Peterson, Douglas (USD) wrote:
The problem is that all of this assumes the final measure of a students benefit from a class comes at the end of the class, and assumption I'm not willing to make.
WARNING anecdotal support ahead!
Many students comment that because of my introductory psychology class they have decided to minor in psychology. I attribute this interest in psychology to "bringing the class to life" with these "seductive details" (this is not to say that there are not other means of bringing the class to life).... But what of the student who never takes another class?...
I have little doubt that something like this happens to some students sometimes. But almost any sequence of events you'd care to describe happens to some students sometimes. That's why anecdotes are of questionable value as evidence.
One of the questions raised by this study, it seems to me, is: Does the sort of thing Doug Peterson and David Epstein describe happen reliably (or "on average", or "with enough regularity for the benefits to outweigh the costs"), or (1) are we simply transferring time away from the material we actually want them to learn in favor of material that we (mistakenly) believe will pique their interest and then generalize to the rest of the material, and (2) are we, over and above that, actually interfering with their memory (whether for the exam or for the hypothetical "Aha!" moment five years later) for that material.
Thus far it seems to me that people have been responding to this result by, more or less, simply repeating the very assumptions that were empirically called into question by it.
Counter-arguments to the effect that I am implicitly assuming the bucket-to-be-filled theory of teaching and that I think there is nothing to education besides the passing of an exam and that I don't recognize all the long-term personal benefits of broad and deep leaning, etc., etc. etc., (apart from being false) are, I think, beside the point. The real question posed here is whether (in addition to wanting students, at minimum, to learn some basic material and do well on exams) any of those other "grand' agendas really being advanced by the things we do that fly in the face of the results of this study? I (like many of you, I would guess) suspect that the whole phenomenon, when fully teased out, will turn out to be a lot more complicated that it is portrayed here in this one small study (thus, my earlier comment about the line between "core material" and "seductive detail" being a fuzzy one). But we don't actually get to that point by attempting to blot out these results by repeating the same old comforting stories to ourselves about why we teach the way we do. This study looks (to me, anyway) like the interesting beginning of a possibly quite significant research program.
Regards, -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada
416-736-5115 ex. 66164 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.yorku.ca/christo
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