Students and what they learn before college

If they don't know the answers, they get it wrong. Too many wrongs = failure. Too many kid failing, = go back to admin, and up the prerequisite requirement. You can't blame yourself for gaps in the education of your students.

Good thing I am not a teacher I guess... But if I were, I would make damn sure the kids knew what they were supposed to before I sent them on to be someone else's problem.

The thing is, I suspect, if you were to directly ask them, they probably could tell you that humans are vertebrates. What they can't do well is synthesize material or make logical connections. I suspect that part of this is they just don't care.

A perhaps-related anecdote:

I was teaching an introductory astronomy class. One year, one of the things I emphasized was the size-to-distance ratio for various astronomical objects. (I'm spending very little time on that this time around, but I always do it somewhat differently.)

In a review test (not the actual test), I gave the students a question that dealt with "number density" and "mass density," although I didn't use that jargon. (I was talking about the number of stars per cubic parsec, as compared to the total mass of stars in a cubic parsec.)

Later, a couple of the students in class objected: "Have we talked about density in this class?"

The answer was no... but students who come to Vanderbilt have supposedly taken a couple years of high school science. My mom, teaching eigth grade, was making density one of the key concepts in her class.

Are we supposed to assume that the students learned nothing in high school science? It's bad enough that they object to the 9th grade algebra I use, but at least there they have some understanding that they should know how that works. In History classes, I'm guessing that the profesosrs assume the students know how to put a sentence together, even though it's (a) not an English class, and (b) not something explicitly taught.

I don't assume the students learned any actual Astronomy in high school, because few will have. However, such a basic concept as density-- if I can't assume that they have some familiarity with that, then what was the point of all that time they spent in high school science classes anyway?

-Rob

There's been a fair amount of work done in the educational-research community on the difficulty of identifying and correcting student misconceptions. I've seen documentary footage of an interview with a very intelligent, curious, and studious seventh-grader who aced his biology test on photosynthesis, for which he had to correctly answer questions on the contribution of carbon dioxide to plant biomass. A few weeks later, he told an interviewer that plants gained weight primarily by obtaining food from the soil.

I think Karlyn has it at least partially right. I don't think that the ability to make logical connections is either developed or valued in much of the educational system. Logical thinking and synthesis are skills that can be developed with practice, but college students have asked me on more than one occasion whether questions that required these skills were "tricks".

I'm not saying this is *the* explanation (in fact, I somewhat cynically think that it isn't), but there is another explanation (aside from the two offered: not knowing humans are vertebrates & not connecting the questions).

If a student knew that humans were vertebrates, but didn't know to which phylum they belonged, a student could split their answer. For example, if they thought they had it narrowed down to Chordata or Echinodermata, they could pick a for 2 and b for 5, figuring a guaranteed 1 point is better than ricking no credit.

In forty years of teaching the same introductory classes (yes, I did that because I wanted to: working with beginning students was a main goal of mine even before I went to graduate school), I found that the reasoning of the students coming from public schools got gradually worse through the years. Finally, I began to drop more advanced topics as it was no longer possible to get to them after devoting enough time to basics for the students to learn. Yes, sometimes students coming from high school just aren't prepared.

But exactly what they are expected to know before the class starts (like the definition of "density") really is best decided on by the department as a whole or the relevant portion of the department, so there is an agreement. The "humans are vertebrates" can, it seems to me, be justified as a logical application of the definition of "vertebrates," so it was certainly reasonable to have it on the test.

I don't think that you can infer that the 20% of the students who answered the two questions differently don't know that humans are vertebrates.

Since there are several new words in both questions, and two questions between numbers 2 and 5, I doubt that those students saw any connection between the information in question 2 and the information in question 5.

I think a more likely explanation is that they didn't know the answers and they guessed.

Logical thinking and synthesis are skills that can be developed with practice, but college students have asked me on more than one occasion whether questions that required these skills were "tricks".

Indeed, and questions that require them are trick questions....

It is true that a lot of science education at the lower level involves memorizing and repeating facts. I think that the introductory non-majors astronomy class is taught that way more often than not. (A senior physics major, after I told him what I was teaching this year, said, "ah, the thinly-veiled definitions class." I try not to do it that way, however.)

