February 19, 2025 • 38 mins
Many students experience challenges transitioning from high school to college. In this episode, Beckie Supiano joins us to discuss changes in the K-12 environment that impact student preparation for college. Beckie is a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education. She began her work at The Chronicle as an intern in 2008 and is a co-author, with Beth McMurtrie of The Chronicle’s Teaching Newsletter.
A transcript of this episode and show notes may be found at http://teaforteaching.com.
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Many students experience challenges transitioning from high school to college. In this episode,
we discuss changes in the K-12 environment that impact student preparation for college.
Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of
(00:21):
innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist...
...and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer......and features guests doing important research
and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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Our guest today is Beckie Supiano, a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
She began her work at The Chronicle as an intern in 2008 and is a co-author, with Beth McMurtrie
of The Chronicle’s Teaching Newsletter. Beckie’s insightful articles have been a regular source of
inspiration for us as faculty and many of our past podcasts were the result of things we’ve
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read in your articles. Welcome.Thanks so much for having me.
Today's teas are:... Beckie, are you drinking any tea with us today?
You know, I'm not really a tea drinker. I have finished my morning pot of coffee, and I've
switched over to sparkling water over here.I would say probably many of our listeners are
right on team Beckie. How about you, John?I am drinking a ginger peach black tea today.
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I'm back to drinking that candy cane tea that I've been drinking lately. It's really
a nice blend of black and herbal mint. Interesting, although that may not work so well
once we hit the summer, you may want to finish it up by then. It just may seem a bit non seasonal
at the rate I've been drinking it, it may happen.
So we've invited you here today to discuss your recent article: “Some Assembly Still Required:
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How K-12 reforms and recent disruptions created Gen Z's baffling habits.” College faculty have, as
long as there have been records, complained that the K-12 system left a lot of students unprepared
for college, but the gap between high school preparation and college expectations seem to have
gotten quite a bit worse in recent years. What are some of the changes in student experiences
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and in the K-12 environment that have made this transition more difficult for both the students
and for the faculty who will be teaching them? I'll mention this article is part of a series that
my colleague, Beth McMurtrie and I and another colleague have been writing for really about
the past year, called “Teaching Gen Z,” which was really our attempt to describe and untangle a lot
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of what professors have been noticing with this group of traditional age students. And so we got
to a point where we sort of thought, “Oh gosh, you know, we really do need to go look at what's been
going on in K-12.” I hear you, these complaints that “students are coming in unprepared” and
“something must be up with schools” are long standing, but there are some things that really
do seem to have changed that are important, and obviously that's what the article is trying to
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make sense of here. I will say it's like, “Oh, something must be going on before these students
get to college.” And I think one thing I'd like to underscore is it doesn't seem to be just one
something, and I think that's part of what makes this very complicated, but also what makes it
really interesting. A lot of my article looks at the test-based accountability movement and
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some of its unintended consequences in terms of what is and isn't focused on in a lot of schools,
and how that sets students’ expectations for what education really is. But there are other things
too. There's been a really significant drop in reading for pleasure, which turns out to
be a very important thing in terms of students’ reading ability, also the teacher shortage and
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what that's meant for who's in front of classrooms and what they're doing. And the rise of technology
to supplement classroom instruction is related with that last point on the teacher shortage,
too. And then, of course, we have the pandemic, which exacerbated lots of existing trends and
created some new challenges. And everyone's still trying to make sense of how that's all played out,
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unfortunately, and what some of the longer-term impacts are. And then there's really the role
that schools play in society, and how many things they're really being asked to do beyond simply
educating our country's children. So what that means, just to take sort of one piece of it that
professors are very interested in, students are not getting as much practice reading books or
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longer articles inside or outside of school, and so professors are noticing that students
are having a harder time doing the kind of reading they're expected to in college. And
if you sort of look at what's going on… again, both in and outside of school before students
get there… you can kind of get a little bit of a better handle on why it might be that way.
One of the things that you talk about in your article is the No Child Left Behind Act and
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just legislation in general that's intentions are to help our education and our society, but there
are sometimes some intended consequences. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, absolutely. So, No Child Left Behind, the federal law signed in 2002 was intended to raise
the floor on student performance in school, which I think most people could agree is a
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good goal. It was a bipartisan effort, and the idea here was that there are groups of students,
especially sub-populations, who would be more at risk, students who are members of minority groups
or low-income students or in special education programs, and before it was sort of easy to
mask if those students were not being well served by school, if they weren't performing well,
and the law was really designed to make it harder to have students kind of passed along
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through school without getting the education they were supposed to. But what happened is
there needs to be some sort of way to evaluate are schools actually educating these students,
and the way that that was done is standardized tests. And just like so many things, once you
introduce a way to evaluate performance and make it a high-pressure thing where everyone has a lot
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at stake, everyone's going to focus on how to look good in that evaluation. And part of what you see
is that some of the things that schools might do to try to improve test scores in the short
term might be misaligned with things you might do if your goal were longer-term learning. And
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there are lots of examples of that, and a lot of it's become more clear now.
So, along with the No Child Left Behind Act there was this increase in standardized tests.
How did the introduction of these standardized tests affect the way in which classes are taught?
One of the examples you mentioned is how 10th graders were taught the Pythagorean theorem.
How did that change in response to some of the standardized testing, as well as the breadth and
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depth of coverage on many other topics.Yeah, so that example about the Pythagorean
theorem is one specific example from a test of 10th graders in Massachusetts that a professor
I spoke with at Harvard, Dan Koretz, mentioned in our interview that I thought was just such a nice
example. So basically, you can reverse engineer these tests to figure out how to help students
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perform well on them. So in this instance, this example that he gave me, the Princeton Review,
figured out like, oh, there's this pattern where this particular test, for this group of students
in this state regularly asked a question on the Pythagorean theorem. And because students
cannot use calculators on this test and the Pythagorean Theorem requires using square roots,
they're really only a few kinds of questions this could possibly be, like, if you memorize
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a few sets of ratios, you can pretty much get the question right, whether or not you understand
algebra, and really, whether or not you understand the Pythagorean Theorem. It's just a sort of test
strategy that you could use to perform well on this item, and that's a problem for a few reasons.
