The Instruction Myth

Why Higher Education is Hard to Change, and How to Change It

John Tagg

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781978804463
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Higher education is broken, and we haven't been able to fix it. Even in the face of great and growing dysfunction, it seems resistant to fundamental change. At this point, can anything be done to save it? The Instruction Myth argues that yes, higher education can be reformed and reinvigorated, but it will not be an easy process. In fact, it will require universities to abandon their central operating principle, the belief that education revolves around instruction, easily measurable in course syllabi, credits, and enrollments. Acclaimed education scholar John Tagg presents a powerful case that instruction alone is worthless and that universities should instead be centered upon student learning, which is far harder to quantify and standardize. Yet, as he shows, decades of research have indicated how to best promote student learning, but few universities have systematically implemented these suggestions.This book demonstrates why higher education must undergo radical change if it hopes to survive. More importantly, it offers specific policy suggestions for how universities can break their harmful dependence on the instruction myth. In this extensively researched book, Tagg offers a compelling diagnosis of what's ailing American higher education and a prescription for how it might still heal itself.

PART I WHERE ARE WE AND HOW DID WE GET HERE?

1 • THE CHRONIC CRISIS

American colleges and universities as places of undergraduate learning have assumed an increasingly important role for the last century. The job of preparing young people for serious and important work has increasingly moved from secondary schools to colleges and universities, and most colleges and universities have neither understood nor met the challenge. And when I say “work” here I don’t mean just earning a living. I mean also the job of living well and participating fully in the world. Indeed, the quality of educational preparation that students receive in colleges has probably declined as our reliance on those colleges for providing the intellectual capital to fuel further growth has increased. As we have asked more of higher education in terms of educating undergraduate students, it has provided less, and at a higher price.

The current default setting for colleges and universities is dysfunctional. It cannot prepare most students for the promising future they hope for. Traditional colleges and universities have become transcript-generating factories that lack the organizational capacity to achieve the mission that they claim to achieve and that society wants them to achieve. The governing paradigm for colleges and universities is that they offer classes, enroll students in classes, keep records of evaluations of student work in those classes using a brief and vague scale, count the classes “successfully” completed, and grant degrees when a sufficient number of classes have been completed. In other words, higher education is in the business of providing instruction in the form of discrete classes, counting them, and crediting students for having been instructed.

In this framework, which Robert Barr was the first to call the Instruction Paradigm,1 the following things are invisible and irrelevant to the institution granting degrees: What did students learn in their classes? What and how much do they remember, and for how long? What are they able to do? How well are they prepared to learn new things and master new skills during and after college? I do not mean to suggest that the faculty, administrators, and staffs of most colleges do not care about these things. Of course they do. And in performance, occupational, or professional programs where students engage in internships or authentic activities, their teachers often do attend to these questions. But colleges and universities as institutions generally fail to measure or respond to what students learn or to change their own organizational behavior in response to it. Colleges and universities, allegedly the depositories of the “higher learning,” do not themselves, as institutions, learn very well.

Most of those who teach in and work at colleges and universities believe in the Learning Paradigm: the fundamental doctrine that what matters most is how much and how well students learn. But as institutions, colleges and universities are stuck in the Instruction Paradigm.

For the most part, colleges and universities cannot distinguish between teachers whose students learn little and forget it quickly and teachers whose students learn much and remember it and apply it for years. Charles Blaich and Kathleen Wise, director and associate director of the Wabash College National Study of Liberal Arts Education—one of the most sophisticated and careful studies of how college affects students—put it this way: “Colleges and universities are capable of accomplishing many complex tasks, among them managing admissions, scheduling courses, allocating resources, and creating and maintaining information technology infrastructures. The governance and bureaucratic structures at most colleges and universities are not built to use assessment evidence to make changes.”2

Richard P. Keeling, head of the educational consulting firm Keeling & Associates, and Richard H. Hersh, former president of Hobart and William Smith colleges and Trinity College, make the point even more directly: “Making the sanguine but dangerous assumption that passing grades equal learning, most colleges and universities do not adequately support, measure, or strive to improve learning itself.”3 This assumption, that passing grades equal learning, is the core belief that sustains the instruction myth.

The architecture and design of higher education is built on the foundation of the instruction myth. The physical campus, the semester or quarter calendar, the curriculum, the schedule of classes, and the daily activities of teachers and students emerge from the central idea that taking classes is what being a student consists of and that scheduling and administering classes is what the college exists for. In other words, colleges and universities are in the business of putting students through a process and observing and recording the steps of that process without paying much attention to the results that the process achieves.

Nearly everyone who goes to college intends to get a degree—though many never accomplish this. A degree is, by definition, granted for the completion of a defined number of courses, or more precisely a defined number of credit hours, usually 120. A credit hour is one hour per week spent in a classroom being instructed by a teacher. By the standards not only of nearly all institutions but of their formal accrediting agencies and the U.S. Department of Education, accumulating credit hours is what students do in college and is the criterion for successful completion. And in enforcing this foundational definition of college work, these parties all embrace the myth that Keeling and Hersh so accurately identify above: “the sanguine but dangerous assumption that passing grades equal learning,” the substitution of process for outcomes. Eduardo M. Ochoa, assistant secretary for postsecondary education in the U.S. Department of Education in the Obama administration, states on behalf of his department, “At its most basic, a credit hour is a proxy measure of a quality of student learning.”4 This is, as we shall see, nonsense looked at from any angle at all. A credit hour is simply a measurement of time (supposedly) spent in a particular room and carries no information about what happens as a result. But the Department of Education, along with nearly every college and university in the country, treats a process as if it were an outcome. That is the core of the instruction myth.

