Friday Fragments, Oct. 30th
A collection of articles looking at who our students are & what we (institutions) are asking our students and instructors to do.
What I’m reading…
A report released this month, Who Should Take College-Level Courses? examines multiple measures placement of community college students and compares outcomes for groups placed with traditional placement exams versus a multiple measures approach (which weights different measures, including high school GPA, to place students). The broad strokes of their results showed that using multiple measures to place students led to more students completing college-level math and English within 3 semesters
All gender, Pell recipient status, and race/ethnicity subpopulations considered (with the exception of men in math) had higher rates of placement into college- level courses using the alternative system. In English, these led to program group course completion rates that, compared to their same subgroup peers, were 4.6, 4.5, 3.0, and 7.1 percentage points higher for women, Pell recipients, non-Pell recipients, and Black students over three terms.
In a New York Times opinion piece this week (You’re Out of Your Mind if You Think I’m Ever Going Back to School), Melinda Anderson relates how for some Black families online learning has “opened up a new world: education without daily anxiety about racism.” While the article focuses on K12 students, it provides some important food for thought for higher education faculty as well.
I appreciated reading Becky Supiano’s article, Students Cheat. How Much Does It Matter? because it presents a variety of perspectives from actual teaching faculty, rather than assuming all academic integrity issues will be solved by making better, more authentic assessments.
On one side are professors who consider themselves pedagogically progressive. They’ve adopted the perspective that many prominent teaching experts have been encouraging: Trust your students, and find creative ways to assess their learning. Yes, some students will cheat. That’s unavoidable, and policing them shouldn’t be the North Star of anyone’s teaching. Especially not during a crisis that has put students under tremendous pressure.
To professors on the other side, who tend to be more traditional, that advice falls flat. In some corners of a college, especially large-enrollment courses in quantitative disciplines with highly structured, sequential curricula, exams are seen as essential to learning. Cheating undermines their value. And no one seems to have figured out how to stop it.
For me, it is fundamentally also a question of support for instructors. If we want instructors to re-think their course outcomes and re-design assessment, we - institutions - need to support them in doing so. Asking this work to happen in the week leading up to fall semester or over winter break isn’t realistic.
This Chalkbeat article, Hybrid or remote? Our NYC charter school settled on a third way, has two charter school leaders reflecting on the choices they’ve made for their student population - many of whom struggle with having school at home due to lack of space, lack of internet access or devices, and family members who need to work. While the challenges of a New York city K12 charter school are not the same faced by higher education institutions across the country, the underlying issue they articulate is, I think, one with which we can all identify:
But in the absence of the fundamental question for all schools — how to achieve educational excellence during a public health emergency— answering only technical questions is not sufficient. Asking children to learn in three different modalities (online synchronous, online asynchronous, and in-person) is both unfair and unrealistic. Asking teachers to teach effectively in these three ways is nearly impossible.
Happy candy-eating & costume-wearing this weekend!