Teaching

Hello and welcome to Teaching, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s newsletter. Today, Dan tells you about a new curricular requirement to help students learn to use data, and Beckie reports on research linking the relevance of coursework with later well-being. She also shares one reader’s thoughts about one pitfall of small classes. And Dan points out some other recent scholarship.

Math in the Real World

Data is an increasingly pervasive force in American life, with the power to shape perception and policy. And so it makes a certain amount of sense that Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute recently adopted a new “data dexterity” requirement for its students, starting in fall 2019.The new requirement, which has a lot in common with more-traditional curricular areas like mathematics and data or quantitative literacy, will be fulfilled through two courses, one at the introductory level and another in a student’s major. The goal, as RPI put it in a news release, is to develop a “proficiency in using diverse datasets to define and solve complex real-world problems.”

Kristin Bennett, a math professor there, gave an example from her entry-level course, “Introduction to Data Mathematics.” Her students work in teams on a project to design drugs, and they devise computer models to predict how different chemicals interact. To do that, they might learn linear algebra or multivariate modeling, subjects that they wouldn’t get to until much later in a traditional curriculum. The new requirement at RPI, she said in an interview, can expose them to sophisticated material earlier, and in a tangible way — by allowing them to work on problems in complex projects with real-world applications.

“These problems are completely open ended,” Bennett said. “They kind of experience what it’s like in the real world to do math.”

Teaching students linear algebra earlier than they would traditionally encounter it also means that there are trade-offs, and Bennett has had to make tough choices about what material to leave out. Some concepts that students typically learn in lower-level courses will get short shrift; and she will teach linear algebra in what she calls “a narrow and deep way.”

Narrowing a curriculum so that students focus on — and hopefully learn — a smaller number of key concepts rather than covering a wide swath of content is a trade-off that I’ve heard many faculty members in lots of disciplines grapple with. Some professors have estimated that they have had to cut as much as a third of a course’s content when they adopted active-learning techniques instead of teaching via lecture.

This dynamic, in turn, mirrors an even larger situation facing many disciplines, says Lee Ligon, chair of the core-curriculum committee at RPI. Professors must make increasingly difficult choices about what material to include in their courses as data, research, and knowledge proliferate at an accelerating clip. They have to determine what new information students need to know while also weighing which pieces of foundational knowledge they should continue to teach. “We have to turn that around into a strength,” said Legon, an associate professor of biology, “to turn that overabundance of information around and use it as a lever to pry open new questions.”

Have you ever dealt with this challenge in your discipline? How have you weighed what content to keep teaching and what you can let go of? What have been your guiding principles? Email me at dan.berrett@chronicle.com and I may use it in a future newsletter.

Why Relevant Coursework Matters

People who believe their college coursework is relevant to their work and day-to-day life are more likely to report that they received a high-quality education, and that it was worth the cost. That’s the main finding from a study released on Wednesday by Gallup Inc. and Strada Education Network.

The report considers how respondents who’d taken at least some college courses answered two items from Gallup and Strada’s polling: “the courses you took are directly relevant to what you do at work” and “you learned important skills during your education program that you use in your day-to-day life.” Respondents’ answers for each item, on a 1 to 5 Likert scale, were added together to create a measure of relevance.

In addition to its relationship with perceived value, the study found that relevance was linked to respondents’ well-being.

The findings underscore the importance that students place on career preparation, said Carol D’Amico, executive vice president at Strada.

Still, respondents could be interpreting the questions narrowly — so that a writer considers relevant what she learned as an English major — or more broadly, thinking of, say, critical-thinking skills, says Brandon Busteed, executive director of education and work-force development at Gallup.

The good news for higher ed, Busteed says, is “there are relatively simple things we can do in practice” to help students draw connections between coursework and post-college life.

Those applications will be the focus of second of two additional reports that Gallup and Strada plan to release on the topic.

Research, Briefly

• According to what is being promoted as the “largest-ever observational study of undergraduate STEM education,” one in which nearly 550 faculty members were observed as they taught some 700 courses at 25 institutions, more than half — or 55 percent — taught via lecture.
• Undermatching happens when a student attends a less challenging college than his or her academic ability would suggest, and the disconnect can have psychological and emotional consequences, according to a report published in Youth and Society. In fact, the study found that students who undermatch from high school to college go on to experience, on average, a 27-percent increase in symptoms of depression.

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Another Downside of Small Classes

Marilee Mason, an adjunct instructor of English at Weber State University, agrees with Jeffrey H. Karlin, whom we quoted in last week’s newsletter, that very small colleges present a teaching challenge. As Mason sees it, the problem is “impoverished” discussion — not “enough diverse voices to cause a rich exchange of idea.” In a very small class, Mason has found, students are less likely to challenge one another’s views.

The poor class dynamic, Mason writes, can have consequences on students’ performance. She describes a course whose enrollment dwindled from 13 to seven. In the end, three of the remaining students failed — a larger number than she had ever seen do so in a class of 20.

Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.

— Dan and Beckie