Over the last quarter century, as public education has made a hard shift towards “accountability” and increased standardized testing, the trend towards the use of research-based instruction in classrooms has become nearly as ubiquitous as the Scantron sheets students are asked to bubble in multiple times each semester.
We all like having someone to blame. Whether it is the state of the economy, security, sanctions (or lack thereof), it just seems to feel better if we can point a finger. Learning is no exception. Educators point fingers all the time. Americans bemoan the state of public education. States experiment with different ways to resurrect dropping exam scores and poor testing results. College faculty often blame high school teachers who often blame middle and elementary school teachers. Teachers also blame parents for not fostering good study habits or disciplining their kids, and blame students for not studying enough.
Many students badmouth teachers (take a look at Ratemyprofessor.com for some eye opening commentary). An educated citizenry is critical to a vibrant, successful, forward-looking, and successful America. If we are loosing the battle to other countries or if our students are not learning things will not end well. Who can we blame when students don’t learn? There are many scapegoats, but do we have any real basis to confidently identify the true scapegoats when learning is not taking place?
And no, there’s no app for that but just good old fashioned scholarship on teaching and learning. Like any empirical study, perhaps we cannot be 100% certain, but there is empirical evidence to maintain a high degree of confidence. A wealth of research on learning nicely highlights what some of the main factors influencing learning are. Ken Bain wrote about What the Best College Students Do and Beth Schwartz and I summarized large swathes of the empirical literature in Optimizing Teaching and Learning and Evidence Based Teaching for Higher Education. These tomes make for good reading if you have a few days to spare but some of the answers are quick to share.
Of course, there are the usual suspects: Effort, ability, motivation, goals, study habits, mind set. Each of these are the no-brainers of learning. Students need to work, care about the outcomes, have goals, good study habits, and believe that intelligence is flexible and not fixed. Most teachers can generate this list from their experience. Some of the predictors of learning are somewhat surprising: Social support and self efficacy (the belief that you can successfully accomplish something). Teachers may not think of the value of support and rapport enough but it is clearly a key component of successful learning. In a recent Gallup-Purdue study of successful college students, 63% of the over 30,000 students sampled cited having at least one professor who made them excited about learning as being critical to their success. Feeling teachers cared and having a mentor who encouraged them to pursue goals and dreams were also important.
Fine, fine, you may say. I promised some definitive finger pointing so let me get to it. Beyond oodles of research studies in psychology and education that shine the spotlight on different parts of the learning puzzle, there is one granddaddy of them all. John Hattie, then at the University of Auckland, New Zealand (now at the University of Melbourne, Australia) gave us some big answers. Hattie took a close look at over 65,000 studies of student achievement. Studies involved close to a quarter of a billion students. Yes, 250,000,000. He then used a statistical methodology known as meta-analysis where he essentially combined the findings to create a measure of the relative significance of different educational factors. This analysis yielded a metric called an effect size which allows us to get a strong sense of just how important a certain factor is. It lets us allocate blame or praise.
Hattie’s work provides a treasure trove of findings for students, teachers, administrators, politicians, and the public in general. In a recent publication in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology (Hattie, 2015), Hattie provides a table listing the top 195 factors influe
ncing education. Most important factors to blame (with low or negative effect sizes) include depression, television watching, and home corporal punishment. Some important factors to praise (those with highest effect sizes) include teacher estimates of student achievement, teacher efficacy, study skills, and classroom discussion. Class size? Not a big deal. Single-sex schools, gender, or type of testing? Next to no effect.
Hattie took all the data and calculated the main categories of factors that influenced learning. Carving nature at its joints, he provides a stark vivid picture of just who is to blame. The lion’s share belongs to the student. Evidence from millions of students suggests that close to half, 50%, of what predicts learning is what the student brings to the classroom!! Before teachers enjoy too many sighs of relief and get fingers ready to point, note that the next largest chunk of influence was teacher qualities. What teachers do, their training, their characteristics, accounts for 20-25% of the variance in learning (see Figure below). The rest can be attributed to peers (5%), home factors (5%), and a number of other smaller contributors.
Fifty percent. Half of learning depends on what students do. As someone who has taught for 20 years or so I can tell you that far too often students look to us faculty as keepers of the keys to learning. I show my students a pie chart with each of the percentages described above but without the labels. I ask them to predict who the data says is responsible for 50% of their learning. Without fail, they think it is teachers. If I only had a better teacher they say. They quickly assume that poor teaching is the lion’s share of the issue. We educators become the scapegoats.
I also know that some teachers put the onus completely on the student. When I ask attendees at teaching workshops to guess how much of variance in learning is due to students, they often guess as high as 80-90%. If students only worked harder they say. Hattie’s data is a stark reminder that BOTH students and teachers have to work together to cultivate learning. I work tirelessly to provide the best instruction for my students and I like to inspire my students to similarly be accountable and participate in their own learning too. Yes, there are many skills both students and teachers can adopt, but the message is clear.
There is no one scapegoat for poor learning. Let’s stop pointing fingers and provide students with the skills to learn and teachers the tools to teach well.
