envision, and we’ve interviewed some schools in this process who did studios or projects just carving out some time to say, even if you assume they don’t learn anything, which is 100% not going to happen. But let’s just give some credit to those who say not enough knowledge acquisition happens, they are developing other skills, and those skills are worthy of the time we are taking away from other things. And the gravy, the cherry on the ice cream sundae, is that it will make kids happier, which we should care a lot about. [LAUGHTER] You know, we should care deeply about that as a factor to motivate, but just as the sort of we would like our kids to be happy. So I do think the timetable is a major barrier, but it is one that is surmountable, and I think we can be creative, and it doesn’t mean that we have to give up all standards tomorrow if we do this.

John: Much of this discussion reminds me of a discussion we had earlier with two economists, with Fabrizio Zilibotti and Matthias Doepke, who talk about differences over time and across countries in the amount of freedom that children have outside of school and how much of their lives are controlled. And what they observe is that in those time periods and in countries where there’s more income inequality, parents tend to put much more structure on children’s lives. And I’m wondering if this could be related to the lack of autonomy that children may have outside of the classroom, where they spend a good deal of their time. So it does seem like in the US, in particular, where we have an extremely high level of economic inequality and there’s a lot of pressure on children from their parents and other sources to do well in school, that perhaps that lack of autonomy, both within schools and outside of school, might be leading to some of this disengagement. If that’s the case, is that something that parents perhaps should work on, providing students a bit more autonomy and choice and control in their day-to-day lives. Would that be helpful?

Jenny: Absolutely. I interviewed them and did a couple stories on them, and I read their book, and I would say my favorite conclusion from that book is that parents aren’t crazy. Parents are responding to the environment that they’re in. So our responses may seem irrational, but they’re rational within the context that we’re in. And so in Sweden, where you’re almost guaranteed a university place, there is a lot less stress around what kids need to do in that process. I’d say between the US and the UK, there are very different markers, and those markers of how you get into university then shape everything that comes down. So to me, the thing that’s challenging about what you’re saying, I think it’s 100% true, and I think parents do have the influence. We showed this in our book, and there’s a ton of research to defend this. We know that parents have a lot of influence, but that you have to be brave. You have to say, is this a long game? I care about my kid and their happiness more than I care about feeding a system that is insatiable and does not care about my kid. And so I think part of why Rebecca and I wrote this book, it requires the confidence of knowing that long term, these bets pay off, investing in agency over more math. Not that math is irrelevant. We’re not saying knowledge doesn’t matter at any turn, but investing in agency, in choice, in a little bit of freedom, and definitely giving them autonomy so they can figure out who they are. That will 100% pay off in the long term, but it might not pay off on the math test tomorrow, and it requires bravery on the part of parents, and that’s hard, it’s hard to be brave in the face of a system that is telling you otherwise.

Rebecca: It seems like there’s a lot of bravery in this discussion. [LAUGHTER]

Jenny: …name of my substack: how to be brave.

Rebecca W.: We talk about in the book that one thing explorer mode does, if you give kids the opportunity to be in explorer mode in school or out of school, is it helps them be brave, because it takes bravery to chart your own path. It takes some element of bravery to think about what you were really interested in and try to pursue that regardless of what other people around you might be telling you to do. And I think more and more, it’s going to take some level of bravery to navigate this huge shift we have coming with AI that’s going to be massively shifting how our jobs work, what skills we need, how we’re teaching… kids are gonna have to have the courage and gumption to figure things out as they go, [LAUGHTER] and to tack and weave and navigate. It takes bravery to do that. You don’t need as much courage to follow a well trodden path that someone has told you just to walk along.

Jenny: We cite and we spoke with a developmental psychologist named Ron Dahl in this book, and said something to me that really stayed with me, and it comes up at different points in the book, which is, you can’t tell a kid to be brave. They need an opportunity to be brave and feel what it is to be brave to then feel a little braver. I mean, it’s very obvious when you say it out loud, [LAUGHTER] but when you think about it in the context of learning, what opportunities are we giving young people to be brave, so they feel the benefit of that bravery and they want more of it. And so we’ve loved that framing.

Rebecca W.: Yeah, one of the quotes I love most in the book is from a young woman who was a total achiever mode her entire time in high school, got to an Ivy League university and had a total meltdown because she didn’t have that internal explorer muscles and that bravery. She didn’t know what the path was, and it was very disorienting. And she said, “You know, I wish I’d had failure therapy [LAUGHTER] in high school.” We were like, “What do you mean? What is failure therapy?” And she said, “Well, I never once failed in high school, and I didn’t know what it felt like to not be able to do things perfectly and then have to pick yourself back up again.” And that is a form of bravery. So just to give some color to Jenny’s point, I’m not saying we should go around and fail all our kids, but give them an opportunity to struggle and figure out how to get out of it again.

Rebecca: We have a lot of students that enter college who haven’t been in explorer mode, as you just illustrated, they might have been in an achiever mode, or they might have been coasting along. How do we help ignite explorer mode as college faculty, knowing that maybe they don’t have the skills quite yet to be in explorer mode. How do we help ignite them to be in that mode and support them to be in that mode when we probably think that that’s what college should be about?

Jenny: I have a great example of that from university, and then I’ll pass it over to Rebecca, but I interviewed a Clayton Spencer who was the head of Bates, and she developed a program called purposeful work, which kind of had three prongs, but one of the key prongs was asking faculty to bring practitioners into the classroom. And you will probably not be surprised to learn that there was quite a bit of resistance to this when it was presented. But her idea was that you’re teaching these wonderful classes, you have this incredible content that you are imparting to these kids, but they don’t know how yet to tie it to the real world. They don’t get the relevance piece of it. The practitioners by dint of having them come in… four practitioners a semester, if it’s a psychology class, it might be a doula, it might be a nurse practitioner, it might be a social worker. They come in, talk a little bit about their day, and you’re starting to get these data points as to, “oh, wait, this matters in the real world.” Okay, I’m gonna double down on why this particular experimental method is really important. It can really feel quite disconnected. And I think one thing that I think college professors could do is to try to connect it better, and that can be outsourced. They shouldn’t be expected to be able to draw those connections, but inviting practitioners in would be one way. And this program is also another example of timetabling. They decided to use every January to do these kind of mini-courses, but four weeks doing something with zero stakes. It does not affect your GPA. It is literally all about explore something you love, see how it goes, and bring that back to the classroom. And it’s just four moments in college to try something, no stakes, no GPA affected, collecting data here. For students who have to work in college it might have a different structure. But I thought those were two interesting attempts to try to build relevance, help kids find their purpose, and also break up the school year a little bit.

Rebecca W.: Another way that I think college professors could be incredibly helpful in helping young people develop these explorer skills is really sending the message that they can advocate for themselves. Often, of course, and we could ask you guys, one assumes that young people come to college or university with these explorer skills already, but often they don’t. So we interviewed one young man who lived in Dallas, and he was first generation. His family had immigrated from Latin America, a first-generation college goer, and he had learned to really advocate for himself in high school, because he did great the first two years, and then started to struggle when classes got a lot harder, and he had someone in the front office. It wasn’t a college counselor, but I think it was like the assistant principal or something, to sort of take him under his wing and say, you go talk to the teacher and ask them this question, and then here’s how you study, and here’s how you can ask for help and communicate like “I’m flailing. I need help, but I care.” And he had really gotten those skills. So when he showed up in college, he was very excited. It was a big deal, and his first sort of core course for his major, he found super difficult. It was super hard. He didn’t quite have the academic knowledge to really excel. And midway through, he was getting a C, close to a D. And he was like, “Oh my gosh, this is my major.” He knew it was something he wanted to do. And he went to the professor and said, “I’m really struggling. I don’t know what to do. I know I need your help to help me succeed.” Like he had the gumption to say that. And then the professor also had the perfect response. She said, “I got your back.” She sat him at the front. It was a very large lecture class. You guys have talked about pedagogy for large classes, but she sat him at the front. She paired him with two other top students in the class. Introduced him, said, “Hey, I’d like you guys to be in a study group together.” They ended up becoming sort of best friends, and he aced the class. So any of those strategies to really let kids know they can advocate for themselves and when they do, taking it seriously and really trying to find ways to help them, I think can be incredibly helpful.

John: We always end by asking, what’s next?

Rebecca W.: One of the things that I have started to do organically, not planned, is use these modes as language with my team members, particularly my young new fresh out of college, or maybe fresh out of their masters, team members, early career team members who have spent a lot of time in achiever mode. But also I always look for a fair bit of sort of explorer tendencies, and they often get overwhelmed with the large task lists that we have at the Brookings Institution to do every day. And one of the things I’ve been telling them is, look, you can modulate between modes. [LAUGHTER] Sometimes you just gotta get it right. Sometimes you gotta really create something, and sometimes tasks are not that important. You can go in passenger mode, do the bare minimum, and it’s enough to be fine. So I’m beginning to experiment about what these modes look like in the workplace. Jenny, what about you? Over to you.

Jenny: I’m in the process of writing something about launching, so sort of launching from college into the real world. And Rebecca’s saying how relevant everything that we’ve written in this book is for that moment as well. So it’s kind of relevant all the way through, is the bottom line. But this idea of, in this really tricky moment, of even if you’ve succeeded in college, suddenly the workplace seems very fuzzy, very fast changing, very hard to get a toe hold, very choppy right now, it’s not so much about the job as it is about the sort of projects or gigs, or less kind of I’ve got my job, I will succeed, and more kind of forever hustling. There’s the complaint I’m hearing more, the forever hustling and feeling like you’re not getting anywhere, and sort of using the modes to build the self awareness to try to target those searches and think more about kind of how I fit in in the world and what I want to do versus what’s available, just so it doesn’t constantly feel so completely overwhelming, that’s sort of like, well, I’ll just try everything, and I don’t really know what I want, and I’ve never had to really ask myself this question. And there’s this kind of paralysis that can come from that and be like, “Okay, well, let’s think about these modes, and how do you show up in the world, and where are you most comfortable, and what do we need to get out of,” and so I think this sort of developmental period, launch period, I think, is interesting to me right now.

Rebecca: Well, both of those sound really interesting as the next phase of this work. Thanks for a really great conversation.

Jenny: Thanks for having us.

Rebecca W.: Thank you for having us. It was really fun.

John: Well, thank you. You’re doing some really great work on a topic that’s incredibly important.

Rebecca W.: Thank you so much.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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371. Student Motivation and UDL

Posted in accessibility, diversity, engagement, higher education, learning, motivation, pedagogy, teaching, universal design
December 11, 2024

Providing more autonomy can increase students’ intrinsic motivation. In this episode, Chris Hromalik joins us to discuss ways of increasing student autonomy within the UDL framework. an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Distance Learning Instruction and Design at SUNY Oswego. He is also the Project Manager of the Universal Design for Learning at SUNY Project. In this role he provides Universal Design for Learning professional development across the SUNY system. Chris is also the recipient of a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. His research focuses on UDL as well as statistical analysis on applied linguistics and education.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Providing more autonomy can increase students’ intrinsic motivation. In this episode we explore ways of increasing student autonomy within the UDL framework.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Chris Hromalik, an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Distance Learning Instruction and Design at SUNY Oswego. He is also the Project Manager of the Universal Design for Learning at SUNY Project. In this role he provides Universal Design for Learning professional development across the SUNY system. Chris is also the recipient of a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. His research focuses on UDL as well as statistical analysis on applied linguistics and education. Welcome, Chris.

Chris: Thank you.

John: Today’s teas are: … Chris, are you drinking any tea?

Chris: I am. I have the Tazo RefreshMint. Very good.

Rebecca: Nice and relaxing, right?

Chris: It is.

John: And Rebecca?

Rebecca: I am back to my Scottish afternoon tea.

John: …and I am drinking Darjeeling tea today.

Rebecca: Oh, you’re mixing it up, John. So Chris, we’ve invited you here today to discuss your work with UDL and instructional design. Can you talk a little bit about how you got started with UDL?

Chris: Sure. So thank you, Rebecca, thank you, John for having me here today. All of it began as far back as 2011 when I took my first course in accessible usable web design. And wow, it’s been a while, but at that time, Nancy Carr, who was the director of the Office of Accessibility Resources at Onondaga Community College, she recruited me to be an Office of Accessibility Resources ambassador, and the idea was to be able to make other faculty aware of how to work more closely with the Office of Accessibility Resources. And I was tasked with helping faculty to better understand digital accessibility, how to make their documents more accessible. With time, I ended up joining the Universal Design for Learning Academy, which, at the time, was funded by the Onondaga Pathways to Career Project through a grant from the Office of Disability Employment Policy through the US Department of Labor. The idea was to train faculty in the Universal Design for Learning Framework. We had a three-day workshop. It went very well, repeated three more times, extended to four days even, and ended up training over 110 faculty, staff, and administrators at Onondaga Community College. And then fall 2021 I ended up bringing it to the SUNY level, and here we are today. All is going well so far.

John: Well, I suspect most of our listeners are familiar with the basics of UDL. Could you just provide a really quick overview of what UDL is, and why should we consider using UDL.

Chris: Universal Design for Learning is a framework based on scientific insight into how humans learn that can help to make more accessible, inclusive, and usable learning experiences for students. We’ll talk a little bit more about the three principles of UDL throughout the interview today, but some of the main benefits would be that if we are thinking proactively about how we can design our instruction to reduce barriers for students during the design process, as opposed to trying to be reactive, and trying to then retrofit our instruction or change our instruction later, we can create learning experiences that are going to be better for all of our students. One of the examples I like to give comes from, going back to the Universal Design for Learning Academy back at Onondaga Community College, a fantastic professor of mathematics. Part of the Universal Design for Learning Academy was, during the summer, be trained in the Universal Design for Learning Framework, and in the fall, we would implement some sort of instructional intervention, some way that we would apply the UDL framework to our instruction with students. And this professor of mathematics had recognized that there was a unit of his instruction that was more challenging than others for his students. It was a lesson on eigenvectors, vector spaces, linear transformations. When you realize that this isn’t a matter of engagement, the students are really interested in this. These are math majors, they really like what they’re doing, but it was a challenging topic. And we took a look at the textbooks, how the textbook was this 2D presentation in text and mathematical formulas and that sort of thing. But he found a visual representation in the form of video that took this, what really is a more three- dimensional concept, and made it three dimensional, as opposed to the 2D representation of the textbook. And where I bring this in is that when we think about Universal Design for Learning, the idea is that we’re creating more accessible, usable, inclusive instruction for our students, but there are going to be benefits that are going to benefit everyone in the classroom. When this professor was thinking about how he’s going to present this, he presents the video, but he is also supplementing the video by describing the visuals aloud. Keep in mind the idea that if we have a student who is blind or has low vision in the class, how can we ensure access to all students in the classroom? And so he would take the time to describe the visuals aloud. And yes, this does benefit a student who is blind or has low vision, but all students are benefiting from this, because when the professor is making salient the most important information from this video, this benefits all the students in the classroom. And so the idea being that when we think about how we can design to reduce barriers for the students in our class, we’re able to then make a better learning experience for everybody.

Rebecca: On July 30, 2024, CAST, which is the organization that puts out UDL principles, released the 3.0 version of the UDL guidelines, both the earlier and current versions of the UDL Guidelines focus on course design that results in students having multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression. So those are the three overlying guidelines, but there were substantial revisions in how those guidelines are described. The 3.0 version of the UDL guidelines remove the word “provide.” Can you talk about the shift in focus away from having faculty provide these UDL features.

Chris: So, Rebecca, the shift that you’re referring to is the idea of moving from providing multiple means of representation, providing multiple means of action, expression, providing multiple means of engagement, and instead saying to design multiple means of representation, design multiple means of action and expression, design multiple means of engagement. And a lot of that comes down to this idea of moving away from a more teacher-centered approach to the classroom and having a more learner- centered approach to the classroom. And so a lot of what we’re going to see in these changes that are in the UDL 3.0 guidelines is this idea of moving toward a more learner-centered approach to the classroom. And it’s not like it wasn’t there before. The idea of teacher-centered of teacher-centered versus learner-centered, it’s always been part of it, but to place greater emphasis on the idea that it isn’t necessarily us as the instructors who are providing the learning experiences, and that we are the ones who are responsible for this. And I’ve seen this with the workshops that I’ve given, that one of the questions that I oftentimes will receive is, is the onus always on us as the instructors to be providing for the students. And so to me, when I saw the change, it made sense. It addresses some of the concerns that faculty in higher education have expressed to me, this idea of, well, we want our students to be intrinsically motivated. We want our students to be interested in what they’re learning. And so the idea is that we’re moving away from this idea of we are the providers of knowledge. We are the sages on the stage. It’s going to be a more learner-centered approach to the classroom.

John: The original guidelines focus on developing student expertise. The new guidelines focus instead on developing learner agency. What’s the purpose of the shift? And what are some ways in which instructors can do this?

