With lavish recreation centers and sophisticated research laboratories, life on college campuses is drastically different from what it was 100 years ago. But one thing has stayed virtually the same: classroom teaching. Professors still design lessons, pick out the readings, and decide how to test—in many cases, in the same way they always have.
In the last few years, however, a cottage industry has sprouted up in academe to measure whether students are actually learning and to reform classes that don’t deliver. Accreditors now press colleges to show that they are teaching what students need to know. And as the Obama administration packs more money into student aid, it wants more evidence of educational quality.
But a roadblock may emerge: faculty culture. Not because professors care little about quality or students—indeed, many care deeply—but because of what colleges tell them is important. “Faculty rewards have nothing to do with the ability to assess student learning,” says Adrianna Kezar, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern California. “I get promoted for writing lots of articles, not for demonstrating learning outcomes.”
A survey last year by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment found that provosts at doctoral universities identified “faculty engagement” as their No. 1 challenge in making greater efforts to assess student learning. Faculty members have long enjoyed autonomy in the classroom, and persuading them to change the way they teach is more difficult than it might sound.
But there are some small signs that concerns about teaching quality are having an impact. On several campuses, professors have embraced quality-improvement efforts. In those cases, carrots have worked better than sticks, officials find. Some universities, for example, have given professors small grants to assess and rework basic courses, while others have reduced professors’ required office hours or simply paid them more if they agreed to spend more time making sure their courses delivered.
Universities have also added new tracks to graduate programs in education that teach doctoral students how to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching. And some faculty job advertisements in other disciplines, too, now ask for candidates who have an interest in the area.
Still, quality assessment in higher education is hardly state of the art. “Only a tiny, tiny fraction of all classes being taught now have been part of reform efforts,” says Kevin Carey, policy director at Education Sector, a higher-education think tank, and a regular contributor to The Chronicle. “But with more people pursuing college degrees, we can’t continue to assume they learned a lot without any sort of verification.”
Little Demand From Students
Faculty members are accustomed to having the final say, indeed often the only say, on what goes on in their classrooms. Only if a professor deviates significantly from the norm do administrators intervene. A tenured professor at Louisiana State University was pulled from the classroom after she gave failing grades to most students in her introductory-biology course last year. Short of that, however, professors are typically allowed to conduct their classes as they see fit. That means there is often tremendous variation in what goes on even in different sections of the same course. And it is often hard to tell exactly what students have learned.
“If a student gets an A in my class, and an A in yours, then we say the student is good,” says William G. Tierney, director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis at USC. “We don’t make any comments about what the student has actually learned.”
That’s the case in part because university prestige often stands in as a proxy for learning. “The general public, they want to go to Stanford whether you learn anything or not,” says Ms. Kezar. “As long as employers and parents promote that system, it’s not really about what you learn, they just care if students go to a prestigious place.”
Indeed, many professors feel little pressure from either students or the public to change the way they do business. “Why I need to spend a lot of time working with my colleagues documenting learning outcomes is unclear to me,” Mr. Tierney says of a hypothetical professor. “What is going to happen if I don’t? Will no one take my classes? Will no students attend this university?” Faculty members, Mr. Tierney notes, are busier than ever, and assessing student learning is often viewed as just one more demand on their time. “Should they pay attention to learning outcomes rather than understand how to make their classes go online or how to update the syllabus on reading that’s changed in their area in the last year?” he asks. “They can’t do it all.”
If there is any pressure from students, say professors, it is to keep classwork manageable. Mindy S. Marks, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California at Riverside, performed a study that showed college students spend 10 fewer hours a week studying now than they did in 1961. Meanwhile, college grades on average have gone up. Unless one is to assume that current students learn much more, much faster than students did 50 years ago, a natural conclusion is that professors are demanding less while giving better grades. Meanwhile, neither students nor their parents are complaining.
“We appear to be catering to students’ demands for leisure,” says Philip S. Babcock, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California at Santa Barbara who performed the study with Ms. Marks. “It doesn’t look to us as though there is any external incentive to make courses more rigorous and grading more strict.”
Even professors who believe they are good teachers with high standards often have no real way to confirm that. “I was looking at an English 101 composition class, and the professor was having them read Foucault,” says Andrew Hacker, an emeritus professor of political science at the City University of New York’s Queens College. “The kids will memorize it like quadratic equations, but they will forget it right away and never use it again.” The young professor, though, probably thought she was doing the right thing, says Mr. Hacker, because “teaching Foucault is what she knows, and it will impress her elders.”
