Why Does College Cost So Much?

Why Does College Cost So Much?

Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman

(Oxford University Press 2011)

Reviewed by George Rainbolt

The authors of this book are professors of economics at the College of William and Mary. I had read and liked a couple of their articles. My expectations for this book were high and I am happy to report that they were met.

Archibald and Feldman are covering some complex ground. However, they succeed in making this book accessible to anyone who can read The New York Times. The technical material is moved to two appendices. They are focused on high-level structural features of the higher education market. They are not examining what makes college X cost more than college Y. They are examining why, over the last sixty years, average tuition at four-year institutions of higher education has risen significantly faster than the overall inflation rate. They then make suggestions for broad changes to the US higher education system to improve access.

Here, in a nutshell, is their answer to the book’s title question. They point to three factors.

(1) Technological progress tends to reduce costs in those industries where machines can be substituted for people. (Think clothes and steel.)  However, in industries were machines cannot be substituted for people, technology will not lower costs.  In fact, it will raise them. In those industries, labor productivity will not increase as it will in industries where machines can be substituted for people. Salaries for workers in the industries that are substituting machines for people will rise as their productivity increases. This means that employers in the industries that cannot substitute will need to pay their workers more to keep them from moving to work in the industries that can substitute. However, ex hypothesi, these employers cannot use technology to reduce costs and so must pass on this higher pay in the form of price increases. (Footnote 1) Thus, one reason for the increased cost of college is the higher cost of industries where it is hard to substitute machines for people.

(2) The technological progress that the US has seen in the last sixty years has favored people with higher levels of education. The number of individuals with higher levels of education has not kept pace with this increased demand so the “price” that firms must pay to employ these individuals has risen. (That is, the salaries of highly educated individuals have gone up faster than the salaries of those with less education.) Universities must employ many highly-educated individuals so their costs have gone up rapidly.

(3) Technological progress does not always reduce costs. Sometimes, instead of allowing firms to make the same item at a lower cost, it allows them to offer a new item and this new item may be costly.  (Think tablet computers. They offer lower performance at a higher cost than a desktop but we still want them because they give us something new, portability.) Archibald and Feldman argue that the technological change in higher education has mostly been like tablet computers, not like steel. For example, they point to the computer systems that every university now has and argue that, instead of reducing costs, it allows universities to do things that they never could do before (e.g., allowing students to pay their fees while sitting in a coffee shop, crunching huge amounts of data). Doing these things is expensive.

There is a lot one could say in response to each of these points, but Archibald and Feldman’s case is interesting and plausible.

Having answered their main question, Archibald and Feldman must admit something that is perhaps uncomfortable. Their view implies that it is not possible to reduce the cost of college without decreasing quality. Therefore, if one wants to increase access to higher education, one must devote more resources to higher education. This is not a message that will go over well in legislatures. Archibald and Feldman propose to double federal support for higher education grants. They also argue for a simplification of higher education financing by eliminating all current financial aid programs that offer grants (e.g., Pell Grants) and replacing them with grants given to each high school graduate.  This money could be used at any institution, but would be lost after a certain number of years if not used for higher education. This is a version of Georgia’s HOPE scholarship and Archibald and Feldman have very positive things to say about HOPE.

Although I am not sure that I agree with all their conclusions, Archibald and Feldman have written a nicely accessible introduction to the economics of higher education. Anyone working in the field would benefit from reading their book.

Footnotes

(1) As Archibald and Feldman note, this phenomenon has been studied for a long time, at least as far back a Ricardo in the early 19th century. In economics, it is called “cost disease” even enough this name isn’t very helpful.

Teaching With Your Mouth Shut by Don Finkle

I should first admit that Teaching With Your Mouth Shut has been sitting on my bookshelf for more than a couple of years—gathering dust and begging to be read. I’ve always found the premise to be enticing, but had never gone beyond the first couple of chapters. Here’s the other full-disclosure comment I need to make before diving in to the book.  Don Finkle taught and wrote about his experiences at Evergreen State College in the state of Washington. Other than being a public institution, Finkle’s experiences at Evergreen State appear to be a world apart from Georgia State, i.e., he is a classics instructor writing at the end of the last millennium in a selective liberal arts college build on cooperative learning groups with an interdisciplinary emphasis and employing narrative statements about students’ work in place of traditional letter grades. Yet, as I read this relatively short book (169 pages, including the appendix), the lessons for any instructor flowed from each page.

The key premise of the book is that Telling is NOT Teaching. Of course, but our practice often belies our conviction.  Finkle bases his assertion on years of teaching in higher education and on research reviews that show interactive forms of instruction ( e.g., discussions) result in higher retention, transfer of knowledge, development of skills, and motivation than do telling/lecturing (see Gardiner, L., 1994).  To emphasize the point, Finkle challenges readers to think about the most significant learning experiences of their lives and surmises that such experiences don’t result from lectures—and quite often teachers were not involved at all.

In the chapters that follow this introduction, Finkle reflects how books, classmates, collaborating and writing promote meaningful learning more effectively than does teacher telling. The principles which guide Finkle’s practice are sound: …students can learn nothing of which they do not feel the real and present advantage in either pleasure or need (p.52, quoting Rousseau) and John Dewey’s guidance to link students’ interest to need. Sometimes (for me) Findle’s  examples of how these principles work fall short. For example,  he assumes that students would have come to class having carefully read the assigned portion of the Illiad (perhaps at Evergreen they do) and that their engagement with the text provides sufficient motivation for them to analyze whether the epic praises or condemns war. One of the most common complaints I hear from GSU faculty is that students do not read what is assigned—even when the material is more relevant and engaging than the Illiad. If we get beyond the specifics of the examples given (nearly all deal with teaching the classics) and consider ways to make course content relevant and meaningful, then the use of texts offer a strategy much more powerful than telling the content to students. The key here is to find a way to make the content of the text meaningful and appealing to students —a puzzle to be solved. 

