colleges do suck at teaching

Last week, Syed Ali wrote in response to my post about the poor state of teaching:

your basic premise is flimsy, so the rest of the article falls apart. i don’t believe you can say we are bad at teaching (or good for that matter) because we don’t now have particularly good tools of evaluation. i wasn’t around back in the day (in the game only 10 yrs), but am guessing tools of evaluation for teaching weren’t better back then.

Well, it turns out that there is actually really good evidence that students don’t learn much in colleges. A new book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa provides good evidence that students aren’t getting as much from the process as we’d like to believe. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

Unsurprisingly, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011), by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, reveals that at least 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated “no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years.” And that’s just the beginning of the bad news.

Their study is based on follow ups of students that tested them in certain skills.

A few responses here. First, there’s a massive selection effect. A lot of people don’t have the academic skills or maturity to really do well in college. Better teaching wouldn’t make a difference for many students. Second, college teaching is not an evidence based practice. We often throw material out there with little sense of how to best communicate it. I knew very few professors who build courses in responses to rigorous studies of student learning. We’re fumbling in the dark and it’s not surprising that students aren’t getting much. Overall, we should stop denying the fact that colleges don’t do a great teaching job and start figuring out what actually works.