{"id":386,"date":"2006-07-12T11:11:55","date_gmt":"2006-07-12T11:11:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/12\/is-our-students-learning\/"},"modified":"2006-07-12T11:11:55","modified_gmt":"2006-07-12T11:11:55","slug":"is-our-students-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/12\/is-our-students-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Our Students Learning?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Inside Higher Ed, there’s an article by Laurence Musgrove on whether student writing has really gotten worse<\/a> in recent years. He suggests a good mechanism for how faculty might be fooled into thinking so:<\/p>\n

\n

[…] I think the main difference between students then and now exists mostly in our heads, since in many cases what we are really doing is contrasting our students’ experiences with our experiences in school. By that I mean, our expectations are pretty out of whack if we expect our students to be the kind of students we once were, because once upon a time we were the kind of students who went on to graduate school and became scholars in a particular discipline. Most of our college classmates didn’t. And that’s who most of our students are. And quite a few other folks besides.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is an excellent point. I have very little direct knowledge of how my college classmates wrote, but the little that I do have more or less agrees with this– I did a group paper for one class in my senior year, and after a quick glance at the drafts the rest of my group had, I immediately volunteered to be the one to collect and compile them, and incidentally clean up the really egregious errors. And if I could spot the grammar errors, serial comma abuser that I am, you know it was bad…<\/p>\n

Musgrove goes on to cite a couple of empirical studies of student writing, that claim to see no change in the frequency of errors between older writing samples and more recent ones. The studies are rather old, though, and sort of mechanical– the errors are evaluated “using an error analysis technique derived from a grammar handbook commonly used in college writing courses.” In the comments, people rightly jump on this as being a little dodgy.<\/p>\n

Of course, the right experiment to do is obvious: what you need is to pull together a random sample of student writing from ten or twenty years ago, and a sample from more recent years, and do a blind test with some faculty volunteers. Have the same professors grade papers from both groups, and see if the older works get better grades.<\/p>\n

It’s probably just about feasible, too, given how infrequently most academics throw things out. There must be some professors around who have twenty-year-old term papers mouldering in a file drawer that could serve as a sample…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Inside Higher Ed, there’s an article by Laurence Musgrove on whether student writing has really gotten worse in recent years. He suggests a good mechanism for how faculty might be fooled into thinking so: […] I think the main difference between students then and now exists mostly in our heads, since in many… Continue reading Is Our Students Learning?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}