May 16, 2008
How Good is Good Enough?
By Bob Connor, The Teagle Foundation
Two colleges in a Teagle collaborative (I’ll give them the imaginative names of A and B) have done work that raises interesting questions about student learning, and more specifically about student writing, including the question, “How good is good enough?”
Here’s what they did. Faculty from the two colleges, along with colleagues from a third institution (let’s call it Z) read 370 papers by students from A and B. Faculty from A read papers from B and vice versa. Their helpers from Z also read some papers from each school, mostly to make sure that the standards of grading were consistent throughout. All readers used a rubric for evaluating student writing developed at Hamilton College. A perfect score on the Hamilton scale is 56. Also, all papers were read “blind”; that is the readers didn’t know whether a paper had been written during high school (and submitted as part of the students’ applications), in the first year of college, or in the senior year.
The project was a lot of work, but revealing. When the results were tabulated, both colleges could point to “value added”. That is, the median scores had risen from the low 20s for those written in high school to the mid 30s for those by seniors. In raw scores, students at each college showed about a 50% gain. Each college, moreover, had something to brag about. The students at College B consistently outperformed those at A; but A’s students made greater improvements and ended up almost neck and neck with those from B. This chart shows the results quite clearly:
If the story stops there, at a moment of self congratulation, it is neither very surprising nor very instructive. Spend four years in college (and pay the tuition) and you ought to be able to write better than you did as a high school senior! But the study doesn’t stop there. It goes on to ask how many students scored at least 3 (on a 7 point scale) on each of the eight categories in the Hamilton rubric. The answer? 79%. On my grading scale that is a C plus. Not bad, but nothing to brag about. The next order of business, clearly, at both A and B, is to get all students over that minimal threshold.
But there is an even more interesting challenge. We don’t really know how well college students could write if a college set an ambitious goal of getting all faculty to work toward its realization, conveying that goal and its importance to students, and systematically evaluating strategies for reaching it. Suppose the goal were 90-90-15, that is 90% of the graduating seniors to score at the 90% level (roughly 50 points) on the Hamilton scale, by graduation day in 2015. Is that too ambitious, too unrealistic? Is there any way to know how good is good enough, except to try?
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April 28, 2008
Visiting Bard
By Bob Connor, The Teagle Foundation
I have made a fair number of campus visits over the years, but a recent one to Bard College stands out, and it raises an important question.
I took the train up the Hudson from New York City (two hours), and was greeted by Carolyn Dewald of the Classics department. She picked me up at the train station, drove me to her country home, and soon thereafter hosted a dinner party for colleagues from both Bard and Vassar. How she did all this, I don’t know.
The next morning came the inevitable campus tour (“I actually like the new science building as much as that Frank Gehry building”) followed by a meeting in that very science building with the people from Bard and Vassar who had been most involved in a very exciting Teagle funded project on improving student writing. I wanted to congratulate both groups for the terrific job they have done, and to think with them about how further improvements could be achieved.
Under the surface of the visit, were old friendships and some emerging new ones. So, of course, I was a prejudiced observer. A more objective take on the campus came from Charlie Blaich and the Teagle Scholars from the Wabash National Study who I bumped into on the campus. Sheer coincidence! They work so confidentially that I can only guess that they will share my sense that something quite extraordinary is taking place at Bard.
That rang home to me at lunch time when I had been asked to give a little talk to “a few Classics students.” That was fine with me, provided they didn’t mind some half-finished ruminations about the Periclean Funeral Oration and whether or not “Athens was really a democracy.” I walked in holding a sandwich and some badly organized notes to find that the room was full with maybe thirty people, about half students, the other half faculty. The classicists were all there (I know universities where most of the Classics faculty never show up on such occasions). There were other faculty colleagues from several departments in the Humanities and Socials Sciences, and, oh yes, one trustee. That is how to flatter a visiting foundation officer -- turn out the troops. But the proof of the pudding was not the turn out, but what happened when I stopped talking. After an awkward silence, one student broke the ice with a question and then one student after another asked questions -- smart, incisive, well informed questions -- until I began to feel that I was a student again, and they were the faculty grilling me at an oral exam. I scrambled to find adequate responses. Faculty members came to my rescue, picking up on topics in the talk, taking them to a higher level, teasing out implications, etc. At every stage the dialogue was supportive, engaged.