Chris: So a lot of this does come back to the idea of learner-centered versus teacher-centered. Nothing has changed in terms of wanting our learners be expert learners. But the idea is, as opposed to focusing on understanding content, it’s more the idea of students taking ownership of their learning, the idea that students are going to help to shape the learning process. So when I think about learner agency and I think about learner autonomy, the first thing that I begin to think about is thinking about self-determination theory. So when we think about self-determination theory, we have three components that are going to influence our levels of intrinsic motivation. We have competence, whether or not we believe that we can actually complete a task or complete a task to a high level of quality. One of the others is relatedness, which we’ll talk a little bit about when we get into talking about some of the other changes that’s related to bias and exclusionary practices. We’ll talk about this idea of relatedness and autonomy is going to be one of the most important aspects, the idea of agency and being able to feel like you’re in charge of the learning experience. And if we think about the idea that if students are more intrinsically motivated, they have this inherent interest in learning, versus extrinsic motivated, going to be more outside influences. It’s the difference between having a student, for example, who’s interested in learning about something just because they are interested in the topic, versus someone who’s learning to get a better grade in the course. And if you want to be able to build up this interest in students’ inherent interest in their intrinsic motivation in the course, increasing their autonomy is going to help to do that. Intrinsic motivation, greater levels have been associated with greater academic performance, greater creativity in the classroom and so it all leads together. Thinking about it from a student success perspective, if we can increase learner autonomy, we can increase their intrinsic motivation, increase their academic performance, and one of the ways to do that is to be able to offer options to learners. But going even further then, in the 3.0 guidelines, offering students the option of having choice, to be able to discover resources on their own. As opposed to giving one textbook reading, could there be other options that we could offer to learners, or the learners can find their own options too? We have so many different things that can be found online, that allowing learners that agency, that autonomy, to be able to search out the information that’s going to help them to be successful and reach the learning objectives of the course.

Rebecca: Are there ways that you embed agency in the classes that you teach?

Chris: I’m going to give a lot of examples today, from online courses that either I’ve taught in the past or courses that I’m preparing at the moment. And one of the ways that, when you think about designing multiple means of representation, one of the ways to offer choice or offer more autonomy for learners is to be able to more guide them toward being able to find things, be able to offer different options. So we have our textbook readings, we have videos, instructional materials that come with it. Be able to point students toward other resources and guide them to understand how to actually purposefully search for information, because search, in and of itself, is a skill. To be able to create a purposeful search, be able to find resources on your own, is part of the learning process itself. So as opposed to just providing just the resources to be able to tell students, here are some other sources we can be consulting. Here are some other high quality resources and then be able to teach them how they can be able to search for that information on their own.

John: While UDL has always had a component of providing students with multiple means of engagement, to provide students with multiple ways of connecting to the content that is the focus of the class. The new guidelines include a focus on removing bias and exclusionary practices. Could you talk a little bit about what this sort of change involves and how it may affect the way in which courses are designed?

Chris: when I think about designing multiple means of engagement, typically when I have a shorter workshop or a shorter webinar, the way I’ll explain this, here’s a simple way of thinking about it is, as opposed to with designing multiple means of representation, where we are considering, how can we provide an accessible, usable option for how we present content, with action expression, how can we design an accessible and usable option for how students demonstrate the knowledge? With engagement, I think about relevance, and how can we design multiple examples for what we’re trying to teach students? So if we think about multiple examples, and we think about examples that are going to represent the diversity of our student population, this is going to help us to remove bias, be more inclusive in the classroom, and for the students to be able to then see themselves in what it is that we’re teaching. To get back to self-determination theory, for example, the idea of relatedness. And if we think about whether or not students do see themselves in what we’re teaching them, will we be able to then help them to build up intrinsic motivation, which, of course, then can lead them to be more successful? This is going to be something that can and has potential to increase student success, for them to be able to see themselves in what they’re learning. And also we think about feedback, one of the strategies I like to emphasize the idea of providing multiple examples of what we’re teaching, and especially thinking of examples, maybe outside of our typical canon. But if we also think about the feedback that we provide to students too, and if we’re providing feedback to students, ensuring that the feedback we’re providing is going to be free of bias as well too. This is a different example, it’s outside of higher education, but I think about the experience of my own daughter and thinking about some of the feedback that at a young age she would receive. That I am not necessarily your typical American in many ways. I don’t necessarily always have all the same customs and traditions. I don’t always honor the same customs and traditions, in the sense of we may do things differently at different holiday times, may eat different foods and what might be typical. And my wife is also not from the US originally. And so when we were raising my daughter, she wasn’t necessarily being raised with the same songs, with the same nursery rhymes, with the same poems and the same ways of doing things that other kids were, and the type of feedback that she received at a young age was there was just a misunderstanding of the fact that she wasn’t raised in the same way as many of her classmates, and it was a misunderstanding about her intelligence, a misunderstanding about what she was capable of doing, because there was a misunderstanding about her upbringing. So thinking about how we can provide feedback that’s going to be supportive and understanding of students who may not have the same lived experiences as each one of us. In the classroom, asking students to be able to provide their own examples, going back and thinking about my daughter and her experiences, they’re discussing in class different traditions they have for Thanksgiving, for the holidays, and having each of the students share their examples, what they do in their household. That it may be that there are different practices that each one of us has, and we may not even realize that they’re going to be different practices. So having students be able to have a voice to share their experiences in, for example, language classroom, students could share the types of foods that they have when they’re at home.

Rebecca: I think along the same lines, the new guidelines provide more focus on development of other things like student goal setting, self regulation, and metacognition. Can you give some examples of ways that you might incorporate these into a class as well?

Chris: So when I think about goal setting, when I think about self regulation, metacognition, the way that I like to incorporate this in the classroom is through reflection. I’m very much a strong proponent of reflective journal entries for students, and especially when in my online courses, I like to have weekly reflective journal entries as students submit one to two paragraphs, just thinking about their learning and how they’ve been learning up until now. And one of the first things we do at the very beginning is goal setting. And so when I think about self regulation, when I think about goal setting, it’s that idea of considering setting goals at the beginning, and how are we going to monitor our progress toward reaching those goals, and how are we going to regulate our emotions? How are we going to regulate our behavior? So in other words, how are we going to use learning strategies that are going to help us to achieve those goals? How are we going to, if there’s a setback, keep going toward reaching our goals? And so for me, when I have reflective journal entries, I like to base them around six dimensions of self-regulated learning. So that’s the “with whom,” the “what,” the “where,” the “when,” the “why,” and the “how” of self-regulated learning. So with whom? Well, basically, at the beginning of the semester, I’ll ask students to say why they’re even taking an online Spanish course to begin with, and what are their goals for the semester? Next week, we’ll be thinking about their learning environment. Where are they studying? Are they working in a distraction-free environment? What are some of the materials that they’re using in order to support their learning? We think about the with whom, with whom are they working? Are they working with other people? Are they asking for help? Are they seeking help when needed, if they have questions and concerns, are they reaching out to the instructor, reaching out to their peers? When we think about the when, another week’s reflected journal entry is to think about how do they manage their time? How do they plan their time? Do they set aside time for studying online? We start to get to our first exam, we think about going back to those goals again. What were your goals originally in your first week, your first reflective journal entry? Do you believe you’re on track to reaching those goals? If not, what can you do differently in order to get close to reaching those goals? So monitoring your progress. Think about how we’re going to change our behavior, adjust our learning strategies, in order to get more closer to reaching the goals we set for ourselves. And so that’s the idea and we’re thinking about the student goal setting that first day of class could be, why are you taking this course? What goals do you have for yourself? In a language course, it’s great because a lot of times our goal is, I want to travel. Or I want to be able to speak to somebody that at this moment I currently am not able to communicate as easily as I wish I could. And then, as we get a little bit further on the semester, we get our first exam back, so we get our feedback on that as we think through, am I working toward this goal? This can be done both online, it can be done a face-to-face classroom as well, and a lot of times we’ll have five minutes at the end of a class session, we’ll have we’ll have just five minutes that we’re not really sure what to do with it. And this is a great opportunity to have a written reflection. In the case of an online course, it could be an option of written versus a video submission for reflection. So we have goal setting, taking that time to reflect on what our goals are. Are we reaching them or working toward them, and what can we do to adjust our behavior in order to get there?

Rebecca: I can imagine that sometimes there might need to be some scaffolding or coaching around goal setting too, because depending on the discipline or shifting between kinds of courses, our expectations may not align with what our goals may even be initially. I want to be fluent by the end of this beginning Spanish class may not be a realistic expectation, and that can lead to frustration or other kinds of emotions that might get in the way of learning if we’re not being realistic about what our goals are.

Chris: And as soon as you were saying that, that was the first thing I thought of too, is in a Spanish 101 course, we’re working in the novice level. We’re beginning. We’re not going to leave being able to speak at a superior level. And this is the opportunity to be able to temper those expectations, to provide feedback to students and say, “Okay, I know we want to reach a certain level, but after four months, we’re only going to be able to reach this level” and to be able to put into clear words, well, this is what we’ll be able to do by the time all is said and done at the end of this course, and say, yeah, that is an opportunity to be able to help to keep expectations in check also.

Rebecca: You have a five-point plan that’s gonna take three [LAUGHTER] semesters to accomplish.

Chris:…but thinking back, even to as a student, I would actually prefer to have a student who has these high expectations and really just wants to shoot for the stars. I don’t want to bring them down, but somebody who has that enthusiasm? Obviously, we take courses to fulfill requirements all the time. We all did that as students ourselves. And so if that’s the reason for taking the course, well that’s great too. That is a reason for wanting to take a course. Wow, if we have someone who has these high expectations, well maybe we want to bring them down to more realistic expectations. But wow, it is also so exciting when you get someone who really wants to learn to communicate in the language and that really is their goal by the time they walk out of the classroom. It’s exciting.

John: One of the things that a number of economists have noted recently is that the rate of change in labor markets seems to have been accelerating in the last 30 or 40 years. A lot of the occupations that made up a large share of the labor force have effectively disappeared, and there’s lots of new occupations appearing. And I would think that this focus on self-regulated learning and so forth would be really helpful in helping students become lifelong learners because the skills they’re developing now might be very different than the types of skills they need in the future. So is that part of the reason perhaps for this shift?

Chris: Definitely, as we, ideally, will be more self-regulated learners, as opposed to other regulated, and being able to be more lifelong learners, being able to then adjust to to be able too, to be more flexible as learners, as you said, in the workforce, we’re in times that are constantly changing, whether it’s new technology, whether that’s going to be new requirements in the workforce. To be able to be lifelong learners, whether that’s through advanced certificates, whether that be through just being able to adjust to changes in technology, then yes, for sure, being more self regulated, opposed to being more other regulated, will definitely be a plus and an important part of how our students are going to be able to make the most when they’re moving into the workforce, for sure.

Rebecca: You just mentioned some new technology, and one of the things that we’ve talked a lot about on the podcast has been AI. And faculty have certainly been concerned about how the widespread availability of AI tools will affect student learning. What are some of the potential benefits and challenges associated with the use of AI in the UDL context?

Chris: So I’ll be honest and say that there’s a lot happening because, as you all know, and it can be difficult to follow change that is happening so rapidly and so a lot of different things that come to mind as I think about this question. The first is thinking about some of the concerns we have as faculty. And it’s true, we do have more concerns about whether or not we can maintain academic integrity, whether or not we’re going to be able to still be able to offer the same types of assessment that will be able to allow for critical thinking for students in the way that we have up until now. And so there are a lot of concerns for sure, when it comes to use of AI. A lot of really great things about it too, though. And so for me, it is a challenge thinking about that balance of where we have challenges, but also thinking about some of the benefits that we have, and especially when we think about benefits in terms of learner agency and learner autonomy, and helping students to be more self directed, more self-regulated learners. AI really does present an opportunity for that. A first thought that comes to mind when I think about my Spanish courses, if we’re completing a chapter of instruction and we’re working toward an exam, one of the most challenging aspects of that exam for students tends to be the composition. When we’re getting to an exam and they have to work on a piece of writing, basically, they’re going to be applying what they’re learning to a longer form piece of writing. And that can be difficult because it can oftentimes be difficult to get feedback on their progress along the way, and thinking about how AI could be leveraged in order for students who want to take charge of their learning, who want to be able to have this opportunity for practice and feedback, is to put into ChatGPT: “What have we been learning about? Here’s a vocab we work with. Here are the grammatical concepts. What are going to be some composition prompts that I might see on the exam? What could I possibly be asked to be able to do?” And from there, you can be writing up your composition and submit it and say, “Well, how did this go? What kind of feedback can you provide in terms of grammar, in terms of vocab, in terms of my overall performance of the task of the prompt you gave me, in terms of my creativity, in terms of how I’ve expressed myself at the 101 level?” So there are opportunities for us to use this to be more self-regulated learners. And I think that part of that comes from teaching students how to do that, to understand what are going to be the ethical ways of using AI. There are still going to be challenges. There are clearly challenges that we’re gonna face as faculty when it comes to AI and lots of transitions that are happening at the moment, but there are a lot of benefits that we could be seeing in terms of helping students to become more self-regulated learners, to feel like they have more autonomy in the classroom too.

Rebecca: Some faculty are reluctant to adopt a UDL framework in their classes because they are concerned that it could require a lot of time. What advice would you give to faculty who express this concern?

Chris: So I’m certainly feeling the crunch of time, and I imagine each of us in this room feels that way too. There’s a lot going on. There’s a lot happening. It isn’t that there aren’t good intentions. Is that there seem to be more and more things that are being given to us as faculty members. There’s more to do. Our days are full. You look at your calendar and you see where the free time is to be taking professional development. When you look for the time when you can make a change to something that you’ve taught 3, 4, 5 times already, there is a limited amount of time. And so what I would say is that one of the best ways to go about that then, if we were to thinking about what’s something we can be doing right away, what can we take from this podcast and be able to make changes in our face-to-face instruction, is to start to think about something small that we could do, that maybe might take a little bit of time now, but could eventually save us some time in the long run. And so I’m just gonna bring it back to UDL and some of the things that I’ll sometimes teach, and some of sometimes teach in some of the workshops that they give. One of the things is providing a model. So when I say providing a model, I’m thinking of a model assignment from a prior semester where a student might have completed a high-quality assignment. If you reach out to a former student, ask if you can share their work, anonymize it, and make it available to students, that takes a few minutes to do at the beginning, but can save you so much time in emails and questions that you receive from students. And so here we have a best practice of giving an example, giving a model to students. And it’s one of those things that can be done in a little bit shorter amount of time, but it can also save time for us in the long run. So these types of things, of building in best practices, can actually save us some time in the long run. When I think about offering a second option for an assignment where, if you can offer a second way that an assignment can be done, it can oftentimes save you, as an instructor, some time too. It may take five minutes to put in a second way of doing that in the assignment directions, but it can save you time. In my online courses, I spent years working with students who would tell me that they had difficulty writing diacritics, accent marks on compositions. And I would set up office hours time with students, and they would come and have extra time at the beginning of semester, and trying to work through, first it was Mac and PC, and then there were Chromebooks, and then there was iOS, and there was all that. And eventually one student said to me, can I just write it by hand and take a picture and submit it to the Dropbox? And then thought to myself, “Well, that makes sense. It all goes the same place. There’s no extra work for me. It takes me five minutes to change all the assignment directions. Why not just let everybody do it? If you want to type it? Great. 90% or so students will type it and submit it; for the other 10% that maybe would potentially withdraw from the course and move on to a different course.” Well, now I’ve retained them because they have the second option. It saves me time. I don’t have these extra office hours on my calendar anymore. I’m not answering as many emails. So some of these best practices of offering a second option that still gets at that same learning objective, these are types of things it can save us time. I think that’s where a lot of challenge comes in, is time. There’s just not time. A lot of times, even for for taking part in a lot of things we wish we could.

Rebecca: It might even bring you a little bit more joy, because you don’t have to have a meeting about how to put diacretics.

Chris: I’m thinking, my reflective journal assignments… I love having a second option of video. So I will get, again, 90% of students will just write one to two paragraphs. Every so often, I’ll get a student who takes me up on the idea of a second option of one to two minutes max on your video. When they do it’s like, “Wow, I feel like I’ve gotten to know this person better.” They seem to be really interested in it. They’ll do it kind of just video blog style, and it’s really interesting. And so yeah, just the joy that comes from a second way of completing an assignment that still reaches that same learning objective. It can make it interesting for us as faculty too. We need that every so often, that little spark of joy that keeps us interested in doing what we’re doing, no matter how difficult it can be.

John: And I’m reminded of Tom Tobin’s suggestion of a “plus one” strategy. Just make one change, and over time, those changes will accumulate, and you’ll end up with courses that are more engaging for students and for you,

Chris: It is sometimes just taking those baby steps. It’s doing something, taking one step, moving the needle just a little bit, because it can be very demotivating if we try and do too much at once. If we try to put too much into place, it will no longer be something that’s going to bring us joy. It’s going to be something that’s going to be demotivating for us and also for the students. If we try and do too much, it can be confusing, it can be blurry. To have too many things going on at once. So trying just little baby steps is in many ways better to be able to just try to start small and make small changes.

