Steven Volk, March 29, 2015

Reading (Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome; Stefano Corso), CC

The “Article of the Week” has considered issues of reading a number of times [e.g., here and here], most often dealing with how much should we be assigning in our classes as well as the technologies of reading. The articles also addressed problems of novice vs. expert reading in disciplinary fields. This last issue has been quite noticeable in my own field, history. The goal of history reading in high school – most often assigned from textbooks – is usually intended to encourage memorization. As such, it is considerably different than the skills we are looking to strengthen at the college level. So, I’m always on the lookout for appropriate ways to scaffold reading assignments to help students read both for comprehension and analysis.

I recently found one such method discussed in the current issue of College Teaching [63:1 (January-March 2015:27-33]. In “Active Reading Documents (ARDs): A Tool to Facilitate Meaningful Learning Through Reading,” Justin M. Dubas and Santiago A. Toledo, respectively an economist and a chemist, present a practical tool that promises to develop student understanding of assigned material incrementally through reading. I’ll summarize their findings in this “Article of the Week” and encourage those of you with access to the journal to read it in its entirety. Continue reading →

Steven Volk, March 15, 2015

This past Thursday, I had the opportunity to hear Michael Horn, the co-founder and Executive Director of Education at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation who was speaking at Oberlin on “Disruptive Innovation and Higher Education.” The following day, I was privileged to moderate a discussion between Horn and Bryan Alexander. Alexander was, for many years, a senior fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) and a leading advocate for education-driven, liberal-arts focused technology. He describes himself as a “futurist, researcher, writer, speaker, consultant, and teacher, working in the field of how technology transforms education.”

Gus Gordon, Herman and Rosie (Roaring Book Press, 2013)

Finally, I hosted Alexander at a CTIE workshop where we enjoyed a wide-ranging conversation on how technology, particularly the ubiquitous use of digital platforms and media might be impacting how our students learn, what that means for teaching strategies, and whether the structure of emerging labor markets (including the fact that our students will be occupying a multitude of jobs in the future suggests that we need to be preparing them in different ways than we have in the past. (Our students are entering what many call the “gig economy”. The “gig economy” is about many, temporary, part-time jobs. It implies not only that we have moved past what I would call long-term employment monogamy, where people hold one or two jobs for their whole lives, but that we have also moved past serial employment monogamy, where individuals spend 1-2 years at a job and then move to another. Instead, it seems, we have moved to employment bigamy (my terms, blame me), where people will find multiple part-time and temporary jobs out of which they will attempt to put together a living wage – think Uber or Alfred). Continue reading →

Steven Volk, March 8, 2015

Some years ago (April 25, 2011) I wrote an “Article of the Week” on empathy in response to the research findings of Sara H. Konrath, Edward H. O’Brien, and Courtney Hsing suggesting that college students are becoming less empathic, and significantly so. [“Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students Over Time: A Meta-Analysis,” in Personality and Social Psychology Review 15.2 (2011): 180-198] In a meta-analysis of 72 samples of American college students, the researchers studied four aspects of “interpersonal sensitivity” including empathic concern (EC), or sympathy, over the misfortunes of others and perspective taking (PT), the capacity to imagine other people’s points of view. (The other two aspects were the tendency to identify imaginatively with fictional characters in books or movies and personal distress, the anguish one feels during others’ misfortunes.) The study found that EC scores declined by 48% when comparing students from the late 1970s/early 1980s and those in 2009; PT scores went down by 34%. For both, the sharpest decline came after 2000. Continue reading →

Steven Volk, March 1, 2015

Some years ago for another “Article of the Week” (Sept. 24, 2012, to be exact), I wrote about the challenge we face deciding how much reading to assign. I thought about it again in light of an eye-opening article by Naomi S. Baron in the Chronicle of Higher Education (February 13, 2015). It was mysteriously titled, “The Plague of tl;dr.”  Obviously, I had to read it since I had no idea what it was about. [If you don’t subscribe to the Chronicle, the link might not work and you’ll need to go through the library’s website or that of your own institution.] Guesses? According the Urban Dictionary, “tl;dr” means “too long; didn’t read.” It’s used in snarky riposte to someone who, according to the grumbler, has gone on too long in a blog post. As in: “tl;dr…why dont you give up on your unabridged edition of War and Peace or at least stop posting it here?” Zing.

“Reading,” Lucas absent pour le moment mais reviens bientôt (CC)

When I posted my own (way tl;dr) article in 2012, it was in response to the hand-wringing that accompanied the publication of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). The authors argued, briefly, that student aren’t learning what they should in college and much of this is due to the fact that they aren’t writing enough, thinking enough, or reading enough. As an example, the authors found that 32% of students do not take any course in a semester with more than 40 pages of assigned reading per week. Academically Adrift does raise a lot of concerns, but one question I still have is what, exactly, to make of their evidence. Should we be happy that nearly 70% of the students are taking courses with more reading? Are the 32% of the “light-reading” courses in the sciences, math, poetry, creative writing, studio art, etc? And finally, for the purpose of this discussion, do we have any research to suggest that more is better? Continue reading →