FAQs on Curricular Transformation at TCNJ

There has long been discussion on the campus about the need to refocus The College’s efforts toward what students learn while they are with us and away from their achievements before they join our community. We have excellent students and they deserve a curriculum that will challenge them to perform at the high(er) academic level of which they are capable. Talking about curricular reform is not a criticism of the education that we provide now, but a means to identify new ways to support students in their efforts to meet the high expectations that we have of them.

We also know that the graduates of the Class of 2006 will face a very different post-graduation environment than the students that entered The College in 1986. We have made modifications to both what we teach as well as the way that we teach during the last ten years, but we have not taken the time nor devoted the necessary resources to a comprehensive review of our curriculum and our approach to course design. The commitment to “deep understanding” and a learning-centered design will require more than tweaks to traditional syllabi. Now is the time to lay out a more deliberate and robust approach to design that focuses us all on the fit between our stated goals, our programs, and our students’ needs.

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I am confused: my syllabus identifies the course objectives and course requirements.

Our syllabi too often only specify the “inputs” (what the professor will do, what topics will be covered, etc.), without being explicit and clear about the intended “outputs” (what students will leave specifically able to understand and do, and how the work will make that happen). The typical syllabus often summarizes what will be taught, not what we expect students to come away having learned; what is tested, not what successful achievement actually looks like. A syllabus is most helpfully framed in terms of performance goals, linked explicitly to outcomes. It needs to answer the learner’s most basic questions: What is quality work in this course? How does this course help me achieve my longer-term goals?

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I am not sure I see what’s inadequate about current syllabi. Can you explain?

Many syllabi we have reviewed state the topics and texts to be read – the inputs. We have found few syllabi that state, with specificity, the key questions and issues to be addressed in the course, how mastery of the core ideas will be assessed, and the specific expectations of learners. In terms of expected “outputs,” the typical syllabus merely says that there will be x papers and y tests, each worth a or b points; and that the class will be a mixture of lecture, discussion, and outside research.

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What’s inadequate about such a general statement of goals? A syllabus is a summary, after all.

Agreed, but in a learning-focused approach the summary needs to say to the student: here is the kind of work you have to do, to this standard, judged against these criteria, and how the assessments and requirements embody the stated goals of the course and program. “Here is what you, the learner, will leave able to understand and do as a result of the course if you work hard” – very different than just stating the topics, methods, and grading formula.

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Give me an example – I don’t get the difference.

Consider the following goal statement, typical of many we saw across The College: “Course requirements: Completion of individual and group projects, class participation, and satisfactory completion of examinations.” The immediate question from the learner here is: what is satisfactory completion of examinations? What kind of work, done to what standard, is expected of me in class? And the first requirement merely asks for “completion” of projects, as if issues of work quality were moot. I have no idea, as a learner, what I will need to do and what I will end up able to do well.

Consider, by contrast, the following example from Nursing: “At the conclusion of this course the student will 1) Demonstrate the ability to assess the health care needs of adults, adolescents, and women through history, physical exam, and diagnostic testing. 2) Develop health promotion and disease prevention plans…” Then, the syllabus lays out, in concrete detail, how those capacities will be embodied in the assessment tasks, how those performances will be scored, and the expectations for behavior as laid out in professional standards and guidelines.

In a sense, a more learning-focused and outcomes-focused syllabus leads us to make a stronger and more explicit contract with the learner: if you work hard and do quality work we are committed to making sure you end up capable in specific ways. In a “teaching-centered” course, by contrast, I only commit myself to “teaching,” not to helping you achieve certain understandings and performance abilities.

More generally, the best syllabi we have seen provide significant detail about how that professor defines “quality work” in the form of scoring guides (rubrics), provides specificity about the final performance requirements, clarifies the general competencies and habits of mind both needed and expected, states the key questions at the heart of the coursework, and explains how the course and its goals links to program goals.

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Fine, that may work in competency-based areas like nursing, but what about history, philosophy, or physics?