Four chapters which comprise the heart of the book have a common theme—engage students in the content to develop the skills of the discipline (i.e., critical reading, deep thinking, thoughtful expression). They are reminiscent of John Biggs’ position that learning is not about what the instructor does but about what the instructor gets the students to do. It is emphasizing the skills that is essential—engaging student to make overt responses through reading, discussing the content in order to answer relevant questions, cooperating and collaborating with others, and expressing the conclusions and receiving feedback in writing. Principles of how Finkle accomplishes this are as follow.

• Having unwavering faith that students’ inquiry is superior to teacher’s telling.
• Making the class a safe place to make mistakes and to learn to examine and question external “authority”.
• Students need feedback, but not all student work needs to be graded.
• Guiding inquiry by soliciting questions, highlighting important contributions, providing a good example of inquiry, assisting students to stay focused, and summarizing key points are ways instructors can contribute to student inquiry.
• Writing personal notes to students on how to improve papers, rather than writing comments on their papers.

For me, the chapter on Experiences that Teach: Creating Blueprints for Learning was especially helpful in laying out the structure for promoting student learning.  Finkle outlines the steps for organizing a model course, or conceptual workshop as he describes it, which supports student inquiry.

• The keystone is to present students with an engaging, provocative question to answer.
• Additional questions are presented in a controlled sequence that requires students, working together, to examine various aspects of the problem.
• Plan a beginning, middle and end for the experience which an emphasis on using the skills of the discipline, as well as learning the content. Finkle emphasizes the importance of emotional satisfaction, as well as intellectual closure.
• Conceptual workshops offer the instructor the opportunity to serve as a witness to student learning as well as being a resource. Listening to students typically reveals that their level of understanding is not as far along as the instructor assumed.
• Save the brilliant lecture to be delivered after the conceptual workshop.

Finkle deals with the issue of what happens when an instructor refuses to teaching--what do students do? Is the instructor giving up power or authority and what does it matter?  In his example, the students initially struggle with not being lead by the instructor. After about three weeks of agony, students “launch happily into a discussion when the bell rings, proud of their new found ability to discuss a work of literature in their teacher’s presence without his direct assistance (p. 113). Perhaps at Evergreen. I’m not sure that GSU students would continue to attend the class, let alone come prepared to independently discuss assigned readings. Finkle does warn of the challenges that instructors face if the prevailing classroom culture (especially student expectations)  is that instructors pour content into students’ heads and then students parrot it back. As I read this section, I thought about the feedback we’ve gotten from GSU students about what would help them to learn more. A large number of our students want their instructors to put PowerPoint slide of the course content online (Cliff Notes in the new millennium).  This is the opposite of what Finkle would advise. Even Finkle warns that a single course experience of teaching with ones mouth shut is likely to be met with student resistance.

A concept that Finkle did not address, but which I think fits this approach comes from David Ausubel : “The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows”. Getting a sense of students’ prior knowledge and possible misconceptions is inherently available if we tell less and listen more.  Unfortunately, learning about what students’ level of understanding is not something that is in common practice in most classes. We often start with the beginning of the book and attempt to cover the content.

If you would like a copy of Teaching with Your Mouth Shut, we have a couple of copies available in the CII. Just let me know:  hdangel@gsu.edu.

The Fall of Faculty and The Rise of the Administrative University

George Rainbolt

A Harangue

In The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters, Benjamin Ginsberg, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins, argues that many of academia’s ills are caused by a rise in the number of administrators. From 1975 to 2005, the average student-to-faculty ratio has held steady at about 15 full-time equivalent (FTE) students for each FTE faculty member. Over this period, the average student-to-administrator ratio has dropped from 84 to 68 and the average student-to-staff ratio has dropped from 50 to 21. (1) He also points to large variation (more than 400%) in students per staff across apparently similar institutions. (2) Among the problems laid at the door of this increase administrators are: (useless) strategic plans, a great deal of wasted time, reduced faculty governance, reduction in the quality and quantity of instruction and research, and increased costs for students.

There are some worthwhile things in this book. Ginsberg’s comments about strategic planning put the utility and effectiveness of this process into perspective. He effectively argues that most strategic plans are inter-changeable. His comments about a herd-mentally among those who read The Chronicle of Higher Education have some validity. He also usefully points out that if faculty object to administrative management, they must be willing to spend the time and energy necessary to shoulder administrative tasks. I also agree that it is useful to look at the student-to-staff ratio across similar institutions. If the ratio is low compared to similar institutions, that does seem to be a good reason to consider reductions in the number of staff. Although Ginsberg does not explicitly discuss this point, it is always worth remembering that, while the creation and dissemination of knowledge is the fundamental purpose of higher education, service work, and therefore much of the work done by staff and administrators, is valuable merely as a means to the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

On the other hand, the book has a number of flaws. The tone often seems more appropriate to a blog than to an academic book. For example, regarding a person at Florida State University whose job description is “Serves as primary requestor and receiver of the Offices of the Provost and President,” Ginsberg remarks:

“Perhaps this might be seen by some as a radical notion, but it seems to me that if the provost and president could learn to do their own requesting and receiving (this might entail learning to use the telephone), the need for still more faculty layoffs and program cuts might be reduced. Just a thought.” (3)

This sort of tone makes it harder to reflect on a person’s argument.

Ginsburg does not effectively argue that the increase in administrators has been harmful to universities. He cites examples of wasteful and/or harmful administrators, but he does not consider the data that support the view that non-academic factors are important to teaching and research. It is not clear to me that the staff members who organize major fairs and the staff members who track the budget of a research grant are doing harm to academia. The key is to have the minimum number of staff needed for to maximize effective teaching and worthwhile research.

Ginsberg’s causal arguments are often weak. He often fails to consider alternative causes of the ills he cites and overlooks the possibility of multiple causal factors. For example, reduction in state support is a possible cause of increased tuition and fees, but that view does not get a credible discussion in the book. There are many cases where anecdotes substitute for data. For example, Ginsberg claims that university administrators are corrupt and gives several examples. He provides no data about whether university administrators are more corrupt than administrators at other organizations.

In some case, the causal hypotheses suggested by Ginsburg are unsupported by evidence. For example, he objects to the rise of civility codes at many universities and claims that they are caused by administrators’ desire to control faculty combined with extreme left-wing views of a few faculty members. It is not clear to me how one could get good evidence for or against this claim, but it does not fit with my experience. I have not seen administrators leading the charge for civility codes.