Rebecca: I like to remind people that accessibility isn’t an on and off switch, it’s a spectrum. And so you think that you can just turn it on or get somewhere where it’s just on, it’s not really a thing. So if you just remember that it’s a spectrum, and you keep working towards making it better and better, and it’s iterative, then it’s an ongoing process.

Chris: I’ve been working with document accessibility since 2011 and I still learn something new all the time. I have a lot to learn, for sure, and it’s little steps, little things to do to continue to improve, for sure,

Rebecca: Incremental change for the win. So we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Chris: Wrapping up the semester, winter break, preparing for the spring. That’s kind of where I’m just thinking that light at the end of the tunnel, starting to see it.

Rebecca: It sounds like one step at a time.

Chris: Yes, that’s exactly it.

Rebecca: Well, thanks for joining us.

Chris: Thank you, Rebecca; thank you, John,

John: Thanks. It’s great talking to you, and we look forward to more conversations.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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370. Why Don’t Students Read?

Posted in engagement, higher education, hypothesis, learning, motivation, pedagogy, reading, teaching
December 4, 2024

There has been a consistent downward trend in the amount of time college students spend reading and completing assignments outside of class. In this episode, Betsy Barre joins us to discuss some strategies that might be used to increase student motivation to engage with assigned coursework.

Betsy is an Assistant Provost and the Executive Director of the Center for Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University. In 2017 she won, with Justin Esarey, the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education’s Innovation Award for their Course Workload Estimator. Among her many other roles, Betsy is also a Professor in the Department for the Study of Religions.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: There has been a consistent downward trend in the amount of time college students spend reading and completing assignments outside of class. In this episode, we discuss some strategies that might be used to increase student motivation to engage with assigned coursework.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Betsy Barre. Betsy is an Assistant Provost and the Executive Director of the Center for Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University. In 2017 she won, with Justin Esarey, the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education’s Innovation Award for their Course Workload Estimator. Among her many other roles, Betsy is also a Professor in the Department for the Study of Religions. Welcome back, Betsy.

Betsy: Thanks, it’s great to be back.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Betsy, are you drinking tea today?

Betsy: I am drinking tea and I’m drinking a raspberry tea.

Rebecca: Oh, that sounds nice. It sounds like it would be really refreshing for what is a very hot October day here. [LAUGHTER]

Betsy: Oh, it’s hot for you all, okay.

John: Yeah, we’re recording it at the very end of October, and it warmed up into the 70s today.

Betsy: Wow.

Rebecca: Like upper 70s, yeah.

John: It was in the 30s and 40s earlier this week. So it’s a nice change. And I am drinking a peppermint spearmint blend today

Rebecca: That sounds nice and refreshing as well.

John: It is.

Rebecca: I have a Scottish afternoon tea, but also a giant thing of water, because it is so hot. [LAUGHTER]

Betsy: Smart.

John: I should have brought a giant thing of water, because I’ve been sitting in this chair now for three hours because I had back-to-back meetings, but I had refilled the tea. [LAUGHTER] We saw an article and the September 25, 2024 issue of Inside Higher Ed, discussing how much time college students spend reading. This article provided a variety of evidence indicating that students are increasingly relying on YouTube videos and ChatGPT or other AI summaries rather than the articles that faculty assigned them to read. We saw your reaction to this article on social media, [LAUGHTER] and wanted to follow up with you on this. What do you think are the causes of this decline in reading by college students?

Betsy: Sure, and just so the listeners know, I think my reaction on social media was, “Well, this was a depressing read before bed.” So I think that was my initial reaction, and then we had some good discussions. So I think the causes are complicated. I think what struck me the most about the article that I, in full disclosure, sort of clicked on it because I was curious and have been thinking a lot about the relationship between AI and reading. And what struck me about the article was it wasn’t just AI and it was a general, sort of long standing issue of, at least from my perspective, how students think about work outside of class, and I think we’ve talked about this before in other contexts on this podcast as well. And that I think reading, and particularly the kinds of reading that professors often assign, is something that’s time consuming. So yes, writing papers is time consuming, problem sets are time consuming, reading is especially time consuming often if we’re giving them challenging things to read, and students are always looking for ways to speed up that time. They’re resistant to having to spend a lot of time outside of class. They often think “my time outside of class should be for studying, not necessarily doing a bunch of, quote unquote busy work.” And so if they can find ways to get around the reading and still, quote unquote, learn the material, like if I’m still getting an A in the class without having to do the reading, I think the most depressing thing about that article was that there was no student they talked to. I think it was some dramatic claim like that they didn’t find any student who did all the reading, [LAUGHTER] or something along those lines. And I’ve seen this throughout my career. I’m sure you all have as well. And even talking with students, some of my best students, my students that I advise. When I was working at Rice, I worked with students who were student advisors to younger students, and they would often, quite explicitly say: “the most important advice I can give you is you don’t have to do all the reading.” So to me, it’s like a long standing issue. There are lots of causes. I don’t think it’s just AI, but certainly AI isn’t making it easier for us.

Rebecca: What’s lost when students start relying on video or AI generated content instead of written work specifically, when we narrow in on this idea of reading?

Betsy: Yeah, I think this is a really important question. Those of us that are thinking about AI in the classroom, how it’s disrupting, if it is disrupting education, we need to be honest with ourselves as we’re thinking about our goals and whether we need to revisit our goals. And so one really radical question you could ask, and some people who are not humanists [LAUGHTER] or not even educators often will ask like, “Well, is it really that important to be reading these long texts anymore, if they can just get summaries for their job? Like, why do we need to teach these skills? Is it as important anymore?” And I’m open to that question, but I think there’s a lot that is lost, and I think there’s a lot of really recent interesting work that I’ve been reading, thinking about, about how reading functions for us. And the way I like to think about it is that, well, there’s different kinds of reading, first of all, so that’s worth saying too. So sometimes we have students read almost as a replacement for content delivery. So it’s like I would give a lecture, but I don’t have time to give a lecture, so read these notes from my lecture, or here’s a training manual, [LAUGHTER] something just that basic, like read this math book to learn how to do this problem. And then you have literature, which I think a lot of people when they’re talking about reading, they think about literature, and we could talk about that more, but I also often, as somebody who is a big fan of non-fiction, like I have a lot of books. I have a huge library, and people often assume that means I read a lot of literature, which I actually don’t read a lot of literature, not anything against it, but, I think we often forget the value of just being a reader about non-fiction as well. So there’s reading for entertainment, or not entertainment, but just like feeling putting yourself in the perspective of another, which is really important, we want to help our students engage in perspective taking. But I actually think what’s often happening with deep reading of texts, because it’s slow, because it takes time, is students are actually engaged in the reflective process that is necessary for learning; that in an ideal world, they’re not just skimming and like getting the information. Sometimes our students do read that way, like I literally am just turning the page and reading every word and say I read the text, like I did my homework. But what you ideally want is for students to read with all of their background knowledge, interacting with the text so that they make inferences. They think about whether they agree with what’s said is true. They try to explain it back to themselves. They ask questions of the text, and that is only possible if they’re taking time. If they have a summary given to them, or if they’re just reading a summary, all the insight that would come from that reflective process, they lose. And so there’s a sort of learning opportunity that is lost. And I definitely don’t think students think of reading this way, and that’s partly on us to help them understand that the function of reading is not just like dumping information in your head, that there’s more that should be going on when you’re reading.

Rebecca: Seems like that same opportunity is lost when you take the approach of I have looked at every single word on this page.

Betsy: Yeah, yeah, right. Get back to the discussion we’ve had before about my workload estimator when I was really interested in how long it takes students to read. As I sort of briefly dipped my toe in the literature on reading as a sort of biological act. And one of the things that is pretty clear in the literature is that good, strong readers will speed up and slow down at different times, and they’ll pause and they’ll circle back to different things. And oftentimes, college students, it really is this, like, steady rate, left to right, just like reading the words, and that’s decoding, like, that’s a skill, like, I’m just reading the words so that I know that word, I know that word, I know that word. But they’re not actually thinking about the meaning of the text as a whole. And so helping them understand that is important, and that that suggests you should slow down and speed up at different times and not just check something off your list.

John: And in general, students are not just cutting back time on reading. They seem to be cutting back time on pretty much all activities outside of class. The American Time Use surveys have found a pretty steady decline over the years, going way back before COVID, but it certainly was accelerated during COVID, that shows that students are spending less time doing class work outside.

Betsy: And that’s been a big concern of mine, generally. I think, honestly, the article in Inside Higher Ed was prompted by AI and concerns about reading, but then ended up [LAUGHTER] realizing they were actually discovering more interesting things about student perceptions of work, and I don’t think it’s just on them, and I’m sure I’ve shared this before in these conversations about workload, is that oftentimes we, as institutions, structure the degree making certain assumptions about how much time students will spend. We aren’t always clear about that, but we’re like, “Oh yeah, you can work a 40 hour a week job,” but we’re trying to make it flexible for students, and often what we mean by flexible is that you can do it in less time, and I don’t think we’ve often grappled enough with like that learning requires time on task, and that we need to help our students understand, and we ourselves also need to understand that the less time students spend, the less they’re going to learn. But higher ed’s built on this model that students are going to, of their own initiative, put time into the learning outside of class, and that isn’t often happening, and I think it’s pretty consistent from the research that that’s not happening and it’s getting worse. And as much as I hate the like, “oh, in my day…”, [LAUGHTER] there is literature that shows that it is actually getting worse… how much time students are spending, and it’s not just because they’re resistant. They’re not coming in expecting to spend that time. And so that’s its own interesting like, how do we set expectations for how much time students should be spending? And individually, we can do that. But I think our institutions can do that as well. And oftentimes we’re giving them other things to do outside of the classroom with, like campus life and other activities that can also take time away. I know we’ve talked about this before, because I know Rebecca we’ve talked about in like art, like, there’s more of an expectation that you’re in the studio all the time, and that’s just kind of a norm. But that’s not true for other students who are working a lot.

Rebecca: We still have the same problem with reading.

Betsy: Yeah, actually, I’m curious. [LAUGHTER] Do you think, sorry, I’m gonna ask you questions now. Do you feel like there’s even more resistance to reading because they want to just, like, do hands on practical like, let me just do this stuff?

Rebecca: I think sometimes that they see more value in that if we’re not really explicit about what the reading or what those other kinds of activities help you gain to complement those hands-on skills, then I think that would be true, where there’s practical hands-on activities in a class. So speaking of other pressing news, the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicates that the pandemic accelerated the downward trend in the reading skills of K-12 students that began around 2012, which really is exemplifying what you were just saying, Betsy, about students not coming in with this [LAUGHTER] expectation of reading. And the proportion of 13-year old students that reported that they read for fun declined from 27% in 2012 to 14% in 2022. What strategies might we use to help encourage students to read more and to develop their reading skills? Full disclosure, I have a second grader that I’m super trying [LAUGHTER] to encourage to read for fun for some of these same reasons.

Betsy: Yeah, these questions are very, very interesting, and I’ve been reading a lot about it. Ironically, I’ve been reading a lot about reading, and I can’t remember where I was just reading the other day, but similar kinds of things, like among college students, and maybe it was in this article too. Like, if you ask them to name your favorite book, or something, the most meaningful book, and how much they struggle to come up with their favorite book. For a long time, I thought, and again, this is my bias, because I really like non-fiction, and I think non-fiction reading is really important. I remember when I was in K through 12, non-fiction was literally like, you’re reading a manual. It’s like, the most boring stuff you could ever read. [LAUGHTER] So like, either you’re doing something very exciting in fiction, or you weren’t really reading arguments, you were reading information, you weren’t actually reading arguments. And so for me, I was like, “We need to teach young people to read for argument.” This is really important, and to learn how to think about ideas. And so I do think that some of that has come into K through 12 over the past 10 – 12, years. But I think also that’s meant that there’s been more pressure with testing, etc., to do that kind of reading for argument and reasoning, which is a good thing. I’m glad that that’s happening, but that probably means there’s less room for the fun stuff that the students get to read. And I also think there’s something about, and maybe this is me being a nerdy idealist too, but, like, it’s not just fiction that it can be fun. You can also have fun reading for argument. If students are passionate about a topic, they’re passionate about sustainability, they’re passionate about art, getting them to read some exciting things about that could be valuable too. And honestly, I think we’re reading a lot, but we’re reading in different ways online, and so that’s an also fascinating question of how that’s changing the way that people read, and then for our young people, I think we’re still figuring this out, but to the extent to which video is replacing reading, and how that is changing their abilities and their habits, and it’s like a muscle. I think there’s been a lot of people have written about reading that it’s not something that’s natural to us. The language is natural to us. But reading is something we invented. It’s like a technology we invented. So you actually have to, like, get them to practice it, get all of us to practice it. If we’re not using it a lot, it becomes harder and harder for us to engage that skill. And it’s a lot of different things. So I don’t have major advice about how to get your kids to be excited, other than giving them fun things that they choose to read. The standard things of teaching, giving people choice, letting them see the value of it in some ways. I mean, that’s important too, because if they feel like they’re just doing it to check a box, like this was a lot of time I could have been spending doing something else. What’s the value of this? I think that’s where summaries and videos are really interesting, because students may be able to get a summary or watch a video of it really quickly, and do fine on our assessments, and then if we’re upset, like you didn’t do the thing I really wanted, the burden is on us to make the case for why that additional step was important, if they did just as well on our assessments. And I think we got to figure that out, and maybe we find out that it’s not as important to do the reading, but I have a hunch that the reading is important, and we just need to figure out how to better assess and explain to students why that’s important.

John: And with the switch to AI summaries and the switch to videos for summaries of material, there’s a lot of nuance that’s likely to be lost, that is captured in the written word. And along with that slower cognitive processing, I think students are getting a much more superficial understanding of many of the concepts we want them to learn about. And I think we may also see that a little bit in social media, much of the divisive social media, would not have the same effect if people had done a little bit more reading [LAUGHTER], or were not just tuned into their particular local networks and they had a broader understanding of what is reality [LAUGHTER] and what is not.

Betsy: Yeah, there’s some interesting questions about how information and argument… there’s the question of the medium, of how it’s spread, and fascinating questions on that front, too. Yeah, I was talking to a friend about this after we were having that discussion on social media the other day… the Inside Higher Ed article… and in philosophy, and not just philosophy, but in allied humanistic fields, there’s historically, even before AI or thinking about summaries, there have been a lot of debate about the value of assigning primary sources to students. So do I need to have them read Kant? Granted, it would be in translation, but do I need to have them read John Stuart Mill? Or can I have them read a secondary summary of those sources, whether it’s a textbook or a secondary sort of argument that sort of gives you an overview of the various moral theories. And I’ve always been a very strong advocate that, in certain classes, secondary sources are more important than the primary… in certain classes. So in some classes, the primary sources are important, but in other classes, the secondary sources are fine depending on what your goals are. So if your goal is for them to take the moral theory and then apply it, then in some ways, what’s more important is that they get quickly to the application. If your goal is to deeply understand Kant, of course, you got to read the primary source, like it’s not even a question. And so what’s interesting is I was talking to my friend about this, is that I was thinking, in some ways, AI summaries may raise similar kinds of questions. Well, first of all, you have the issue of it could just be wrong. So, let’s be clear about that, where it’s not good enough yet. So I’m imagining a world in which it’s perfect. It would be my summary, [LAUGHTER] not mine, but like anybody, it’s not that I’m perfect, but like, there would be a good summary that we’d be happy and proud to put in front of our students, and it’s not there yet. So I want to be mindful of that. So first of all, there’s the problem of it not being fully accurate and missing things, but if it is a good summary, then I think one question could be asked is “Well, is it like a secondary source that they can quickly get the material and then do something else with it?” And maybe in some classes, that’s valuable, that I want them to then integrate it with other things, or I want them to do something else. And so that’s where sort I’m of landing was on that. That’s kind of interesting, but I’m coming around to this idea of, as you helpfully reminded the listeners, is this idea that taking the time is itself necessary for building the connections and having the insights, that it’s actually the inefficiency of the reading that’s a good thing, that it takes a lot of time like, and so a lot of people like, “Uh, you know, this thing could have been an article.” There’s this book that could have been an article, and oftentimes they are right about that, because it repeats itself, like oftentimes books will repeat themselves. They’ll go on like weird sort of tangents. But sometimes, as a reader, you think of a different insight the second time you read the thing, and that there is something about that inefficiency of the medium that allows us to do the sort of reflection and inference and have insights that we wouldn’t have had if we got the quick summary. So I know that seems a little strange, but I’m starting to think this more. So it’s not like I want to give them difficult things that are intentionally difficult, but I want them to just spend time on it, that’s the big thing. It’s not I want them to bang their head against a really hard text. I want them to spend time thinking about their own view. I think oftentimes people think about reading as I’m learning from somebody else. And of course, that’s true, but it’s just as much about you reflecting on your own thoughts, or it should be you reflecting on your own thoughts and connecting prior knowledge with new things you’re picking up. And this is why annotation is so important in my classes, I try to really emphasize annotation as an important skill, but you wouldn’t have to do that to have that moment. But yes, as you can tell, I swing back and forth on what I think about how bad it is. Is it good? Is it disaster if they’re using summaries? Sometimes, I think it might be okay, but as long as they’re spending time. I guess that’s my point. If you got a summary, and you spent a ton of time with that summary, and we’re thinking about it with respect to other things, and you may be building similar connections, assuming it’s accurate, and you’re applying it in ways that are kind of interesting, than you would reading the primary source. But again, it just depends on the goal for your course.