Why are they any different? All the program goals in those areas stress that students should become competent at the professional tasks of critical and creative work. All we are saying is: specify the expert capacities that the course should help the student leave with – in addition to any specific knowledge or understandings about the texts in question – in which you link the course goals to those outcome statements and assess the work in a manner that embodies those outcomes desired.

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But what if we are talking freshman intro. courses?

Good point: we have to get better at developing a coherent “map” of how a student advances from novice to expert over time, and how course sequences enable that mastery. That’s why some colleges have developed long-term scoring scales and assessment plans for evaluating such developmental mastery, for use beyond the specific goals and tests in a course. That is why many world language programs use the developmental scoring rubrics developed over many years by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. We will provide examples of and training in developmental scoring scales and assessment strategies as part of the unfolding work at The College.

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We spent a fair amount of time writing up learning outcomes in recent years. Was our work for naught? How is this different?

This initiative picks right up where the development of outcomes left off. Those were fine statements of programmatic intent, cast for the most part in explicit performance terms. The challenge now is to develop strategies for ensuring that the desired learning outcomes are made to function in assessments and met by instruction, through a more robust approach to course design.

The logic is simple enough: if x is a desired outcome, what counts as appropriate evidence of achieving such a result? And how do the proposed learning activities optimize the likelihood of achieving those results? We call this the 3 Stages of “Backward” Design.

Example: Biology includes the intended outcome that students should be able to “apply knowledge of the various areas of Biology to real-world problems.” The various syllabi and program framework should reveal to students how that goal will be achieved specifically – namely, what assessments, in what courses, will enable students to master that ability. And I should then be able to see how the proposed instructional plan aligns with those goals. So, course design is more aggressively focused on achieving those outcomes (as opposed to a more typical, passive way – what might be sarcastically termed, “teach, test, hope for the best.”)

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You’re not going to make us do more busywork, are you?

No, quite the contrary. Our curricular reform efforts will build on the learning outcomes that have been identified. Beyond the capacities now identified, faculty will specify the deep understandings that our students need to ensure their success here and once they graduate. Then we will work on instructional design to better ensure that our courses contribute more explicitly to student achievement of those outcomes.

The aim here is not more checklists or needless detail. Rather, the aim is more helpful learning-centered information for course takers on the expected results of a successful course, and how each course feeds into the programmatic goals.

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It seems silly to talk about an initiative that wants to make teaching more learning-centered!

To call for a learning-centered approach to educational design and instruction sounds like a silly redundancy but, alas, it is not. In a learning-centered education, the designer/teacher establishes clear learning goals for students, in performance terms; proceeds mindful of what students will need to experience and master to meet the learning goals established; anticipates rough spots and learner misunderstandings; and seeks feedback constantly about what is and is not being understood, making adjustments based on that information.

In the most comprehensive study ever done about what is known about learning, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences proposed three core findings:

1. Students come to the classroom with preconceptions. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information.

2. To develop competence, students must:

· Have a deep foundation of factual knowledge

· Understand facts and ideas in a conceptual framework

· Organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application

· A key finding is that organizing information into a conceptual framework allows for greater transfer

“The research clearly shows that usable knowledge is not the same as a mere list of disconnected facts. Expert knowledge is connected and organized around important concepts; it is conditionalized by context; it supports understanding and transfer to other contexts.” (p.9, How People Learn)

3. A metacognitive approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their learning. The teaching of metacognitive activities must be incorporated into the subject matter. Ultimately students are able to prompt themselves and monitor their own comprehension without teacher support

“There is a good deal of evidence that learning is enhanced when teachers pay attention to the knowledge and beliefs that learners bring to a learning task, use this knowledge as a starting point, and monitor students’ changing conceptions as instruction proceeds.” (p.11, How People Learn)

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What is this metacognition stuff? Sounds like pointless jargon to me.