Finally, Ginsberg does not look very deeply at possible causes for an increase in the number of administers. He considers hypotheses such as increased reporting requirements and students demanding higher level of ancillary services (such as rec centers and counseling), but attributes most of the increase to administrators’ desire to increase their power and prestige. While this desire may well be part of the cause of the increase in administrators, many groups want to increase their power and prestige and we need to look for the structural factors that enabled the increase in university administrators. For example, one might argue that the increase in the percentage high school graduates who go to college has brought to universities a group of students who require more from the institution.

Every student, faculty member, or staff person who has been frustrated by a university administrator will have a spark of recognition when Ginsburg describes the different types of bad administrators and their effects. On the other hand, in a world with not enough time to read, I cannot recommend this book.

George Rainbolt

Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Georgia State University.

-------------------------------------

(1) Chapter 1, Table 3. Page numbers are not cited because I read a Kindle edition of this book.

(The data and definitions are from the National Center for Education Statistics.)

(2) Chapter 7, Section “The Board.”

(3) Chapter 6, Section “Administrative Priorities”

Predictable Outcomes

According to William Bowen, Matthew Chingos and Michael McPherson there are patterns of educational attainment at public universities (which happen to educate two-thirds of all full-time students seeking bachelor's degrees). In their rather comprehensive text Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Public Universities, the authors examined what they argued are four reliable indicators of college success: 1. choice of major; 2. academic performance; 3. time-to-degree; and 4. graduation. Their study included 124,522 students who matriculated as first-time freshmen in fall 1999. Their evidence revealed the following important and useful information (my suggestions are in italics):

• Nearly half (44%) of all withdrawals occur after the second year (therefore universities should consider academic support focused on students starting their junior year and continuing through graduation)



• 3.0 or above grade point average in the first-year of college has a significant impact on graduation rates (therefore student affairs professionals must be keenly aware of their critically important academic function outside of the classroom)



• Raising the student index does not appreciably raise the graduation rate (therefore make all students regardless of academic preparedness feel the high expectation that they must graduate)

These conclusions are but a few proffered by the authors; I purposefully shied away from discussing their findings concerning race/ethnicity and social economic status in graduation rate disparities. I think anyone interested in that type of information should read the text, and daresay you will find it quite enlightening.

Building Expertise: Cognitive Methods for Training and Performance Improvment

Discussion by George Pullman

I've found this book tremendously interesting because it provides advice about how to teach based on research into cognition and memory. I wish I had more time to sew the pieces I've excerpted below into a coherent overview of the book because the effort would ensure deeper encoding, but the Kindle running summary approach will have to do for now once again.

And again, frustratingly, no page numbers. The quotations below highlight about three quarters of the book. You want to read the whole thing.

But before I get to that, I want to highlight an observation that the author makes near the end of the book: "minimize the need for the learner to make inferences". This assertion is akin to the usability book Don't Make Me Think. One might argue that by the time a student gets to university, their ability to draw inferences should be the only thing we are really interested in and the most reliable way to assess a students' knowledge and ability to think. If you are teaching a procedural activity, and memorizing the steps isn't going to be effective because they are complex and you have to know how each step effects the process, then drawing inferences for the learner will help them avoid pointless errors. But if what you want them to learn is how to think like a member of a discipline -- like a chemist or an anthropologist or an art historian -- then doesn't it make sense to set up learning experiences that require the learner to draw inferences? On the other hand, playing "guess what's on my mind" is a frustrating and useless activity and if you make people infer, you have no control over where they will go and you won't necessarily see the thought process that led to the conclusion, especially if the conclusion is out of sync.  Anyway,

• Part of building expertise is to train the brain to “see” problems through the eyes of an expert; in other words, to build the ability to represent problems in ways that lead to effective solutions.  
• Most modern scientific findings today are the result of research teams working collaboratively expertise is the product of mental models that develop over long periods of time, with the highest levels of expertise growing out of deliberate practice.   
• Learners with little knowledge about the topic were greatly helped by graphics; whereas graphics did not improve learning of learners with relevant background.
•  In spite of the popularity of individual differences known as learning styles, research points to prior experience as the most significant learner characteristic influencing learning practice opportunities. In contrast, learners with greater prior knowledge have more mental resources to draw upon during learning.
•  To the extent that you can make tradeoffs in lesson design based on their psychological effects and can justify your decisions to others, you embrace evidence-based practice.
• The primary goal of organizational training is to help learners build the best mental models to support job-relevant expertise.
• Novices will be much more subject to cognitive load in working memory than will experts in their skill field, and therefore novices will require different instructional methods for success in learning  873    
• Learners who have well-developed schemas have a more extensive basis for the integration of new content than learners lacking related schemas.
• Motivation relies on of a set of beliefs—beliefs about yourself, about the learning goals and content, and about the outcomes from a learning event.
• Help learners selectively attend to what is important by adding cues such as behavioral objectives and by avoiding distractions that cause learners to divide their attention
• Many believe that the MTV and video game generation is accustomed to high-intensity multimedia and will profit from rich media. However, experiments with college-age learners in which background music, environmental sounds, or both music and sounds were added to a narrated multimedia lesson found that learning was 61 to 149 percent better in the absence of unnecessary audio.
• By studying a worked example, the learner can build a mental model of how to solve that type of problem in a manner that requires less mental effort than directly solving the problem herself.
• Research shows that when learners have contact with the instructor while doing individual work, their engagement rates increase by around 10 percent.
• I have found that the common technique of pausing and asking: “Does anyone have a question?” is usually not productive. Instead, pause for a practice exercise or brief participant discussion that requires learners to apply new knowledge and skills. During the activity, the participants and instructor can verify understanding and learner questions will surface.
• Brophy and Good (1986) recommend that: “Achievement is maximized when teachers not only actively present material, but structure it by…outlining the content and signaling transitions between lesson 
• parts; calling attention to main ideas; summarizing subparts of the lesson as it proceeds” 
• Problem-based learning is a type of collaborative learning in which a small group of five to seven learners begins their learning with a problem discussion. The lesson follows a structured process, including identifying potential solutions to or causes of the problem, defining learning issues, conducting individual research on the learning issues, and reconvening to resolve the problem. 
• Those who had attempted to answer and justify responses to pre-questions learned the most. Even learners in that group who gave incorrect responses to the pre-questions showed better outcomes than those in the other two groups.
• Research on discourse processing shows that people work harder to understand material when they feel they are in a conversation with a partner, rather than simply receiving information.
• Learners love examples. In fact, they prefer them to explanations.
• Many research studies conducted with all age groups over the past forty years provide consistent evidence that, under the right conditions, participants who study together learn more than those who study alone. This holds true for many different subject areas and a wide range of tasks completed by learners who work in small groups or in pairs (Cohen, 1994; Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 2007; Lou, Abrami, & d’Apollonia, 2001; Qin, Johnson, & Johnson, 1995; Springer, Stanne, & Donovan, 1999)
• Wiley and Voss’s (1999) findings that individual learners assigned to write a pro-and-con argument learned more than learners asked to write either a narration or a summary 
• Mayer and Wittrock (2006): “Creative thinking involves generating ideas that could be used to solve a problem, whereas critical thinking involves evaluating ideas that could be used to solve a problem” (p, 288, emphasis mine [Clark's])
• Mayer and Wittrock (1996) conclude that “Modern attempts to find mind-improving subject matter such as Head Start in preschool or LOGO have not been more successful than historical attempts to use Latin to improve minds. A consistent theme is that a short course of study in one subject-matter area does not have enduring effects on solving radically different problems in other subject matter domains” (p. 52)
• ECONOMIC COMPETITIVENESS increasingly relies on adaptive expertise—expertise that grows from flexible and creative thinking skills problem-centered design as an instructional strategy in which tasks or problems relevant to the instructional objective are the context for learning presents content in a relevant context.  
• The best feedback is aligned to productive task goals and is informative as well as corrective include a self-assessment diagnostic test they can use to define their qualifications for your class