I mean one, it means that the item can't really tell us if students understand math, because they
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don't have to to get this question right. So this item, which is one of a small sample of
questions used to test (07:58):
“Do you understand algebra generally?” can't really be effective at answering
that question for us. But a related problem is that if you know that certain material is going
to be tested on and again, if there's a lot of pressure to shore up student performance, there's
all the incentive in the world to really focus on those aspects of a subject in your preparation for
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students. So lots of practice on specific parts of math, specific reading skills, lots of short
passages of reading and writing, because that's what students would be evaluated on. And so you
see this reallocation that certain subjects are emphasized to the detriment of others. And then
within subjects like math and reading that were really emphasized, only certain pieces
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of those subjects would really get attention, which could lead to nice looking test scores,
but would also lead to students not having the full preparation they would need to build on those
skills in future work, including at college.When we’re talking about standardized testing,
other systematic assessment rubrics also became increasingly common in high schools
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and colleges. And in your interview, one of the faculty members that you interviewed,
Ethan Hutt, suggests that this has made it more difficult for students to create more
interesting writing assignments. Is the increased prevalence of rubrics also an outgrowth of the
nature of standardized testing?Yeah, so I think that's a really good
example. A rubric can be helpful if students are supposed to come up with a certain type of answer
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when they're answering a question on a test. Writing can be kind of formulaic at any level,
but there's some variation in how formulaic it is, and students have been kind of conditioned to
write to spec, right? I hear from professors all the time, just interviewing them in our day-in,
day-out, coverage of teaching that students really seem to think they are being asked to come up with
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the answer, the right answer, the answer the professor has already thought of and is walking
around with and expecting to hear back, even if students are being asked to share an opinion or
talk about their personal experience, something that presumably the professor can't really have a
predetermined answer for. And you can kind of see how this all connects. And so what Hutt was saying
is students just feel really lost when they're asked to just write an essay on a topic. They
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expect a lot more granular instructions of exactly what to do to deliver the kind of product that the
professor wants and will give a good grade to, and when he'll tell them, like, “I don't really
have that, that's not really what I do,” they don't believe it. They think he just won't tell
them. And I've heard similar things from other professors as well. I think it's long been the
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case that college students are asked to work at a higher level, that they have more freedom to
kind of spread their wings and try things out. But it seems like professors are noticing that
this group of students, rather than kind of enjoying that and running with it, feels kind
of stuck or anxious or just doesn't know how to proceed without a lot more explicit direction.
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And that's put a lot more pressure on college faculty also to use rubrics with assignments,
which, again, can limit creativity in students’ writing. We'd like to have students develop some
creativity and be able to analyze material, but if we are requiring them only to focus on
a narrow subset of their disciplines, might that do some harm to their ability to be productive
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members of society in a world where they're not going to be just completing assignments
designed to a rubric, or where they're not going to be getting standardized tests,
but they have to deal with real-world problems.Yeah, I think that there's a lot of concern about
all of what you just said on the part of faculty, and it's hard to figure out how to communicate to
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students what you really are trying to get them to do, and it's hard for these reasons,
and it's hard because of generative AI. There's a lot going on here that's working against trying
to convince students to think critically and do their own creative work, and kind of to find their
voice. And that seems to be something that is a heavier lift for everyone involved, sure.
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Along those same lines, at the college level, university level, we're expecting students to
be independent and have autonomy and really take those reins. Are there things happening in the
K-12 system that are reducing student autonomy? Is that in response to the high-stakes testing
and rubrics and all the standardization? Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think,
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in terms of how to go about completing the work that does seem to be in play. And some of it,
I think, is just also about the way you think about education, and what it's for.
The testing regime is performative, like you're getting a test and you're performing on it,
and your performance is really important. That's really different from other ways of thinking about
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education as being a process. And I think many people in higher education and gosh, you know,
many people in K-12 too, would understand that the process thing is important. We're
supposed to be lifelong learners. This is how you go about learning anything. A lot of times,
people will talk to me with illustrations of like, “How do you learn to play a sport or a musical
instrument?” This is sort of how humans learn. We have better and better handle on that from
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research on learning, but it's tough, I think, to get students to shift gears. And this is,
I think, interrelated to something that professors also experience, where students are very grade
motivated, and I think it's easy for professors to be exasperated by that, but especially at a
place with a selective admissions process like, oh gosh, you know, students have been really strongly
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conditioned to think about their grades, or they probably wouldn't be in your classroom
at all. And it's hard to turn that off.And much of this seems to be related to the
changes in incentives that K-12 instructors and administrators face because the funding they
receive may be tied to the success of students on these standardized exams, but by narrowing what
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students are studying, or narrowing the range of topics addressed to those things that can be
captured in multiple-choice exams and standardized tests, one of the things you're suggesting,
I think, in the article, is that students are missing out on some of the wider explorations
and a wider breadth of learning that perhaps might have been more common in the absence of
some of the standardization. Is that correct? Yeah, it's interesting. Some of the education
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scholars I spoke to emphasize that before all of this, if you go back pre-2002,
and there were even some earlier efforts in this direction before that, you just probably had a
more uneven landscape. Like a really good teacher could do some things that would be
harder to get away with now. But also that isn't to say that's always what happened. Teaching was
probably a little more uneven before, which is interesting to think about. But this narrowing,
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I think, is interesting. One of the things that came up again in my reporting here, I also looked
a bit at the Common Core, which is designed to help students be college and career ready. Again,
like really good intentions there, but there's this idea that, okay, most of us out in the
working world, most of the reading and writing we do is shorter things. It's emails and memos
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and reading an article that's kind of shorter. It's not sit down and read this book and then
write a term paper, and that's not what most people are doing. But it seems now that there
are some things about reading whole books that change the way people read. Their reading ability
is different if they only read like snippets of things and don't have to think about like,
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“What is this author's argument in some sort of a context beyond just some little passage?” And
another example that came up is history, if you're reading in history, like as a subject,
and then in college as a discipline that, in addition to giving you access to a different
disciplinary understanding of the world, would also enhance your reading ability in
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ways that just doing reading drills won't. The reading drills can maybe bring up that floor,
but there's some ceiling there that students aren't getting the ability to work toward,
and it's interesting just thinking about how these things are interconnected. Another dimension that
came up in my reporting was students reading for pleasure. And if you think about it, oh,
it makes sense. If you just read more of anything, you learn more stuff, and you can make connections
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between the things you learn when you're reading this book just because you're interested in
whatever to other things you're learning at school and elsewhere, and to just take that
piece away has a lot more consequences than maybe would be apparent if you're just thinking about
the basic things that everyone needs to know.One of the things that came up in your article,
but we're also just observing in our landscape is not just short-form reading,
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but there's a plethora of videos available, podcasts available, AI available. For example,
even on The Chronicle website, , now there's an AI tool to get information fast. It's great. It's
helpful to be able to get information in a lot of different modalities. There's real strength
in the ability to get information in multiple modalities. There's benefits to that, as well
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as maybe some detriments to not always using all the modalities available.
I think it's interesting, and it's hard for professors to figure out how much reading and
writing, per se, really matter as a way to get information or a way to convey what you
know. But I think, for most of them, it's hard to imagine that there isn't something
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important about those skills in particular,I remember when I went to high school sometime
last century, a while back, but it was really common for us to be asked in English classes
and in social science classes to read multiple books in the semester or in the course of the
academic year, but with the introduction of the Common Core standards that you've mentioned,
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the focus on that is a bit different. One of the things you suggest is that the Common Core
focus is more on close-reading skills, which encourages practice with close-reading skills.
How might that be harming students’ ability or interest in engaging with larger texts.
When I talked to a professor, James S. Kim, who studies reading and the development of that,
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one of the things that came up was that there was a sort of virtuous cycle with reading, like,
if you read more, you get better at it, and reading at length is just different. I mean,
I think close reading is an important skill, but you can work on that while you're reading
something longer, and the reverse kind of isn't true. And I think part of what's emerging is
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that there are so many different things going on with reading, and focusing just on close reading
doesn't enable students to be able to be well prepared to do all the things they need to do
with it when they get to college. Reading in college does work differently. It's supposed
to. You read differently in different courses, and that's always been a hump for students,
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but it again, seems to have changed. One of the education professors I interviewed for my story
was describing how her students in like, not a first-year course, didn't read the directions
correctly on an assignment, and she had to kind of go back and do that with them. And her argument,
this is Julie Cohen at UVA, her argument is that this illustrates to her that it's the
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teacher shortage, that someone who's gone through the right preparation to be a classroom teacher
would have covered this in high school, and students just aren't getting enough practice
with it before they get to college. That's her read on the situation. But we've heard this from
other professors too, that some of this is even just like a simple reading comprehension issue.