Well, regardless of your feelings about the word, the idea in question is vital for effective teaching. Meta-cognition as the word suggests, refers to self-conscious attention to how we learn, what patterns of thought we engage in, how we monitor ourselves, etc. The most successful teaching helps the learner become conscious of and more expert at such mental tasks. I can’t learn to “think like a historian” or “work like a physicist” unless I am mentored in how to think in such ways. The “discipline” of a subject matter is neither natural nor easy to master, so it has to be modeled and coached. Such metacognitive training might be as simple as teachers doing a better job of helping learners reflect on and hone their questioning skills, or as sophisticated as showing them how certain habits of mind impede or promote productive research and problem solving. (It is all so natural and intuitive to us, we have forgotten how hard-won such ways of thinking can be.)

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I am afraid that disciplinary rigor and integrity might be threatened in such an approach. This isn’t middle school, after all: my job is to teach the subject.

The issue is how to teach more effectively for our goals. We need to become more explicit, not less, about the big ideas and core performances at the heart of “doing” each subject, and more explicit about how the teaching will help students learn how to get “inside” the subject with its ways of thinking. You cannot achieve your goal of deep understanding for students unless you attend to how they think as you teach them.

We are trying to get more attentive, not less, to the big ideas and core performances at the heart of “doing” each subject. We want to better ensure that the various “doings” at the heart of the “discipline” are honored by our courses than at present. Thus, as the outcomes already developed suggest (and as the goal of “deep understanding” implies), our courses (especially our assessments) should do a better job of requiring students to use knowledge wisely, not just give us back pat answers on exams. Students will be better able to understand and apply the content of a discipline when they study that content in the context of a rigorous inquiry into the discipline’s essential ideas and inferences, and are expected to master the performances at the heart of that discipline.

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What does “deep understanding” really mean?

When students have a deep understanding, they have certain abilities in which genuine insights and knowledge are reflected - abilities that the apprentice or merely learned do not reveal. Think of the term “expertise”: experts are fluent and flexible with what they know. They can make countless meaningful connections and translations in the domain (and out of it); the apprentice is limited somewhat rigidly to the patterns and connections that were taught – there is little transferability or generalizability evident in their words or actions. The expert sees the domain with foreground and background, and has perspective about what is important and what is relatively trivial; for the novice, all is undifferentiated and overwhelming detail. The expert has become aware of the unobvious, perhaps even counter-intuitive ideas and results, of the subject; the apprentice will likely fall victim to or still harbor important misunderstandings about the work. The expert asks (and keeps asking) questions that penetrate to the core of current ideas, frontiers, or key assumptions in the field; the apprentices ask questions related to their own attempts to grasp what is known and understood in the field.

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What is the relationship between content knowledge and understanding?

Knowledge is necessary but insufficient for understanding. The Oxford English Dictionary states that the verb understand means “to apprehend the meaning or import” of a fact, idea, or event. Sure, you have learned some key facts. But what do they mean, imply, suggest, depend upon? What can be done with that information? Someone with understanding grasps the why’s and the so what’s. Recall, as a wry example of this usage, the case not too long ago of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a girl in his class. As reported in the paper, the father’s response was, “We might read him that sexual harassment [policy statement] all night, and he might be bright enough to remember it. But would he understand it?”

However, “understanding” is not just possession of such knowledge, but use of it. As John Dewey explained in How We Think, to understand something “is to see it in its relations to other things: to note how it operates or functions, what consequences follow from it, what causes it” (p. 137, emphasis in original).

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Well, I think we do that very well now. Like all my colleagues, I provide my students with key insights…

Understandings cannot be “professed” and then merely heard and pondered to be truly understood. They have to be tested, discussed, worked through. (It is in that sense that cognitive psychologists say understandings must be actively “constructed” by the learner.) Here is another key quote from How People Learn that makes the point clearer:

“Students develop flexible understanding of when, where, why, and how to use their knowledge to solve new problems if they learn how to extract underlying principles and themes from their learning exercises.” (p. 224, emphasis added)

The student must be helped to learn how to draw conclusions and see them as conclusions, not be handed them for storage and recall as if they were unproblematic facts. Nothing new here: it was Whitehead’s point 80 years ago about the difference between inert knowledge and fluent insight.