By and large, colleges and universities as educational institutions do not get better. And in an environment in which the level of preparation of incoming students is declining and the number and variety of students is increasing, if they don’t get better, they get worse. We have seen a boomlet in recent years in books and commentaries on the Crisis on Campus (the title of a 2010 volume by Mark Taylor). If we look back a few years, however, we note something interesting. The criticisms of higher education that have gained much public notice in the first decades of the twenty-first century are not new. Even at a fairly detailed level, the critique goes back at least to the 1980s, and in many respects to the 1920s. Alfred North Whitehead’s The Aims of Education was first published in 1929. Alexander Meiklejohn’s The Experimental College, which contains many elements of the contemporary critique of higher education, was published in 1932. Evidence has accumulated, new voices have been added to the chorus of criticism, but the essential critique persists in a very consistent form. So if higher education is experiencing a crisis, we have to acknowledge that it has become a chronic crisis. How can such an oxymoronic problem persist for so long? Only one way. The institution in crisis has averted its gaze from its problems and persisted with the practices that cause those problems. The problem is not just that higher education is failing. Today’s distinctive problem is that the system has refused to learn from its failures but has embraced and preserved the causes of its dysfunction, repeatedly deflecting calls for change.

These are, of course, generalizations, and there are exceptions to all of them. I hope the exceptions are increasing in both number and quality. But the exceptions get attention these days in part because they are so exceptional, so different from the norm.

Colleges and universities, like other human institutions, have changed in many respects over the years. But they have reached a state of equilibrium, especially in the past half century or so, and while they have gone with the flow of social and technological changes, they have been especially resistant to designed change. Keeling and Hersh describe a state of affairs that has now persisted for decades: “A large percentage of what students have learned vanishes after the grades are in; almost half of students who begin college never finish; and the results of national tests of college student achievement have been dismal for years. Worse, these data are largely ignored by leaders in positions to respond and instigate reform.”5

I am speaking here of colleges and universities as educational institutions, as the organizations that facilitate and certify significant learning for adolescents and adults. This is not the only role that such institutions serve. They also conduct research and serve their communities in a variety of ways. These are important functions. Indeed, universities have probably been the major engine of progress in human life for more than a century through their research in a broad array of fields. Universities have changed rapidly and aggressively as research institutions. It is fair to say that, in terms of their research function, since the Second World War American universities have been seedbeds of innovation that have responded avidly to the developing markets for new knowledge and discovery. So you will often hear the claim that the United States has the best universities in the world, that our higher education system is the envy of other countries. Most of the top-ranked universities in the world, by the most widely accepted rankings, are American, and American universities have produced over a third of all Nobel Prize winners.6

But if we contrast the operations of the laboratories and research centers at any major university with the operations of teaching and student learning, we will see something that should be rivetingly interesting but usually goes without notice. Research in most fields today is answering very different questions, using very different technology and very different methodology than it was in, say, 1960. But teaching, for most students at most universities, is largely the same. Indeed, if we peel away the veneer of usually superficial technological tools—PowerPoint has replaced the chalkboard—it is almost as if we are caught in a time warp. Dominic Brewer and William Tierney, scholars of higher education at the University of Southern California, have noted the contrast: “Whereas research infrastructure—how one conducts research, with whom, its funding, its transfer, and the like—has gone through enormous transformation over the last century, the same cannot be said of teaching and learning.… Indeed, if one transported John Dewey from when he first started teaching in the early twentieth century to a classroom of today, he most likely would recognize the basic components and infrastructure; the same could not be said if Emile Durkheim investigated how researchers now conduct research.”7 Or, in the words of Eric Mazur, a physics teacher at Harvard, “The way physics is taught in the 1990s is not much different from the way it was taught—to a much smaller and more specialized audience—in the 1890s, and yet the audience has vastly changed.”8

Why is this? Is it because research fifty or one hundred years ago was undeveloped and in need of improvement while teaching had already been perfected? Hardly. No, teaching in higher education has been caught in a strange time warp for other reasons, and we will discuss them in the pages to come. One of those reasons is that research has become the defining mission of the university; in the words of Stanford University’s Larry Cuban, it has “trumped teaching” in the internal calculations of the university.9 My focus here is on the university’s role of promoting undergraduate learning rather than the research function because the research function has gone relatively well while the undergraduate learning function, as we shall see, has not. The two roles are neither mutually exclusive nor mutually reinforcing, but both are important. We can see them clearly only if we see them separately.

DOES HIGHER EDUCATION NEED TO CHANGE?

Most students get both smarter and more knowledgeable in college. So do most young adults whether they are in college or not. But college students probably grow in many ways that non-students don’t. They are, after all, in a setting for several years where knowledgeable people are intentionally exposing them to important information and ideas. But it is still true for many of the twenty million or so American college students that being a student consists largely of preparing through short-term reinforcement for multiple-choice tests that call upon them to sort correct from incorrect information in structured and isolated debriefing contexts. If they can pass enough of these tests, they get the degree. The best evidence we have suggests that many students fail to understand much that they learn, that most fail to remember what they learn, and that very few are able to transfer what they have learned to new settings. If this account is even partly correct, the implications are dire, and colleges and universities need to change.

The evidence for the effects of college has been hard to interpret because there has been so little of it. And this is one of the most important ways in which universities as research institutions differ from universities as educational institutions. The results of academic research are made public and vetted openly by critical experts. Research is an ongoing process of testing and evaluating ideas, of generating and reviewing evidence, so that researchers get smarter about what they do, and the world gets smarter about what researchers study. Most colleges and universities, on the other hand, can provide no credible evidence one way or the other about what their students have learned or can do as a result of their college experien...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Where Are We and How Did We Get Here?
• Part II: Why Is Change So Hard?
• Part III: Learning to Change, Changing to Learn
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author