Rebecca: I think you’ve underscored this idea that it depends on context, and there’s times when a video or a summary could help someone spark interest or find out whether or not this is the source or the article that’s worth reading.

Betsy: Yes, absolutely, absolutely.

Rebecca: …or digging into so there’s certainly value in having those tools available to us as instructors, but we have to really think intentionally about when to employ them and when not to make substitutions, when the slow read is the thing that maybe we’re looking for, but also help students understand why we’re making those choices. And it always comes down to being really explicit about why we’re doing things.

Betsy: Yeah, part of my interest in reading is also, if I’m being honest, it’s also tied to my sort of interest in the liberal arts, more generally, and interdisciplinarity, and just the sort of value I’ve seen in my own life, but that I see in others who I deeply admire, who have really broad knowledge of a lot of different things. These are the well read people that you encounter, and they just know a bunch of stuff, [LAUGHTER] and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I read this thing over here the other day, or I read this, and I’m pulling from that literature.” And there’s something for me personally, that’s really attractive about that. And so I often think about, how do I model that for students? How do I help them see that as attractive, and to see that it’s not just something you’re born with, that this is something that through a sort of disciplined skill and practice of making time in your day for reading or for learning, and it’s really for learning, but reading is the way in which most of us do that, can have major benefits for your life as a person, to help you understand the world, help you understand yourself as you move forward in the world. And so I often think about, how do I help them see that really well read people, really smart people, quote, unquote, are not just naturally smart, but they’re often just really well read, and they’ve taken the time to read, to make it attractive to them, because motivation is ultimately, at the end of the day, what we need to be thinking about here is, how do we motivate students to do this? And I think a lot of us think back to, “Well, what motivated me” like, “Why was I interested in reading?” Not the perfect answer, because students aren’t all us, but at least, it can help us start thinking of some ideas that might be useful for some of our students.

John: One of the things I see when I teach labor economics, and sometimes in introductory economics, is we talk about the economics of education, and one of the things we look at is what the value of an education is to individuals. And two of the models we talk about are the human capital model, where there’s skill development and people end up being more productive because they’ve acquired skills, but there’s also the signaling model, where basically it’s the credential or the degree that has value. And I’ve seen a shift over the last decade or so in students’ perceptions of this, where they seem to be thinking of education more as this credential they get rather than just that they’re acquiring some skills that may be useful in their future life, in terms of being able to do a variety of things. And it’s hard to break that.[LAUGHTER]

Betsy: It is.

John: What can we do to help students see that they really are developing skills through reading and through engaging with their coursework in ways that are a little less superficial?

Betsy: Yeah, it’s a tough one. There’s no easy answer here. When I teach, I get to teach what I want to teach, which is nice, being a Director of a Teaching Center, and I usually try to teach things that I think will attract students’ intrinsic interest. So as I shared before the podcast, I often teach a class on sex and relationships and ethics. So I get them to read about ethics, because they’re interested in their relationships. But what I try to do, again so it’s not just like, hey, I’m going to sneak it in and then you’re not going to realize it. Yes, they’re reading hard stuff, but to try to get them to reflect in a meta way about this is valuable in other areas of your life too. It’s not just here that a question comes up in life. I don’t have kids, but I have friends that have kids, a question for their kids, or some medical issue comes up, and academics usually approach this very differently. [LAUGHTER] They’re like, I’m gonna go read things. I’m gonna go read things to figure this out. I guess googling counts as a kind of reading, but academics are doing something different than somebody who’s not an academic might do, and to help them see that, that skill of being able to quickly figure out where you can go to get not just want the canonical view, but to get conflicting views. Like, I know how to find second opinions about this issue that I’m curious about. And here’s a debate in the literature about and often this is why, probably doctors find us super annoying, is that we come in with, like, multiple research articles, [LAUGHTER] with different views on something. That’s probably not attractive to some of our students, but helping them see that it’s relevant to all areas of their life, and not just getting a grade for school. I think the more we can tie our courses to things that they will be doing later in life, I think it will at least help, but even just getting them to have conversations. I’m glad you’re talking about this in your labor class. Like, what is college for? And they may be right in some ways, that it is this signaling mechanism, but then to empower them to say, like, was that how you want it to be? Would you want something better? And like, what would it look like if you had something better? And how can we help together to make this environment one where you can do something more than just collecting a degree to signal that you are now ready for a job. But I don’t have any clear solutions. I’m glad you’re talking about it, though. I think that’s the first step, is getting them to reflect on their own reasons for being in school for sure.

Rebecca: So new faculty, it’s often something that we talk about on the podcast… and I know that we’ve talked a bit about it before too, Betsy… start their teaching careers with certain sets of expectations. One might be that their students would complete their readings outside of class, and then maybe they quickly realize that their students don’t do that, and then you’re trying to negotiate what to do. And perhaps the response is that they use in-class instruction time to make up for it, and then students realize, “Oh, I don’t have to do the reading.” And then downward spiral from there. What strategies can we use as instructors, or can we encourage instructors to use to motivate students to complete assignments outside of the classroom. And this goes beyond just readings, but when we started this conversation a little bit, but I think it’s also ways to help our instructors feel prepared for the classroom and for this idea that, like, oh, students are going to do stuff outside of class, but only if we kind of set up the parameters, maybe in the right way.

Betsy: So it’s interesting. There have been a number of pieces about student reading that have come out since the Inside Higher Ed piece. So there’s my friend Jon Malesic, writes for The New York Times a piece. I don’t if you saw that New York Times piece about “There’s a Very Good Reason Why Students Aren’t Reading,” and it’s related. Actually, the argument is similar to the one that John just… it’s about preparing for jobs. And maybe that’s not important, but there have been a couple other ones, and I’m always fascinated by reading the comment section, which I should never do, [LAUGHTER] but I do read the comment section. And the number of people who are just like, mad at faculty, and they’re like, just make it hard, like, hold them to high standards, and they’ll do it. Like, if they’re not doing the reading, it’s because you’re not making it hard enough. I mean, there’s some truth to that, but it’s also the case that, well, first of all, some schools, you can’t just fail all your students. [LAUGHTER] They’re not going to let you do that, but it’s also really a challenge to figure out how, especially now with AI, to assess them in a way that is well designed enough that you’re not punishing the students who did do the work outside of class, but that you are somehow capturing those who didn’t do it, like unless we’re going to actually follow our students around and watch what they’re doing and check off boxes and sort of model like that. It’s going to be tough for us to design it like an exam that perfectly distinguishes between those who didn’t do it and those who did do it. Now, of course, it can distinguish between knowledge, but that’s a different story. So I guess that’s a long way of saying, I don’t think that the sort of, let’s just create a bunch of hard quizzes is the solution. I do think that if we just read it to them when they come to class, I think, Rebecca, you’re 100% right. Like they’re gonna figure out very quickly I don’t need to do that. And in fact, that’s why they tell other students that you don’t need to do the readings. They’re not stupid. And one strong recommendation, I just started reading this book called 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People. It came out in, I think, the end of August or September by David Yeager, and he’s a developmental psychologist who also taught high school. And again, I’m only on chapter three. What I appreciate about it is the way he talks about motivation is that we often talk about young people as if, like they’re neurobiologically incompetent, like they don’t have fully develop prefrontal cortexes, so they’re just idiots, and we gotta just tell them what to do, because they can’t be trusted. And he sort of debunks that and says, actually, neuroscience suggests that there was a good reason for us to promote that for the sake of, like, the death penalty. We didn’t want to, like, have the death penalty on young people, so we really pushed that undeveloped prefrontal cortex for a while. But in fact, our students are quite strategic and thoughtful, but they just have different goals than us. [LAUGHTER] What they’re very interested in is social status and respect. So this is really interesting, but so far, he isn’t saying anything that’s like radical to anyone who’s been a teacher, but it’s nice to put it all together and to think about, how can we use the things they care about to motivate them: social status and respect? And so one thing, it’s not perfect, instead of just trying to, like, negatively incentivize them with a low grade and that sort of thing, and one thing that I think has been somewhat useful for me is getting them to work together outside of class. I know that’s easier said than done at an institution. I’m at an institution where my students aren’t working 40 hours a week, it’s hard to get them organized outside of class at other places. I want to fully acknowledge that. But the more there’s sort of a social cost and also a social benefit to the work that they’re doing, the more they’re going to care about it. Now that’s not exactly reading [LAUGHTER] together, but it’s at least discussing the reading, and then maybe they can model for each other: here’s the things you can do outside of class, or in class. So even just something like when you come into class, the first thing we’re going to do is, I’m going to put you into pairs, and you’re going to come to class with three questions about the reading. A lot of people do like come with three questions about the reading, but the element that I like about what I’ve done sometimes is that I have them ask those three questions to the other student, and the other student has to answer them. And so if this becomes like a regular habit practice, first 5,10 minutes of class, you know you’re going to get paired up and have to answer one of your fellow students’ questions. Now some may have no shame at all and be like whatever. I didn’t do the reading, but the hope is that that sort of social pressure of I might have to be able to answer my friend’s questions about the reading might motivate them to do some reading too. I do really love like Hypothesis and Perusall, the kind of social reading annotation tool not going to solve all these problems, but leaning into the social aspects of the classroom, I think can be really powerful, and then also just not underestimating our power, if they respect us as instructors, to encourage them and to thank them for the work they’re doing. So when they’re doing the hard work of reading, I think sometimes we focus on the negative. We’re so annoyed when they’re not reading, and then we shame them and we’re pissed, myself included, I get really mad, but when they do do the reading, and they show up and they’ve got really insightful questions, honoring that, showing them that respect and saying like this is really great, that was really close reading. With your friends around watching let me say that this student has read really closely, and that’s a kind of motivating thing for them too. It’s like, I want to make my professor proud, and I want the other students to see that I’m doing too now, different contexts matter. Maybe you’re on a campus where that’s too nerdy, it’s not going to happen, but I’ve seen it happen. I definitely have seen that happen, and at least as a nudge in that direction.

John: And so if we wanna get students to have more practice in reading, Hypothesis or Perusall is one strategy. But for many Gen Ed courses, there are also adaptive learning, or personalized learning systems, where students read a little bit, but then they’re asked questions, where they have to make connections to the material that become a small part of their grade. So it does add just a little bit of incentive to do that, where it’s actually often easier just to work through it that way than to rely only on a summary. But you can also provide videos, where if you created the videos, or if you use a tool that takes existing videos and embed questions in them. It’s having them look at it, perhaps a little bit more deeply, and doing a bit more cognitive processing while they’re watching the video to try to make those connections. And we do know that multimodal learning is beneficial, so seeing it from multiple perspectives is good, as long as they’re not relying only on shortcuts, and so I think some of those tools, in some cases where that’s available, that could help as well.

Betsy: Yeah, these are all good. I’m actually realizing I didn’t fully answer the question about new faculty too, because there’s a number of things that I think it’s useful that new faculty be thinking about. Like, I had a new faculty member that came to me at one point and said, like, “Am I like, totally radical to think that maybe I should have a whole class where I assign no reading?” Like, it’s kind of radical question, you know, they’re scared because there are cultural norms associated with that. And so I actually want to just say, in response to John too, that the multimodal stuff is important. Like, I’m not someone who is, like, never any video. Sometimes there are places and context and purposes for that. And I do think there’s some interesting benefits to digital reading that, like, if you’re reading on a screen, there’s some downsides that are really interesting to talk about too. But because I think it doesn’t have to be a downside, but just the habit of how we’ve traditionally built our habits of reading on screens is to read at the surface level, and so we tend to just go faster. But if you build in these, like the quiz questions in the video, where you build in spots to pause and reflect and ask questions. And I’ve kind of done that before with Hypothesis, or even before Hypothesis existed, you could sort of annotate a PDF and you just seed it with questions or summaries and have the students engage, or at least slow down, like slow down here, and think about this. I want you to think about this question. I think that’s great. Like, I love that idea. I think the more we have some strategies that people have used that seem to have worked, that we can share with our new faculty. Because I think the temptation with new faculty is often like, I’m just going to do a quiz, or just to assume they’re going to read it no matter what which they often won’t, or to assign too much. So that’s also part of it too, like being really intentional about how much you assign, and then to make sure that you’re rewarding them for that careful reading is important. The last time I taught, I was teaching a first-year seminar where their reading was an outcome. So something like, it’s a university-wide set of outcomes. So I didn’t get to choose these outcomes. But one of them was, like, critical reading, and it was post AI, so it was recently, and I thought, “Hmm, how am I going to assess?” because normally you would assess reading by giving a paper, and if you can’t write this paper, you probably didn’t read it very closely. And now that’s not always so clear, that connection is not always so clear. So I decided to do some in-class reading annotation where they hadn’t seen the reading before. They had homework where they had to annotate their readings, but they could do that on their own, like I wasn’t really policing that. But the incentive for them doing that was I would give them feedback, because they would have, on the midterm, and in the final I would be giving them a new section of text that they hadn’t read before. That was philosophy about sex, like so, about sexual ethics, and then they would have to annotate that. And what really struck me, and I talked to my students about it again, we got very meta about it, was they were quite good at this, quite good at it, which was shocking, because, and I guess it depends on where you are. I want to be mindful of that. But I would say that what was noticeable to me was that when I didn’t give them the time and the incentive to read closely and read well, they wouldn’t do that, and then they’d come to class and they wouldn’t know what was going on. And it’s just as easy for a faculty member, and this is important for new faculty to hear too, is to assume, “Oh, our students don’t really know how to read, or they’re really struggling,” when it may just be they don’t put the time into it. It may just be they’re not putting time into it. But when I gave them time in class to read a passage really closely, to ask questions, to draw inferences, to do all the things that we want them to do, they were very much able to do that, in the varying levels, but many of them did quite a good job. And so I asked them, I was like, “This is amazing.” And they’re like, Oh my God. They’re like, we would never read like this. It would take so much time. And they weren’t saying it to be rude to me, but they were like, how would you ever read this closely? And it goes back to this issue of how much time are they expecting to set aside time for class. And even if they do set aside time, the idea of sitting for an hour with a text is just very foreign to them. And so having those conversations with our students, I think, is where we just gotta begin and explain why we think it’s useful, and also share our own struggles. Like I actually think it’s really just as useful for me to share sometimes that, in my life, podcasts and videos and all these other things that I’m so busy and I’m reading quickly, that my stamina for sitting with a textbook, not a textbook, but a book that’s actually like a print book. I’ll give another recommendation too. Adrian Johns has a history book. So he’s a historian at the University of Chicago, and I picked this up a couple weeks ago. It’s a history of the science of reading. So it’s called Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America: The Science of Reading. And it’s a real history. So it’s, like, very dense, and I’m loving it, but I’m like, “Whoa. It’s been a while since I’ve read a very long and dense history.” So letting students know this is a muscle that you have to practice to build that stamina. And unfortunately, and I think that’s what I appreciate about some of the other articles that have been floating around about reading, is that when we give them shorter passages, it’s great they can learn how to read for argument, but they may not be getting the stamina or practicing having the stamina to sit for periods in time and read. And the biggest question I have left open to me is, why is that important? Because I think somebody could ask me, like, why is that important? Isn’t that just a technology we don’t need anymore? And so I think the burden is on those of us that want to defend that practice. So saying, here’s the extra stuff it gives you, beyond just watching a video or even listening to an audiobook, right? The audiobook… I listen to tons of audiobooks, but what’s missing when you’re listening to an audiobook versus reading a text and figuring that out, I think, is a really important question for educators, particularly humanists, as we move forward.

Rebecca: One of the things that you just underscored when you were describing what you do in your class, Betsy, is it sounds like you’re teaching students how to annotate a text, rather than assuming that students know how to annotate a text or how to read closely. And that seems like if that’s an expectation that instructor has, that that’s something that we would actually need to include maybe some instruction around, if that’s something that we want students to be doing.