This distinction between knowledge and understanding is not just hair-splitting. There is a painfully practical side to this. At one time or another we have all griped as teachers that too many students can have a great deal of knowledge but limited understanding of what the knowledge means. Or the opposite: a student may not have done the homework fully or listened to the lectures carefully, but nonetheless grasped all the subtler points, seemingly lost on more merely-dutiful students. Knowing the facts and doing well on tests of knowledge doesn’t mean that students understand what they know, and doing poorly on tests of factual knowledge doesn’t mean that students lack insight into the key ideas of a topic.

The same is true for accomplished men and women. In talking about Charles Darwin, scholar Frank Sulloway notes that what “differentiates revolutionary from non-revolutionary thinkers is almost never a greater knowledge of the facts…. Darwin, who knew less, somehow understood more.”[1] (Darwin in fact had to rely on other botanists and geologists to identify some of his key finds, as Sulloway, citing Mayr, reports.)

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What’s the implication for assessment, then? What do you mean when you talk about performances of understanding?

Those with deep understanding do not merely “possess” ideas and facts. We “perform” well, in diverse contexts when we have understanding. We can always go “beyond the information given,” in Jerome Bruner’s phrase. We can do certain things that those with mere factual knowledge cannot: bind together seemingly disparate facts into a coherent, comprehensive, and illuminating account, predict heretofore unsought for or unexamined results, illuminate strange or unexamined experiences, etc. We draw from our repertoire efficiently and effectively, in the context of varied (and perhaps unique) problems, culminating in a complex performance indicative of that understanding (e.g. lecturing, conducting and presenting original research, writing, drawing, modeling, etc.). Novices, or those with only “book” knowledge, are not (yet) able to perform effectively and gracefully on their own, at the key performances in a realistic way. As researcher Howard Gardner has put it:

The test of understanding involves neither repetition of information learned nor performance of practices mastered. Rather it involves the appropriate application of concepts and principles to questions or problems that are newly posed (1991, pp. 117).

The issue is again practical: what will we count as evidence of deep understanding, as opposed to merely learned recall and cued use of knowledge? How will we design and “teach to” our assessments so that deep understanding (or lack of it) becomes revealed through authentic performance challenges. Too many conventional exams merely test what is easy to test. Evidence of “Understanding” (or lack of it) can easily fall through the cracks of an exam.

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What do you mean by “authentic” application?

We mean it in the same way that many college programs talk about “real-world” use of knowledge and skill. Use of knowledge to reveal understanding requires learner judgment, in a context, at a complex and realistic task. Any test for “application” thus requires the use of non-routine blue-book questions, as Bloom (1956) and his colleagues long ago argued in developing the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives:

If the situations . . . are to involve application as we are defining it here, then they must either be situations new to the student or situations containing new elements as compared to the situation in which the abstraction was learned. . . . Ideally we are seeking a problem which will test the extent to which an individual has learned to apply the abstraction in a practical way (p. 125).

Similarly, in describing synthesis, the authors of the taxonomy argue that the student must develop a “unique product or performance,” in which it is vital that “the student must have considerable freedom in defining the task for himself/herself, or in redefining the problem or task.” And where the tasks mimic as much as possible “the situation in which a scholar, artist, engineer, or other professional attacks such problems. The time allowed and conditions of work, for example, should be as far away as possible from the typical controlled exam situation.” – i.e. more “authentic” in the sense of how experts in the field are actually challenged.

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Won’t this emphasis on performance inappropriately downplay the importance of core knowledge and its mastery?

Why would it? The assessment tasks related to understanding are deliberately designed to assess realistic mastery of content in use, in relation to the objectives established by each program or course of study. On the contrary, if understanding implies higher-order activity and work, performance is the only way to frame the learning goals properly in terms of the most meaningful and professionally valid outputs (cf. understand soccer only as the “content” of each discrete lesson vs. performance goals based on the game itself).

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Fine in theory, but this seems perilously close to trampling on my freedom as a professor.

How so? All we are suggesting is that syllabi and courses be designed to more explicitly embody the stated goals of the program and the course, and more precisely reveal to students the performance goals and expectations, in “output” terms.

