Mistaken Goal: Where Student Affairs & Technology Meet

Note: As part of a College Teaching and Learning class in which I am enrolled, I will be reflecting weekly on the course I am teaching. I will likely withhold some details and information from these public blog posts to respect the confidentiality and sanctity of my classroom but I hope to be frank about my own actions and emotions as I teach this course for the second time.

I’ve graded the final assignments and submitted final grades (and made one correction to a final grade).  The class is over and I now have some time to try to see the big picture and reflect on the class as a whole.  I learned some very interesting things from reading the final assignments but I’ll save that for a separate post as that goes well beyond just this one course.

Taking the course as it was conceived and constructed, I am relatively pleased with how it turned it this second time around.  The material flowed much more smoothly this semester and that helped me keep the the ideas and concepts integrated as we changed topics.  Although I risked being repetitive, I constantly and intentfully reached back to material we had previously covered to tie it in with the new material and discussions.  That was a challenge for me at times but it’s a good challenge to undertake both for me and my students.  If it had been too difficult – if I had not been able to tie the ideas together on a regular basis – that would have indicated potentially severe problems with the design of the course.

Eliciting discussion was a constant challenge.  I attempted to meet that challenge by varying our activities.  I have a lot to learn about how to effectively use active learning activities, particularly those that employ different learning styles and engage more creative skills such as visual and physical skills.  In a course designed as this was (with a rather formal structure and flow), I would have liked to have employed more creative activities such as concept maps.  We made concept maps on the last day of the class as a way to reflect on everything we had discussed and learned and I was very pleased with the discussion generated by that activity.  It’s easy to blame the difficulty of engaging in discussion on the diverse makeup of the class and the general nature of U212 courses as nearly all of the students are in the course solely to pick up a few credits after having dropped another course.  It’s also easy to blame it on the fact they’re “just undergraduates” and discussion-based classes are relatively rare for many of them, particularly those still in their first couple of years.  There is truth in all of those reasons but I can’t help but view them as excuses.

Ultimately, however, I question whether the class was constructed in the most effective manner to help the students learn about identity and how it is being presented online.  Although I incorporated active learning and assessment throughout the course, it was still at its heart an instructor-led course built on the readings that I had collected and thought were interesting and insightful.  I am very inspired by the innovations of teachers like Michael Wesch and how he has structured at least one of his classes as student-led, trusting them to be not just students but partners in research and exploration.  I imagine that it’s difficult for most experts to put that level of trust in amateurs; even my language – “experts” vs. “amateurs” – betrays some of my emotions and difficulties.  But it seems like an incredibly powerful way for people to learn and I hope I can figure out how to integrate those kinds of ideas into my teaching.  I think it all comes down to trust: trusting that undergraduates can be mature partners in exploration and trusting that a class without a rigid syllabus stuffed full of pre-selected readings and content can be a meaningful learning experience.  Intellectually, I know that it’s not about content but about learning.  But that’s a difficult chasm to leap when almost all of my 20+ years of education have been content-centered.

I don’t know if I’ll want to teach this class again, at least in the near future.  Logistically, it’s been taught for two semesters and it appears that the powers-that-be want to keep the roster of U212 classes fresh.  Teaching is definitely good experience for someone aspiring to the faculty ranks but teaching undergraduates doesn’t carry near as much weight for me as teaching or working with graduate students since higher education programs only exist at the graduate level.  And as you can tell by my comments above, if I were to teach this again I would try my best to significantly change the structure of the course to make it less content-centered and instructor-led and more exploration-centered and student-led.

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Discussion about the possible relationship between college students’ use of Facebook and lower grades continued this week with the publication of a First Monday article addressing this topic.  This article follows up on previous discussions that followed the widespread publicity surrounding a poster session presented at AERA that found a correlation between Facebook usage and lower grades. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that the research and related discussions have shed more light on this topic.  But it sure has been exciting to watch how quickly it’s all happened!

The discussions have followed two general threads: (a) the AERA research was poorly done and (b) the media got the story wrong. I’ll address the first thread in detail below.  The second thread has been relatively short-lived as there isn’t any real disagreement that many reporters and editors leaped (without looking, thinking, or corroberating) from “there appears to be a link between Facebook usage and low grades in this small sample of this very limited study” to “Facebook causes bad grades!!!”  That’s irresponsible and everyone agrees on that point.  There is also a third thread that focuses on “I can’t believe this is true but I don’t have any evidence!” but it’s not worth wasting any time on those ill-informed opinions.

In general, most of the current research into Facebook usage seems to lack sophistication (and much lacks rigor; how many of the articles based on surveys discuss or even hint at validity or reliability?). The researchers behind the poster session and this First Monday article both rightly acknowledge that they are discussing correlation but there is a whole lot going on that they don’t acknowledge or can’t account for with their selected (or mandated) methodologies and data.  In trying to understand college students, we go to great lengths at the shop where I work to isolate and separate the influence of different variables and we struggle with this mightily.  In many instances, we have to employ relatively-sophisticated analyses such as multilevel modeling to adequately control for different variables, particularly the institution-level and student-level variables.  In fact, I don’t recall seeing any mention of institution-level influences in any of the currently-available research even beyond this poster session and article (of course, one can’t do anything about this if one’s sample is only drawn from a handful of institutions, another significant limitation of nearly all Facebook research). I acknowledge that institution-level influences only account for a small proportion of the variance among most of the things we measure but omitting measurement and discussion of institutional characteristiscs altogether seems to indicate a lack of theoretical and methodological sophistication. To put it bluntly, this is the kind of thing that many non-higher education researchers often miss as it simply isn’t their area of expertise and why higher ed scholars desparately need to be actively contributing to this conversation.

