Would College Students Retain More If Professors Dialed Back the Pace?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-works-what-d...

("What Works, What Doesn't: Some study techniques accelerate learning, whereas others are just a waste of time—but which ones are which? An unprecedented review maps out the best pathways to follow.")

Behind paywall, but mirrored at http://tguilfoyle.cmswiki.wikispaces.net/file/view/What_work...

A short summary for the article is:

https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mernst/advice/effective-stu...

I know the headline says the word "retention" and the content deals with this above stuff to some degree, but there's also different goals stated like inspiring students to want to learn, getting students to reflect on their inherited values, and becoming sensitive to experiencing themes in literature. For purposes like these, there's simply no point to covering a lot of material, and it may often be counterproductive.

I think one key point is stated in the article: no one thinks "slow teaching" should be the only method. But (anecdotally lol) I personally am glad I had a few seminars with a glacial pace, as those were the ones where I really learned how to write, plus how to think when facts aren't available or directly relevant.

Personally I think stepping back and asking what a course is trying to do is the first step. If it's to expose students to as much evo bio as possible, a slow teaching "philosophy" wouldn't be appropriate. If it's to get a group of people who might be hostile to the idea of evolution to consider the possibility ("reflecting on values"), I don't know what other approach could work.

For instance, we all probably had to go through math classes where the professor writes so fast that it's a hand cramping race just to even scribble together enough notes to follow each gigantic derivation later for learning purposes. Nobody in that class is retaining any of that.

The kid who aces that class, is almost invariably someone who likes to to play with the equations in their free time at their own pace, so they get a feel for what process they need to employ toward a solution rather than brute forcing it. (When applicable, sometimes brute force is the only tactic.)

Math classes in general really, desperately need to slow down and let students grasp higher-order concepts. The number crunching method is stressful, and all it does is massively discourage bright people who may be geniuses in their field but flee University because the school made Calculus their "breakout" class.

Anecdote. When I went to University, I had a professor who graduated MIT tell the class that he'd realized how much pressure we were under in our Calculus class trying to keep up, that this was deeply unfair, and that he was erasing our last test score because they were unreflective of the performance that he knew we were capable of if we had any time for his class. Calculus was a core requirement, his class was elective, so almost every student had been forced to ignore his class, and we were amazingly lucky that he was good enough to sympathize.

This man used to work at Bell Labs and swam 200 laps a day to keep fit. And he was telling us we had it rough. I saw people cry out of gratitude.

As an example of a major doing things correctly, in my opinion, is MIT's aerospace engineering with their "unified engiineering" course that covers the basics in a highly integrated fashion.

My experience in a different engineering program was that I learned some sophomore math freshman year (because I had placed out of "freshman calculus"), then didn't use it at all until junior year when I had forgotten it. And then things tried to be integrated senior year when we had a senior design project that tied all our random classes together. I turned out alright, but I think an integrated approach would be much more fruitful.

All that said, I do think there is some value in having the purely mathematical ability to look at an equation, classify it as a certain type, and then know how to solve it. Not every problem you face in life will be an application that existed when you were in college.

It was so interesting that the professor would do theorems walkthrough classes which were optional and everyone would attend them.

As a professor, I so wish we could do this more. But realistically, it seems that we just can't afford to let students fail who aren't yet equipped to learn that way. But I do try to allow for this while still staying within the bounds of fairness, for example, giving students a grade based just on exam scores when that would be a higher grade, so they can blow off homeworks that other students really need credit for to shore up their grade.

Nominally, yes. In reality? No. The reality of higher education is to act as a preliminary screen for employers. Few people who apply to well known schools get in. Fewer still survive to complete their degree. Many switch programs (to a less competitive field), drop out, or even commit suicide.

I wish universities were as committed to education as they say they are. But we wouldn't have people failing right out of school if that were the case.

I even had one teacher who told us he never went to class, so he didn’t expect us to, but that showing up would make the problem sets easier. In classes like that, the lectures basically act as a starting point, and establish the scope of the problem sets. If you didn’t attend the lecture, you can still do the problem set, but you’ll probably end up over complicating it because you missed the many hints of how to approach it that were in the lectures.

The problem here is the debt students need to take on to go through college, not the college content per se (at least at the level of which courses students need; some of those courses themselves could use better content and pedagogy).

Learning a lot in a short period of time is strongly coupled with coping strategies and discipline due to time pressure and the high requirements. After this process you probably have gained some insights about yourself and further, confidence to have capabilities to read and learn through whatever comes your way. At least to a certain degree.

> It depends on what you want. I didn't want to waste time in college. I wanted to get all I could out of the 4 years.

However, I think there's still a lot of space for improvement. Especially towards technical or math expertise. A lot of students even lack of the bare basics just a few months after the exams are over. And even more importantly, problem solving skills and critical thinking are, at least in my experience, neglected. One of the main reasons therefore is the lack of time. Thinking and solving a problem _yourself_ instead of looking up the solution or being able to reproduce a solution at your exams are two different things. With the former being the critical point at which universities currently fail the most.

College students don't know what they are interested in, that's a big reason for going to college in the first place. You can't ask them what they need to know because they don't know it yet.

Requiring that students not only show that they understand current knowledge but also that they retain past knowledge seems to be a much better way to educate students. It obliterates the slacker cram mentality that many students have.

I remember more from my first-year philosophy/communications/ethics classes then I do from half of my CS curriculum. I didn't have much of a classics education, but presumably, the value of it is not in learning the classics (Nobody actually gives two rat's asses about the the themes of the Illiad), but in learning how be analytical.

The purpose of general education classes is to turn us into better people, and the purpose of specialization classes is to make us employable. I think Silicon Valley could use a lot more of the former.

Personal anecdote: I believe there is a broad and pervasive culture of extreme procrastination across liberal arts campuses (it's much harder to do this in the sciences because if you don't keep up you completely drop off). Vast majority of my peers were pulling all nighters and needed a looming deadline to finish any assignment. It is very difficult to retain information on no sleep.