Why Student Output Should Be Better (But Isn't)
25 years ago, I was an 18 year old person in senior high. If we did research at all, it was mainly in a reasonably well-stocked library, or from our own collections of material. We sometimes had files of newspaper clippings, sorted by topic and date.
A lot of that (though not all) has now been made redundant simply because most schools now purchase online access to journals and newspapers. Simple search functions linking to any of those databases will produce a plethora of peer-reviewed journal articles. In conjunction with Google™ Scholar and Wikipedia, a student can literally research and produce a paper on any topic, running at around 2000 words, in less than 400 minutes, maybe even less than six hours.
25 years ago, this was just barely possible, except that you would have to read piles of material because there was no search function and you'd have to rely on the occasional annual index of topics that kind journal-publishers might produce, or on the experience (and philanthropy) of the person manning the morgue at the newspaper office. If you were fortunate, you had a knowledgeable librarian.
And yet, the quality of student work these days is poor. Each paper is generally poorly referenced, and the references selected are often poor themselves. The argument doesn't hang together, and neither does the structure.
Why is this so?
I have an idea, developed after many years of talking to high school students and asking them about their work processes. It's a pretty sad idea.
I think that students don't read enough.
Search functions identify quotes which they can use in their papers, but they have seldom read the entire book or chapter from which these quotes have been lifted. Because the context has not been read through and analysed, the quotes are unjustified or simply taken out of context in the worst way possible.
Students don't read around the topic anymore, because instead of homing in on their material, they jump straight to it. It's like the subway or MRT. If you pop up in the middle of a neighbourhood, you only know the area around the station, and your knowledge of context and related material diminishes sharply as the distance increases.
Students don't read enough often because their teachers and librarians don't read enough. My personal library consists of about 8000 books. This is small, and in the age of the Internet, it ought to be redundant (and often is). But when I research a paper, I end up with a bibliography; a 25-page paper with perhaps 8000-10000 words in it takes a week for first draft because I have normally read an average of 500 pages from various sources while planning and writing that paper.
If a student comes to me with a topic, I can often recommend books or journal articles or websites because I've seen them, read them, or know someone who has. And if I can't recommend sources, I use Google™ like everybody else, or Wikipedia. But if I do, I take the additional step of trying to triangulate my sources to see if they agree. If I can find only one source, and it is not linked to any other, I can't in good conscience recommend it as an authority unless there are seriously good reasons to do so.
It all boils down to three things: receive a lot of input, think a lot about it, structure it into consistent output. That provides basic quality. Style, grammar, neatness — all this provides extended quality. But any kind of quality requires hard work.
The final bit of hard work is reading your own stuff critically. You need to read it aloud, if possible. This exposes the silly stuff better. Sometimes, under the influence of sleep deprivation or bad environmental pollution, you write silly things. It's best to pretend your paper was written by someone you hate and that you will get a cash reward for finding mistakes in it, arm yourself with a red pen for hard copy or something like those awful comment flags in MS Word™, and attack your own work.
This phase takes a lot of time, for me. I literally read and re-read everything I publish, several times. Unfortunately (as some of you have noticed) I do this less for my blog posts. I don't like making mistakes, though. That means I make some attempt to find mistakes, will amend them as soon as I find them, and will confess them if some poor sod has already been subjected to them.
Students these days claim they haven't enough time. I just wonder how much less time they would have had in the days before advanced search and online databases, before YouTube and Wikipedia, before the ability to download digital versions of key documents within minutes. They have less excuse for mediocrity than I had.
One final rant about reading: why can't students bother to look things up for themselves, given all the online help they currently have? I hate it when students ask me for definitions of things, places, people or ideas. It's all online!
Yesterday, I had coffee with a young man who lamented the difficulty of training educators. He asked how I would go about it. Well, I told him that each person should be educated in a different way, but that there were some key requirements.
I told him that first of all, a person should have read all the fundamental texts (or at least, enough texts to cover the fundamentals) of the subject to be taught. A general educator should have a broader and more difficult reading list than a specialised educator.
Secondly, the person to be 'trained' (I hate that word in this context; it reminds me of dog obedience school) needs to develop the capacity for interacting with people, listening to feedback (verbal or non-verbal) and tweaking the interaction as it progresses. You need to try as hard as you can to understand the people you're teaching, and you need to feel apologetic if you don't quite 'get' them.
Thirdly, the person needs to be able to detect bullshit both in what is taught and in the responses of students. Yes, self-critical as well as other-critical analysis is required. You shouldn't lie to students even by accident. If you don't know something, say so. If you have made a mistake, admit it and apologize.
If students are badly taught, then their role-models of learning are deficient. This is another reason why student output is bad; their input and learning models are bad too. As my grandfather used to say, "Why do children misbehave? Because their parents do!"
In most parts of the world that I've seen, I estimate that perhaps one teacher out of every 20 is a good one. The quality tends to be worse if the organization is larger, unless a lot of money is spent and a lot of research and evaluation is carried out in the attempt to 'buy' good staff. That means students have to be good self-teachers most of the time.
I wish my own students all the best. I try to give them my best, being fully aware that it's never enough. But they should also aim to do better, by reading, thinking, and being self-critical — and by remembering that the best is always yet to be.
A lot of that (though not all) has now been made redundant simply because most schools now purchase online access to journals and newspapers. Simple search functions linking to any of those databases will produce a plethora of peer-reviewed journal articles. In conjunction with Google™ Scholar and Wikipedia, a student can literally research and produce a paper on any topic, running at around 2000 words, in less than 400 minutes, maybe even less than six hours.