I would have been delighted to find a comparable degree of student and faculty engagement at far larger, wealthier and more prestigious institutions. What’s more, I kept finding evidence that Bard is a community with an intensely vigorous intellectual life.
So here’s the question: How does that come about? Campus cultures of this sort don’t just happen. But everything we know about student engagement and learning point to their importance. The intellectual vigor of such cultures doesn’t correlate with institutional wealth or prestige.
So in my remaining time on the campus I asked that question at every turn. Here are some of the answers:
- “The quality of our students has increased in recent years as we have become better known.”
- “It’s the vigor of the arts on this campus that encourages creativity and engagement.”
- “Our students are not careerists; you don’t go to Bard to get a job with Goldman Sachs.”
I suspect that all these are true but they don’t add up to the explanation. Could it be that faculty culture, faculty engagement and learning, and faculty interest in the core of liberal education has something to do with it?
Here’s a feather in the wind: A faculty member from the Romance Languages department and another from Classics are going to co-teach a course next year on Vergil, Augustine and Dante. My immediate reaction was “I wish I could take it.” “That’s funny,” one of them replied, “It’s what we keep on hearing from our colleagues. We could fill that course with faculty alone.”
That says a lot, I think. Could that be it?
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April 21, 2008
Stan Katz on Assessment and General Education
By Bob Connor, The Teagle Foundation
At commencement time last year, the normally adroit president of Princeton, Shirley Tilghman, slipped on a banana peel—the idea of using evidence systematically to improve student learning. In her inaugural address at Harvard, Drew Faust came perilously close to doing the same. Presidents, provosts and other senior academic officers at other elite institutions are, I hear, now echoing their arguments that there really is no good way of assessing the major outcomes of a liberal education, at least for twenty five years or so after graduation.
Stanley Katz, a distinguished American historian who served as president of the American Council of Learned Societies and has now returned to Princeton to teach, has taken a close look at such arguments and spoken out forthrightly about them. His must-read speech "Assessment and General Education" is terrific, and devastating, but take a look and decide for yourself.
While you are at it, you might enjoy our podcast series about a renegade archaeologist who got into big trouble trying to strengthen undergraduate education at world famous Grandview University: The Amazing Adventures of Indigo Jones can now be heard on our website.
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April 10, 2008
Synonyms: Robert Goheen and Liberal Education
By Bob Connor, The Teagle Foundation
Anyone who cares about liberal education should know about Robert F. Goheen. To my way of thinking “Bob Goheen” and “liberal education” are practically synonymous.
Sadly, Goheen died on March 31st at the age of 88. He had been the third youngest president of Princeton since way back when, and then president of many other worthy organizations, including the Council on Foundations and of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. He served as Ambassador to the country in which he was born, India. He was also one of the founders of the National Humanities Center, and at every turn an advocate for the humanities and liberal education. Since the facts about his career are well summarized in the Times obituary, and on the Princeton website, let me add just one anecdote.
It was the custom at Princeton as late as the 1970s for the president to extend an invitation to chair a department during a visit to that person’s home. That would seem a quaint courtesy these days, but that was the way it was done. Our department, Classics, was in some disarray at that time, and for whatever reason, he telephoned one day to ask if he might come to our flat that evening. Our younger son, Steve, had been born that very week, and on his arrival from the hospital we had disconnected the door bell to keep him from being awakened. But that evening Callie and I forgot what we had done in our hurry to clean the flat. The appointed time came and went. Perhaps Mr. Goheen (we never said “President” or “Professor” or, heaven forbid! “Doctor” in those days) had thought better of it. Then we heard, lightly at first but growing more insistently, a pounding on the door. Too late we remembered the disconnected door bell and dashed to the door.
At the end of the conversation I eagerly accepted the appointment, and asked if he had any advice for me. I thought he would have some sage words about departmental politics or university policy. All he said was, “Be as humane as you can.”
The episode is perhaps too trivial even to record. Bob had steered Princeton through the tumults of the 60s, opened its doors and extended a genuine welcome to African-Americans, led and guided the transition to co-education. He raised a lot of money and appointed a lot of good people to key positions. He did all this without hiding his political liberalism and internationalist commitments. He spoke out on many matters, including, repeatedly, the importance of a genuine liberal education. His book on Sophocles Antigone is still a model in classical scholarship. But, for all this, it’s those words, “Be as humane as you can,” that ring in my ears and make me miss him so badly.
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