My recent blog titled Why Your Freshman Year in College Will NOT Be 13th Grade must have struck a particularly sensitive nerve in a very large group of people because it has received over 19,000 views.
Professional development opportunities for high school psychology teachers have traditionally been hard to come by. In the past, the only significant opportunities to see presentations on best practices in the teaching of high school psychology were limited to the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) annual meeting or the Advanced Placement Annual Conference. Both are outstanding opportunities for professional growth but typically require significant travel and expensive conference fees.
Psychology majors are both blessed and cursed.
Your ability to prepare yourself for a remarkably wide variety of careers because the psychology curriculum provides so many opportunities to develop the seven crucial sustainable job-related skills (i.e., communication, collaboration, critical thinking, professional, self-management, technological, and ethical reasoning) that employers value most during the hiring process. These same seven skills also help new hires gain positive on-the-job outcomes (e.g., new responsibilities and promotions) and avoid negative on-the-job outcomes (e.g., reprimands, discipline, and termination). This blessing is the reason why “students who complete a baccalaureate degree in psychology will have completed an almost ideal workforce preparation”.
The knowledge you acquire as you learn about the causes and consequences of human behaviors and mental processes, which are perhaps the most interesting, complex, and important topics addressed in higher education today. The captivating nature of psychological knowledge attracts huge numbers of students to the major, produces more than 117,000 bachelor’s degrees in psychology each year, and prepares you to enter a remarkably wide range of careers that deal with people and their interactions with each other and their environments.
Unfortunately, there are downsides (i.e., curses) to these blessings.
The prospect of making a decision from such a massive set of career choices is a daunting task for many psychology majors. Unlike your education-, accounting-, and nursing-major peers who know exactly what they will become when they graduate (i.e., teachers, accountants, and nurses), only a small percentage of psychology majors continue their education, earn graduate degrees, and become psychologists (Hettich & Landrum, 2014). The rest enter the workforce immediately after graduation in diverse fields such as business, advertising, human resources, social services, health care, law enforcement, technology, education, fitness, recreation, and the military.
Psychology is a very popular major. This may initially appear to be a blessing, but it also means that a bachelor’s degree in psychology places you at risk in the job market simply because so many are competing with one another for jobs. If you lack the ability to prove the possession of a strong set of job-related skills, you risk job dissatisfaction, the disturbing belief that your jobs are not related to your major (Borden & Rajecki, 2000), and the very real possibility of having to accept a job that does not require a bachelor’s degree (Rajecki & Borden, 2009), or—worse yet—that presidential candidate Jeb Bush was correct when he stated that psychology majors end up “working at Chick-fil-A”.
The experience of teaching, advising, and mentoring thousands of psychology majors during my 40-year academic career has led me to conclude that this group is composed of two subgroups:
These subgroups approach their professional futures in profoundly different ways.
Savvy students adopt a proactive, two-stage approach to the collegiate experience by deliberately using it as an opportunity to explore, identify, and refine their career goals. You create and follow a well-crafted plan to acquire the skills you will need—and the evidence that you have acquired them—to attain your post-baccalaureate aspirations. In other words, you intentionally use your undergraduate educations to decide who you want to become and then begin a systematic process to construct yourself in the image of that person.
On the other hand, if you are a not-so-savvy student, you will live your undergraduate life under the ill-fated illusion that you are entitled to, and will acquire, a good job after you graduate simply because you possess a college diploma certifying that you have accumulated enough credit hours to graduate. You will take courses to “get them out of the way,” avoid challenging classes in which you could strengthen important career-enhancing skills (e.g., writing, public speaking, and math), choose easy rather than skill-building electives, and spurn extracurricular opportunities because you believe them to be a waste of time, rather than opportunities to develop valuable collaboration and leadership skills. These unfortunate strategies, paired with the misconception that the work required as an undergraduate student cannot be applied to the “real world” of work, can produce very negative consequences.
Case in point is the extreme disgruntlement one of my former students described several years ago in The Huffington Post who, in debt and without a steady job, attempted to sell his diploma on eBay® for $36,000 plus $3.50 shipping and handling. Perhaps as a result of living out a self-fulfilling prophecy, he was quoted as saying, “Universities are handing out too many degrees that have zero real-world application.”
From “How to Maximize the Blessings and Minimize the Curses of Being a Psychology Major,” by D. C. Appleby, 2015, Eye on Psi Chi, 20(1), pp. 16–19. Copyright 2015 by Psi Chi,the International Honor Society in Psychology. Adapted with permission.
Additional References:
Borden, V. M. H., & Rajecki, D. W. (2000). First-year employment outcomes of psychology baccalaureates: Relatedness, preparedness, and prospects. Teaching of Psychology, 27, 164–168. doi:10.1207/S15328023TOP2703_01
Hettich, P. I., & Landrum, R. E. (2014). Your undergraduate degree in psychology: From college to career. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Rajecki, D. W., & Borden, V. M. H. (2009). First-year employment outcomes of U.S. psychology graduates revisited: Need for a degree, salary, and relatedness to the major. Psychology of Learning and Teaching, 8, 23–29. doi:10.2304/plat.2009.8.2.23
