Some recent events and the "How Is This Possible?" thread got me to wondering. Are we still teaching kids how to put together and follow outlines?
I'm not being facetious or anything: is how to put together and follow an outline something that is no longer taught in the primary schools? I ask this because over the past few years, I've been seeing more and more students who have absolutely no idea how to listen to a presentation and summarize the key points and how they relate to each other. Worse, when presented with a pre-made outline, a great many of them cannot understand it and regard it as simply a list of key concepts -- that is, they have no idea that its organization is significant and is conveying relationships between concepts.
I've had a great many students flat-out
tell me that they've never been taught what an outline is, much less how to read one -- and
certainly not how to construct one.
Maybe this is partly a function of "No Child Left Behind"; I dunno. I've known quite a few teachers at the primary level who have told me that in their opinions, the most significant impact of NCLB is that it encourages (if not all but
forces) educators to focus on "teaching to the test" and teaching kids to memorize facts -- with little or no emphasis on teaching them to look for
relationships between their memorized facts.
So it seems to me that more and more, what I'm encountering at the college level is kids who can memorize "facts," but simply
cannot reason even a little bit. Colleagues who've been doing this longer than I have frequently tell me that it's not my imagination; by and large, students seem much less capable of simple reasoning than they were a decade or two ago.
Or maybe it's just a consequence of where I've taught for the past few years. Maybe it isn't a systemic thing at all ...
At the previous college where I taught, one of the first things I was told when I was hired was, "If you expect any students to pass your classes, you're going to have to prepare outlines of each of your lectures and give them to the students, so that they can use them as study guides and to organize their note-taking. You'll find that they
cannot and
will not summarize lectures and identify key points on their own."
This particular college mostly caters to poor, rural students. Almost all of the students who attend the college are local. And, as both the college faculty and the students themselves were quick to point out, the local primary schools were simply
terrible.
And, sadly, I all too quickly learned that my colleagues had not been exaggerating. For the most part, students simply
could not and/or
would not construct lecture outlines on their own. They could listen to a lecture and maybe even ask a few relevant questions, but they simply could
not summarize the key points and indicate how they related to each other. Even though the textbook included "Chapter Summaries" at the end of each chapter and highlighted each concept in the chapter headings. And despite the fact that I did essentially the same thing in my lectures.
In teaching Introductory-level courses, I quickly learned that not only were the great majority of my students incapable of summarizing something they'd read or seen or listened to and making up an outline -- a great many of them had no idea what an outline
was. I found that I had to walk them through how to read an outline and understand what it was trying to tell you. This was something that had never been taught to them in their primary education.
Okay. Maybe this was just an indictment of the local schools.
I left that school, and came to one that -- as it turns out -- is rather similar. Again, I'm dealing with students who are overwhelmingly local and who attended primary schools that are -- as both the students and my colleagues are quick to point out -- are simply
terrible.
And again, one of the first things I was told by my colleagues was that I shouldn't expect our students to be capable of summarizing information and figuring out relationships.
Things go a bit further here, though. For each class, the lead instructor prepares a "Course Pack." This is sold at the bookstore, along with the textbooks. Each "Course Pack" contains a detailed outline for each lecture topic.
Not only are the students
literally given a pre-written outline for each lecture, most of them are structured with lots of space between the lines so that, during lectures, students can simply follow along in their outlines and fill in the gaps between the topic headings.
In short, we
literally do everything except take their notes for them. (And don't think for a moment that some instructors don't give the students lecture outlines that are so detailed that they effectively
are giving the students pre-written course notes -- so that the students only have to sit in class during lecture and follow along in their notes.)
And once again, I find that in the Introductory-level courses, it's not sufficient to simply give the students pre-written outlines -- I have to explain what an outline
is, and how to read one. Otherwise, they tend to regard the outline as simply a list of key concepts, and far too many of them have no idea at all that it's attempting to show relationships between concepts.
And again, the students will frequently come right out and tell me that they were never introduced to the concepts of "outlines" during their primary education, and so have no idea what an outline
is. Nor -- as they're generally quick to point out -- have they ever been taught how to summarize the key points of a presentation and indicate how they're related.
Now again, maybe that's more an indictment of the local educational system than a generalized problem.
Still, when I was in college, you were expected to make your
own darned outlines, because that was more or less the entire
point. You read the assigned readings, you came to class and took notes and then --
you re-wrote your notes, organizing them into an outline format as you did, so that relationships between concepts were clarified. This, as my instructors frequently reminded me, was the point -- by organizing your notes thus, you highlight (and hopefully come to understand) the relationships between concepts.
Now, I don't want to read too much into it, because these last couple of schools and their students are probably not entirely representative. Nor am I blaming the students. After all, as both they and my colleagues are quick to point out, most of them have never before been even
introduced to the concept of summarizing information, identifying key concepts, and showing relationships between those concepts.
The result, though, is students who seem to be capable
only of memorizing "facts." For the most part, they simply
cannot read a text or listen to a lecture and summarize the key points and their relationships. And worse, almost all of them seem to be
completely incapable of puzzling out or following even the simplest chains of logic.
Take a couple of recent examples from my Advanced Human Anatomy and Physiology class. Let me stress this: this is the
advanced class. They've been through several Introductory-level courses to have gotten this far -- including several courses in Chemistry, General Biology, and lower-level Human Anatomy and Physiology. We're
not talking about dummies, here.