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One of the things that we haven't quite touched on yet is the introduction of smartphones and
apps. We talked a little bit about AI and video and things and how they've predominated
our media landscape, but what about the access to smartphones and high school
students and earlier having access to these.There’s obviously a lot of debate around this,
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and I'm not sure that anyone has it all completely figured out, But there are real concerns about
attention and certainly time you're spending scrolling on your phone is time you're not
spending reading for pleasure. That seems kind of obvious. Some of this is about what's going on
outside of school. And then one of the professors I talked to, Morgan Polikoff, at USC, was saying
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that he thinks a sort of underappreciated dimension of this is that there's this idea
now that younger students don't read, won't read, and sort of a hesitation to expect it of them,
right? Like, oh, we have just used something that students are going to participate in.
And so his argument is that there's sort of this acceptance of like, oh, students won't do this,
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so let's not even try to make them.I wonder if that's tied to whether or
not we have role models that are doing that. I'm thinking about my own daughter,
who's in second grade. We've instituted family reading time mostly because we want to read,
so she has her own sets of books so that she's reading, but that's because we're all spending
time reading. And if that's not a culture in a space where a kid is, where people aren't
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reading all the time and they are on their phones, then the expectation might be to be on a phone.
I think it's an interesting question. There's obviously, like, more than one way you can
be using your phone, and I think a lot of us do a lot of reading on our phones too,
but from the outside, it's not always even clear if that is actually what you're doing. And when
I talked to James Kim, he did talk about that, what parents are doing matters here
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too. Are you talking about school and even if you are reading, is that visible to kids? And
we know a lot of adults aren't reading either.And smartphone apps are designed to get attention,
there's a large financial incentive for the developers of those apps to build apps
that capture attention, and so it's a tough competition, from a student's perspective,
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between something that provides this immediate gratification and interesting content,
or learning something in more depth, which may be a little bit more tedious, which was a challenge
that wasn't faced in much earlier cohorts. Yeah, I mean, I've definitely talked to some
students who are aware of that problem. I did another story for this series about students
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struggling to work independently and just needing more support to do ambitious work in a course,
like a big paper or project. And that's something that came up talking with students about their own
habits. It is hard. And I think it's hard even for those of us who are past that part of our lives,
that distraction is real. And I think there are a lot of people who don't really have
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the option of just putting the phone in a drawer for large stretches of the day,
because they have to be reachable. And if you're reachable, you're reachable. It's definitely a
hard thing for students, and I think one that I think a lot of us can sympathize with.
One of the conversations that I had recently with a colleague, and we were having with some kids,
where the kids were like, “Well, can you just Google that for me, if you don't know the answer,
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like, just look it up.” Yeah, we used to have to, like, look in an encyclopedia, go check out a book
from the library, and just like the difference in how quickly you can get an answer to a question
versus having to work a little bit to get an answer to even basic questions about whatever.
It's really interesting. And then I think the challenge is then easier to get an answer, but
harder to know if it's a good answer, right? Yeah.
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I mean, I think that's hard for, again, lots of folks who are long past being a
student and just figuring out, okay, you can search for something, but
how do you evaluate the answers you're seeing?So, generative AI and hallucinations provide
students with some serious challenges there, too, in interpreting or examining the accuracy
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of information that's being provided.There's a long thread on blue sky recently
about hallucinations related to summaries and searches about some basic science topics. So
if a kid's like looking up a basic answer to something it could be completely inaccurate.
It would be a topic that would be somewhat simple to answer, but the answer that they're
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getting because they're looking at the AI summaries are just completely inaccurate.
Although it has been getting better…Yeah, It’s getting better, but…
... to be fair.Again, these were searches
that just happened in the past. So one of the other things you talk
about is the impact that the pandemic has had on student preparation for college.
Could you talk a little bit about that?Yeah, absolutely. I think it's hard to
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tease out exactly what's gone on here, just from covering pandemic teaching while it was going on,
I think there was a long period of just everyone kind of wishing very hard that things would
go back to normal this time, like, okay, next semester, we're gonna be back to normal. Okay,
next semester, we're gonna be back to normal, and I can sympathize, again, with why people had
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that expectation, but there are some things that really do seem to have shifted. One question is,
did students just not get whatever they were supposed to learn during the period of emergency
remote instruction, which, of course, looked different at different schools, like, how long
did that last for and how did it work, and how much instruction were students really getting
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during that time, and how much were they actually expected to do their work? And as time goes by,
the students coming into college who have been younger and younger whenever that happened, and
have had more time to kind of regroup from that and catch up in various ways. But other things
change too, and part of what seems to have changed is expectations. For a while there, students in
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high school were given a little more ability to push back on expectations, to say, like,
“We really can't do this. You're asking too much,” and to be listened to in a way that they probably
wouldn't normally be. And I think, even for folks who think that was the right way to proceed during
that time, it's been hard to come back from, like, this idea that deadlines and grades and you really
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do have to do this stuff, just haven't come back. And someone else I spoke with, Elena Silva at New
America think tank, was describing that even just the question of, like, “Why are we here at all
in the first place?” I mean, before you kind of close physical schools for a stretch of time, I
think for many students, it wouldn't really occur to them, like, “Oh, why are we here at all? What
could we be doing instead?” And then she pointed out, a lot of the rest of us never quite went back
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to working the way we normally did, but students have kind of been expected to do that, and there's
a little more pushback and like, “What is this all for?” And it's something I hear so much,
again, from my higher ed sources, from professors, from faculty developers, like giving students that
“why,” that reason, is just so important. They seem to need it more now. Getting some buy-in
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from them that, like, this isn't just some busy work you're being forced to do to like kill time,
but we're actually trying to give you something valuable, and being able to really articulate what
that is, is not a silver bullet, but it does seem to be a necessary first step in a lot of cases.
How has the pandemic affected student preparation for college?
I think that it's really such a mixed bag. I talked to Tim Renick, who has all this great
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data from higher education in Georgia looking at entry-level courses there, and he said, like, “Oh,
we really saw, like, this immediate pandemic era hit in student performance in these intro courses,
but we seem to have worked through that.” Like students have kind of bounced back to normal on
that front. But I do think there's more to it than just “did you kind of get the content that you can
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build on in this next course?”...all these other things around, like how to function as a student,
the independent work, and the sort of understanding of why you're there, and the
ability to kind of forge ahead with that. Those things do seem to have taken a hit. The other
article I wrote for this series about students working independently, described that, like a lot
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of professors, years out from pandemic teaching, have found that if they really want students to
deliver some big project or paper or deliverable, if you will, from their course. If they really see
that as important, they have to create more time and space for students to work on it, give them
more feedback, maybe give them more class time. It seems like students are having a harder time
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doing work on their own outside of class, and professors have to decide, like, if they really
want that work to happen, they might have to sort of change the way it gets done, including where,
including it might have to happen more when the professor is available to students in class.