Betsy: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. Thanks for drawing attention to that. And I actually think that we all have different purposes. And I think just like with writing, we often just assume students know how to write in our discipline, and then they go from English to history to econ, and we all have radically different expectations for what good writing is. And the same thing is true with reading, actually. We all read differently. We all expect students to be asking different questions of texts when they’re reading. And so, while I do give them guidance, I often say, when you’re reading for philosophy, here’s some questions you should be asking, or here’s some things I want you to be reflecting on. And so I do have a little guide of the kinds of annotations, like “note when it reminds you of something else you’ve learned in class.” So this is again, trying to connect it to their prior knowledge or something else you know in your life. If you disagree with something that is said, circle that and explain why. If you are confused, ask a question, and it’s the kind of basic stuff of processing information when you’re learning. But I want to nudge them in that direction. But of course, they’ve also learned to annotate texts. A lot of them, when you ask them about annotation, a lot of my first-year students, at least, they remember it from literature class where they were doing something very different when they were annotating the text, which is fine, but just different. So I think we do if we want students to annotate or to learn how to read, we have to talk to them about different kinds of reading. And so I actually also sometimes will assign some short readings about reading [LAUGHTER] in the first week. So my former colleague at Rice, who’s a historian, Caleb McDaniel, has a blog post called “How to read for history.” And even though I don’t teach history, it’s pretty good, at least allied enough that it works pretty well. And then there’s a couple pieces about reading philosophy that I really appreciate. It’s basically like you’re struggling with the author over your mind, of like, whether you’re going to agree or not, and sort of thinking of reading that way, that you’re like, in this battle with the author, which students do not think of, right? They’re like, I’m just reading it because my professor says it’s true and I’m just going to it’s true, and I’m just going to try to process the information for the exam. And so assigning those short pieces on reading and then having a conversation about reading can be really fun, but at the end of the day, we’re still going to run up against, even if I convince them that there’s a value to reading, how much time they have. And they have many motivations, many concerns, many things that are of interest to them as they should, and how do we get the thing we want them to do to be top priority? And I think that’s just always a challenge for teaching, particularly for college instructors, and that’s where I think that book on motivation is at least helping me try to think creatively about some things that I might do socially, to nudge them a little bit towards reading a little bit more carefully. Also, I want to do an experiment with them, like, I haven’t done this yet, but people have done these with AI experiments where you would have, like, half the class read it closely, and half the class read just the summary, and then have a discussion, and then have a meta discussion about how that went. The students who read it all closely, and they might actually do the reading that time, because they’re participating in an experiment. And the more you can get them to discover the thing we want them to believe, I think that might have some of a role, but I think the overall summary of a lot of what I’ve been saying today is that I think if we haven’t done this already, it’s time that we actually have explicit conversations with students, that we actually engage them in conversations about this, instead of just trying to pull on the edges with like little strategy changes. If we expect them to read, maybe we don’t, but if we expect them to read, we’re going to have to talk to them about it and get their thoughts and have some discussion about it.

John: One of the things you suggested earlier is the value of being well read in general. I’m wondering if we could use AI a bit to help motivate students, because it’s going to lead to some pretty dramatic transformations in job markets. Many of the job categories that are most popular today didn’t exist 30 or 40 years ago, and many of the things they may be doing in the future could be very different than what they think they’re doing when they’re motivated towards this one particular career and just reminding them that the world is changing quite a bit, and they may need to be prepared to go in different directions than they initially expect in response to those changing roles or the changing job market conditions.

Betsy: Yeah, 100% I also think… our teaching center is in a library, like many teaching centers, and I’m very happy about that, because I really love libraries, and I’ve often talked that sometimes like I really got to get the students on board with this, but about the symbolic power of libraries. And one of the things that I think is really interesting in the AI age is helping students think about the library. You walk out, you look at the stacks, and it’s just like a whole bunch of information. Oh, isn’t that amazing? But you can also think of it as like human knowledge, the collection of human knowledge throughout centuries. It’s all here. And so some of our students may not be there yet, but some of our students, I think, are anxious about competing with AI, like, I still want to show that there’s some value to the human and to say, like, this is the collective knowledge of humanity, right? Reading. And what’s ironic about it, of course, is that the reason AI is as good as it is is because it is actually drawing on that collective knowledge of humanity, and it’s really a mirror of us more than it is us. But that’s another reason to motivate them is to say, like the reason it’s capable of doing what it’s doing is because it is essentially kind of well read. And so for you to be aware of all of these fields, all of these questions that you might ask of the AI, you’re going to be better able to ask questions of the AI, you’re going to be able to perform, hopefully, better than the AI. So yeah, the more we can help them see the value of this, beyond just narrow training, I think is a good thing, and I do believe that we can make a case for liberal arts in the age of AI, because there’s so many questions it raises that narrow training is not going to prepare us to answer. But I do love the idea of thinking about like libraries, and there’s something beautiful about a library, I don’t know. I almost feel like I should teach a class on the book or something, or about reading, because there’s more to it. It’s in our pop culture too. It’s not just a bunch of nerds who are sitting off in an ivory tower. There’s a lot of interesting stuff. You think about Game of Thrones, like there was that big library in Game of Thrones, which I loved. But I think it’d be interesting to get students to reflect on what is going on when we use a library, what’s the library trying to symbolize here, and what happens if we don’t read? I mean, I’d be curious to know what students would think. I haven’t really asked them that, like what if we stopped reading all together, will we be okay? [LAUGHTER] And they might say, “I don’t know, as long as we have videos, like we’re good,” but it’s worth engaging them in this conversation, because I don’t think we have a clear answer yet, and whenever that’s the case, getting students as conversation partners is just as important as figuring out how to nudge them in particular directions.

Rebecca: I think sometimes the benefit of the AI conversation is reminding them that they need to gain expertise, just as you were kind of indicating Betsy in kind of the area that you want to use AI in, and the surrounding areas, that if you gain expertise, then you can use the tool better and more efficiently, because you could write better prompts, etc, and get the tool to do what you want it to do. But if you’re writing as a novice in a discipline, then it kind of spits out novice-like answers. [LAUGHTER]

Betsy: Yeah. And actually, one of the things I love about being a teaching center director, I’ve always loved interdisciplinary work. It’s part of why I did religious studies instead of philosophy for my PhD. So I did philosophy in undergrad, and then I wanted to do comparative ethics. I did that in a religion department because it was area studies, so I could do a little history, a little anthropology, a little philosophy, is that I have always loved interdisciplinary work, and I like being a teaching center because now I get to expand it even broader, like I can go talk to physicists, I can go talk to dancers, you know, much broader [LAUGHTER] than even my own narrow area. And I do sometimes think that my prompting is because I have that wide sort of swath. And I can say, well, let me actually pull these two weird things together that no one would think to pull together, and then its answers are amazing because it actually has that wide swath of knowledge, but you have to know how to prompt it to do that. Also, the more you know about the interconnectedness of knowledge, the better able you’ll be to engage with AI as well. So, yeah, really fascinating thought there, for sure, and trying to encourage them on that front.

Rebecca: Gotta use every tool in the toolbox.

Betsy: Yeah, that’s right, [LAUGHTER] including sometimes external reinforcement. Sometimes we need to nudge them with a little bit of motivation that way. But, they do read some things, but it’s interesting what they read, and why are they reading it, and how can we leverage those things that they do read? And I guess I just am feeling this is often the case, you want them to have at least one powerful experience reading. You want them to see firsthand what the benefit is. You still will have an uphill battle after that, because they have lots of other prior interests, but sometimes they come in and they just don’t even see the value at all. Of like, “I’ve never had a reading experience where I had an aha moment.” I bet you there’s some students that that’s the case, and so giving them a powerful reading experience, and maybe that means there is some in-class reading that happens not because I don’t trust you, but because I just want to have this moment where I’m going to walk you through this. I meant to say this before John and I forgot to mention this, because you were mentioning doing the reading and then inserting the questions in the reading and sort of walking them through a video. There’s real power for instructors to help students see how you read a text. So even if it’s not a common practice, like doing one read aloud, where you like… think aloud is often that’s used in the literature… where you will read a text and pause, and at every part that you would normally pause and say, like, “Oh, now I would normally ask this question of the text,” or “now I’m thinking of this, and now I’m reflecting on that.” And that can be really powerful for students, because that is not how they’re reading. To help them model what you want them to do, but also to help them see, oh, I can see why yeah, you’re gonna get a lot more out of that experience if you’re doing that than if you were just reading and decoding the words, which is often what they do. And I hope that listeners, if you have solutions for this challenge, will write in or call in and maybe on the next episode, because it’s really tricky. And I often said that I actually think AI is more of a threat for reading than it is for writing, because I think students don’t like to spend a lot of time outside of class, and they haven’t been convinced of the value of reading yet. And AI is pretty good at reading, not amazing, but pretty good if you give it the full text. And so yes, something we’re all going to have to face and figure out. And so I hope that we’ll think about it collectively, learn from each other.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up, as you know, by asking, what’s next? [LAUGHTER]

Betsy: Yeah, so I’m reading these books, one on motivation and one on the science of reading, and I think we’ll probably do that motivation book as a reading group, on CAT, next semester. We’re also having Jim Lang come to campus in the spring, and so I’m also interested in how this intersects with attention as well, motivation and attention and reading and all these things that he’s interested in all sort of mixed up together. And so I hope that next semester, this will be something of a theme. I know I have some faculty who are really interested in thinking about reading and the future of reading, and it’s a core learning outcome of our Gen Ed. And so we’ve also been thinking about doing some programming around the faculty who are teaching. Courses where they’re supposed to be teaching critical reading to rethink, what does this mean in this age, and how do we motivate students to do this? How do we assess it? So hopefully, maybe I’ll have more insight in a year as we talk about it at Wake Forest. But that’s where we’re going next.

John: Well, thank you. It’s always great having these conversations with you, and we’re looking forward to that next one

Betsy: That’s the same. Thanks so much.

Rebecca: Yeah, thanks so much.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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366. Connecting to Core Values

Posted in authentic learning, classroom community, diversity, engagement, equity, evidence-based practices, first-generation, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, income inequality, learning, motivation, pedagogy, racism, social justice, STEM education, teaching
November 6, 2024

Engaging and motivating students starts but doesn’t end with inclusion. In this episode, Bryan Dewsbury joins us to discuss ways of connecting class content to students’ core values to prepare students to productively engage with their communities as we work with our students to make our disciplines more equitable.

Bryan is an Associate Professor of Biology at Florida International University. He is the Principal Investigator of the Science Education and Society research program, an Associate Director of the STEM Transformational Institute where he directs the Division of Transformative Education, and a Fellow in the John N. Gardner Institute. Bryan is also one of the co-authors of The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. He is the developer of a free MOOC on Inclusive Teaching, offered through the HHMI Biointeractive and Science and Education Society. Bryan is a highly regarded keynote speaker and workshop leader.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Engaging and motivating students starts but doesn’t end with inclusion. In this episode, we discuss ways to connect class content to students’ core values to prepare students to productively engage with their communities as we work with our students to make our disciplines more equitable.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guest today is Bryan Dewsbury. Bryan is an Associate Professor of Biology at Florida International University. He is the Principal Investigator of the Science Education and Society research program, an Associate Director of the STEM Transformational Institute where he directs the Division of Transformative Education, and a Fellow in the John N. Gardner Institute. Bryan is also one of the co-authors of The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. He is the developer of a free MOOC on Inclusive Teaching, offered through the Hhmi Biointeractive and Science and Education Society. Bryan is a highly regarded keynote speaker and workshop leader and he recently provided the keynote address at the Academic Affairs Retreat here at SUNY-Oswego at the start of the current semester. Welcome back, Bryan. It’s good to see you.

Bryan: Thanks for having me back. I hope that the welcome back means that I was good the first time. [LAUGHTER]

John: People are still talking about your keynote. They were really impressed.

Bryan: Well, I’m glad you all enjoyed it. How are you all doing?

Rebecca: We’re doing great. Today’s teas are:… Bryan, are you drinking some tea?

Bryan: I’m not right now because I actually did have some for lunch. So I’m on campus right now at FIU, Florida International University, and I had lunch with a colleague, and we did have some tea. So, does earlier count?

Rebecca: Sure. Do you want to tell us what you had earlier?

Bryan: I don’t know if I said this in the last episode I was here, but I grew up in Trinidad. I know I said that part, but when I was growing up, the main tea that at least my mother would buy is Lipton. Like it’s almost to the point where most of us didn’t know there were other types. [LAUGHTER] So you come to America and you see, like 19 labels in the grocery, but of course, because of that, that’s kind of the tea I like the most, because that’s just what I was used to. So when I do see it, I like to have it. I’m not a big tea drinker. Oh, that sounds like sacrilege to the podcast, but when I do drink tea, that’s sort of my preference, and it’s just maybe kind of a nostalgia thing. So that’s what I had.

Rebecca: That makes sense.

John: I have a tea which is new to me. It is a black tea with cherry from one of Rebecca’s local tea shops, and I forgot the name. I had to rush here from a meeting, so I didn’t get a chance to jot down the name. But it’s delicious.

Rebecca: Oh, I’m glad you enjoyed it. I’ve mentioned it before. I think the smell of the cherry teas are really good, which enticed me to buy them. And then I discovered I like, absolutely hate the flavor of cherry teas.[LAUGHTER] And so I gifted them all to John because he likes them. I have just a Scottish afternoon tea today. John.

John: Very good.

Rebecca: Nice and plain, without any cherries. [LAUGHTER]

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your work on inclusive teaching. Could you tell us a bit about how inclusive teaching has become a substantial focus of your work?

Bryan: Yeah, so it’s a good question to answer, because, how do I put this? I actually don’t think it has. It has, but it hasn’t. Let me explain why. I do talk about inclusive teaching a lot, but the real focus of my work is education that is designed in a way that everyone can access it, and when they access it, they can be their best selves in that experience. And when they are their best selves, then they become this really engaged, loving, thriving participants in an evolving democracy. That in three sentences, if that was three sentences, that’s the thing we are trying to unpack as a group, not just through research, but through communication, through professional development. And so the inclusive part is a step towards that big a goal, because for the thriving to happen, for the access to happen, we have to sort of figure out, what are the barriers that are currently present that don’t allow people to be their best selves when they’re in a classroom, that don’t allow students to access certain institutions, that don’t allow them, even when they do access them, to graduate with the kind of credentials and the kind of mindsets and ways of knowing, ways of being, that allow them to understand how crucial it is for them to be engaged participants in a democracy. So inclusion is part of the riddles that we are trying to solve, but it’s not the end point, and to that extent, we have written a lot about it, I’ve talked a lot about it, but I think it’s important for people to know that our goals are bigger than that, without diminishing inclusive work, our goals are much bigger than that.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about your work in the STEM Transformational Institute in particular? I think it’s interesting in that role, how the role of democracy in your work, in moving democracy forward, fits into STEM because we don’t always hear those in the same sentence,