The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How.

Daniel Coyle, 2009

Discussion by George Pullman

This is a readily digestible rendition of some of the findings of psychologists who study expertise and its acquisition. Coyle's presentation of that information is wrapped in a personal travelogue. He went to various places in the world, he calls them "hotspots", which have produced a remarkable number of people talented in a specific endeavor --Soccer in Brazil, golf in South Korea, tennis is Russia, music in The Catskills. He then argues that these places have been successful because of how they teach, breaking the skill set down into component parts or "chunks" and practicing them slowly and repeatedly, focused always on detecting and correcting errors and striving always, endlessly for perfection. Someone who is on the path to becoming great at something notices even small errors and feels them deeply, often even developing a private language to describe them. The would-be expert doesn't blame others or make excuses. He or she slows down; locates the cause of the error; repeats the correct move; fixes the error and moves on. Would-be experts also push themselves always just beyond their comfort zones (Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development) so that new imperfections are bound to arise; thus they can fix those too. Coyle observes that most people try to avoid errors and to mitigate their psychological impact when they happen, two tactics which are counter-productive of expertise.

From a writing teacher's perspective, one of Coyle's more interesting examples is the Brontës sisters, three girls from a not terribly learned family raised in the middle of nowhere special who grew up to write remarkably good novels. Why? Because they played at writing novels with serious intensity from the time they were children.

Barker's work conclusively establishes two facts about the Brontës' little books. First, they wrote a great deal in a variety of forms—twenty-two little books averaging eighty pages each in one fifteen-month period—and second, their writing, while complicated and fantastical, wasn't very good. As Barker put it, “Their slap-dash writing, appalling spelling, and non-existent punctuation well into their late teenage years is usually glossed over [by Brontë biographers], as is the frequent immaturity of thought and characterization.

 The unskilled quality of their early writing isn't a contradiction of the literary heights they eventually achieved—it's a prerequisite to it. They became great writers not in spite of the fact that they started out immature and imitative but because they were willing to spend vast amounts of time and energy being immature and imitative, building myelin in the confined, safe space of their little books.

 “The fact that the creative activity of writing about an invented world was a joint exercise contributed enormously to the authors' enjoyment. It was a marvelous game, in which each participant eagerly ingested and responded to their sibling's latest installment.”

As writing coaches, when we focus on the surface level of our students' work, "appalling spelling, and non-existent punctuation", we teach at cross purposes. We make them think that grammar and punctuation are all we care about and thus that we are superficial nit picking simple minded souls when in fact we agree that such matters are trivial but nevertheless prerequisite. We want our students to feel a spelling mistake or a punctuation error or a subject verb agreement error the way a skilled musician hears a bad note or an ill-tuned instrument. We want them to wince and fix it before they turn it in so that we can then focus on the ideas, which is what we too would rather focus on. If we ignore the superficial errors, as we do when we give one grade for content and one for form, we reinforce the idea that basic conventions don't matter, but if we line item edit, we either overwhelm them with corrections after the fact, and thus they don't learn to wince, or they discount our efforts as those of superficial elitists, ignore the marks and learn to shrug instead of wince.  So we have to engage their interests, get them to question their ideas, interrogate their thinking, and then oh by the way this sentence is fused ... you need to punctuate it like this... because... Targeted practice means fitting the advice to the recipient's ways of learning and sense of what is important but with the goal that they should learn to wince at what makes us wince. So the feedback has to come quickly. Students need to write short pieces frequently and get near as possible instant feedback.

Key to the effort required for this kind of deep or targeted practice is desire, he calls it "ignition",  that comes from personal identity. The people who succeed at becoming truly outstanding at something can become so because they see themselves as the sort of person who is supposed to become an expert. To slack off, to lose focus, are alienating experiences that the would-be expert instinctively rejects. Greatness is derived from a sense of destiny, but it has to do with psychology rather than fate. Novices destined for greatness have a "vision of their ideal self" and that vision is what keeps them focused. It helps a great deal if they can readily conjure a concrete example who resembles them in many ways. That's why when Se Ri Pak won the McDonald's Master's golf tournament, South Korean girls saw a possibility they hadn't seen before. I can't help but remember the Michael Jordan Wheaties ad, "Just like Mike".