Along with the changes in the way students were learning during the pandemic, there were also
some pretty substantial learning losses that were shared fairly unequally across the population.
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All the students who were in elementary or high school during that period ended up being quite
a bit behind the usual rate of progression. International standardized test scores like
the PISA have been steadily declining, but there was a precipitous drop during the pandemic where
students are about anywhere from six months to a year behind in terms of where they would have been
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in terms of math scores and reading scores, but those gaps are pretty unequally shared. There's
a pretty high variance in that, which again, presents some problems. What sort of things might
college faculty do in addressing those learning losses and also the disparity in those losses that
occurred across our student populations?I think this is a huge challenge. And again,
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it's something that predates the pandemic, but was magnified by it. I mean, students are not
getting the same kind of preparation for college. A lot depends on where you went to school and what
resources you have available in your school and at home, and that's long been true, but it's,
I think, kind of easy to pretend that it isn't, that students are coming in and they're all kind
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of expected to sort of do the same thing wherever they're coming from. I hear a lot of debate among
faculty about whether it's on them to help students do things like learn how to study,
learn how to read the directions. Know that you can't just sit there with your textbook and a
highlighter at the library, and then do well on your STEM exam in college. And on the one hand,
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professors are in their role because of their subject matter expertise… that's very important
to them, and in a lot of courses, making sure that students have a handle on certain material
for specific reasons for the future is really the name of the game, and I can understand why
people really center that. But I'm hearing a lot of other professors say, like, “Well, if students
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come in and they don't know how to do something, even if it's something kind of basic we all think
they should be able to do, we have to teach them now, like they can't do the work of the course
if they don't know how to study, or they don't know how to read the way we expect them to read,
or they don't know how to write the way we expect them to write. And even if that doesn't seem like
it's within the parameters of your job, if students haven't gotten this somewhere else
(30:52):
by the time they get to you, they're not gonna be able to do well in your course without it,
then you do have some responsibility to help them figure that out, and it's really a lot to ask of
professors. It's not like there's extra time for that, and also it's not something that professors
necessarily know how to teach students. They don't have the same kind of training
(31:13):
as a K-12 teacher. Some professors really don't have much training at all in teaching,
and it's really complicated to figure out why people are missing something that they're missing,
and what they need to kind of get there, and if you're seeing different kinds of misunderstandings
or mistakes or gaps than in the past, like that does really put a lot more work on faculty. But
(31:37):
what's going to happen if they don't try? Like, what's going to happen to those students?
The No Child Left Behind Act was put together to try to make sure that the quality of education
was raised for all students so that we weren't losing more students along the way. And it's
resulted in some changes that probably help students at the bottom a little bit more,
but it also may limit the range of topics that students learn and the depth of topics. But in
(32:02):
terms of colleges, one of the things that we encourage faculty to do in terms of creating an
inclusive teaching environment is to provide more structure on assignments, to use rubrics to make
expectations more transparent. That has been shown to reduce some of those equity gaps in outcomes,
but it might also tend to reduce the time that students spend on developing critical thinking
(32:26):
skills. So that's a trade off that I think is at the heart of some of this discussion, both in K-12
and also in college discussions. We want to make sure that all students have equal opportunities,
but perhaps some of the strategies we're using to do that might limit learning for all students to
those things that we're focusing on in our rubrics or a test. Do you see any way of resolving that,
(32:50):
other than continually experimenting to come up with the best balance?
Yeah, I don't think I have the answer there. It's hard, and I think it's hard to ask anyone
teaching, meet students where they are and then get them where they're supposed to be. That's
a tall order, always, and it seems especially hard now. It reminds me a bit of the pandemic
(33:10):
era debate on how much flexibility to give students and how much structure, which kind
of cuts similarly, like, Okay, it's a crisis. Students need flexibility. They don't have time,
they can't meet these deadlines. And then it kind of turns out as time goes on, like, oh, the same
students whose lives beyond the classroom really require them to have flexibility also really need
(33:32):
structure, because they haven't gotten the same opportunities to figure out how to build it for
themselves. And so how do you support both of those things? It's hard, and I think like figuring
out how to create more equitable conditions, I don't think you can create equitable conditions,
(33:52):
given the very different background students are coming from. But to move toward that and
also really support learning is hard, and I think there are things that professors are doing to try
to help students that end up not helping all of them or not working out as intended. And yeah,
I think there is constant experimentation with that. I think it's kind of hard to overstate how
(34:14):
difficult all of this is if you really care about it and try hard to make it better, as many of the
people I talk to in my job are oriented to.As you were asking your question, John,
I was thinking, it's not just like critical thinking, it's like creativity,
there's just a lot of space there, I don't know if balance is the right word either,
right if we can find a balance, it's just like, how do you keep all of those things in
(34:35):
the kitchen while you're cooking as ingredients? So we always wrap up by asking, what's next?
Yeah, that's a hard question, isn't it? One of the thoughts I had as I was working on this K-12
story is just how hard it is to remember what it was like for there to be this bipartisan
education effort. Consensus is too strong, but like, just sort of this shared understanding,
(35:00):
even of like, what are the problems and how might they be tackled? That feels just very unfamiliar
right now, even though I was there writing about some of this as it was happening. So that's just
sort of wild to think about. I think for colleges and professors, what's next, I think, is partly
just recognizing there does seem to be something that isn't just a short-term shift in play here,
(35:25):
and just kind of accepting that, I guess, and figuring out some way to try to hold things
together in light of that. There's sort of this crisis approach that everyone was in for a while,
and that's faded. But. It does seem that student work habits and expectations really have changed,
and figuring out how to move forward with that is going to continue to be important. Again,
(35:48):
one thing I have been thinking about is, is there some shift in what happens in class,
and what does that look like? I've talked to a lot of individual professors who are rethinking that,
both because of these student preparation issues and also because of AI and the possibility that
students will turn in work that they haven't really done work on themselves, would obviously
(36:11):
be enormously complicated to expect students to be in class more during college, but that's one of
the things I've started wondering about. I mean, this sort of expectation that you spend a couple
hours on your own doing this independent work for every hour you're in the room seems like it's kind
of broken down. And so what do you do with that? I think there's an answer there for professors,
(36:35):
and then there's the much harder kind of system level answer to that.
Well, thank you. It's been great talking to you. And we'd also like to put in a
plug for The Chronicle’s podcast. Could you talk just a little bit about that?
Sure, The Chronicle has a fairly new podcast called College Matters, which is hosted by my
colleague Jack Stripling, and it's a great way for people inside and outside of higher ed to
(36:57):
kind of follow along with some of the big issues of the day. Jack features Chronicle
journalists and also some of the people we write about, expert sources, policy makers,
folks who work on campuses. And it's a really fun listen, because he's a really good interviewer,
and I would encourage folks to check that out.Well, thanks so much for joining us. I know that
(37:18):
you'll continue being an inspiration for our podcast and always a good read.
Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
If you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes
or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on
(37:40):
our Tea for Teaching Facebook page. You can find show notes, transcripts and
other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
Many students experience challenges transitioning from high school to college. In this episode,
we discuss changes in the K-12 environment that impact student preparation for college.
Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of
(00:21):
innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist...