Bryan: Yeah. Well, yeah, or never, right? So I think that there’s two questions you’re actually answering. So I’ll talk about the institute first. It’s a pretty remarkable group. I’m one of several fascinating individuals who work here on the faculty side. Many of us, like myself, have a departmental appointment, whether it’s biology, engineering, physics, math, chemistry, and some other percentage of our appointment is with the Institute. What that allows is most… all of us, actually… were trained in some STEM discipline at the undergrad and PhD level. And so we can teach the classes. We can teach basic science classes. We can think about that ecosystem and that culture, right? Biology culture, physics culture, but discipline-based education research compared to other fields of research in biology, physics, or any of the above is relatively recent. And I think there is an understandable challenge of traditional STEM scientists in understanding and evaluating the kind of work that people like myself do. And so having a place like the STEM Transformation Institute creates several things. Number one, a community, for those of us who are thinking about education research in STEM to collaborate, to be in community, to ask questions, to write grants together. But also, there’s a mechanism for us when we kind of go through the ladder process for the STEM transformation Institute, to contribute some kind of understanding, to put all packages in perspective. Obviously, when you have this amount of faculty, and I think it’s maybe 20 of us, I can’t remember the exact number, some economies of scale benefits come with that. And so you can write bigger grants, because you have the intellectual capital there, you can have much more collaboration across the different STEM disciplines and with non-STEM disciplines. And then the Institute also has a unit called FIUTeach, which mainly focuses on training pre-service STEM teachers, a pretty robust, maybe the nation’s largest learning assistant program, undergraduate learning assistant program. And there might be some other pieces to it, but those are kind of the three things we tend to be known for on campus. So now, pivoting to your question about STEM and democracy, without taking up your whole podcast [LAUGHTER] giving a history lesson on Enlightenment thinking, the STEM instruction that we are seeing in classrooms today is really a product of maybe, I would say, a mix of the post-World War Two US higher ed-government alliance that kind of proliferated at that time, and the Humboldtian model of graduate education that became popular in the early 1900s. I think John Hopkins may have been the first place that some of that started and then some of the Sputnik-era stuff. And so the way too superficial summary of it is, if you were trained as a subject matter expert in STEM, your role in class was basically to tell people stuff. It wasn’t, perhaps said explicitly, but you were a big gatekeeper to that information. Because, remember, there was no World Wide Web, there was no Google search. In some cases, there wasn’t even really a lot of textbooks, right? And if there were, prohibitively expensive. So the only way you got to find out how big the glaciers were in in the Arctic was to hear the person who got on the boat to go there to talk about it. And there’s some other pieces to it. And I would encourage listeners to read the book Amateur Hour by Robert Zimmerman, because it’s discussed way more specifically and way better than I’m describing it, but there was some gender dynamics to this, because remember the normal schools that existed in the 60s and 70s, and who were the faculty there, and then, because of that association, how college faculty felt about teaching as a skill in and of itself. So there’s a brief period where there was some discussions about college professors getting trained. That died. [LAUGHTER] That didn’t last very long. So okay, I’m saying all of that to perhaps take us even further back to the role that Enlightenment thinking played in the Declaration of Independence, and more specifically, the influence that Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, in particular, who wrote Treatises of Government played an influence in Thomas Jefferson and some of the language that you see in the Declaration of Independence, and I’m thinking of one line in particular: “We submit these truths” to “a candid world…” Book recommendation: Jill Leporie These Truths, some of this is me interpreting her writing. It’s basically kind of saying, Look, man, we have these 13 colonies, we’re gonna try this out. We’re not gonna get everything right. We’ll see what happens and we’re gonna have to keep working at this. And in the same way, the scientific method and Enlightenment thinking comes with some expectations of critique, self critique, public critique, falsification, seeing new evidence and changing your mind on things and all of the above moving towards the sense of whatever you’re trying to understand. It improves over time because you are willing to keep refining and refining and refining. So in so doing, STEM, or specifically, science, has so much to teach us as citizens of a nation that is constantly trying to improve and what an improvement process looks like from a social perspective. And this is what I tell students: same when you collect data and okay, right now, it seems like you can’t disprove your knowledge, however you want to put that, but somebody’s going to come across and collect different data and critique those assumptions and improve on your methods. And that’s how we have vaccines that could be made in like two hours now, right? I mean, I’m exaggerating. So that same humility you have to display when you approach your intellectual pursuit is the same humility that I’m asking you to think about when you are in the public domain, when you are at church, when you are listening to news, when you are making consumer purchases, when you are listening to information come across your television. When you have to absorb all of the endless data that exists out there, that same critical mindset, but also mindset of humility that we ask of you in this culture of science and the culture of STEM, that has transferable lessons to other parts of how you live your life. And I think it’s a very under discussed component of STEM teaching, of how just STEM itself and science itself, the practice of science, is discussed with students. And I guess, Rebecca, what I’m basically said to you in five minutes is that we lean heavily into it, right? We talk about these things openly.

Rebecca: That’s great.

John: And we’re living in a world where we do need an informed citizenry, because there’s so many sources of information out there that are not so reliable, and the development of those critical thinking skills are incredibly important right now, given all the various sources of misinformation.

Bryan: And part of it too is I’m only… I don’t know if I should say only… but I’m 44, so I’m old enough to have grown up in a time when you had to go to an internet cafe to check your email for $20 an hour. We lived through this just remarkable transition of information ubiquity. I mean, I had a Encyclopedia Britannica set from A to Z like my mom used to joke with me, I would read it like a book. That’s how nerdy I was, right? And I remember looking at those 18 books or whatever, and thinking like, how much information is in here. You have that times infinity at the click of a button. I would just wonder, if we don’t pause long enough to reflect on what a sea change that is in terms of having easy and quick access to information. Now, that’s not the same thing as having knowledge. [LAUGHTER] So now the challenge has shifted. So if maybe initially it was being able to access that information and knowing all of the beautiful things that is happening around the world, now it’s how do you sift from all of this to pick out the information that’s useful, that’s credible, that’s reliable, that’s truthful. And I think our teaching and the way we think about teaching needs to shift with that. I don’t know, man, sometimes John, Rebecca, I have all due respect for online classes, this is not like a for or against, but I’ve always taught in person throughout my career, and I just absolutely love it. But as a commodity, and using the class that I teach a lot, intro bio, all of the learning outcomes I have in my syllabus, all of them, you can find a very good lecture on YouTube for free. You’re not gonna find maybe the test bank and all that. I get it, all of that, right? So in terms of accessing the information that we talk about in the class, the tuition and the three credits, and Bryan Dewsbury, I’m not a buyer. You just need a laptop and good working internet. So what is the added value I provide? What’s the added value that the institution provides by asking you to fork over a tuition check and housing and gas money to get to campus and all of that stuff, to physically be here. And I’m really curious, just as a thought experiment, if you were to put that question to all instructors, what will we say? What can we honestly say? Maybe 10,15, 20 years ago, you would say, “Well, how else would they know how DNA replicates? [LAUGHTER] I got a PhD in DNA, so therefore I have the right to tell you, right?” But I don’t think that argument holds as much water anymore, any water. And that, to me, is not perhaps the challenge, is the opportunity of the new information landscape.

Rebecca: It’s interesting that you bring up the encyclopedia in that kind of curated experience, but there’s also curated experiences online. Sometimes it’s hard to find those curated experiences to know that something’s of good quality, but even if it’s a curated experience, and even if it’s an inexpensive or free experience, you still have to have the motivation and the determination and the context, maybe, to put the pieces together to kind of figure it out on your own. [LAUGHTER] If you have something on the side, like you’re trying to do. How many of us have tried to sit and learn and do something on your own? I’ve been sitting and trying to crochet in the round in the evening, and I sometimes get frustrated using a video. [LAUGHTER] I want someone to show me how to do it, like, sit there and I can ask questions, and I want it to be interactive. This is just one example of just a thing that you want to learn from a person and have a dialog and be able to troubleshoot and have someone’s expertise to work through. And you think about the opportunity that you have as a faculty member to curate experience with readings and activities and classroom experiences, and then faculty maybe complain that students don’t engage in that full experience, and sometimes it’s because students can’t quite figure out what’s relevant to the next step or whatever. Can you talk a little bit about some of the ways that you might connect those assignments or other things that you’re doing in your classes to give students that relevance, or to actually answer your own question, like, what is it that we’re doing in our classes that give the students the reason why to come to class or why to do this experience, as opposed to do it on the side?

Bryan: Yeah, great question. Rebecca. So I’ll give you three examples that address your question, perhaps in slightly different ways. To me, another way of asking your question is when we do something in a class or when we have things in our syllabus or curriculum, why is it worth doing? That is a fair question for somebody, especially at the prices college is asking students to pay. That is a fair question to ask. And there are perhaps too many situations, maybe not intentionally, where there is an implicit eat your vegetables approach in that, “because I said it’s worth doing,” right? Like I have the great book, and I’m the PhD, and it’s worth doing, and so therefore you should believe. And I think my first part of my answer to you is to make that “why” more explicit. So we start the class not even talking about bio. First assignment is a reflection assignment that I shamelessly stole from National Public Radio called “This I Believe,” it’s on, it’s a public website, it’s: thisIbelieve.org/guidelines and the prompt asks… I’m summarizing here: “Describe the values that shape your deepest passion.” Before we get into anything technical. I want us to start this community by reflecting on what your why is, because your why, if you understand that clearly, or if you at least begin the mental process of exploring that, that is a big of why you’ll be motivated to be your best self, pursuing the technical piece. This could have easily been, you show up and I give you a bunch of materials, you show me if you know it or you don’t know it, and move on. But forcing you to really ask: “Well, why pre med? Why medicine? There’s so many things you could be doing in biology. There’s so many other great things you can be doing with all the other majors in this school. Why that choice?” So that sort of begins a very particular kind of conversation, because I expressed them my why and why I chose to be a professor, and why that was exciting to me, and why I love this class and love them. The second thing is, when we’re doing certain activities, regardless of what the subject matter is, they are implicit behaviors in how you do a technical task and get a solution that I think in a lot of times in a lot of teaching approaches, it happens as a function of the class, but it’s not made explicit that those behaviors are very important skills that you should be developing as you go forth as a technical expert. So when you put students in groups, for example, it might make things easier to grade, because now you’re just doing x divided by four or whatever assignment, there’s that piece. And I understand, like, you know, what the active learning literature says about group work and things like that, but what you’re really doing, my friends, is you’re teaching people how to work with difference. If you set those groups up right, If you talk about what positive group behaviors look like, what implicit biases look like, you are preparing them for a world of work, a world of engagement, where they will be in one type of group or the other. I can’t think of a profession… well, I could think of one, but not that many… where you will essentially be solo and so some of those group behaviors that really makes group work effective, like active listening, respecting silence, by hearing different opinions, being willing to accept critique, being able to give respectful critique. We have whole discussions about what that’s like and why it’s important. So it’s not just going to groups, and we hope everything works out. It’s going to groups, and this is a thing, and in order for this thing to go, well, let’s actually have a discussion about why that thing matters. The third part of my answer is, at selected points in the semester we try to make, or not try, we make very clear the ways in which scientific practice intersects with society. And this is where I think people get a little confused, perhaps, about what we mean by inclusive or equity-minded teaching. I remember once I saw on Twitter, and I know Twitter is what it is, right? But somebody put a statement that said, what is so inclusive about the mass of boron? [LAUGHTER] And I get where they’re coming from. I get why they would say that, but it, of course, betrays a misunderstanding of what we mean when we talk about inclusion in a classroom, there’s a lot of technical things that we discuss in an intro bio class, and not everything we talk about, we sort of bend over backwards to then relate it back to some social context. But there are things that do allow themselves to make that connection very, very clear. And the connection basically comes down to: science doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Science is done by people, and the people is human beings who ask those questions. Human beings ask those questions, and human beings decide which questions to ask. They decide which questions are the important questions to ask. They decide when they ask those questions, and they carry out studies, they decide how those studies are conducted. And they don’t only decide how those studies are conducted, they interpret what data they collect from those studies, and they write the narrative that comes out of that analysis, that comes out of that interpretation. This is not to demonize any particular individual who does anything on any one of those steps, but it is to point out the reality that since the bridge between the existence of nature and life and life science and our understanding of how this works, if the bridge is the human being or human beings plural, who help us to understand that, then by definition, the social positioning of that individual, of those individuals, may sometimes color how we come to understand the world as a collective. And we have slight examples of this: that they took, what 10, 15, years to ask what female chimpanzees did, because only men were in the field, right? And then we have very, very dark examples of this when we thought eugenics was a real thing and we were sterilizing disabled people in North Carolina. So throughout history and even today, we are saying to students that you will go forth to be some wonderful whatever you plan to be, whether it’s medical doctors, whether it’s health professionals, public health, whether it’s research scientists, whatever it is. And there will come a time when you will be a decision maker. You will be the one they come to to try to understand, how do we reduce COVID rates? How do we keep people safe? And when you get this, it’s important for you to understand that COVID doesn’t care who it infects, the differential rates of deaths and the differential rates of infection is not because the virus itself made that differentiation. It is simply following a pathway that was already constructed along social lines. And so if you really want to get at the root of the problem, you have to understand how those social lines were constructed. I’m not saying you have to get a PhD in Sociology, but I’m saying I have to know enough to be dangerous. And so that’s the argument that’s made to talk about Flint, Michigan when we talk about the effect of lead on the nervous system. That’s the argument we make to talk about Tuskegee when we talk about the study that took place there. And it’s not to say, and this differentiation is important, This is not to just say that “Hey man, America is a terrible place. We’ve done some really terrible things.” I mean, we have done some terrible things in history, but what the goal of that discussion is to say “but we can learn. We can do better.” We have examples of looking back and saying “That was a mistake.” As a social science researcher, every study I do, I apply for Institutional Review Board approval because those things happened. It’s unfortunate that those things had to happen, but now we know better. So it’s important that that piece is there because sometimes, unfortunately, the narrative or the interpretation of having these discussions is you’re just trying to make people feel bad. You’re just trying to make America to be this terrible place. And no, no, it’s a great place, because of the capacity to learn. So anyway, I hope that answers. Those are the three parts all woven together, Rebecca. I hope that’s fine.

Rebecca: Thank you.

John: So. much of what you’re discussing there is just finding ways of helping students connect what you’re teaching in classes to their own lived experiences, rather than just seeing it as this isolated material separate from the societal context in which it exists?

Bryan: Yes. Yes would be the short answer to that. And just to get into the specifics, right? I mean, I think sometimes a listener might hear like, “Okay, now do I have to go and find out every single student’s life specifics and find something that connects to that? And again, I’m not saying that that’s what you have to do. I think it’s good, and I appreciate that some people have very large class sizes, so sometimes some of these strategies can become overwhelming, depending on what your load is. But there are low-lift ways to get a sense of who your students are, where they’re coming from, what was the class they took before yours? If you’re at an institution where there’s sort of a very set matriculation pathway. If most of them are coming from local high schools, there are ways for you to get at least a summarized sense of the students that you teach. The other piece to it, though, is not just like, what’s your community, let me make it relevant. The classroom is also a place where you hopefully get introduced to an understanding of the world that you may not have encountered had you not come to that classroom. Part of the beauty of teaching is the ways in which we open students up to new experiences, new ways of thinking, including ways that may challenge the ideologies and ways that they had before they walked in the door. I’m not saying that this is what you were doing, John, but sometimes people think about culturally relevant teaching, and it gets trapped in a “if you’re from this neighborhood, let me talk about this neighborhood.” It’s like, well, no, it’s way more than that. It’s way more than that. One of the blessings of a country like this is the amount of diversity there is across so many lines, and you need to have to physically live next to the diversity, to know and learn and appreciate and just see its beauty. This is another place that college does it just through the classes, through texts, through learning, through studying, through inquiry, you learn more and more about the world and yourself. So it’s a little bit of both.

Rebecca: Along the same lines, one of the great things about being a faculty member is that same thing, that the students bring some really great experiences that we haven’t had either, and allowing them to bring their stories and experiences into the classroom allows us to continue to grow and learn on a constant basis too. It’s great when they can bring those things too.

Bryan: I mean, especially when you grew up going to internet cafes to use the internet. At this point, they’re coming in with high-speed computers in their pockets, right? [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah.

Bryan: They grew up in a completely different environment. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So you started off explaining how you get to know your students a little bit at the beginning, you start not even talking about biology in a bio class. Can you talk a little bit, maybe further down the line in the same class, and how civic engagement may enter into that same course later down the line?

Bryan: Yeah, so and this, you can perhaps consider this more social context than civic engagement, but I just so love this assignment and love the kind of discussions that come from it. We talk a lot in bio class about DNA as a molecule and all of that stuff, and it’s chemical structure. But we also spent some time talking about what led to the discovery of DNA. It’s a fascinating story. It’s a story about a time when there were not that many high-resourced labs in science. And so you can look up the book Double Helix, if you want to get a fairly brief version of it. But there’s also a story where if you were a woman in science, how the community responded to you, was very different to how they do now, although they’re pretty well documented cases where, not in all cases, that have changed, right? And so it does open up a conversation. First, we talk about the lack of credit that Rosalind Franklin initially did not get, but then we also talk about where we are now. There’s a really good documentary called Picture a Scientist solely focused on that issue, and we have discussions about why those things matter, and the role that power and hierarchies and power dynamics play in the experiences that people have. And I really want to emphasize, this is not to say I’m preparing you for a doom and gloom world and everything will be terrible. I’m preparing you for reality. And the reality is, I certainly wish for you a lot of great experiences, and I think you will mostly have that. But the reality is there’s still a lot of work to be done for us to get to the place of equity that we claim we have, [LAUGHTER] and the discussion of the gap between what we think we have and where we need to be is really my invitation to you to help work on that problem, but also to be aware of what may come when you get there. And I hope listeners take my comments in that spirit. So to the extent, Rebecca, that’s sort of an example of what you might encounter when you get out there in society. That’s one example of a conversation that takes place.

John: In addition to the issue of trying to make STEM classes more engaging for students, one of the problems that we see is that there’s some pretty significant differences between the DFW rates for first-gen students, for Pell eligible students, and students from historically minoritized groups, which is tied to differences, in large part, in the quality of education that they receive, and that serves as a barrier where many students enter into college planning to go into a STEM field, but end up not being as successful and then either transferring into other disciplines or leaving college altogether. What are some ways in which we can overcome the opportunity gaps that students face if they haven’t come in with as strong of a preparation for success in STEM?