Such an approach to design is based upon respect for the freedom of the faculty who develop courses and curricula. You identify the big ideas, the key questions, and the key performance tasks that embody your aims. You choose the learning outcomes that will form the basis of that course. The learning-centered approach offers a useful framework, based upon “best practice” and research, for the subsequent design of the course so that students have the greatest chance of successfully achieving the outcomes that you have chosen.

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I don’t see how these understanding and performance aims can be met within a lecture format, yet to reject a lecture format is neither feasible nor palatable.

The lecture format is both efficient and time-honored; it is here to stay on economic as well as instructional grounds. But as How People Learn makes clear, the issue is not so much what format we teach in but how we teach within that format. There is significant research to show (and common sense reveals) that we must get timely feedback if we are to learn (that applies to both the professor and the students!). Giving over 5 minutes toward the end of a lecture for a “one-minute essay” on the big ideas of the lecture is vital not only for students but for professors to find out in a quick and timely way what was understood and what wasn’t. This was a key finding at Harvard when faculty were surveyed as to their most effective practices. (You may recall that finding and others from Richard Light’s “Assessment Seminar” at Harvard discussed on campus last year.)

We may find, however, that the hours outside of class and other non-lecture uses of time we already use (such as in labs and seminars) take on a greater role in our courses as we reflect on the methods most suited for the goals we identify – particularly when those goals are cast in terms of learner abilities as opposed to topics and texts. (There are numerous books on learning in higher education that describe how lecturers can teach students to more effectively self-assess and self-adjust their own work, and to make their teaching more suitable for deep understanding. We plan to provide annotated bibliographies and training in how to use such learning-centered techniques more effectively.)

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An “understanding” is what we seek as a result in the learner when we teach all the stuff we teach. To ask “What are the understandings you seek students to have?” is to ask a different question than what performances need they master to display understanding. Whatever understandings, in this sense, we seek are best thought of as inferences, generalizations, propositions that summarize the non-obvious insights we will try to get students to draw from the work of the course. The stated understandings “propose” specific inferences that we will design our coursework backward from. A simple way of putting this is to pose a question: What is the “moral of the story” of your course, the moral(s) you are helping students grasp by all the activities of teaching, learning, and assessing.

The practical reason for asking you to state your understandings as propositions is to avoid the common error of stating our goals in merely a topical phrase. Why is stating the goal as a phrase inadequate? If I tell you that my aim is to have students understand “the cause and effects of the Civil War” you only know what the course is about, the “inputs”; it does not tell you what I want understood, specifically, about the causes and effects; nor does it imply any specific teaching and learning strategies since there are no explicit or implied performance goals (the “ouputs”). The nudge of asking the designer to state the target in the form of “specific generalizations” invariably helps the designer be clearer about specific purposes and makes the design more coherent and effective. (We find it helpful if designers state the desired understandings using the following sentence stem: “Students should come away understanding that…”)

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Won’t framing the goals as specific “understandings” stifle inquiry? Won’t it lead to parroting back – instead of true understanding?

No, not if done right. Being clear as a teacher about one’s specific learning goals is the only antidote to randomness in learning outcomes – the harm of which might be more revealingly called “teach, test, and hope for the best.”

I in no way stifle inquiry by alerting students at the outset that I want them to study through the lens of some specific big ideas, and that there are some specific intellectual goals I have for them. It helps, not hurts, student inquiry and final performance to know as soon as is possible what the key questions, issues, and performance goals are. Consider the following example:

My understandings: “Wise folks can be blind; the naïve can see; we may not know when we are one or the other.” “There is pain in all understanding since we must give something up as we see things differently.”

Essential questions: “Who has vision and who is blind? Who is a visionary and who is a fool? Can the blind see and the wise become blind, and if so, how?”

Texts: Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Freud’s Introductory Lectures, a selection from Helen Keller’s My Story, Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”)

NOTE: Students are encouraged to take notes and do research around the questions from the beginning. They know in advance that the final exam will involve the questions.

As the example hopefully makes clear, this approach does not hinder inquiry or prevent students from coming up with unorthodox views. On the contrary, it welcomes them because the structure, pedagogy, and transparency make clear that focused inquiry into vital questions is what we value. And in good post-modernist fashion we merely called them my understandings: an understanding, by definition is not privileged (unlike officially-sanctioned disciplinary “Knowledge”).