...and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer......and features guests doing important research
and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
(00:47):
Our guest today is Beckie Supiano, a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
She began her work at The Chronicle as an intern in 2008 and is a co-author, with Beth McMurtrie
of The Chronicle’s Teaching Newsletter. Beckie’s insightful articles have been a regular source of
inspiration for us as faculty and many of our past podcasts were the result of things we’ve
(01:08):
read in your articles. Welcome.Thanks so much for having me.
Today's teas are:... Beckie, are you drinking any tea with us today?
You know, I'm not really a tea drinker. I have finished my morning pot of coffee, and I've
switched over to sparkling water over here.I would say probably many of our listeners are
right on team Beckie. How about you, John?I am drinking a ginger peach black tea today.
(01:30):
I'm back to drinking that candy cane tea that I've been drinking lately. It's really
a nice blend of black and herbal mint. Interesting, although that may not work so well
once we hit the summer, you may want to finish it up by then. It just may seem a bit non seasonal
at the rate I've been drinking it, it may happen.
So we've invited you here today to discuss your recent article: “Some Assembly Still Required:
(01:54):
How K-12 reforms and recent disruptions created Gen Z's baffling habits.” College faculty have, as
long as there have been records, complained that the K-12 system left a lot of students unprepared
for college, but the gap between high school preparation and college expectations seem to have
gotten quite a bit worse in recent years. What are some of the changes in student experiences
(02:17):
and in the K-12 environment that have made this transition more difficult for both the students
and for the faculty who will be teaching them? I'll mention this article is part of a series that
my colleague, Beth McMurtrie and I and another colleague have been writing for really about
the past year, called “Teaching Gen Z,” which was really our attempt to describe and untangle a lot
(02:39):
of what professors have been noticing with this group of traditional age students. And so we got
to a point where we sort of thought, “Oh gosh, you know, we really do need to go look at what's been
going on in K-12.” I hear you, these complaints that “students are coming in unprepared” and
“something must be up with schools” are long standing, but there are some things that really
do seem to have changed that are important, and obviously that's what the article is trying to
(03:04):
make sense of here. I will say it's like, “Oh, something must be going on before these students
get to college.” And I think one thing I'd like to underscore is it doesn't seem to be just one
something, and I think that's part of what makes this very complicated, but also what makes it
really interesting. A lot of my article looks at the test-based accountability movement and
(03:26):
some of its unintended consequences in terms of what is and isn't focused on in a lot of schools,
and how that sets students’ expectations for what education really is. But there are other things
too. There's been a really significant drop in reading for pleasure, which turns out to
be a very important thing in terms of students’ reading ability, also the teacher shortage and
(03:48):
what that's meant for who's in front of classrooms and what they're doing. And the rise of technology
to supplement classroom instruction is related with that last point on the teacher shortage,
too. And then, of course, we have the pandemic, which exacerbated lots of existing trends and
created some new challenges. And everyone's still trying to make sense of how that's all played out,
(04:10):
unfortunately, and what some of the longer-term impacts are. And then there's really the role
that schools play in society, and how many things they're really being asked to do beyond simply
educating our country's children. So what that means, just to take sort of one piece of it that
professors are very interested in, students are not getting as much practice reading books or
(04:32):
longer articles inside or outside of school, and so professors are noticing that students
are having a harder time doing the kind of reading they're expected to in college. And
if you sort of look at what's going on… again, both in and outside of school before students
get there… you can kind of get a little bit of a better handle on why it might be that way.
One of the things that you talk about in your article is the No Child Left Behind Act and
(04:55):
just legislation in general that's intentions are to help our education and our society, but there
are sometimes some intended consequences. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, absolutely. So, No Child Left Behind, the federal law signed in 2002 was intended to raise
the floor on student performance in school, which I think most people could agree is a
(05:15):
good goal. It was a bipartisan effort, and the idea here was that there are groups of students,
especially sub-populations, who would be more at risk, students who are members of minority groups
or low-income students or in special education programs, and before it was sort of easy to
mask if those students were not being well served by school, if they weren't performing well,
and the law was really designed to make it harder to have students kind of passed along
(05:39):
through school without getting the education they were supposed to. But what happened is
there needs to be some sort of way to evaluate are schools actually educating these students,
and the way that that was done is standardized tests. And just like so many things, once you
introduce a way to evaluate performance and make it a high-pressure thing where everyone has a lot
(05:59):
at stake, everyone's going to focus on how to look good in that evaluation. And part of what you see
is that some of the things that schools might do to try to improve test scores in the short
term might be misaligned with things you might do if your goal were longer-term learning. And
(06:20):
there are lots of examples of that, and a lot of it's become more clear now.
So, along with the No Child Left Behind Act there was this increase in standardized tests.
How did the introduction of these standardized tests affect the way in which classes are taught?
One of the examples you mentioned is how 10th graders were taught the Pythagorean theorem.
How did that change in response to some of the standardized testing, as well as the breadth and
(06:45):
depth of coverage on many other topics.Yeah, so that example about the Pythagorean
theorem is one specific example from a test of 10th graders in Massachusetts that a professor
I spoke with at Harvard, Dan Koretz, mentioned in our interview that I thought was just such a nice
example. So basically, you can reverse engineer these tests to figure out how to help students
(07:07):
perform well on them. So in this instance, this example that he gave me, the Princeton Review,
figured out like, oh, there's this pattern where this particular test, for this group of students
in this state regularly asked a question on the Pythagorean theorem. And because students
cannot use calculators on this test and the Pythagorean Theorem requires using square roots,
they're really only a few kinds of questions this could possibly be, like, if you memorize
(07:29):
a few sets of ratios, you can pretty much get the question right, whether or not you understand
algebra, and really, whether or not you understand the Pythagorean Theorem. It's just a sort of test
strategy that you could use to perform well on this item, and that's a problem for a few reasons.
I mean one, it means that the item can't really tell us if students understand math, because they
(07:52):
don't have to to get this question right. So this item, which is one of a small sample of
questions used to test (07:58):
“Do you understand algebra generally?” can't really be effective at answering
that question for us. But a related problem is that if you know that certain material is going
to be tested on and again, if there's a lot of pressure to shore up student performance, there's
all the incentive in the world to really focus on those aspects of a subject in your preparation for
(08:21):
students. So lots of practice on specific parts of math, specific reading skills, lots of short
passages of reading and writing, because that's what students would be evaluated on. And so you
see this reallocation that certain subjects are emphasized to the detriment of others. And then
within subjects like math and reading that were really emphasized, only certain pieces
(08:43):
of those subjects would really get attention, which could lead to nice looking test scores,
but would also lead to students not having the full preparation they would need to build on those
skills in future work, including at college.When we’re talking about standardized testing,
other systematic assessment rubrics also became increasingly common in high schools
(09:05):
and colleges. And in your interview, one of the faculty members that you interviewed,
Ethan Hutt, suggests that this has made it more difficult for students to create more
interesting writing assignments. Is the increased prevalence of rubrics also an outgrowth of the
nature of standardized testing?Yeah, so I think that's a really good
example. A rubric can be helpful if students are supposed to come up with a certain type of answer
(09:29):
when they're answering a question on a test. Writing can be kind of formulaic at any level,
but there's some variation in how formulaic it is, and students have been kind of conditioned to
write to spec, right? I hear from professors all the time, just interviewing them in our day-in,
day-out, coverage of teaching that students really seem to think they are being asked to come up with
(09:52):
the answer, the right answer, the answer the professor has already thought of and is walking
around with and expecting to hear back, even if students are being asked to share an opinion or
talk about their personal experience, something that presumably the professor can't really have a
predetermined answer for. And you can kind of see how this all connects. And so what Hutt was saying
is students just feel really lost when they're asked to just write an essay on a topic. They
(10:18):
expect a lot more granular instructions of exactly what to do to deliver the kind of product that the
professor wants and will give a good grade to, and when he'll tell them, like, “I don't really
have that, that's not really what I do,” they don't believe it. They think he just won't tell
them. And I've heard similar things from other professors as well. I think it's long been the
(10:39):
case that college students are asked to work at a higher level, that they have more freedom to
kind of spread their wings and try things out. But it seems like professors are noticing that
this group of students, rather than kind of enjoying that and running with it, feels kind
of stuck or anxious or just doesn't know how to proceed without a lot more explicit direction.