25 years ago, this was just barely possible, except that you would have to read piles of material because there was no search function and you'd have to rely on the occasional annual index of topics that kind journal-publishers might produce, or on the experience (and philanthropy) of the person manning the morgue at the newspaper office. If you were fortunate, you had a knowledgeable librarian.
And yet, the quality of student work these days is poor. Each paper is generally poorly referenced, and the references selected are often poor themselves. The argument doesn't hang together, and neither does the structure.
Why is this so?
I have an idea, developed after many years of talking to high school students and asking them about their work processes. It's a pretty sad idea.
I think that students don't read enough.
Search functions identify quotes which they can use in their papers, but they have seldom read the entire book or chapter from which these quotes have been lifted. Because the context has not been read through and analysed, the quotes are unjustified or simply taken out of context in the worst way possible.
Students don't read around the topic anymore, because instead of homing in on their material, they jump straight to it. It's like the subway or MRT. If you pop up in the middle of a neighbourhood, you only know the area around the station, and your knowledge of context and related material diminishes sharply as the distance increases.
Students don't read enough often because their teachers and librarians don't read enough. My personal library consists of about 8000 books. This is small, and in the age of the Internet, it ought to be redundant (and often is). But when I research a paper, I end up with a bibliography; a 25-page paper with perhaps 8000-10000 words in it takes a week for first draft because I have normally read an average of 500 pages from various sources while planning and writing that paper.
If a student comes to me with a topic, I can often recommend books or journal articles or websites because I've seen them, read them, or know someone who has. And if I can't recommend sources, I use Google™ like everybody else, or Wikipedia. But if I do, I take the additional step of trying to triangulate my sources to see if they agree. If I can find only one source, and it is not linked to any other, I can't in good conscience recommend it as an authority unless there are seriously good reasons to do so.
It all boils down to three things: receive a lot of input, think a lot about it, structure it into consistent output. That provides basic quality. Style, grammar, neatness — all this provides extended quality. But any kind of quality requires hard work.
The final bit of hard work is reading your own stuff critically. You need to read it aloud, if possible. This exposes the silly stuff better. Sometimes, under the influence of sleep deprivation or bad environmental pollution, you write silly things. It's best to pretend your paper was written by someone you hate and that you will get a cash reward for finding mistakes in it, arm yourself with a red pen for hard copy or something like those awful comment flags in MS Word™, and attack your own work.
This phase takes a lot of time, for me. I literally read and re-read everything I publish, several times. Unfortunately (as some of you have noticed) I do this less for my blog posts. I don't like making mistakes, though. That means I make some attempt to find mistakes, will amend them as soon as I find them, and will confess them if some poor sod has already been subjected to them.
Students these days claim they haven't enough time. I just wonder how much less time they would have had in the days before advanced search and online databases, before YouTube and Wikipedia, before the ability to download digital versions of key documents within minutes. They have less excuse for mediocrity than I had.
One final rant about reading: why can't students bother to look things up for themselves, given all the online help they currently have? I hate it when students ask me for definitions of things, places, people or ideas. It's all online!
Yesterday, I had coffee with a young man who lamented the difficulty of training educators. He asked how I would go about it. Well, I told him that each person should be educated in a different way, but that there were some key requirements.
I told him that first of all, a person should have read all the fundamental texts (or at least, enough texts to cover the fundamentals) of the subject to be taught. A general educator should have a broader and more difficult reading list than a specialised educator.
Secondly, the person to be 'trained' (I hate that word in this context; it reminds me of dog obedience school) needs to develop the capacity for interacting with people, listening to feedback (verbal or non-verbal) and tweaking the interaction as it progresses. You need to try as hard as you can to understand the people you're teaching, and you need to feel apologetic if you don't quite 'get' them.
Thirdly, the person needs to be able to detect bullshit both in what is taught and in the responses of students. Yes, self-critical as well as other-critical analysis is required. You shouldn't lie to students even by accident. If you don't know something, say so. If you have made a mistake, admit it and apologize.
If students are badly taught, then their role-models of learning are deficient. This is another reason why student output is bad; their input and learning models are bad too. As my grandfather used to say, "Why do children misbehave? Because their parents do!"
In most parts of the world that I've seen, I estimate that perhaps one teacher out of every 20 is a good one. The quality tends to be worse if the organization is larger, unless a lot of money is spent and a lot of research and evaluation is carried out in the attempt to 'buy' good staff. That means students have to be good self-teachers most of the time.
I wish my own students all the best. I try to give them my best, being fully aware that it's never enough. But they should also aim to do better, by reading, thinking, and being self-critical — and by remembering that the best is always yet to be.
Labels: Critical Thinking, Education, Students, Writing
etched with acid at 9:41:00 am
3 Comments:
The Indons have this saying:
"Teachers piss standing, students piss running."
It means that if you have bad learning models, it's not only that you'll become bad, but you'll become even worse.
The education motto is also quite good. This is it in Javanese:
"Ing ngarsa sung tulada, ing madya mangun karsa, tut wuri handayani."
(From the front becoming an example, from the middle building passion, from behind supporting)
Xylph: That's excellent! :) Thank you very much.
I think you might enjoy this article on The Long Decline of Reading.
It's quite a long article, but then again Reading is an Investment In Thinking. The second link was the blog I followed that linked the article.
Post a Comment
<< Home