Re: paleonet "Graduated but Not Literate"

[Chris Baldwin <baldwin@xxxxxxxx>]

TomDeVrie@aol.com wrote:

> One area for improvement that could lead to higher levels of adult 
> literacy, in evolution as well as other subjects, is student testing.
>
> How many professors reading paleonet assess their students' progress 
> with exams that force students to formulate a cogent and coherent 
> response and then express that response in an intelligible, organized, 
> and grammatically correct manner?
>
> Alternatively, how many professors hand out multiple-choice exams that 
> can be processed through a scantron machine?
>
> While at Amherst College in the mid-1970s, I don't recall having taken 
> a single multiple choice test. I've seen some college exams since that 
> would be a professional embarrassment for a middle school teacher. In 
> my own high school classes, I haven't ever given a multiple-choice, 
> true-false, fill-in-the-blank, match-the-items test.
>
> As for the teaching of evolution (or any subject with an important 
> conceptual component): students who are required to communicate their 
> own understanding of the subject, and who receive feedback from an 
> instructor if their understanding is deficient, are more likely to 
> walk away with the skills advocated by adult literacy proponents than 
> students who are told simply that answer 'a,' 'b,' or 'c' is correct.
>
> The moral of the story: if you want to have higher levels of 
> performance, you must have higher levels of expectation. Students can 
> only while away their time with Facebook or other distractions if 
> there are no academic consequences. If students are only assigned 50 
> pages to read a week, and correctly conclude that reading half that 
> will yield a good grade, is the diminished learning the student's 
> fault, or the professor's?
>
> Tom DeVries

I agree. In my own department I am the only one who requires long, 
researched papers during the semester and essays in every one of my 
finals.  I confess I give each of my classes some Scantron-MC questions 
which I tell them will show what they don't know. In contrast the essays 
allow them to show what they do know. The results are interesting. 
Uniformly they get better marks on the essays than they do on the MC 
questions. Some are just plain terrible - they lack any experience in 
constructing a multi-faceted answer and some can write just two lines in 
a two hour exam. Some are just superb and clearly enjoy a good romp 
through some well organized technical information and synthesis. Sadly, 
for most conventional, just-out-of-school students their ability to use 
the English language is very weak (this year the substitution of "two" 
for "to" caught my eye amongst "sedamentology"(sic)!

What is noticeable is the fact that ... ummm....errr..."non traditional" 
students (read: older[!]) are far more capable of framing coherent 
sentences and structuring multiple ideas. Seems there was something 
different going on in schools years ago that certainly isn't happening 
now. So the issue of adult literacy needs some careful analysis.

A couple of years ago I wrote to our new university president who was 
trumpeting improved SAT scores for our incoming class and suggested that 
from my own observations perhaps 40% of my students in intro geology 
classes were functionally illiterate. Partly (small part) this was 
prompted by an encounter with a home schooled young lady who told me 
that she was experiencing difficulty taking notes and linking my Power 
Point slides to the relevant part of the course text because effectively 
she could not read!

I was educated in the UK and finals at Liverpool tended to be pretty 
heavy and very final. But even in Grammar school we were trained to take 
exams very formally. I'm surprised when now my students roll up 15 
minutes late with no flustered look on their face. Clearly they just 
arrived at their own convenience and seem to consider schedules as for 
guidance only. When I tell them that no they can't leave for a pee in 
the middle of the exam, or no they can't leave the exam to go buy a blue 
book (that they forgot) their confusion and anger are something to 
behold (but funny nonetheless). These kids are just woefully trained and 
they are destined to suffer for a very long time.

Chris Baldwin