I'm not sure I've captured Coyle's point here, but I have a doubt or two about what I've just said. I'm not sure every expert grows up dreaming of playing Carnegie Hall or hoisting trophy.  Some people just love the actions involved in something to the extent that that's all they want to do. Moe Norman was a Canadian golfer who loved to stand on a range and hit golf balls all day long. And he hit them really really well, so well that he could play professionally, but professional golf didn't appeal to him. He hated the professional part. He was a bit of a savant I suppose, awkward around people and impatient with social activities. It was as if his being needed the sensation of hitting a golf ball and nothing else. Moe's vision was inward focused. Maybe this is why Tiger Woods keeps tearing down his swing. It's the sensations created by the pursuit of perfection that appeal to his being. Not the achievement, but the pursuit. At any rate, 

Expertise is also affected by great coaching. Coyle observes that "master coaches" are great intuitionists of character. They can tell what kind of work ethic a prospective student has, what kind of analogies will make sense to each one, how each student needs to be encouraged and in exactly what ways--harsh with some, gentle with others but also cerebral with some and kinesthetic with others. Great coaches don't say a great deal or spend a lot of time in inspirational talk. They watch and provide feedback on specific chunks in a sequence. They are, in effect, an extra pair of eyes and a different vantage point  for the would-be to use to refine his or her inner sense of the activity they are trying to perfect.

Practice and feedback, overseen by Shiloff's gentle but tough-minded coaching, correcting any inaccurate perceptions and pushing them to try harder, once more.

Linger in the discomfort a little longer each time.

 The Shyness Clinic. “When I thought I was born this way, then I thought, what's the use,” Andre said. “But when it's a skill, everything changes.”

 Practice staves off cognitive decline.  

Pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their effort.

It's Not Tv, It's Social Tv

It's Not Tv, It's Social Tv

http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP7799

 

Participants:

Chloe Sladden (Twitter)

Fred Graver (The Travel Channel)

Gavin Purcell (Late Night with Jimmy Fallon)

Lila King (CNN.com)

Timothy Shey (Next New Networks)

 

Summary

"How is social media changing the TV experience for good? Over the past ten years, we've seen television become truly interactive, from SMS voting on American Idol to real-time audience feedback via Twitter and Facebook becoming a part of everything from CNN to Oprah to Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. At the same time, web series have built millions of viewers on places like YouTube, iTunes, and XBox Live. Now a new wave of always-connected mobile apps, set-top boxes, and gaming platforms are making entertainment more social, location-aware, and connected than ever. Our panel of producers of hit TV shows and top web platforms will talk about how they're enabling social viewing and collaboration between producers, stars, and audiences in real time to create new kinds of TV experiences."

 

While I am not particularly interested in TV experiences connected to education, I did find this panel to be one of the most useful and interesting (and I'm not just saying this because my wife was on the panel or because they handed out Krispy Creme donuts).  The panel focused on how communities can be created using Twitter or other social media tools to create brand loyalty, drive larger audiences to live TV shows, gather user feedback data, and use audiences to create content.  Much of the discussion seems easily transferable to the University.

 

GSU has various Twitter and Facebook accounts (Arts & Sciences, Parking Services, Bill Curry, School of Music, Campus Events, etc.), and from what I can tell they serve as a place to announce events and information.  The GSU social media page is at www.gsu.edu/social.html .  I'm wondering in what ways the university, departments, or individual faculty members could use/are using social media beyond just the one-way dissemination of information.  I just signed up for Twitter, so I'm no expert, but just listening to this discussion, hashtags are the easiest way to do this. Gavin Purcell showed an example from Jimmy Fallon that makes it clear how hashtags can be used: http://www.hulu.com/watch/192364/late-night-with-jimmy-fallon-hashtags-aw-hell-no .  Most of the sessions I went to at SXSW had a hashtag where the audience could tweet questions for the panel throughout the session.  Robinson College of Business is creating something similar to this with Test Question System: http://www.youtube.com/georgiastateu#p/u/30/hRUd0Sc3ve4  (why not just use Twitter?).  The in-class application seems useful and easy, but I'm wondering how it could be used to create GSU communities outside of the classroom.  Could Political Science create a GSU hashtag for the next presidential debates and give students a place for discussing the debates as they happen with their peers?  What about a pop culture class asking students to analyze a TV show as it happens?  Music students a concert?  All these types of communities already exist elsewhere (and for all I know this is happening here), but having GSU communities could be an exciting way to see what students are thinking, to get feedback about how we are doing as eachers or as a university, and to make students feel more a part of GSU.

B

Death of the textbook, Emergence of games

Death of the textbook, Emergence of games

Participants:
Alan Gershenfeld (E-Line Media)
James Bower (Numedeon/Whyville)
Sara DeWitt (PBS)

Provided Summary
"Textbooks published on trees are on the way out in Texas, California and the rest of the country and world. The Textbook industry is hoping they will be replaced with on-line versions spruced up with animated graphics. However, it is likely that on-line textbooks will be no more successful than magazine advertising that morphed into banner ads. Linear content with multiple choice answers at the end of each chapter, won't work. And as with banner ads, on the Internet you can measure that they don't work. What does work? Socially networked GAMES. The question for this panel is whether games will replace traditional educational media, and what those games look like. What will the teachers manual look like? How will learning be assessed? What happens to the classroom, or the school itself, when on-line learning is available 24/7? What does the PTA look like if parents can play along with their kids? What happens to the distinction between vocational and instructional if playing games is equivalent to performing a virtual job or service? And what happens to the college admission process, if instead of taking a standardized aptitude test, students have been playing a complex game for years. In fact, what happens to colleges and universities where lecture halls still reign supreme? There is a revolution underway, driven by kids and the games they play. Will the educational system adapt or die? We will see (and discuss)."

Got in late on this one, but was immediately interested. This panel was focused more on k-12 kids (as are the majority of education panels), but Bower was discussing how the technology of the printing press has dominated the structure of education for hundreds of years. Books, he argued, are the driving force behind having distinct disciplines, departments, and prerequisites. Because books are a fixed medium, textbooks are most efficient when they deal with one topic. Classes develop around the textbooks and a student has to master one issue before they can move to the next. Kids in classes have different skills and experience levels, so many likely know much of the content and have to sit there while others are behind. The teacher has to move through the textbook in a linear way because that is the nature of the book. This is at least how I understood his basic argument. Could be off a bit.