-Rob

Posters here are basically right. You can (and should) do some remedial teaching in or before introductory classes (Lund university has a three week summer repetition course for budding math students before the first semester starts), you should bend over backwards trying to get concepts across, and you should do everything you can to teach them how to really think (or, to think) when they get disparate facts they need to connect.

And there is a point at which the inferred conclusion should not be "the teaching needs to be improved" or "we need to cover more of the basics", but "this student is in the wrong class, the wrong major and possibly does not belong in college at all."

As a recent graduate from a bio undergrad program, a lot of my friends tried to get through classes through rote memorization (as were trained in high school). While they were fantastic at memorizing things, the slightest curveball on a test would throw them off.
Point being, there are many people who don't connect A to B, unless they have been in the routine of doing so (as in by memorization). I'm not condoning their lack of the proper human phylum, I'm trying to give a basic explanation of why this logic disconnect might exist.

As somebody said here, not all students who are accepted should be students who graduate, and some are plainly unfit to be college grads. That's one of the reasons we have tests and assignments, since o/w we could just walk around and give anybody with a high enough SAT his B.Sc. or B.A. immediately.

The fact is that there will always be students who object to learning and thinking. My favorite example was TA'ing a class where I've asked the students to take out their notes of the day before (as given by lecturer, not me) and put them on the desk in front of them, since we were going to be clarifying some key concepts. I then said that we were going to be going over "exact forms" (adv. calculus stuff), and a quarter of the class said "but we haven't learned this". Funny thing was, I could see the words "exact forms" and the precise definition of those forms on the top of everyone's notes.

Coclusion: some students are there to be spoodfed and coddled, and will fail if asked to think. These do not need to be there, and if they can't shape up, then ship them out.

Your question actually has several levels.

I agree with those above who imply that our students are poorly prepared for real education. Lifelong emphasis on memorization and multiple choice testing is ruinous, and departmental obsession with "content" over "quality of thinking" doesn't help. Students shouldn't be arriving at their first year of college unable to participate in critical thinking--those skills should be developed from first grade on.

As the previous paragraph suggests, one of the things I'd do if I were you is scrap multiple choice testing. It's pedagogically unsound, and conveys all the wrong messages to our students. It teaches them that "recognitition" is the same as learning; it teaches them that information comes in bite-sized nibblets; it strongly emphasizes memorization over understanding. It also allows them to get by without utilizing that vastly underemphasized (and hugely important) skill, communication via the written word.

As to the direct question about expectations, my own anecdote shows a struggle with the same kind of problem. I'm one of several faculty members here who teach a large, non-majors introductory bio course. We have wrestled for several years over the problem of students who are woefully unprepared to do even the simplest task-related math. We also struggled with an administration which seemed to believe "introductory" and "non-majors" in combination meant "zero expectation," a view not shared by instructors. After a number of years of attempting to dumb-down our labs and other expectations, we finally got snotty and forced through a **gasp** prerequisite requirement for our course.

So my answer is--yes, we have the right to expect that students coming to our classes haven't been sleeping for the last twelve years. If they aren't prepared, they need to go *get* prepared before they take our classes.

College, after all, is grown-up school.

Lynn

I?m not sure of the level where many of your responders are working/teaching but they do seem eager to find fault with science education in high schools. As a high school teacher, I would like to point out that science education has taken a back seat to those areas included in the state tests mandated by NCLB. We are not encourage to have students think about real science, rather we spend time trying to adjust content to reading test samples and writing prompts. If the ?whispered about? science competency tests come to fruition then what you will see in your classes will be masses of students who know a finite set of facts that fit into the eligible content identified by state bureaucrats. There is not a real scientist among the lot. If you want to see a difference in your science students then get to work on the political science students because they will probably dictate what will be taught and learned in the high schools of the future.

Students who are unprepared for an introductory college level class shouldn't be in it. Ideally you can do what one of my college profs did for me - he took me aside and suggested that since I clearly lacked the pre-requisite skills I should drop the course. In the non-ideal real world, if they can't cut it, let them fail. I had to deal with that too, and while I hated it at the time, it's served me better in the long run.

The flaws in the elementary school system cannot be fixed if they are covered/made up for by institutions of higher learning.