Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi tells us that a balance of challenge and skills is one of the central aspects of an intrinsically rewarding educational experience (2014, 183). Finding this balance is one of the most challenging aspects of teaching at the university level, as the skills our students have before entering our classroom vary so widely. As Karin Scager, Sanne Akkerman, Albert Pilot and Theo Wubbels (2017) found in their analysis of the ethical dilemmas narrated by twelve teachers from a liberal arts university in the Netherlands, “One of the main dilemmas encompassed maximizing challenge versus keeping all students on board. University students differ in their ability, confronting teachers with the feeling that choosing to serve one group could be detrimental to the learning of others” (2017, 318). How do we, as educators, address this ethical dilemma when teaching humanities courses, where our learning objectives often emphasize critical thinking skills as much as or more than subject comprehension? Two solutions offered by the SoTL literature are student partnership models and early-term assessments.
Student partnership models:
One way to ensure that all students, regardless of their background knowledge or proficiencies, feel sufficiently challenged is to involve students as partners in the assessment process. The following two studies offer examples of student partnership models at the individual level (Fluckiger et al. 2009) and the institutional level (Hale 2020).
Four professors at the University of Nebraska at Omaha shared their experiences of how they involved students as partners in the assessment process (Fluckiger et al. 2009). All four emphasize formative assessments as the ideal place for this type of student-teacher interaction to occur. The following is how each professor, all within the discipline of teacher education, engaged students as partners in their own assessment:
- Three-color quiz: Working in groups, students respond to short-answer quiz questions using three pens. They write what they know in black ink, what other members of their group know in green ink, and information from the textbook or lecture materials in blue ink. This color coding allows students to reflect on their own learning process by seeing at a glance how much they are relying on their peers or notes, and can work towards increasing the amount of blank ink present on their own quizzes.
- Midterm student conferencing: Students prepare for a conference with the professor in the middle of the term, during which students narrate their own experiences and evaluate their own progress. The student does most of the talking, and the student and professor brainstorm solutions to the students’ challenges together.
- Shared revision of student-generated questions: Students prepare questions on course topics for a Jeopardy-style game and provide narrative feedback on each other’s questions. This allows students to work together to practice creating effective questions for future classroom assessment.
- Assignment blogs: Professors create an “assignment blog” which facilitates timely feedback on drafts to allow students to revise and adapt their learning before turning in the final version of a long-term assignment. This allows assessment to become an integral part of the assignment itself while reducing the amount of time teachers need to spend on writing long feedback on the final versions of assignments.
Adrian Hale (2020) suggests that a partnership model can help address perceived gaps in literacy skills in introductory humanities courses. He argues that approaching students with perceived deficits as a “problem” is counterproductive for a number of reasons. Instead of teachers identityfing deficits in their students’ prior knowledge and then working to overcome them (he also suggests moving away from the word deficit altogether!), Hale suggests that teachers should encourage students to identify their own challenges and work together with them to address these. Most of the time, students do not need to be told what they are struggling with, because they know better than anyone! His study focuses on a first-year humanities course initially intended to address perceived gaps in incoming students’ academic literacy. After an unsuccessful first year, changes were made to the course in order to address students’ needs without labelling the course as “remedial” – a label that Hale suggests doesn’t help with student retention. He provides examples of struggles students themselves identified and how instructors were able to address them without considering them “deficits.” For example, when student feedback indicated that low assessment scores discouraged them from participating fully in class, professors responded by including explanations of feedback given and reducing the number of high-stakes assessments in favor of more lower-stakes ones (Hale 2020, 252-254).
Early-term assessments:
Barbara Gross Davis claims that one of the key strategies for teaching academically diverse students involves being aware of the knowledge a teacher assumes a student will have upon entering the course and taking the steps necessary to ensure students in fact have the necessary knowledge to succeed in the course (1993, 55-56). Including a low-stakes, potentially ungraded assessment in the first week of class can help teachers tailor their course materials to the abilities of each new group of students, and can also help students predict where they might need the most support.
The following links from Yale’s Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning and Carnegie Mellon’s Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation provide examples of possible early-term assessments and activities that can help assess students’ background knowledge.
https://poorvucenter.yale.edu/StudentsPriorKnowledge
https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/aboutus/index.html
Of course, the above solutions are not only useful for humanities courses, and have wide applicability across disciplines. A potential area for future discussion lies in the design of interdisciplinary courses and programs in which varying levels of student familiarity with different subjects is encouraged. Darcie Rives-East and Olivia K. Lima of Augustana College provide some best practices for designing these courses and accommodating a wide range of student knowledge:
To put students at ease, acknowledge they bring varying levels of experience and ability. Create a climate where asking basic questions is accepted and encouraged… Provide some background for students. Focus on what students outside your discipline need to follow key concepts in your course… Form heterogenous student groups so students with the requisite background can teach the others. (Rives-East and Lima 2013,103)
These suggestions are potentially useful to any teacher who is teaching to students from outside their discipline, whether or not interdisciplinarity is a stated focus of the course. Seeing a diversity of background knowledge as a potential asset rather than a problem is a common thread throughout the teaching practices discussed in this section.
Works Cited:
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 2014. “Intrinsic Motivation and Effective Teaching.” In Applications of Flow in Human Development and Education, 173–87. Dordrecht, Netherlands: SAGE.
Davis, Barbara Gross. 1993. Tools for Teaching. 1st ed. The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Fluckiger, Jarene, Yvonne Tixier y Vigil, Rebecca Pasco, and Kathy Danielson. 2010. “Formative Feedback: Involving Students as Partners in Assessment to Enhance Learning.” College Teaching 58 (4): 136–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.2010.484031.
Hale, Adrian. 2020. “Not Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel: Disadvantage, Diversity and Deficit as Rich Points.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 19 (3): 244–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022219832453.
Rives-East, Darcie, and Olivia K. Lima. 2013. “Designing Interdisciplinary Science/Humanities Courses: Challenges and Solutions.” College Teaching 61 (3): 100–106. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.2012.752339.
Scager, Karin, Sanne F. Akkerman, Albert Pilot, and Theo Wubbels. 2017. “Teacher Dilemmas in Challenging Students in Higher Education.” Teaching in Higher Education 22 (3): 318–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2016.1248392.
Further Reading:
Academic Journals:
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education
Community College Journal of Teaching and Practice
Articles:
Bellaera, Debney, and Baker. 2018. “Subject Comprehension and Critical Thinking: An Intervention for Subject Comprehension and Critical Thinking in Mixed-Academic-Ability University Students.” The Journal of General Education 65 (3–4): 264. https://doi.org/10.5325/jgeneeduc.65.3-4.0264.
Juchniewicz, Melissa M, Lorraine Dagostino, and James Carifio. 2007. “Beginning with Literacy Needs: Community College Program Development That Considers Individual Students’ Contexts.” Community College Journal of Research and Practice 31, no. 3: 199-215.
Grant, Michael, and Marshall Smith. 2018. “Quantifying Assessment Of Undergraduate Critical Thinking.” Journal of College Teaching & Learning (TLC) 15 (1): 27–38. https://doi.org/10.19030/tlc.v15i1.10199.Nielsen, Niels Møller. 2019. “Problem-Oriented Project Learning as a First Year Experience: A Transformative Pedagogy for Entry Level PPL.” Education Sciences 10 (1): 6. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci10010006.
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