Sure, you could frame the targeted understandings in such a way that the objective becomes narrow, rigid, lower-level - but then the intellectual aim of understanding would be compromised: by definition a true “understanding” cannot be grasped by being told only.

What’s the alternative, really? No goal for the reading other than reading skill or personal enjoyment of the book? Though it sounds harsh to say it, teachers who balk at stating their own understandings may lack a self-conscious purpose beyond exposure. Worse, the argument is sometimes made disingenuously. Teachers have agendas. There are, in fact, conclusions almost every teachers wishes the student to draw (in addition to there being conclusions the professor has already drawn which they want the students to know as “knowledge”). All we are saying here is: come clean! Alas, the poor student is often left to read a text, tackle a complex science lab, conduct a historical inquiry, etc. with no clear sense of direction or purpose behind the assignment. “Guess what I think is important?” is not a teaching strategy based in the research or common sense. Nor is it honest to say “figure out what is of value in this text” without some sense of why the professor chose it and assigns it.

Whether or not the student should hear the professor state and explain those understandings and/or receive them in printed form in the syllabus is a strategic problem, of course. Our goals may or may not be compromised if the students are alerted to the specific understandings they are striving for. If the aim of the work is for students to seek and find such understandings then we should state that as an understanding: the students should “understand that their task is to learn to find solutions, not seek to borrow them from the professor.” Or they should “come to understand that there are many legitimate competing understandings of this text, depending upon one’s background and point of view.”

Even if good faith is a given, many teachers have surprising difficulty in stating the specific understandings they expect students to take away from their work. To design for deep understanding requires answers to such questions as: What should students be walking out the door with, specifically? What abilities should they end up with “by design?” What big ideas are essential for making sense of the mass of facts they will encounter, and how does my design equip them with those enabling tools, experiences, and know-how? What misunderstandings will they predictably harbor that we have to root out? The goal in framing the syllabus for the learner should not be merely to describe the landmarks on the journey ahead but to provide some sense of the lessons to be learned from the journey.

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Why do you suggest that a deliberate concern with student misunderstanding is a key feature of learning-centered design and instruction?

The learner is not a blank slate; the problem is not merely whether the learner has cognitive and will power. Coming to understand is more like developing a completely new golf swing or accent as a speaker. Old habits of thought have to be unlearned – with some difficulty. Well-intentioned students thus can take away lessons that their teachers never intended or have their pre-conceptions untouched by the teaching.

We get a glimmer of the difficult problem of teaching for deep understanding (and the anxieties it can raise for us) when we watch teachers lose their patience with students who don’t “get” the lesson. When attentive students don’t “get it,” we may start to question some of our methods – or go into impatient and strong denial of the problem being the teacher’s. (An incessant blaming of the student “victims” for failed understanding is a far-too-common occurrence in college teaching – and a reliable indicator that a campus is not yet learning-friendly).

A sense of greater urgency stems from research over the past 20 years. Such research shows that even some of the best students, who appear to understand class material—as revealed by their tests and in-class comments—later reveal significant misunderstanding of what they learned when asked to answer follow-up questions or to apply what they learned. Gardner, Perkins, and their Harvard colleagues at Project Zero have summarized these findings eloquently and thoroughly in the past decade, though the misconception research goes back to work in science in the 1970s.

As Gardner (1991) sums up the research:

[What] an extensive research literature now documents is that an ordinary degree of understanding is routinely missing in many, perhaps most students. It is reasonable to expect a college student to be able to apply in new context a law of physics, or a proof in geometry, or the concept in history of which she has just demonstrated acceptable mastery in her class. If, when the circumstances of testing are slightly altered, the sought-after competence can no longer be documented, then understanding—in any reasonable sense of the term—has simply not been achieved (The Unschooled Mind, p. 6).