Bryan: So a couple years ago, I published a paper about inclusive teaching methods and active learning methods, and a big crux of that paper, we talked a lot in the paper about what we did in the class and how much we cut content to really focus in on this sort of very social relationship-driven model of teaching. And in that paper, we not only reduced the DFW rates that you just described, John, but also when that group went on to future classes, they did fine, not just fine, they actually did better comparatively to peers from other sections. And some people, perhaps who hadn’t read the paper yet, kind of assumed that when we said everybody did fine, it meant everybody got As. And that is not the truth. We have a pretty high pass rate, but the class size average over the years that I taught it was in the 150s, it was a large class, and then maybe 10 or 15 years, there wasn’t a ton of students who… we had a very diffuse assessment model, a lot of quizzes, a lot of case studies and other stuff like that. And so what I’m saying that to say is that I don’t want people to feel that, for students who may come into your institution, who had 18 years of a social structure that wasn’t set up to engineer the best out of them. It is very difficult to right all those wrongs with one semester of an intro class. Now, at the same time, I can hold multiple truths in the same conversation, it is all well and good. In fact, this is just my personal belief, I don’t know if everybody shares it. I do believe, no matter what your circumstances are, even if they were really terrible, that within you there’s your potential to be great at science. There’s a potential to be great at biology. The question then becomes, given all of that history, what is needed to get you to a place where you can see that and take the reins of the chariot and go be your best self. And sometimes that may mean half of that first semester. Sometimes that may mean two semesters of Cs or failing a class and coming back. But the important thing is, I start from a place of the potential is there. I don’t know when the light will start to shine, but I’ve been doing this job for now almost 11 years, and I’ve been with students It took years for that light to switch. So what would happen, I can just tell you, on the ground with that intro bio class, for some of them that turn around point came like nine weeks in, and it’s one of the most satisfying and gratifying experiences as a teacher. When you see that student is like, “Ah, it’s not that bad.” And of course, by that time, there isn’t enough assessment for them to magically get an A between mid-October and December, but they might get to C plus, might get to B minus. They have to really nail a bunch of stuff. But here’s the difference, when they start the second semester, not with me, when they start the second semester of the institution, your now a different person. You’re not the same person who came in first year not sure of yourself, not confident, didn’t think you belonged in science, had a fixed mindset about math and all of that stuff. No, no, no. Now you know, yes, if I have the right strategies, I have proven to myself, and some of this is coming straight from motivation theory. I have evidence that if I take the right approach, good things will happen. And that’s why I brought up this paper. That’s why those C pluses in first semester turn into As in their second semester, because you’re not dealing with the same student. So that in a nutshell, is my lesson, in that there’s a whole discussion to be had about primary and secondary education. There are brilliant people having those discussions, read everything. Diane Ravitch writes, that’s a whole discussion we need to have in this country. There is also a role that institutions of higher education can play in that discussion, but specific to people who are privileged to teach classes, especially at the introductory level, that to me is a mindset I would like to have, assume the best, assume that it’s there, and know that the work that to teach, if I had to define teaching, to teach, is a degree to which you can walk a student from their current state of readiness to that place where they see what their potential can really be. That, to me, is the act of teaching, the content is part of the mechanism of the vehicle that drives that process. But teaching is a process, and that’s the process,

John: So encouraging a growth mindset is really critical to this process, it would seem. But the other thing is, you’d have to design your course in a way where you can’t use too many high-stakes assessments, especially early on where students could get deterred. You need to provide some mechanism so that students can, by the end of the class, get those Bs or C pluses and so forth, right?

Bryan: So, yeah, I mentioned earlier in this conversation a diffuse assessment model, right? And that’s done on purpose. So the psychology behind the high-stakes assessment, especially ones that are early. If it’s super high stakes and very early and they don’t do well a couple issues: One, mathematically, it makes recovery very difficult, you’re already down to a B minus after exam 1, you don’t have much wiggle room to even pass the class; the second thing is, and this is why I like to talk about teaching as a process and a relationship, because there’s a psychology to it… there’s a psychology that you need to understand, especially with first-year students, and what it means to transition into this environment. We don’t have enough time on this podcast today to summarize all the literature on emerging adulthood, on sense of belonging, on John Henryism, that all these things that are invisible, that are in the air and that even the students themselves may not be able to articulate, but it’s happening. And so what it means to be a teacher and be able to read the subtitles and see how certain behaviors are indicative of some of those processes happening, that’s the challenge. So your high-stakes exam, especially that first one, could be simply measuring the presence of those psychologies, not actual ability, not actual learning. You can just be capturing the fact that somebody is scared to death. You could be capturing the fact that somebody is carrying the weight of a generation at home and you must be a doctor, you must be this, you must be that. And that’s high stakes. This is playing out on that exam. They’re never going to say it to you that way, but it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. [LAUGHTER] And so part of the diffuse assessment model is to say, “Look, I am going to do my best to design assessments that accurately reflect learning, and the stakes are going to be high enough that I think you will take this seriously. But the goal of these assessments is to provide both of us, myself and you, the student, information that gives us some sense of where you are in this learning journey. And when we get that information, depending on what it says, we can have a discussion. We can have a specific discussion.” And I can say things like you do really well on recall questions, but you seem to struggle when I say explain. You have all of the language of this process in there, but it’s actually not coming together as a story. I can give you feedback that’s very, very specific, because with the sort of fixed/growth mindset dichotomy, giving you things that are changeable is what gives you an opportunity, it gives you an avenue to change your behavior. If I just said you need to try hard, what does that even mean? So I hope I’ve been underscoring the deliberateness of everything, everything, even from the way feedback is given, to how and why we set up exams in certain ways and how much we do. It’s all based on, again, this philosophy of teaching is a process.

Rebecca: I think we often use the word specific and say specific all the time, but you’ve just illustrated what you mean by specific, which is really helpful. So it’s really fun to talk, and we could talk forever and ever and ever, because there’s lots of fun things to talk about, and you’re teaching such interesting classes in interesting ways. But one thing we want to make sure we get to before we wrap up today is the asynchronous class that you’ve developed on inclusive teaching. Can you talk a little bit about this course and who the target audience is?

Bryan: Yeah, so this course was a collaboration between my program and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Biointeractive Program. It is based on a paper I wrote back in 2019 called “Deep Teaching in STEM.” The secret is that, yes, it says STEM because it went to a STEM journal, but the things we talk about in that paper really applies to all teaching. The other secret is that there’s nothing in that paper that’s particularly new. It’s just that we in STEM had ignored it for so long, and so perhaps that’s why we felt a need to re-center some of those ideas that, oh, by the way, it might be good to build relationships with your students and know who they are as people, and not just treat them as student ID numbers that need a grade. So that paper talked about five components that goes into what we call deep teaching, and those components then came to represent a module on that massive open online course. One of the key features of that course we wanted to really model was the very sort of introspective, spiritual, even soulful, way we think about teaching and we are asking listeners and participants in that course to be reflective. We wanted to model that in how the course itself was delivered. So we were very selective in who we asked to guest lecture, and the nine lectures are very, very long. We’ve infused at the end of each module. So there’s a main module, and there’s sort of four sub-modules that represent each component. Every main module, one of the sub-modules is an artistic piece. So we commissioned a painting. We had poetry, spoken word, even a Negro spiritual, and it was not random. They all thematically connected to what the module is talking about. And it was built in a Canvas shell, which is, as a MOOC, it’s free for anybody to access. But also what we’ve done is we’ve been working with a lot of universities who uploaded it onto their own Canvas shells and running faculty learning communities with a local facilitator going through the LMS. And the course has many practical, specific things. You want to think of a reflection in your course, here are some examples of prompts. So you want to have more transparency in your assignment, consider Mary-Ann Winkelmes’s framework. But what it also has, especially because of the nature of the way the course was set up, just a lot of moments for reflection. We didn’t want it to feel like a worksheet. You just go through this, do that. Go through this, do that. Like, when you hear somebody talk about motivation, like, think about when you were motivated, what made you motivated, and sit with that reflection, because that sort of empathetic approach is what really is going to make the course impactful for you. There are many 1000s of people who’ve just done it by themselves and have found a lot of meaning for it, but we’re really having a lot of fun seeing universities do it as a FLC on their campus. So that’s a nutshell. I think the web name is a little long for me to remember, but I know if you just Google inclusive teaching biointeractive, it should be the first thing that pops up.

John: And we’ll include a link to it in the show notes as well. I see that you have two books coming out in a little over the next year. Could you talk a little bit about those?

Bryan: Yeah, so it’s actually three, but one is not in the next year, right? So the two that I’m working on, one I’ve been collaborating with just a wonderful group, Peter Felton, Isis Artze-Vega, Dan Bergen, and Leo Lambert. Leo nd Peter wrote a book a few years ago called Relationship-Rich Education, which is just phenomenal, and that has led to a few follow ups. So we’re working on one of the follow ups to that project, so more details on that soon when that’s a bit further along. The other book, I’ve been collaborating with a colleague on campus. We’ve been interviewing people about telling personal stories, about times when they either felt a sense of belonging or have not felt a sense of belonging in STEM, and as somebody who comes from a storytelling background, from a literature background, the use of this discipline and this art form and this communication style, I think, is an underused approach in science in general, especially when you’re trying to convey something like that. And so I’m just very grateful for those people who’ve been willing to share their stories with us. So that will come on as an anthology, and, I guess dates TBD, but pretty excited about it.

Rebecca: Those both sound like really exciting projects. So we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Bryan: Well, I would say what’s next, like my most sort of next next, so I’ve been part of a group, a Gates Foundation funded group that has worked pretty hard over the last couple of years doing a landscape analysis that trying to identify what are some of the things that institutions around the country are doing to do equity-minded practices, especially in the intro classes. And that landscape analysis incorporated a lot of things like document analysis, interviews, data mining, and things like that, and we are launching the findings of our analysis as a report on October 25 in Washington, DC, at FIU, in DC’s campus there. It’ll be a free report. Obviously, there’ll be a Zoom link for anybody who wants to attend, and the report will be made available on our website. And we’re pretty excited about it, because there just is a lot of institutions doing great things out there. And to this point, we hadn’t seen a place where those great things were just collated in one place. And the obvious next step from this project is to take those great practices and say, “Okay, now that we know what’s good and who’s doing it, and how it’s worked, where they were, can these things all simultaneously exist in one institution? Can we learn from all of these best practices and say, if we have a goal of success for all on our campus, this is a place where we can look to to get some real both like comprehensive but specific ideas on how to make that happen. So that’s October 25 and pretty excited for that launch.

Rebecca: That sounds really exciting.

John: And we’re looking forward to hearing more about these books once they are ready to come out. Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you again, and we look forward to more conversations in the future.

Bryan: John, it’s always a pleasure. Hopefully next time in Oswego.

John: That would be great. [LAUGHTER]

Bryan: Alright, man, thank you.

John: Thank you.

Rebecca: Thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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349. Growth Mindset Messaging

Posted in continuing-generation, diversity, engagement, equity, first-generation, first-generation students, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, large-class instruction, motivation, STEM education
July 10, 2024

First-generation college students, on average, have lower GPAs and higher dropout rates than continuing-generation students. In this episode, Elizabeth Canning, Makita White, and William B. Davis join us to discuss a growth-mindset intervention that has eliminated this equity gap in a large STEM class.

Elizabeth is an Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at Washington State University. Makita is a graduate student at WSU’s Experimental Psychology Program, and William is a Professor of Molecular Biology and the Interim Vice Provost for Academic Excellence and Student Achievement at WSU.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: First-generation college students, on average, have lower GPAs and higher dropout rates than continuing-generation students. In this episode, we discuss a growth-mindset intervention that has eliminated this equity gap in a large STEM class.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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Rebecca: Our guests today are Elizabeth Canning, Makita White, and William B. Davis. Elizabeth is an Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at Washington State University. Makita is a graduate student at WSU’s Experimental Psychology Program, and William is a Professor of Molecular Biology and the Interim Vice Provost for Academic Excellence and Student Achievement at WSU. Welcome back, Elizabeth and Makita, and welcome, William.

Bill: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

John: Today’s teas are:… Elizabeth, are you drinking tea?

Elizabeth: I am drinking tea. I’ve learned from past podcasts with you that I should bring some tea along. So I’m drinking some sweet and spicy black tea today.

Rebecca: Sweet and Spicy… [LAUGHTER] sounds interesting.

Elizabeth: It has some cinnamon and some orange. It’s very good.

John: Very nice. And Makita?

Makita: I’ve got classic Earl Grey today.

Rebecca: Can’t go wrong with a classic. [LAUGHTER]

John: And Bill?

Bill:I have a Raspberry Zinger herbal tea today.

Rebecca: I’ve moved on to Awake tea… this time of day. [LAUGHTER]

John: We recorded another podcast much, much earlier today. So that’s probably needed a bit more. [LAUGHTER] And so that I won’t be awake all night tonight, as I have been for much of the last couple of nights, I have just a pure peppermint tea.

Rebecca: Probably a better choice for this time of day. [LAUGHTER]

John: And for this time of the year.

Rebecca: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss your March 2024 study: “Growth Mindset Messages from Instructors Improve Academic Performance Among First-Generation College Students,” which is quite a mouthful. [LAUGHTER] But before we discuss the study, can you talk a little bit about the difference in outcomes between first-generation students and continuing-generation college students?

Makita: Sure. So when we say first generation, we usually mean someone who’s the first in their family to attend college. For this study, we specifically defined it as a student for whom neither parent has earned a four-year college degree. And these students typically have to face and overcome a lot of social and cultural barriers in order to be successful in college. And although almost a third of the people who go to college are first-generation, they don’t always seem to do as well as continuing-generation college students. On average, they tend to have a little more difficulty adapting to college, they typically earn lower grades and they have higher dropout rates. They also act a little bit differently, they’re less likely to do things like go to office hours, or communicate with their instructors, whether that’s by email or in person to seek clarification on course materials. And just in general, they tend to be less likely to try to access helpful academic resources when we compare them with continuing-generation college students, which would be students for whom at least one parent has earned a four-year college degree. And on top of all of that, the students are also usually… I mean, they have to be… dealing with having less familial guidance than their peers do when it comes to navigating higher education. So if you’re a continuing-generation student, you have a parent who might tell you something like, “Hey, it’s a good idea to go to office hours,” or “You should be asking questions” or “there’s a financial aid department,” important stuff like that. They also may be dealing with a mismatch between the values and culture that they grew up in, compared with the values and expectations of an American university, which is typically very individualistic and may not be as supportive as what they are used to. And of course, they’re also more likely to be working, living off of campus, and they usually get less financial support from their families. But there are other factors that may exacerbate the difficulties that they’re dealing with. And this study is about one of those.

Bill:And one of the things that, just for context at our local institution to keep in mind, is WSU has a lot of, for lack of a better term, brand loyalty. It was not uncommon for me in my class to have fourth generation Cougars. And if you think about that legacy of your great-grandparents had attended this institution, as had other people, that sort of familial knowledge that gets passed along, is a huge benefit for that population of students as compared to the first-generation students as Makita was talking about.

John: One of the things that you mentioned, Makita, was differences in help-seeking behavior. And one of the studies on that is one that we talked about with you and Elizabeth in an earlier podcast, and we’ll include a link to that in the show notes. Could you describe this current study?

Elizabeth: Yeah, so this study we conducted in 2021, I believe. It was the second semester online, so the pandemic year. I know we’re all sort of crossing out that memory from our minds… [LAUGHTER] …that whole year. As instructors, it was a little tumultuous. But Bill and I got together and we designed this study together in his class. He was teaching at the time the introductory biology class at WSU. And what we decided to do is test out some actionable techniques that instructors can do to communicate a growth mindset to their students. So a lot of the research that my lab does looks at how growth mindset messages impact different students from different backgrounds. And at this time, there was a lot of suggestions about how to implement growth mindset ideas in your class, how to change course material, how to integrate it throughout, but there wasn’t really any experimental evidence of specific strategies that instructors can do. So we decided that we would just test it out in Bill’s class. So what we did in this study is we randomly assigned everybody in the course to one of two conditions: a control condition or a growth-mindset message condition. And after the first two major exams in the course, students received an email from Bill, and in the control condition they received a message that is pretty typical of an instructor after an exam has been conducted in their class. It says things like: “exam grades are posted online, here’s how we calculated them,”
“here’s what it means,” and then “feel free to talk to me in office hours, or ask questions about it.“ In the growth mindset message condition, we included all of that information, but we also included a fairly lengthy paragraph… I’ve gotten comments on… but it’s a big chunk of a paragraph that basically says, in Bill’s words, “Here’s what I believe about student performance and exam performance and improving in the class.” And there we integrated growth mindset theory, we talked about how abilities can be improved, we talked about how academic struggles are normal to experience, and that this struggle is part of the process of learning, that is something that is controllable. That you can put in effort that you can use different strategies to make improvements. And I think we used, Bill, if correct me if I’m wrong, we started with a draft of this email that you had already been doing in your class. And we just sort of infused it a little bit more. So Bill really wrote like the first draft of it, and then we kind of went back and forth a little bit to edit it and infuse it a little bit more with growth mindset. But it’s really written in the voice of the instructor. After we implemented this email after the first exam, we did it again after the second exam, changing the language a little bit. We assessed their performance across the semester. So we looked at their exam grades, we looked at their final course grade, and we found that students who were in the growth mindset condition earned higher grades in the course. And this was predominantly driven by first-generation college students. So first-generation college students performed much better in the course, when they received those growth-mindset messages from the instructor.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the effects and how significant they were?