(10:59):
And that's put a lot more pressure on college faculty also to use rubrics with assignments,
which, again, can limit creativity in students’ writing. We'd like to have students develop some
creativity and be able to analyze material, but if we are requiring them only to focus on
a narrow subset of their disciplines, might that do some harm to their ability to be productive
(11:21):
members of society in a world where they're not going to be just completing assignments
designed to a rubric, or where they're not going to be getting standardized tests,
but they have to deal with real-world problems.Yeah, I think that there's a lot of concern about
all of what you just said on the part of faculty, and it's hard to figure out how to communicate to
(11:42):
students what you really are trying to get them to do, and it's hard for these reasons,
and it's hard because of generative AI. There's a lot going on here that's working against trying
to convince students to think critically and do their own creative work, and kind of to find their
voice. And that seems to be something that is a heavier lift for everyone involved, sure.
(12:04):
Along those same lines, at the college level, university level, we're expecting students to
be independent and have autonomy and really take those reins. Are there things happening in the
K-12 system that are reducing student autonomy? Is that in response to the high-stakes testing
and rubrics and all the standardization? Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think,
(12:24):
in terms of how to go about completing the work that does seem to be in play. And some of it,
I think, is just also about the way you think about education, and what it's for.
The testing regime is performative, like you're getting a test and you're performing on it,
and your performance is really important. That's really different from other ways of thinking about
(12:48):
education as being a process. And I think many people in higher education and gosh, you know,
many people in K-12 too, would understand that the process thing is important. We're
supposed to be lifelong learners. This is how you go about learning anything. A lot of times,
people will talk to me with illustrations of like, “How do you learn to play a sport or a musical
instrument?” This is sort of how humans learn. We have better and better handle on that from
(13:13):
research on learning, but it's tough, I think, to get students to shift gears. And this is,
I think, interrelated to something that professors also experience, where students are very grade
motivated, and I think it's easy for professors to be exasperated by that, but especially at a
place with a selective admissions process like, oh gosh, you know, students have been really strongly
(13:33):
conditioned to think about their grades, or they probably wouldn't be in your classroom
at all. And it's hard to turn that off.And much of this seems to be related to the
changes in incentives that K-12 instructors and administrators face because the funding they
receive may be tied to the success of students on these standardized exams, but by narrowing what
(13:54):
students are studying, or narrowing the range of topics addressed to those things that can be
captured in multiple-choice exams and standardized tests, one of the things you're suggesting,
I think, in the article, is that students are missing out on some of the wider explorations
and a wider breadth of learning that perhaps might have been more common in the absence of
some of the standardization. Is that correct? Yeah, it's interesting. Some of the education
(14:18):
scholars I spoke to emphasize that before all of this, if you go back pre-2002,
and there were even some earlier efforts in this direction before that, you just probably had a
more uneven landscape. Like a really good teacher could do some things that would be
harder to get away with now. But also that isn't to say that's always what happened. Teaching was
probably a little more uneven before, which is interesting to think about. But this narrowing,
(14:43):
I think, is interesting. One of the things that came up again in my reporting here, I also looked
a bit at the Common Core, which is designed to help students be college and career ready. Again,
like really good intentions there, but there's this idea that, okay, most of us out in the
working world, most of the reading and writing we do is shorter things. It's emails and memos
(15:06):
and reading an article that's kind of shorter. It's not sit down and read this book and then
write a term paper, and that's not what most people are doing. But it seems now that there
are some things about reading whole books that change the way people read. Their reading ability
is different if they only read like snippets of things and don't have to think about like,
(15:27):
“What is this author's argument in some sort of a context beyond just some little passage?” And
another example that came up is history, if you're reading in history, like as a subject,
and then in college as a discipline that, in addition to giving you access to a different
disciplinary understanding of the world, would also enhance your reading ability in
(15:50):
ways that just doing reading drills won't. The reading drills can maybe bring up that floor,
but there's some ceiling there that students aren't getting the ability to work toward,
and it's interesting just thinking about how these things are interconnected. Another dimension that
came up in my reporting was students reading for pleasure. And if you think about it, oh,
it makes sense. If you just read more of anything, you learn more stuff, and you can make connections
(16:16):
between the things you learn when you're reading this book just because you're interested in
whatever to other things you're learning at school and elsewhere, and to just take that
piece away has a lot more consequences than maybe would be apparent if you're just thinking about
the basic things that everyone needs to know.One of the things that came up in your article,
but we're also just observing in our landscape is not just short-form reading,
(16:42):
but there's a plethora of videos available, podcasts available, AI available. For example,
even on The Chronicle website, , now there's an AI tool to get information fast. It's great. It's
helpful to be able to get information in a lot of different modalities. There's real strength
in the ability to get information in multiple modalities. There's benefits to that, as well
(17:04):
as maybe some detriments to not always using all the modalities available.
I think it's interesting, and it's hard for professors to figure out how much reading and
writing, per se, really matter as a way to get information or a way to convey what you
know. But I think, for most of them, it's hard to imagine that there isn't something
(17:27):
important about those skills in particular,I remember when I went to high school sometime
last century, a while back, but it was really common for us to be asked in English classes
and in social science classes to read multiple books in the semester or in the course of the
academic year, but with the introduction of the Common Core standards that you've mentioned,
(17:48):
the focus on that is a bit different. One of the things you suggest is that the Common Core
focus is more on close-reading skills, which encourages practice with close-reading skills.
How might that be harming students’ ability or interest in engaging with larger texts.
When I talked to a professor, James S. Kim, who studies reading and the development of that,
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one of the things that came up was that there was a sort of virtuous cycle with reading, like,
if you read more, you get better at it, and reading at length is just different. I mean,
I think close reading is an important skill, but you can work on that while you're reading
something longer, and the reverse kind of isn't true. And I think part of what's emerging is
(18:30):
that there are so many different things going on with reading, and focusing just on close reading
doesn't enable students to be able to be well prepared to do all the things they need to do
with it when they get to college. Reading in college does work differently. It's supposed
to. You read differently in different courses, and that's always been a hump for students,
(18:52):
but it again, seems to have changed. One of the education professors I interviewed for my story
was describing how her students in like, not a first-year course, didn't read the directions
correctly on an assignment, and she had to kind of go back and do that with them. And her argument,
this is Julie Cohen at UVA, her argument is that this illustrates to her that it's the
(19:14):
teacher shortage, that someone who's gone through the right preparation to be a classroom teacher
would have covered this in high school, and students just aren't getting enough practice
with it before they get to college. That's her read on the situation. But we've heard this from
other professors too, that some of this is even just like a simple reading comprehension issue.
