Do We Really Value Learning?

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Chemical Education Today

Editorial

Do We Really Value Learning? University faculty think of their institutions as places in which learning is valued and pride themselves on the discovery of new knowledge. Indeed universities have been unusually successful in supporting research and developing new knowledge that has been enormously beneficial to society, and university faculty value learning far more than the average. But some kinds of learning are more valued than others—a fact that I believe is detrimental to the long-term welfare of both universities and society. By far the most valued learning is by someone who discovers what nobody else has learned before. We call the process of achieving such learning “research”. It is the coin of the academic realm, at least partly because it is easy to evaluate. Those who do it creatively can reap the rewards of respect from their colleagues, better facilities and instrumentation from their institutions, regional and national awards from their disciplinary societies, and increased funding from government and industry for their endeavors. Significantly less valued are activities that help others to learn, especially when the learning involves things already known by many. We call such activities “teaching”, although the dictionary definition of “teach” (“to show how to do something; give instructions to; train”) is not broad enough to encompass the range of activities currently being used to encourage learning. There is a widespread notion that teaching is easy and requires no real creativity. Nontenured faculty are often warned that time spent on teaching will be thought of as “wasted”, and those well established in research have been criticized for spending too much of their time on the “unproductive” activity of teaching. Teaching is held out to students as a fall-back position in case their other career plans do not pan out, and sometimes those who educate teachers are willing to accept less than the highest quality from the students to whom they provide credentials. Those who employ teachers often require little or no evidence that a candidate is prepared appropriately. At the college level, evaluation of a lecture on research is considered adequate, with the tacit assumption that someone who knows a subject can teach it—or worse, that teaching ability is irrelevant. At the precollege level, the attention paid to subject-matter expertise is often minimal, the assumption being that someone who knows how to teach can do so without knowing what students ought to be learning. Helping students to learn is an activity that has longterm value to society, but our society seems bent on discounting the future. Research can do things for us now (or soon). Teaching nurtures potential research workers, helps citizens understand better the choices they need to make regarding society’s future directions, enables students to connect what are now separate disciplines into new areas of intellectual development, and develops intellectual abilities that otherwise might be lost. These benefits will perhaps not even accrue within some of our lifetimes, so why put resources into them now? We can profit more now if we avoid taking responsibility for the future—and often we elect to do so.

In a world increasingly If we want students to dependent on intellectual rather than economic capidevelop their abilities tal, such a course seems to address and solve bound for disaster. But can problems different we do something about it? One way to improve the from those they have status of teaching would be seen before, then we to make it easier to evaluneed to develop means ate how good a job a teacher has done—to of assessing whether greatly improve our ability they can do so. to assess accurately whether students have met the learning goals we set for our courses. The inability of current assessments to demonstrate that students have learned what we want them to makes evaluation of teaching subjective and superficial. Performance of students on most current assessments is relatively independent of both teacher and method of instruction, but more sensitive tools could distinguish those who understand more deeply from those who do not. Better assessment would bring to the discipline of chemical education more credence and respect. To a considerable degree, assessment of students drives how students react to our curricula. If we want students to develop their abilities to address and solve problems different from those they have seen before, then we need to develop means of assessing whether they can do so. Such means might be pencil-and-paper tests or quizzes, technology-mediated problem-solving simulations, or observations of students’ contributions to a group solution of a difficult problem. There would be far more concern about students’ mastery of chemistry if those students had to perform in assessments that really measure deeper knowledge and understanding. The need is to find new assessment methods that can be applied by large numbers of faculty and that are much more effective in finding out whether our learning goals have been met. A start along these lines has been made in the Conceptual Questions and Challenge Problems column in JCE Internet (http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/JCEWWW/Resources/ CQandChP/). Edited by William R. Robinson and Susan C. Nurrenbern, the site awaits your contributions of additional questions that can assess students’ conceptual understanding. These should complement the many questions in current examinations and textbooks that are designed to assess whether students can apply algorithms to the solution of common chemistry problems. This column and other similar efforts represent initial steps in the direction I think we need to be going—toward much more effective ways to demonstrate that students have, or have not, met our learning goals. Such demonstrations can in turn provide a much better foundation for evaluation of teaching, thereby enhancing the status of good teachers and good teaching. Eventually they can lead to greater recognition of teaching’s importance to our discipline and our institutions of learning.

JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 76 No. 1 January 1999 • Journal of Chemical Education

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