But even Mr. Hacker, who is beginning his 55th year of college teaching, acknowledges that he has no way of knowing whether his own lessons get through to students. Yes, they seem rapt during class and compliment him on his teaching. Still, he says: “I couldn’t say objectively or reliably what I do for students.”
Researchers have found that there are different ways to measure a professor’s effectiveness in the classroom. Scott E. Carrell, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California at Davis, studied student learning at the U.S. Air Force Academy and found that students who took introductory calculus from experienced professors didn’t do as well in the intro class as students who took the course from less-experienced instructors. But students who had the experienced professors did better in subsequent courses, like Calculus II, than did students who had inexperienced teachers for introductory calculus. Mr. Carrell’s results were published last spring in an article in the Journal of Political Economy called “Does Professor Quality Matter?”
Fear of Testing
Because professors prize their autonomy, they are leery of any efforts to standardize classroom teaching. That doesn’t necessarily mean they just want to do their own thing whether it’s effective or not, or that they don’t care about students. Gary Rhoades, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, says good professors already pay attention to what works with students and what doesn’t. “What do you think we’ve all been doing for 100 years?” he asks.
But no one wants a higher-education version of the testing spawned by No Child Left Behind, the standards-based reform created when the Bush Administration began questioning what students in elementary and secondary schools learned. Requiring professors to document student learning can be counterproductive, says Mr. Rhoades.
“There is the mentality that you have to have a lesson plan and learning objectives, and so you end up encouraging the professors to spend more time filing those than they actually do engaging students and working with them,” says Mr. Rhoades. “Classes are like organic things: Not every one is the same. If you are a good professor, you are responding to what students are getting and what they’re not. If you try and mechanize that, it can be a problem.”
Mikita Brottman says listing learning goals on her syllabus doesn’t make sense for the courses she teaches in psychology. “These aren’t courses where I have certain information that I present to students, and students will have the ability to do A, B, and C,” says Ms. Brottman, a professor in the department of language, literature, and culture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. “It’s much more like an exploration. I don’t know what the students are going to achieve. It will be something different for everyone.”
Research and Results
Plenty of campuses, though, are beginning to evaluate courses—particularly those within the general-education curriculum—to ensure that students are learning basic skills. Getting faculty members involved in those efforts can be complicated.
North Carolina A&T State University is part of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, which helps campuses “enhance the educational impact of their programs.” North Carolina A&T asked students what worked and what didn’t in the classroom.
Based on the students’ responses, the university started leaning on professors to provide two hours a week of extra group tutoring for students, something that professors haven’t been pleased about. So the university is experimenting with ways to entice professors. At first the university offered to reduce their required office hours. But that didn’t prove enough of an incentive, so the university is now offering to pay professors extra if they give students more help. “Faculty members tend to have more independence,” says Scott P. Simkins, director of the Academy for Teaching and Learning at North Carolina A&T. “They want to be their own agents and manage their own time. But what we’re trying to do is be more data-driven and show them what seems to work best.”
Michelle D. Miller, an associate professor of psychology at Northern Arizona University, has worked with the National Center for Academic Transformation to help redesign the introductory-psychology course on her campus. First the university put a full-time professor in charge of coordinating all sections of the course. Then it collapsed several sections into larger ones with more students but increased the staff, by asking two professors to team-teach each section. The university also asked graduate teaching assistants to monitor questions that students e-mailed to professors, so that faculty members weren’t on the front lines. Both the team-teaching and the e-mail filter appealed to professors and made them more amenable to helping with the course redesign and assessing the results. The university is now giving professors small grants to help redesign basic courses in three other academic departments.
“There is a right way and a wrong way to talk to faculty about assessment,” says Ms. Miller. First, she says, “something is better than nothing, and it doesn’t have to be perfect.” Faculty members in psychology, for example, give students a simple multiple-choice assessment before and after they take Psych 101 to see how much they’ve learned.
The other thing that resonates with faculty members, says Ms. Miller, is to tell them that being able to measure student learning is in their best interest, like an insurance policy, if anyone does question their effectiveness. Ms. Miller developed an online psychology class for her university and was ready when he colleagues asked: Are students really learning? “I had my assessment tools, and I know students are not just sitting at home clicking buttons,” she says. “There is no magic to assessment. You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in it. Just think of something that makes sense to you.”