(19:34):
One of the things that we haven't quite touched on yet is the introduction of smartphones and
apps. We talked a little bit about AI and video and things and how they've predominated
our media landscape, but what about the access to smartphones and high school
students and earlier having access to these.There’s obviously a lot of debate around this,
(19:56):
and I'm not sure that anyone has it all completely figured out, But there are real concerns about
attention and certainly time you're spending scrolling on your phone is time you're not
spending reading for pleasure. That seems kind of obvious. Some of this is about what's going on
outside of school. And then one of the professors I talked to, Morgan Polikoff, at USC, was saying
(20:19):
that he thinks a sort of underappreciated dimension of this is that there's this idea
now that younger students don't read, won't read, and sort of a hesitation to expect it of them,
right? Like, oh, we have just used something that students are going to participate in.
And so his argument is that there's sort of this acceptance of like, oh, students won't do this,
(20:41):
so let's not even try to make them.I wonder if that's tied to whether or
not we have role models that are doing that. I'm thinking about my own daughter,
who's in second grade. We've instituted family reading time mostly because we want to read,
so she has her own sets of books so that she's reading, but that's because we're all spending
time reading. And if that's not a culture in a space where a kid is, where people aren't
(21:02):
reading all the time and they are on their phones, then the expectation might be to be on a phone.
I think it's an interesting question. There's obviously, like, more than one way you can
be using your phone, and I think a lot of us do a lot of reading on our phones too,
but from the outside, it's not always even clear if that is actually what you're doing. And when
I talked to James Kim, he did talk about that, what parents are doing matters here
(21:27):
too. Are you talking about school and even if you are reading, is that visible to kids? And
we know a lot of adults aren't reading either.And smartphone apps are designed to get attention,
there's a large financial incentive for the developers of those apps to build apps
that capture attention, and so it's a tough competition, from a student's perspective,
(21:49):
between something that provides this immediate gratification and interesting content,
or learning something in more depth, which may be a little bit more tedious, which was a challenge
that wasn't faced in much earlier cohorts. Yeah, I mean, I've definitely talked to some
students who are aware of that problem. I did another story for this series about students
(22:10):
struggling to work independently and just needing more support to do ambitious work in a course,
like a big paper or project. And that's something that came up talking with students about their own
habits. It is hard. And I think it's hard even for those of us who are past that part of our lives,
that distraction is real. And I think there are a lot of people who don't really have
(22:35):
the option of just putting the phone in a drawer for large stretches of the day,
because they have to be reachable. And if you're reachable, you're reachable. It's definitely a
hard thing for students, and I think one that I think a lot of us can sympathize with.
One of the conversations that I had recently with a colleague, and we were having with some kids,
where the kids were like, “Well, can you just Google that for me, if you don't know the answer,
(22:57):
like, just look it up.” Yeah, we used to have to, like, look in an encyclopedia, go check out a book
from the library, and just like the difference in how quickly you can get an answer to a question
versus having to work a little bit to get an answer to even basic questions about whatever.
It's really interesting. And then I think the challenge is then easier to get an answer, but
harder to know if it's a good answer, right? Yeah.
(23:19):
I mean, I think that's hard for, again, lots of folks who are long past being a
student and just figuring out, okay, you can search for something, but
how do you evaluate the answers you're seeing?So, generative AI and hallucinations provide
students with some serious challenges there, too, in interpreting or examining the accuracy
(23:40):
of information that's being provided.There's a long thread on blue sky recently
about hallucinations related to summaries and searches about some basic science topics. So
if a kid's like looking up a basic answer to something it could be completely inaccurate.
It would be a topic that would be somewhat simple to answer, but the answer that they're
(24:01):
getting because they're looking at the AI summaries are just completely inaccurate.
Although it has been getting better…Yeah, It’s getting better, but…
... to be fair.Again, these were searches
that just happened in the past. So one of the other things you talk
about is the impact that the pandemic has had on student preparation for college.
Could you talk a little bit about that?Yeah, absolutely. I think it's hard to
(24:23):
tease out exactly what's gone on here, just from covering pandemic teaching while it was going on,
I think there was a long period of just everyone kind of wishing very hard that things would
go back to normal this time, like, okay, next semester, we're gonna be back to normal. Okay,
next semester, we're gonna be back to normal, and I can sympathize, again, with why people had
(24:45):
that expectation, but there are some things that really do seem to have shifted. One question is,
did students just not get whatever they were supposed to learn during the period of emergency
remote instruction, which, of course, looked different at different schools, like, how long
did that last for and how did it work, and how much instruction were students really getting
(25:05):
during that time, and how much were they actually expected to do their work? And as time goes by,
the students coming into college who have been younger and younger whenever that happened, and
have had more time to kind of regroup from that and catch up in various ways. But other things
change too, and part of what seems to have changed is expectations. For a while there, students in
(25:26):
high school were given a little more ability to push back on expectations, to say, like,
“We really can't do this. You're asking too much,” and to be listened to in a way that they probably
wouldn't normally be. And I think, even for folks who think that was the right way to proceed during
that time, it's been hard to come back from, like, this idea that deadlines and grades and you really
(25:51):
do have to do this stuff, just haven't come back. And someone else I spoke with, Elena Silva at New
America think tank, was describing that even just the question of, like, “Why are we here at all
in the first place?” I mean, before you kind of close physical schools for a stretch of time, I
think for many students, it wouldn't really occur to them, like, “Oh, why are we here at all? What
could we be doing instead?” And then she pointed out, a lot of the rest of us never quite went back
(26:15):
to working the way we normally did, but students have kind of been expected to do that, and there's
a little more pushback and like, “What is this all for?” And it's something I hear so much,
again, from my higher ed sources, from professors, from faculty developers, like giving students that
“why,” that reason, is just so important. They seem to need it more now. Getting some buy-in
(26:38):
from them that, like, this isn't just some busy work you're being forced to do to like kill time,
but we're actually trying to give you something valuable, and being able to really articulate what
that is, is not a silver bullet, but it does seem to be a necessary first step in a lot of cases.
How has the pandemic affected student preparation for college?
I think that it's really such a mixed bag. I talked to Tim Renick, who has all this great
(27:03):
data from higher education in Georgia looking at entry-level courses there, and he said, like, “Oh,
we really saw, like, this immediate pandemic era hit in student performance in these intro courses,
but we seem to have worked through that.” Like students have kind of bounced back to normal on
that front. But I do think there's more to it than just “did you kind of get the content that you can
(27:27):
build on in this next course?”...all these other things around, like how to function as a student,
the independent work, and the sort of understanding of why you're there, and the
ability to kind of forge ahead with that. Those things do seem to have taken a hit. The other
article I wrote for this series about students working independently, described that, like a lot
(27:48):
of professors, years out from pandemic teaching, have found that if they really want students to
deliver some big project or paper or deliverable, if you will, from their course. If they really see
that as important, they have to create more time and space for students to work on it, give them
more feedback, maybe give them more class time. It seems like students are having a harder time
(28:12):
doing work on their own outside of class, and professors have to decide, like, if they really
want that work to happen, they might have to sort of change the way it gets done, including where,
including it might have to happen more when the professor is available to students in class.