What most people want to see is not correlation but causation.  In other words, we want to be able to say that (the use of ) Facebook causes lower grades.  That’s a damn hard claim to make.  Even under the best circumstances, establishing causation is fiendishly difficult.  It would require sophisticated measures and analyses. Given the previously-mentioned lack of sophistication in most of these studies I don’t know that these researchers collected the right kinds of data to even begin to do the work necessary to establish causation.  Frankly, I think it’s so complicated and the analysis would be so fragile and fraught with assumptions and caveats that it’s a fool’s errand.

Let me illustrate this with an example drawn from the work done by folks with whom I work.  We know, from several years of repeated data collection and analysis by different researchers, that more frequent use of technology is strongly associated with higher levels of student engagement.* But even with all of the data we have collected, the rigor of our data collection methods, and the sophistication of our analyses, we haven’t yet figured out what exactly causes these measures to be correlated.  In other words, although we know that students who frequently use technology do better in many different ways we don’t know why that happens.  There are many different possibilities but even after 10 years of poking at this we don’t have any explanations upon which we can hang our hat and say, “That’s it – that’s why!”

It’s interesting and instructive to read not only the First Monday article, the response from the AERA poster session author, and the response from the FM authors.  I am hopeful that we will see more sophisticated and better planned research and I am more hopeful that this will occur if those who are most knowledgeable of college students and American higher education continue working and contributing to this discussion.

* In the context of this discussion I must emphasize that although we do ask students about their grades our focus is almost always much wider than just that one measure; in fact, we see broadening discussions of educational quality beyond simple measures such as grades or rankings as one of our primary missions.  I also add that we typically don’t specifically ask in any of our surveys about SNS use.  We do have a set of experimental questions out right now that asks about this but if I recall correctly the question is limited to communication about academic issues as we’re exploring how students and faculty communicate and collaborate.  Our colleagues at UCLA have explored this general issue, however, and it’s worth looking at their work if you haven’t already done so.

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Note: As part of a College Teaching and Learning class in which I am enrolled, I will be reflecting weekly on the course I am teaching. I will likely withhold some details and information from these public blog posts to respect the confidentiality and sanctity of my classroom but I hope to be frank about my own actions and emotions as I teach this course for the second time.

Last week was the final week for this class. We spent the week ramping up for the final paper that is due on Wednesday during Finals Week. That paper, as described in the syllabus, is a brief policy proposal outlining the use of SNSes in evaluating applicants for undergraduate admission.

We spent Monday in small groups creating brief policy proposals for the use of SNSes in evaluating entry-level job applicants.  This is, of course, very similar to the final project.  The different groups came up with very different answers but they had pretty good reasons for their answers and we had a good discussion afterward about some of the contextual issues (historical, legal, etc.) that could come into play in a real policy proposal.  Of course, I also explicitly told them that they were not expected to account for those contextual issues in their final paper as we didn’t have time to discuss those issues in this half-semester course.  Overall, it was good practice for their final paper and I think that it got them thinking about the issues and the different angles one could take.

Wednesday was our last day of class and it was even more relaxed than normal as I brought in cookies and milk (I feel a little bit emasculated saying that but damnit I like to bake and I’m good at it).  One of my students also brought in some food he made which was very nice of him and very welcome.  We began the class by quickly reviewing the breaking news about NACAC’s just-released report “Reaching the Wired Generation: How Social Media Is Changing College Admission” (400k pdf).  This was an incredibly timely report as it discusses exactly what we were discussing and writing about in the final paper!

We spent the rest of our time in Wednesday making concept maps recalling and linking together the main ideas of the entire class. At the suggestion of one my colleagues, we began by making a list on the board of the main concepts we had discussed throughout the class.  As my students called the ideas out, I wrote them down.  I often asked for clarification or explanation to help jog everyone’s memory about the ideas.  I also prodded for a few specific ideas but overall I was very pleased with the level of recall exhibited by my students. After we had a good list, we then broke into small groups and created concept maps and then shared them with the rest of the class.  The maps themselves were not terribly good but they were (a) created quickly and (b) the first exposure many students had to the idea of concept maps.  Although the maps themselves weren’t very good the conversations before and during their creation were fantastic.  And that – recalling the ideas, grappling with them, and trying to see how they relate – was the point of the exercise.  The maps are just a side effect and an artifact of those conversations.

This week, I also had to deal directly with those students who had slipped behind in the class or simply never showed up.  I obviously can’t go into any detail about this but I am sure that every teacher shares my frustration in knowing that there are some students who you can not seem to help.  I know these students are adults and they need to learn to deal with the consequences of their actions (they’re all young, traditional students, by the way).  But having been there myself – young, naive, and listless – I am sympathetic and there is still some small heartache when I give them the poor grades they have earned.

I will write closing reflections later this week after I have received and graded the final assignments.  In the meantime, those who are interested in some of my personal reflections about this class are welcome to read the brief “Learning Essay” (13k pdf) I wrote for my College Teaching and Learning class.

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