If his explanation is correct, what does this mean for the university? We are certainly more fixed in our disciplines than elementary school teachers. We are rewarded for focus on 1 area and while there's a buzz about interdisciplinary work, there is little reason to work with faculty in other departments and the tenure process actually discourages it. WAC is all about bringing folks in from across the disciplines, but our focus is pedagogy. While most profs are very interested in having discussions about what happens in their classrooms, everybody knows that good teaching is not highly rewarded from the top.

The focus of the panel was how online games can challenge the textbook paradigm. The speakers were involved with the PBS website and Whyville, which are two of the major online educational sites for kids. Whyville sounds particularly interesting. It is the longest running virtual world for kids. They form online communities and can explore the world on their own (heavily guarded and monitored though). There is an economy based on "clams" and "pearls". They earn this money through playing educational games. There is a newspaper that is produced by the kids in the community and many of them create products and set up stores. There is also a government. Because the world has existed for a long time there are a lot of kids who have been there for years and some participate in structured mentor programs for younger kids.

Some of the major issues the panel discussed:

1. How to create a curriculum partially based on games. Part of the power of these sites is that it is relatively not structured. Kids learn at their own pace and can move on when they are ready. They are less likely to get either bored or discouraged. But in a school setting how would this work if games played a major role instead of just a small part. Who would develop this curriculum? How would it be paid for?

2. What role the teacher will play. Teacher training would have to be drastically restructured. One of the panelists argued that the curriculum should be free and all of the money saved should go into professional development.

3. "Assesment should not be episodic but continuous." games are excellent tools for assessment. On the back end teachers, developers, administrators can see when kids are struggling with material or when the work is too easy. This is essential to creating games because kids get either bored or frustrated and will stop trying. This is true for standard education too, but games are much easier to fix than creating a new textbook

Brennan at SXSW

SXSW is not an academic conference. All the panels I've attended have at least 50 people. I am learning this the hard way. 3 of the 6 sessions I've attended so far I had to wait to get in and then had to sit on the floor. Most of the sessions I've been to have over 100 attendees and a couple had a good many more.

Everyone has a laptop, iPad, or iPhone open during the sessions, and all but 2 so far take questions throughout the time of the panel through twitter. I've been surprised that a lot of the panels have had basic technology problems even though there is an army of SXSW technology assistants in all the rooms. It's kind of refreshing actually. All the speakers deal with the problems without skipping a beat.

No one has just read a paper.

My plan is to create an entry for several of the more interesting panels I attend. I will give the title, the participants, and the summary they provided. I will then share what I felt were the most important points. Following is a list of panels I attended and a link to that panel. Some include audio from the panel:

Death of the Textbook, Emergence of Games

The Potential of Augmented Reality for Education

Interactive Comics: Techniques to Enhance Math Education

It's Not Tv, It's Social Tv

Why Visualizing Government Data Makes Taxpayers Happy

Time Traveling: Interfaces for Geotemporal Visualization

Decision Trees: YouTube's New Breed of Interactive Storytellers

Building Fences in the Sky: Geo-Fencing Has Arrived

Keynote Simulcast: Christopher Poole

People-Powered: Technology's Role in the People's Revolution

B

Academically Adrift

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses

by Richard Arum, Josipa Roksa

Discussion by George Pullman

This book is getting a great deal of press and it is certainly worth reading and talking about. If fact, we are planning to gather a group of faculty from across campus for a 2 session discussion of the topics and questions raised by Arum and Roksa. If you don't have time to read the book, the authors provide a great summary here. We are particularly gratified to see capstone courses and portfolios mentioned positively. For a sense of what Academically Adrift is about, have a look at the quotations below. Again, apologies for the absence of page numbers. Kindle app glitch.

• "With a large sample of more than 2,300 students, we observe no statistically significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills for at least 45 percent of the students in our study."
• "While they may be acquiring subject-specific knowledge or greater self-awareness on their journeys through college, many students are not improving their skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing."
• "Evidence of limited learning and persistent inequality should give pause to the recent emphasis on “college for all” policies."
• "Fifty percent of students in our sample reported that they had not taken a single course during the prior semester that required more than twenty pages of writing, and one-third had not taken one that required even forty pages of reading per week."
• "If students are not being asked by their professors to read and write on a regular basis in their coursework, it is hard to imagine how they will improve their capacity to master performance tasks—such as the CLA—that involve critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing."
• "Students are taking courses without significant reading and writing requirements, it is probably unreasonable to expect them to develop skills to improve on performance tasks that require critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication."
• "Having faculty members who are perceived by students as being approachable and having high standards and expectations is associated with greater learning."
• "The combination of reading and writing in coursework was necessary to improve students’ performance on tasks requiring critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in their first two years of college."
• "If we select top-performing institutions—institutions that show much larger gains on the CLA than others, net of individual characteristics— we find, not surprisingly, that their students report higher incidence of behaviors that are beneficial for learning (figure 4.8).61 Students at these institutions report greater course requirements: almost two-thirds (62 percent) of their students reported taking courses that required both reading more than forty pages a week"
• "Among other characteristics, these institutions had an “unshakeable focus on student learning.” Their emphasis on undergraduate learning was manifested in a range of practices, from institutional openness to new and experimental instructional techniques to faculty investing more time in students and taking greater responsibility for them, as well as showing greater commitment to both providing and receiving feedback."
• "When students report that they have taken a class in which they had to read more than forty pages a week and write more than twenty pages over the course of a semester, they also report spending more time studying: more than two additional hours per week than students who do not have to meet such requirements."
• "Faculty throughout the higher-education system have learned that research productivity is rewarded not just with increased salary, but often with reduced course loads—and they have come to believe that to the extent that undergraduate instruction matters at all in these institutions, it is assessed primarily in terms of student satisfaction on course evaluations."
• "Association of American Colleges and Universities and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, for example, urges all institutions to develop “ambitious, specific, and clearly stated goals for student learning” and to “gather evidence about how well students in various programs are achieving learning goals."
• "Association of American Colleges and Universities, for example, has noted that “capstone courses and portfolios provide promising anchors for a meaningful approach to educational accountability."