Along with the changes in the way students were learning during the pandemic, there were also
some pretty substantial learning losses that were shared fairly unequally across the population.
(28:37):
All the students who were in elementary or high school during that period ended up being quite
a bit behind the usual rate of progression. International standardized test scores like
the PISA have been steadily declining, but there was a precipitous drop during the pandemic where
students are about anywhere from six months to a year behind in terms of where they would have been
(28:59):
in terms of math scores and reading scores, but those gaps are pretty unequally shared. There's
a pretty high variance in that, which again, presents some problems. What sort of things might
college faculty do in addressing those learning losses and also the disparity in those losses that
occurred across our student populations?I think this is a huge challenge. And again,
(29:22):
it's something that predates the pandemic, but was magnified by it. I mean, students are not
getting the same kind of preparation for college. A lot depends on where you went to school and what
resources you have available in your school and at home, and that's long been true, but it's,
I think, kind of easy to pretend that it isn't, that students are coming in and they're all kind
(29:45):
of expected to sort of do the same thing wherever they're coming from. I hear a lot of debate among
faculty about whether it's on them to help students do things like learn how to study,
learn how to read the directions. Know that you can't just sit there with your textbook and a
highlighter at the library, and then do well on your STEM exam in college. And on the one hand,
(30:07):
professors are in their role because of their subject matter expertise… that's very important
to them, and in a lot of courses, making sure that students have a handle on certain material
for specific reasons for the future is really the name of the game, and I can understand why
people really center that. But I'm hearing a lot of other professors say, like, “Well, if students
(30:31):
come in and they don't know how to do something, even if it's something kind of basic we all think
they should be able to do, we have to teach them now, like they can't do the work of the course
if they don't know how to study, or they don't know how to read the way we expect them to read,
or they don't know how to write the way we expect them to write. And even if that doesn't seem like
it's within the parameters of your job, if students haven't gotten this somewhere else
(30:52):
by the time they get to you, they're not gonna be able to do well in your course without it,
then you do have some responsibility to help them figure that out, and it's really a lot to ask of
professors. It's not like there's extra time for that, and also it's not something that professors
necessarily know how to teach students. They don't have the same kind of training
(31:13):
as a K-12 teacher. Some professors really don't have much training at all in teaching,
and it's really complicated to figure out why people are missing something that they're missing,
and what they need to kind of get there, and if you're seeing different kinds of misunderstandings
or mistakes or gaps than in the past, like that does really put a lot more work on faculty. But
(31:37):
what's going to happen if they don't try? Like, what's going to happen to those students?
The No Child Left Behind Act was put together to try to make sure that the quality of education
was raised for all students so that we weren't losing more students along the way. And it's
resulted in some changes that probably help students at the bottom a little bit more,
but it also may limit the range of topics that students learn and the depth of topics. But in
(32:02):
terms of colleges, one of the things that we encourage faculty to do in terms of creating an
inclusive teaching environment is to provide more structure on assignments, to use rubrics to make
expectations more transparent. That has been shown to reduce some of those equity gaps in outcomes,
but it might also tend to reduce the time that students spend on developing critical thinking
(32:26):
skills. So that's a trade off that I think is at the heart of some of this discussion, both in K-12
and also in college discussions. We want to make sure that all students have equal opportunities,
but perhaps some of the strategies we're using to do that might limit learning for all students to
those things that we're focusing on in our rubrics or a test. Do you see any way of resolving that,
(32:50):
other than continually experimenting to come up with the best balance?
Yeah, I don't think I have the answer there. It's hard, and I think it's hard to ask anyone
teaching, meet students where they are and then get them where they're supposed to be. That's
a tall order, always, and it seems especially hard now. It reminds me a bit of the pandemic
(33:10):
era debate on how much flexibility to give students and how much structure, which kind
of cuts similarly, like, Okay, it's a crisis. Students need flexibility. They don't have time,
they can't meet these deadlines. And then it kind of turns out as time goes on, like, oh, the same
students whose lives beyond the classroom really require them to have flexibility also really need
(33:32):
structure, because they haven't gotten the same opportunities to figure out how to build it for
themselves. And so how do you support both of those things? It's hard, and I think like figuring
out how to create more equitable conditions, I don't think you can create equitable conditions,
(33:52):
given the very different background students are coming from. But to move toward that and
also really support learning is hard, and I think there are things that professors are doing to try
to help students that end up not helping all of them or not working out as intended. And yeah,
I think there is constant experimentation with that. I think it's kind of hard to overstate how
(34:14):
difficult all of this is if you really care about it and try hard to make it better, as many of the
people I talk to in my job are oriented to.As you were asking your question, John,
I was thinking, it's not just like critical thinking, it's like creativity,
there's just a lot of space there, I don't know if balance is the right word either,
right if we can find a balance, it's just like, how do you keep all of those things in
(34:35):
the kitchen while you're cooking as ingredients? So we always wrap up by asking, what's next?
Yeah, that's a hard question, isn't it? One of the thoughts I had as I was working on this K-12
story is just how hard it is to remember what it was like for there to be this bipartisan
education effort. Consensus is too strong, but like, just sort of this shared understanding,
(35:00):
even of like, what are the problems and how might they be tackled? That feels just very unfamiliar
right now, even though I was there writing about some of this as it was happening. So that's just
sort of wild to think about. I think for colleges and professors, what's next, I think, is partly
just recognizing there does seem to be something that isn't just a short-term shift in play here,
(35:25):
and just kind of accepting that, I guess, and figuring out some way to try to hold things
together in light of that. There's sort of this crisis approach that everyone was in for a while,
and that's faded. But. It does seem that student work habits and expectations really have changed,
and figuring out how to move forward with that is going to continue to be important. Again,
(35:48):
one thing I have been thinking about is, is there some shift in what happens in class,
and what does that look like? I've talked to a lot of individual professors who are rethinking that,
both because of these student preparation issues and also because of AI and the possibility that
students will turn in work that they haven't really done work on themselves, would obviously
(36:11):
be enormously complicated to expect students to be in class more during college, but that's one of
the things I've started wondering about. I mean, this sort of expectation that you spend a couple
hours on your own doing this independent work for every hour you're in the room seems like it's kind
of broken down. And so what do you do with that? I think there's an answer there for professors,
(36:35):
and then there's the much harder kind of system level answer to that.
Well, thank you. It's been great talking to you. And we'd also like to put in a
plug for The Chronicle’s podcast. Could you talk just a little bit about that?
Sure, The Chronicle has a fairly new podcast called College Matters, which is hosted by my
colleague Jack Stripling, and it's a great way for people inside and outside of higher ed to
(36:57):
kind of follow along with some of the big issues of the day. Jack features Chronicle
journalists and also some of the people we write about, expert sources, policy makers,
folks who work on campuses. And it's a really fun listen, because he's a really good interviewer,
and I would encourage folks to check that out.Well, thanks so much for joining us. I know that
(37:18):
you'll continue being an inspiration for our podcast and always a good read.
Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
If you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes
or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on
(37:40):
our Tea for Teaching Facebook page. You can find show notes, transcripts and
other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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