Are your students really learning what you are teaching them? How do you know? Why? Why not? Those are simple questions, but ones that are very difficult for historians, and many other professors to answer.
A little while back two professors in the University of California system (Philip Babcock at the Santa Barbara campus and Mindy Marks at the Riverside campus) published an article that shows that college students are devoting less and less time to studying than they did forty years ago. The average student at a regular four-year college in 1961 put in roughly 24 hours a week of study. Today the average student devotes only 14 hours.
That study has created a lot of consternation in higher education as people debate why? Any number of culperits have been found responsible for the decline in study: the rise of the computer, interactive media, and changing demographics. Some people have asked related questions about teaching effectiveness and wondered if it is a bad thing that students are studying less. Maybe modern students are better at using their time more effectively.
Babcock and Marks, for their part, believe the decline is due to what I called in
Blog LX “the student vote.” They argue that a major reason for the decline in study hours is a breakdown in the relationship between the professor and the student. Instead of a situation where a professor sets standards and students try to meet them, they claim that the more common outcome is a scenario in which both sides hope to do as little as possible.
“No one really has an incentive to make a demanding class,” Marks told
The Boston Globe. “To make a tough assignment, you have to write it, grade it. Kids come into office hours and want help on it. If you make it too hard, they complain. Other than the sheer love for knowledge and the desire to pass it on to the next generation, there is no incentive in the system to encourage effort.”
Murray Sperber, a visiting professor in the graduate school of education at the Berkeley branch of the University of California, blames teaching evaluations. The original idea behind evaluation was a noble one. Students got a chance to express their opinions about their classes, but the whole concept has backfired. Course evaluations have created a sort of “nonaggression pact,” Sperber explained to
The Globe. Professors—particularly those seeking tenure—tread lightly on assignments and students reciprocate with glowing course evaluations.
I disagree with this assessment for two reasons. First, my personal assessment is that factors external to higher education are responsible for the decline in study hours. The big drop took place in the 1960s and 1970s. So the reasonable question to ask is what happened during this period? What were college students doing with this extra time? Two things: television and sex. Television, it is true, became a major cultural phenomenon in the 1950s before this drop, but college students in the early 1960s would have developed as high school students and, in some cases, college students before the television came to dominate American society. Also, there is a real possibility that their families could not have afforded to give them a television when they went off to college. Nor would there have been room for them in college dorm rooms. So television had less impact in 1961 than it did in 1969 or 1971.
The second reason is due to the development of the birth control pill. College students had sex long before the 1960s, but it became far more common after the pill gave women the power to control their fertility. As the chances of having sex increased, students (male and female) often found the pursuit of the other more interesting than studying accounting, political science, astronomy, or any of a number of other fields.
The other reason I disagree with this assessment is that it accords the students too much influence. As I discussed in
Blog LX, student evaluations are not that influential. Now, in preparing to write this blog, I came across a number of news stories about professors being denied tenure. For one reason or another these stories, made it into the local media. The professor often claimed they were rejected because of teaching evaluations that complained of heavy study obligations. While those evaluations might indeed support the professor's claim, there usually is something else at work—like a failure to publish or publishing in mediocre venues unworthy of tenure. Adrianna Kezar, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern California, got to the point when she told
The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Faculty rewards have nothing to do with the ability to assess student learning. I get promoted for writing lots of articles, not for demonstrating learning outcomes.”
The Babcock/Marks study is important because it is forcing some people to ask if students studying less is a good thing or a bad thing, and it is also getting people to ask how you assess student learning, which is no easy thing. Andrew Hacker, an emeritus professor of political science at the City University of New York's Queens College, who has been teaching for over fifty years admitted to
The Chronicle that he has no way of knowing what type of impact he is having. “I couldn't say objectively or reliably what I do for students.”
I will repeat what I said in
Blog LX, the student vote is important, but mainly in indirect ways. It is also important to consider that faculty have different stages of their careers in the classroom just as they do in publishing. Scott E. Carrell, an assistant professor of economics at the Davis branch of the University of California, explored learning at the U.S. Air Force Academy. What he found is interesting. The cadets that took introductory calculus from experienced professors failed to do as well in these introductory class as the cadets that took the course from more junior instructors. On the other hand, the cadets that had an experienced professors did better in higher-level courses than did students who had inexperienced teachers for introductory calculus.
A good professor should pay attention to those approaches that work with students and those that do not. “What do you think we’ve all been doing for 100 years?” Gary Rhoades, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, asked a reporter from
The Chronicle. “Classes are like organic things: Not every one is the same. If you are a good professor, you are responding to what students are getting and what they’re not. If you try and mechanize that, it can be a problem.”
He is right. A good teacher can only do so much with the raw material they have to work with, which is to say the intellectual ability of the students. A 2008 survey of undergraduates in the University of California system made that point. Students were asked to list what interferes most with their academic success. The number one reason, according to 33 percent, was that they simply did not know how to sit down and study.
With that point made, it might be a good thing for a new faculty member to be able to document their effectiveness with something more than teaching evaluations. Here at the Naval War College a lot of that is done for the faculty by our staff. Now, there is a difference between teaching mid-career professionals and teenagers. I also keep a diary to document what is working and not working in the classroom. Another simple way to document teaching effectiveness is to give students the same multiple-choice assignment at the beginning and end of the class. Use it as a diagnostic tool rather than a grading mechanism. Someday someone is going to question your teaching effectiveness and having this material might prove very useful.
Steven Luckert is a curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . He holds a BA, MA, and a Ph.D. from Binghamton University. He is the author of The Art and Politics of Arthur Szyk.
Robert B. Kane holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Los Angeles. He served in the U.S. Air Force, and retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. He then served as the deputy historian for the Air Armament Center, Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. Kane now works in the Organizational History Branch at the Air Force Historical Research Agency, located at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. He is the author of Disobedience and Conspiracy in the German Army, 1918-45. 
Megan Sniffin-Marinoff is the University Archivist of Harvard University. She holds a BS and MA from Boston University, and another MA from New York University. Before coming to Harvard, she was the head of special collections at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was at Simmons College where she was the college archivist and then the director of the archives programs at the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science. She is a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists. This distinction is the highest honor the organization bestows on individual members.
C. James Taylor is the Editor-in-Chief of the Adams Paper Project at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Before that he served as co-editor of The Papers of Henry Laurens and was an associate research professor at the University of South Carolina.
Nicholas Evan Sarantakes is an associate professor of strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Southern California. He is the author of four books. He has also won five writing awards for his article work. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is currently finishing work on a book about the making of the film Patton.
Kevin Allen lives in Somerville, Massachussets and manages the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation’s Historic Curatorship Program, a long-term leasing public-private partnership program. Allen received a Bachelor’s Degree in History and Film Production from the University of Colorado in 1994, and a Masters in History/Historic Preservation from the University of South Carolina in 1999. He currently serves on the Somerville Historic Preservation Commission. He has worked in the public history field for 14 years, having previously worked at the Smithsonian Institution, in the Planning Department for the City of Columbia, South Carolina, the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office, and Wake County, North Carolina’s preservation Non-Profit.
Aaron W. Marrs is a historian at the U.S. Department of State. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina and is the author of Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society. He is currently the chair of the American Historical Association's Graduate and Early Career Committee. 
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