How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching

Susan A. Ambrose, Michele DiPietro, Michael W. Bridges, Marsha C. Lovett, Marie K. Norman, Jossey-Bass, 2010.


Discussion by George Pullman


This struck me as an extremely useful book. While much of it may seem like common sense to people who have been teaching for years, the authors render this common sense explicit and offer research to back up its validity. While this text is definitely worth reading in its entirety, below are some salient ideas to whet your apatite. Page numbers are absent because I read this book and developed quotations from it via the Kindle App. If you are new to teaching, you definitely want to read this book.

• Because students come to think of writing as a “one size fits all” skill, they misapply conventions and styles from their general writing classes to disciplinary contexts in which they are not appropriate. For example, they might apply the conventions of a personal narrative or an opinion piece to writing an analytical paper or a lab report. 
• Because students learn most effectively when they connect new knowledge to prior knowledge, it can be helpful to begin a lesson by asking students what they already know about the topic in question.    
• Ask Students to Make and Test Predictions 
• Ask Students to Justify Their Reasoning  
• Novice and expert knowledge organizations tend to differ in two key ways: the degree to which knowledge is sparsely versus richly connected, and the extent to which those connections are superficial versus meaningful. 
• A key difference they found was that the good problem solvers were far more likely to monitor their understanding while they studied, that is, to continually stop themselves as they were reading to ask whether they were understanding the concepts just presented      
• Research has shown that good problem solvers will try new strategies if their current strategy is not working, whereas poor problem solvers will continue to use a strategy even after it has failed
• Students who believe intelligence is fixed have no reason to put in the time and effort to improve because they believe their effort will have little or no effect   
• Be More Explicit Than You May Think Necessary    
• Tell Students What You Do Not Want
• Check Students’ Understanding of the Task 
• Provide Performance Criteria with the Assignment   
• Provide students with ample practice and timely feedback to help them develop a more accurate assessment of their strengths and weaknesses     
• Provide Opportunities for Self-Assessment    
• For complex assignments, provide students with a set of interim deadlines or a time line for deliverables that reflects the way that you would plan the stages of work.
• Remember that planning is extremely difficult for novices. 
• Have students create their own plan.    
• Instead of solving or completing a task, students could be asked to plan a solution strategy for a set of problems that involves describing how they would solve each problem.
• Have Students Do Guided Self Assessment 
• Require students to reflect on and annotate their own work   
• What did you learn from doing this project? What skills do you need to work on?    

Bob Broad's What We Really Value

What We Really Value by Bob Broad, 2003

Discussion by George Pullman

This blog is part experiment, part blog entry. I read Broad's book about writing assessment today using the Kindle app on the Ipad and highlighted what I thought was interesting and then copied the highlights from kindle.amazon.com and pasted them below. For some reason there were no page numbers associated with these notes. Perhaps that feature hasn't yet made it into the kindle.amazon website yet. At any rate, what we end up with is a somewhat unreadable gist of the text. Handy as a refresher looking back weeks or months later but not really a useful alternative to reading Broad's book. Given more time I might stitch the more salient quotations together to make a gist.

Broad makes a number of interesting points about the weaknesses of rubrics as writing assessments tools, their lack of context, their idealized assumptions about what we think we value when it comes to writing, among other things.

Interestingly, WAC-CTW did a similarly ethnographic activity to generate one of our early sets of rubrics for critical thinking. We took a list of critical thinking traits and asked faculty to rank them in order of importance and then to rank them in terms of how well they believe their students do them.  You can see the results here.

At any rate, below is a list of direct, verbatim quotations from Broad's book, which I urge you to read..

A prime assumption of my work is that a teacher of writing cannot provide an adequate account of his rhetorical values just by sitting down and reflecting on them; neither can a WPA provide an adequate account of the values of her writing program by thinking about them or even by talking about them in general terms with her writing instructors. 

For all its achievements and successes over the past half century (see Yancey), the field of writing assessment has no adequate method for answering one of its most urgent and important questions: What do we value in our students’ writing? What we have instead are rubrics and scoring guides that “over-emphasize formal, format, or superficial-trait characteristics” of composition (Wiggins 132) and that present “generalized, synthetic representations of [rhetorical] performances … too generic for describing, analyzing, and explaining individual performances” (Delandshere and Petrosky 21).  

within the world of positivist psychometrics, the world in which ETS and other commercial testing corporations still operate, precise agreement among judges is taken as the preeminent measure of the validity of an assessment. 

understand and carefully map out the swampy, rocky, densely forested terrain of writing assessment that they found lying before them, they quickly moved to simplify and standardize it thus:

ETS researchers eventually derived from those seven main headings a list of five “factors” that seemed to capture the values of their readers: Ideas: relevance, clarity, quantity, development, persuasiveness Form: organization and analysis Flavor: style, interest, sincerity Mechanics: specific errors in punctuation, grammar, etc. Wording: choice and arrangement of words And thus was born what became the standard, traditional, five-point rubric

Confronted with an apparent wilderness of rhetorical values, they retreated to a simplified, ordered, well-controlled representation that would keep future writing assessment efforts clean of such disturbing features as dissent, diversity, context-sensitivity, and ambiguity. 

The historical context of U.S. culture in 1961 and the following decades, rubrics may have done more good for writing assessment and the teaching of writing than any other concept or technology. During a time when educators were under constant pressure to judge “writing” ability using multiple-choice tests of grammar knowledge, the work of Diederich, French, and Carlton (and other researchers at ETS and elsewhere) legitimized direct assessment of writing (assessment that took actual writing as the object of judgment). 

Rubrics provide badly needed relief and enable faculty to assign and judge actual writing from large numbers of students with relative speed and ease. 

Scoring guides yielded yet another set of advantages: documentation of the process of evaluating writing. 

Students, instructors, and the general public could hold in their hands a clear framework for discussing, teaching, and assessing writing.