To see how easy it is to misunderstand things we all know, consider the question, “Why is it warmer in summer and colder in winter?” Every student in the United States has been taught basic astronomy. We know that the earth travels around the sun, that the orbit is elliptical, and that the earth tilts at about 20 degrees off its north-south axis. But when graduating Harvard seniors were asked the question (as documented in a video on the misunderstanding phenomenon), we discover that few can correctly explain why it is colder in winter than in summer (Schneps, 1994). They either have no adequate explanation for what they claim to know, or they provide a plausible but erroneous view (i.e., the weather changes are due to the earth being closer to or farther from the sun). Similar findings occur when we ask adults to explain the phases of the moon: Many well-educated people describe the phases of the moon as lunar eclipses.

Actually, the recognition of the acuteness of the problem of learner misunderstanding (and thus the need for greater attention to metacognitive issues) is actually quite old. Plato’s Dialogues vividly portray the interplay between the quest for understanding and the habits of mind and misconceptions that may be subconsciously shaping or inhibiting our thinking. Francis Bacon provided a sobering account of the misunderstandings unwittingly introduced by our own intellectual tendencies operating unawares in the Organon 400 years ago. He noted that we project categories, assumptions, rules, priorities, attitudes, matters of style onto our “reality” and then develop countless ways of “proving” our instinctive ideas to be true, for example:

"The human understanding ... when it has once adopted an opinion draws all things else to support and agree with it . . . it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the intellect to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives. . . Numberless, in short, are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections color and infect the understanding."[2]

There is a long line, from Kant, Wittgenstein, and Freud, to Piaget and modern cognitive research in which psychologists and philosophers have attempted to understand and elucidate the kind of intellectual self-assessment and self-discipline needed to move beyond naïve conviction.

A learning-centered approach to design is therefore constantly mindful of how the teaching will be taken in by the learner, and of the importance of student self-assessment. Such instruction is designed with deliberate and careful attention to student misunderstandings, needs, and resistance. To successfully engineer understanding in more students, professors have to be able to anticipate and try to root out predictable misunderstandings, based on the simple notion that most Big Ideas are odd or downright counter-intuitive to the novice.

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Some of my lectures and modules do not aim for in-depth understanding of complex ideas. Is that OK?

Sure. We might not go into depth on Newton’s third law when discussing the idea of “natural law” in Locke’s 2^nd Treatise of Government. And in a course where the goals focus on entry-level skill (as in computer programming or world language), we will often attend primarily in our teaching to straightforward coaching of skill. The key is to be clear on one’s priorities and what they imply for achieving results.

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Is designing for deep understanding like worrying about learning styles?

No. We might make the following distinction. We are advocating learning-centered education, not learner-centered education. The focus is on designing backward from our academic and intellectual goals, in a 3-step way of asking: what are those goals? and what do they imply for assessment? What do the two answers imply for successful learning activity? Rather than answer in a politically-correct, arbitrary, or habit-bound way, our challenge is to consider what the analysis reveals: Given the answers to the first two questions about goals and evidence, what follows of necessity for the answer to the third question about appropriate learning activity?

Whatever the pedagogical virtues of attending to the empirical fact that different learning styles exist – and there are many, as found in the research on learning - the instructional-design challenge here is different. Our stated learning goals may imply the use of cooperative learning groups, or they may not. Our goals may imply attention to kinesthetic intelligence, or such an intelligence may be irrelevant to the desired understandings. The task is to identify the best enabling strategies, given the goals.

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But I find so much of what passes for research in education to be either obvious truisms or bogus, arbitrary claims. I’ll stick with what I know.

There is a lot of bogus research in every field – remember the cold fusion experiments in science a few years ago? It is odd, though, how often some college professors dismiss all education research out of hand when all they offer in return is a rationalization of their own largely-unresearched habits. It is also a bit disingenuous to happily ignore educational research on the one hand but decry attempts at institutional change as an inherent threat to the integrity of their field on the other. There is a solid literature on what works in teaching and learning, and more professors need to be conversant with that research: attention to the findings would improve learner achievement at the very idea-based outcomes that professors hold dear.

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[1] Frank Sulloway (1996) Born To Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives , p. 20.

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[2] Francis Bacon (1960). The New Organon. Book I, #45–#49.

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