Elizabeth: Yeah, so when we look at the group differences in the control condition, what we find that’s very consistent across big STEM courses across the university, that continuing-generation students are getting better grades than first-generation students. So in this course, they’re earning about three-fourths of a letter grade higher than first-generation students. So this is a really, really big gap between the continuing-generation students and the first-generation students. It’s not specific to this one course. So we see this in a lot of different datasets. But what was really remarkable in this study is that that difference in their grades was completely eliminated in the growth-mindset condition. So first-generation college students earned about three-fourths of a letter grade higher in the growth-mindset condition compared to the control condition. So this is a pretty large effect on final course grades. And of course, it’s pretty significant in terms of the curriculum that they’re a part of. Bill, if you want to talk a little bit about the students who took this course and how it plays a role in their career trajectories.

Bill:Yeah, thank you for that. I was looking forward to jumping in a little bit. And this is a little bit about my journey too, in this course. So, at this point, just for context, this was the 16th semester that I had taught this course. Largely I had been either the sole instructor or I was the primary instructor of record for the course. It’s taken by about 450 to 550 students each semester, little bit of differential between fall and spring in size, over 50 different majors, or pre-major students take this class. It’s nominally a freshman majors biology course. But there’s a substantial number of students who are neither biology majors or life science majors. And there’s a sizable number of students who are not freshmen. So, in reality, the highest population of my course normally were sophomores, freshmen were the largest population in that spring semester. And that was pretty typical, because it is oftentimes taken as the second semester of an introductory biology sequence. So yeah, and to be honest, over the years before this study, I had been trying to narrow those opportunity gaps between first-generation and continuing-generation students. I knew they existed. I had done many things with the course experimentally over the years, and never had really closed that gap. This was one of the first times, if ever, I saw that gap completely close in anything that I tried, and I tried tinkering in the lecture in the lab, big changes, small changes, a lot had gone on before this.

John: You mentioned that the class is normally about 450 students. Could you tell us a little bit more about the specific course in which you implemented this? You noted that this was during the pandemic. Was this offered remotely? Was it synchronous? Was it asynchronous? And how many students were there in this particular sample?

Bill:So, the course was taught in a synchronous Zoom manner. So both the lecture and the lab were taught using zoom. I believe, if memory serves, I had the largest Zoom Room on campus that semester. I can’t remember the exact number, I want to say my enrollment that semester was somewhere close to 550, or 600

Makita: The final sample is 417, I believe.
Bill:417. That’s right. That’s how many students, so it must have been around probably 450, at the beginning of the semester, or something like that. Yeah, we had synchronous Zoom every day with students. In fact, I learned pretty quickly how to crash Zoom my first semester I taught remotely. [LAUGHTER] So by then, it was a little bit more of a pro, and at least knew how to keep it running for 50 minutes at a time.

Rebecca: And true badge of honor.

Bill:[LAUGHTER] Well, there are many lumps that we took in the pandemic and learning how to teach and Zoom was one of them. [LAUGHTER]

John: I had 350 students in the fall of 2020, and it was not my most enjoyable teaching experience. What are the factors you controlled for? Because you did control for some other variables to separate out the effect of the growth-mindset messaging?

Elizabeth: Yeah, so we controlled for three things in our analytic models. We controlled for students’ prior college GPA… so this was just their self report… GPA that they’ve had in college. Since this was in the spring semester, all the freshmen had had a semester under their belts at that point, to have an idea of what their college GPA was. We included this just because we were looking at performance. So we wanted to filter out or control for their prior performance, that’s a big predictor of their performance in the class. We also controlled for their self-reported personal mindset beliefs. So we asked the students themselves, what do you believe about the nature of intelligence? Do you think it’s something that can improve? Do you think it’s something that you’re just born with? So we measure their own self-reported mindset beliefs, and we control for that and all of the analyses, because we want to look at the effect of the intervention above and beyond student’s own beliefs about ability. And then the last thing we controlled for was their race or ethnic status. So what they self reported to us on a survey. Here, we controlled for that because there is some overlap between race, ethnicity, and first-generation status. We did look at the different groups separately, we don’t have enough power to really look at race ethnicity as a moderator at the intervention. So we control for it in our analyses to look at the effect of first-gen status above and beyond race and ethnicity,

Rebecca: I can imagine, as an instructor who’s fiddled quite a bit in their class to overcome these equity gaps, that it might have been a little surprising [LAUGHTER] how much of a change happened with such a relatively small intervention.

Bill:It was shocking. It’s funny, because one of the things that Elizabeth has really talked about is how we took materials that I actually already possessed in some ways, and modified them slightly in some cases, and more radically in others, but just that transformation was enough to start to really make an impact. And you could see it happening. And that was amazing to me. I remember when I halved my opportunity gaps in my class with an intervention. And I remember dancing and celebrating, [LAUGHTER] and then this one was just on that scale. This was huge and amazing to me.

John: One of the interesting things in this study is you were looking at the effect in terms of grades on subsequent exams, but you didn’t find much of an effect on the second exam from the first intervention. But when you had two of those messages coming out, that’s where you found the relatively large effect. Why do you think the second message was having more of an effect than just a single message?

Elizabeth: Yeah, so we have a couple of theories. We think that one reason could be that they just need the message more than one time. So they need two doses or more than two doses to sort of really get people’s attention and make them change their behavior. That c ould be one reason. Another reason is that it might be enough to just have one message, but it would take time for behavior to change in order to see a difference in their performance. So it could be that after the first exam, they started engaging with the material differently and then that then sort of snowballed to affect their third exam scores, and then again, their final course performance, but we don’t really know exactly what’s going on. Another reason could be that towards the end of the semester, students get a little antsy, and they start waking up a little bit to, “Oh, I should probably be doing something different if I want to have a grade that looks like this.” So it could be timing, it could be dosage, it could be the effects take longer to materialize in terms of performance changes. One of the interesting things that we found here in this dataset is we did try to look at behavior in the way that we had access to, so we pulled all of their activity on the course website. And this semester, our campus was using Blackboard as the course sites. And we pulled all of the Blackboard data. So we looked at whether students in the growth mindset condition were engaging with Blackboard differently. And we found that they were. Students, on average, who were in the growth-mindset condition engaged with the course material 40 instances more, on average, than students in the control group. This is around a 12% increase in webpage engagement. So after they get this message from the instructor saying that intelligence is something that can grow, abilities can improve over time, and here are some strategies that you might implement to realize those changes, they’re going to the course website, they’re clicking on things, they’re re-reading their notes, they’re looking over the course lectures, they’re engaging more with the resources that are posted there. And then not surprising to any instructor ever, [LAUGHTER] that when students are engaging with the course materials that then lead to greater performance in the class. So we found a mediation effect through their behavior with the course material that was posted online. So this is one example of the behavior change that I was talking about earlier, that when they get this message, it can be inspiring, it can inspire a different type of behavior that can lead to better performance in the course.

Rebecca: Those are really strong click rates generally, [LAUGHTER] especially when we’re often complaining that students don’t read our emails or messages. [LAUGHTER]

Elizabeth: Yes. So, we did look at differences in Blackboard in terms of clicking on course material versus going to the page where all their grades were, like the gradebook. And we didn’t find any differences on their engagement with the gradebook. So it wasn’t that they were just tracking it more or anything like that. But it seems to be the case that they’re actually engaging with the substantive course materials more, on average, in the growth- mindset condition.

Rebecca: It’s just incredible. [LAUGHTER] Can you talk a little bit about… and we’re hinting towards this, obviously… what does this study suggest that faculty and institutions can do to improve outcomes of first-gen students, or maybe even, Bill, what you’ve continued or started to do?

Bill:I think, for me, what I took away from it was being very intentional with my students in communicating what I believe about them. And I mean that in the spirit of the old NPR show, or the segment that they used to do, you know, “This I believe,” where people would have those small snippets. I felt like this intervention was something along those lines where I could be authentic in communicating what I truly believed about their abilities. And I did it in a way that, with some small tweaks, obviously had these much deeper and larger payoffs. And I think that’s one of the real nuggets of wisdom here is that when you want to transform, and have better student outcomes, you want to narrow these opportunity gaps for students from certain backgrounds or experiences when they come in. Oftentimes, you don’t have to throw away what you’re already doing. Oftentimes, you already have nuggets of really important things that you’ve built over time. And all you need to do is to work with somebody who sees things just a little differently and can tweak them with you. And I think that partnership with Elizabeth and Makita was really critical for me. They were able to take things that I already had, and show me a different way to just modify what I was already doing. That messaging would go out to every student after that time point. When you see an effect that size, it almost becomes ethical to in fact, it is ethical, in my opinion that you don’t preclude any student from experiencing it. So that should be the way that everyone should be communicating with their students, in my opinion. And you want to make sure that it’s authentic as well, because I started with a set of materials that I had already written and sort of came from my heart, my own experience, that made the authenticity, I think, real whereas if I would have tried to have said something to students that I really truly didn’t believe about their abilities, I think they would have sniffed that out in a heartbeat. And we probably wouldn’t have seen the effect that we did.

Rebecca: It’s amazing what a little bit of intention can do in the design of something, especially because we often don’t realize how big of an impact a simple communication might have. We almost think of it as like a throw away, or a quick thing you might be doing, but you add a little intention to it, and it starts having a really different impact.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think you mentioned earlier that students might not read the email, you might think that they’re not going to engage with it. And we also thought that, [LAUGHTER] so we think that in designing this intervention, we were really drawing on a lot of the intervention research that had been done previously. So research on wise interventions, mindset theory, all of that was integrated into the design of the message itself. So we started with Bill’s original emails that he was sending out to students and the messages that he had already curated for his class, and timing it in a time in the class in which students are receptive to that information, I think, is also really key. So we don’t know this empirically. But I would guess that if we were to send that email a couple of weeks before the exam, it would not have the same kind of impact. We send it directly when that performance information was posted online. And that’s when students are questioning themselves. They’re saying, “What does this score mean? Does this mean that I’m not good at this? Does this mean that I can continue? Does this mean that I’m smart or not smart? …and that uncertainty, that is the right time to infuse your message as an instructor to counteract those uncertain messages about ability. So I think the timing really matters. I think authenticity, like Bill said, really matters. Makita and I have been working with other institutions to implement a similar type of intervention with instructors. And before we did that Makita did a bunch of focus groups with the students at these institutions and showed them the messages that we used in Bill’s class, and we ended up changing them quite dramatically. The students gave us feedback like “nobody here would ever say something like that,” or “here’s what you need to say to reach students here in my class,” or “here’s what I will be receptive to.” So students in different contexts are going to respond to different messages. And so you really do want it to fit your own class, how you would speak, how you would talk to your students, the needs of the students in that moment might be different from the class they’re in. So it really is not a copy and paste type of situation where you were gonna copy what we did here and put it in your class. I think you do need to kind of go through the process of generating it for yourself and your own students.

Rebecca: I could imagine there would be an element of needing to evolve it over time, too, as your student population changes, and as you change as a teacher.

Elizabeth: Yeah, absolutely.

John: One of the things that I think is particularly nice about this study is that we see higher DFW rates by first-gen students in STEM classes in particular, and so many students end up leaving STEM fields that they intended to major in in their first couple of years. And that’s where the rate of return to education is the highest. And in general, first-gen students come from lower socioeconomic groups and lower family income groups, and if we do want to see more equity in outcomes, getting more first-gen students into the STEM fields could do a lot to help reduce some of those equity gaps in terms of overall outcomes.

Elizabeth: You mentioned the long term nature of these effects. I think it’s a great question. I think it’s something that we’re currently looking at in a project that we’re doing that’s funded by the National Science Foundation, where we’re looking at how these interventions in an introductory course can change career trajectories, that when you get a B instead of a C in a major introductory course, that’s gonna mean something different to that student, that’s going to set them on a path of following that next course sequence, that next step. So that’s the question that we’re asking and the research that we’re doing now, and hopefully, we’ll have some answers in a few years.

John: Peter Arcidiacono at Duke had done a study on the decision to stay in STEM fields. And he did look at some of these questions in terms of the effects on major choice based on the grades that were received. We can share a link to that study in the show notes. In the IRB proposal, did you include the possibility of following up these students in terms of their outcomes a few years later, in terms of retention rates for the students?

Elizabeth: That’s a great question. I believe in terms of IRB, we had students consent to their academic records. So we should be able to go back and look at transcripts from the students who participated in the class. We could look at course taking, we could look at graduation rates, we could look at major. If these students were freshmen/sophomores in 2021, then we’re probably around the time where they would be finishing up so maybe in the next year we could.

Bill:I was just thinking the same. Now’s the perfect time to go back and take a look, because we’ve had enough time since the intervention to see what’s happened. And actually I was gonna go back to one of your earlier points. You were talking about statistics earlier. Basically, this is really the only way that we’re going to increase the number of STEM students going forward. If first-generation students at WSU are 40% of our population today, that means if we don’t improve their outcomes, then we’re going to continue to see the declines in STEM outcomes and STEM graduates that we are trying so desperately to fight against, and also, we’re not going to have the representation in our STEM graduates of the population of the US that we want to see.

Rebecca: I think in addition to the growth-mindset piece, I’m sure that the authentic nature of the messages also just showed deep care. And that can be really important for first-generation students who need that ally or advocate for them in their college journey. So I can imagine those messages coming from Bill in Bill’s voice that make them feel like “Yeah, you can do this, I care about you,” from that perspective is also really important.

John: And there was a study done by a couple of economists, entitled “My Professor Cares,” where they did follow up students four years later, and they did find a significant effect in retention rates four years later by a similar type of intervention, I don’t think it was quite as much growth-mindset focused, but just sending a signal that the professor cared about the students outcomes, a very simple message, made a significant difference in student’s grades as well as longer term outcomes. So it’s nice to see more studies of this, especially focused on issues such as growth mindset.

Elizabeth: Yeah.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking: What’s next?.

Elizabeth: So Makita and I and our lab have been working for the past couple years on following up on these data in different institutions. We used this study as pilot data in a grant application. And now we’re sort of scaling up to other institutions. We have a project with a really large HBCU, a Hispanic-Serving Institution, WSU is continuing to be involved as well, an Asian and Pacific Islander Serving Institution to where we have a number of instructors who vary in different characteristics, different class compositions, and we’re looking at these instructor messages in an experiment in these different contexts to see what matters. Does it help students develop their own growth mindset? Does it change their behavior? Does it work in some contexts, but not others? Do the instructor characteristics matter? So far, in the past two years, we’ve collected data from around 10,000 students who have been involved in this intervention project, and we’re currently in data analysis phase. So stay tuned for future studies and papers that come out of that data set.

John: Makita?

Makita: Well, what’s next for me is Elizabeth and I are actually going to meet right after this to do a debrief and to discuss some of the analyses that I just ran on a study that will be involved in my dissertation.

Rebecca: And how about you, Bill?

Bill:For me, I think about: “How do I proselytize about this work?” Because I think about what little changes make a big difference in an institution. We talk a lot about student retention, we talk a lot about student outcomes, we talk about creating the global citizenry that we want to see emerge from higher education. And the one experience that every student has in common, whether they are a first-generation a continuing-gen, or from some other background, is they have to take classes, and they have to be in classroom environments every day of the week, for the most part, over a course of four years. And I think about what would it look like to have interventions like this, that have evidence that back them, that students get inoculated with repeatedly over multiple time points with different voices, and that faculty engagement in the process of helping our students become better, to find success and to move forward in their careers? To me, that’s the magic of this. I’ve been talking to other people about it and I think about what would a curriculum look like that had small things like this? And how could it transform what we do? And I think that’s a vision that I can buy into, and I hope others are gonna come along for that ride.

Rebecca: I think the scope of the interventions that you’re talking about, that have this kind of impact, are really easy to buy into. Because usually you’re thinking about some drastic, giant investment of time, is what most people are thinking about. And that often is what prevents action from happening. So I’m excited, excited to share this and to hear what comes of your bigger study.

John: And one thing we appreciate is when we see things like this posted on social media so we can hear about it [LAUGHTER] and we can share it out a little bit further. [LAUGHTER] And I hope you’re presenting this at various conferences to reach a larger audience.

Elizabeth: Yeah, we will be presenting some of this work at SABER this summer. So that is the Society for the Advancement of Biology education research, and we’ve presented it in some other psychology conferences throughout the past year as well.

John: Excellent.

Bill:And I gave a plenary talk at the summer educational meeting for the ASBMB, American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. So I gave a little preview of what we had found. And that generated a lot of discussion and excitement, actually people asking for additional resources and ideas and things. So I think there’s a receptive audience out there.

Rebecca: That’s wonderful.

John: Well, thank you for joining us. It’s always great talking to you and it’s great to hear about this newest study and to meet you, Bill. We’re looking forward to hearing more about how things go in the future.

Elizabeth: Thank you so much. Thanks for having us.

Rebecca: I hope you’ll reach out when your next study is done. [LAUGHTER]

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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