Assessments should improve performance (and insight into authentic performance), not just audit it. (129) 

For the assessment to be relevant, valid, and fair, however, it must judge students according to the same skills and values by which they have been taught. 

Very rarely do rubrics emerge from an open and systematic inquiry into a writing program’s values. 

By predetermining criteria for evaluation, such a process shuts down the open discussion and debate among professional teachers of writing that communal writing assessment should provide. 

a rigorous inquiry into what we really value and a detailed document recording the results of that inquiry. 

“Dynamic Criteria Mapping.” 

Huot foresees that the new generation of assessment programs will be
 1. Site-based
2. Locally controlled
3.Context-sensitive 4. Rhetorically based 5. Accessible 

metamorphosing from the psycho-metric paradigm to a hermeneutic one 

The long-term outcome should be better learning for students of composition, enhanced professional development for writing instructors, and increased leverage with the public for writing programs that can publicize a complex and compelling portrait of 

Precisely because they lacked the teacher’s rich knowledge about a particular student, outside 

evaluators wielded their own distinctive authority in deciding which students passed 

participants volunteered to explain their pass/fail votes. Along with evaluative issues that bore directly upon the decision to pass or fail a particular text, related topics often arose that posed substantial and complex questions or problems for the FYE Program as a whole, such as “How do we define ‘competency’ in English 1?” “How important is it for a writer to ‘fulfill the assignment’?” 

First, I systematically, comprehensively, and recursively analyzed more than seven hundred pages of observational notes, transcripts of group discussions and interviews, and program documents to develop an emic map of City University’s terrain of rhetorical values. Working from my best understanding of their experiences, I then brought that conceptual map into dialogue with critiques of traditional writing assessment—and especially of rubrics and scoring guides—current in the literature of evaluation. Extending grounded theory in this way, I found participants’ complex criteria for evaluation cast in a new light, suggesting new possibilities for improving communal writing assessment, professional development, and student learning in the classroom. Dynamic Criteria Mapping seizes on those new possibilities. 

Using QSR Nvivo software for computer-assisted qualitative data analysis, I coded every passage mentioning criteria for evaluation, defined as “any factor that an instructor said shaped or influenced the pass/fail decision on a student’s text.” 

Without a method for placing side by side statements from program documents and candid statements from various norming and trio sessions—some privileging revision and others privileging unrevised prose—a writing program would lack the ability to identify a serious pedagogical and theoretical fissure 

Interesting criterion comes from Grant Wiggins, who complains in several of his publications that he encounters great difficulty trying to persuade groups of English instructors to place Interesting on their rubrics and scoring guides. 

Researching what we really value when teaching and reading rhetoric, as opposed to placing in a rubric only what we think we are supposed to value (typically “objective” and “formal” features) in large-scale assessment settings.

Cliché can be another’s Subtlety suggests that a writing program’s Dynamic Criteria Map might contain potentially hidden links among criteria depending on different readers’ literary or stylistic orientations. 

Dynamic Criteria Mapping can document and bring to light evaluative systems of which composition faculty might otherwise remain unaware (or about which they prefer to remain silent), 

A key observation at the outset of this section is that Constructing Writers is a widespread and perhaps inescapable feature of reading. We always construct an ethos behind a text as a means of interpreting and evaluating that text. What is new is our awareness that we need to document such evaluative dynamics so we can hold them up to critical scrutiny and make programmatic decisions about how to handle them. 

Ethos as a Textual Criterion consists of inferences drawn by readers on the basis of clues observable in the text. 

Constructing Writers is a Contextual Criterion precisely because the clues from which readers construct these portraits or narratives of authors come from outside of the student-authored text. 

Ted felt that the teacher’s wider knowledge of the student’s work gave the teacher the ability to make a better judgment than outside instructors’ “cold readings” alone could provide. 


 Imagined Details was the dominant mode of Constructing Writers in norming sessions, where (with one or two exceptions) the authors of sample texts were complete strangers to every reader present. 

They frequently inferred, imagined, or simply assumed “facts” about a student-author and her composition processes. 


Portfolios are, in and of themselves, powerful contexts for rhetorical judgment. The discourse of participants in this study lays out several specific ways in which evaluation of portfolios differs from evaluations of single texts. 

Which is not to say that a single essay might not tip the scales one way or another on a borderline portfolio, 

Instructors sometimes attempted to project imaginatively into the English 2 classroom, to imagine a particular student there and especially to imagine themselves or one of their colleagues teaching that student. 

Depending on their deeply felt sense of what were the core goals of English 1, instructors might pass or fail an essay 

Right or wrong, many instructors held an almost magical faith in the capacity of the Writing Center to cure student-authors of their rhetorical ills. 

The common evaluative implication of this faith in the Writing Center was that borderline texts failed because instructors believed authors could have gone the Writing Center to get help with their problems. If texts that came before them for evaluation showed difficulties of various kinds (most often with Mechanics), students were assumed to have neglected to make use of the Writing Center as a resource. 

how the professional growth and awareness (or mood or level of exhaustion) of the instructor-evaluator shapes evaluation. 

DCM transforms the way we understand not only writing assessment but the nature of composition itself. 

Communal writing assessment, and especially Dynamic Criteria Mapping, require more of faculty than do teaching and grading in isolation. 

Instructors become more aware of their own evaluative landscapes; they learn how others often evaluate and interpret texts very differently; and they work together to forge pedagogical policy on such sticky issues as revision policies, how to value in-class timed writing in a portfolio, and plagiarism. 

The purpose of DCM is to discover, negotiate, and publish the truth about the evaluative topography of any given writing program, not to turn away from complexity and dissent 

Sample texts for DCM should be selected because they feature as many kinds of rhetorical successes and failures as possible. 

Tape recordings and transcriptions of norming sessions, trio meetings, and solo interviews. 

scribes should write down the specific criteria to which readers refer when they explain why they passed or failed a particular sample text. Scribes should also note the specific passage in the specific sample text to which a participant refers when invoking one or more criteria. 

Now that they know, perhaps for the first time, how they do value students’ writing, they need to undertake high-powered professional discussions regarding how they should value that writing. In other words, their focus shifts at this point from the descriptive to the normative.