02.08.06
Can College Students Think?
I was reading the website of the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory in the area of higher-order thinking and sound reasoning and was particularly focused on five identifiers they list for students who are higher-order thinkers. While this site is aimed at K-12, this is equally as applicable to higher education.
Reading the identifiers made me wonder how many of my students (seniors and graduate students) have these abilities (paraphrased from the original list … use the link to see them in their entirety):
- Ability to identify the “essential elements in a problem as well as the interaction between those elements”
- Ability to “assign relative values to essential elements of a problem and use those values to rank elements in meaningful ways”
- Ability to “construct relationships between the essential elements of a problem that provide insight into it”
- Ability to “create and apply criteria to gauge the strengths, limitations, and value of information, data, and solutions”
- Ability to “build new solutions through novel combinations of existing information”
It has been my observation in over 30 years as an educator that undergraduate education often falls short of developing these characteristics in students. I think that we begin to build them at the graduate level, but don’t think “outside the box” enough to develop them in undergraduates. Of course, that is a generalization that doesn’t always apply, and where it does apply, it might be somewhat discipline-specific. Still, it is clear that we need to make an effort to do better at active learning concepts (where these characteristics are typically developed) and begin to remove some of our dependence on doing things the way we were taught decades ago. Just because it worked for me doesn’t mean it will work for my grandchildren, who are working their way through the school system now. My 2 year old granddaughter can use the computer. She can’t read, but she can use the mouse, point to icons, and click on them. I know plenty of 70 year olds who can’t do that. We have an inversion when it comes to technology. The younger they are, the more comfortable they are with it. Todays students demand (and deserve) a better approach to learning and one that is more in synch with the way they have grown up.
We can begin to solve the problem if we will opt for interactive approaches to our teaching. There is still a place for the synchronous/non-interactive activity (i.e. lecture), but its use should be significantly curtailed in favor of both synchronous and asynchronous interactive activities. Let’s not shortchange the future.