And yet, the great majority of them seem to be incapable of anything other than straight memorization.
In a recent lab, we were looking at how the senses function. For one of the exercises, they were shining flashlights into each others' eyes. I had them note that when you shine a flashlight into
one eye, the pupils of
both eyes constrict. Neat. Their assignment was to work out why this happens.
Here are some of the things that had already been covered extensively in lecture. These are things that (theoretically, at least), they
already knew.
The pupillary response is due to the fact that the optic nerves send fibers to the pretectal nuclei of the brain as well as to the visual cortex of the brain. In response to impulses from the fibers of the optic nerves, each pretectal nucleus sends impulses out the oculomotor nerves that trigger constriction of the pupils.
About half of the afferent fibers coming in from the optic nerve
cross over (
decussate) in the optic chiasma. That is, about half the fibers coming in from the right optic nerve cross over to the left side of the brain, while about half continue on to the right side of the brain. The same is true for the left optic nerve.
The efferent fibers of the oculomotor nerves that originate in the pretectal nuclei
don't decussate. So the right oculomotor nerve sends fibers
only to the right eye, and the left oculomotor nerve sends fibers
only to the left eye.
Now, given what they already knew, it seems to me that figuring out why
both pupils constrict when light is shone into only one eye should not be difficult. I gave them an hour or so to work on the problem. I even let them work in groups, so that they could "brainstorm" ideas. I kept giving them really, really,
really big clues -- I was doing everything short of actually telling them the answer outright. "Think about what you know of the layouts of the sensory and motor pathways related to the pupillary response."
So you'd
think that sooner or later, someone would have said, "Well
duh! We know that the sensory fibers from the optic nerve decussate and so impulses from each optic nerve go to
both pretectal nuclei. We also know that the oculomotor nerves
don't decussate. So logically, if you shine a light into one eye, since both pretectal nuclei are being stimulated, their motor outputs will cause both pupils to constrict. Elementary."
Instead, for an hour, they sat and asked each other, "Do you know why it happens? No. Do
you know why it happens? No. How about
you?"
And I'd be standing there, saying, "Think about the sensory and motor pathways responsible, and how they're laid out."
And so they'd look this up in their textbooks. And, after reading and re-reading it three or four times, they'd go back to: "Do you know why it happens? No. Do
you know why it happens? No. How about
you?"
At the end of the lab,
not a single student was able to puzzle out the answer to the question. Not. Even. One.
And these are the
advanced students.
In the same class, I assigned them a report. The assignment (for which I wrote up a detailed summary of what I expected, knowing that it would be disastrous to simply tell them verbally) was to choose a disease or disorder -- such as, say, diabetes mellitus -- research the disorder, and prepare a properly-referenced, properly-formatted report on the physiology of the disorder.
I gave them the option of turning in their report early. I told them that I would read it, offer criticism and correction, and return it -- so that they could turn in a revised version for final credit.
One of them turned in her paper early. Before I continue, I should stress something:
This is the best student in the class. She's conscientious. She frequently asks questions. And she
desperately wants to get a good grade. And she does very well on the tests. [The tests are standardized, "multiple-choice" tests. I'm not lead faculty, and so I don't design the tests.]
She's very, very good at memorization.
Anyway, her "report." It consisted of five pages of random facts. There was
no attempt at organization. There was
no thesis. There was
no conclusion. There was
no explanation. There was not even
one in-report citation -- just a "Literature Cited" section at the end. (As I pointed out to her, it's not entirely accurate to call it "Literature Cited" when there were no actual
citations.)
Just five pages of randomly-spewed facts. No organization, no attempt to connect or explain these facts. Just five pages of random facts about diabetes mellitus.
True, her report
was organized into paragraphs. But they made absolutely no sense. I can only assume that she put down facts at random until she felt that a "paragraph" was long enough -- at which point she hit "Enter" and started a new "paragraph."
And so it literally read like this:
Diabetes mellitus is a disease. "Mellitus" means "honey." Diabetes mellitus is not the same thing as diabetes insipidus. Diabetes mellitus can cause blindness. If you have diabetes mellitus, there is too much glucose in your urine.
There is more than one kind of diabetes mellitus. Diabetes mellitus is very common in the United States. If you have diabetes mellitus, there is too much glucose in your blood.
And no, that's not an exaggeration. Gods, how I wish it was. This went on for five pages.
And let me stress again: this is the best student in the class, at least in theory. But she has absolutely no idea how to summarize, absolutely no idea how to identify key points, and absolutely no idea how to relate concepts to each other.
Not so far as I can tell, anyway.
And it's not as if this is happening in just my class. I see it in other classes and hear about it from my colleagues. And I spend a ridiculous amount of time in Introductory-level (and even advanced!) classes trying to get students to grasp the seemingly-simple and intuitive notion that concepts are
related -- that there's a
reason why you have to master the basics before you can hope to understand the more complex material -- and that if you hope to actually
understand something, you must do more than simply memorize "facts" and treat them as if they're completely unrelated.
I dunno. Are these things that simply aren't being taught anymore? Is primary education now simply an exercise in getting students to memorize "facts" so that they can regurgitate them onto standardized tests, without any actual
understanding expected or required?
Because that's pretty-much what my students are telling me.