Retired English professor leads charge against apathy in college students
The Teaching and Learning Collective at Central Michigan University hosted a conference Friday in response to the presentation last fall of the book “Academically Adrift.”
The book, written by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, questioned how much students really learn in the classroom.
Friday’s conference highlighted correlational studies that link certain attributes of faculty members to their popularity among students.
Peter Koper, the conference keynote speaker and retired English faculty member, along with other academic colleagues, authored a 2008 article pointing out strange patterns between a teacher’s “helpfulness, clarity, quality, easiness and hotness” to the ratings of faculty members teaching in American and Canadian universities. Koper and his team used websites such as RateMyProfessor.com to collect student evaluations based on the listed categories.
“When we did our study, we were given the data set for RateMyProfessor.com by the man who was then the president and founder,” Koper said. “That meant that we had the postings for more than 6,000 teachers in the United States and Canada who had at least 20 ratings.”
Koper said as a team he and his colleagues were interested in how valid the recommendations were when studying the correlations between categories and student opinions.
“We found some very interesting results,” Koper said. “Some departments were marked high. Others, such as sciences, were marked very low. However, when we subtracted the scores for hotness and easiness from the scores for quality, the rankings suddenly flipped.”
Because Koper’s findings were so striking, he admitted it was not hard to have his article published. Universities in both the U.S. and Canada showed their students were more apt to picking easier classes with teachers who would, in a sense, “spoon-feed” them, rather than provide challenges for the students.
“This study came out with pretty depressing findings,” said Merlyn Mowrey, co-director of the conference and associate professor of philosophy and religion. “Students are not learning complex reasoning, and the amount that they do learn from the time that they enter into the university until two years after or four years after shows negligible improvement.”
For six hours, the Bovee University Center flooded with students and staff who came to listen to retired faculty members and student speakers respond to Koper’s study. Activities included thinking assessments and adaptation methods, questioning whether faculty members should adapt to the mindset of the students or vice-versa. Student speakers were able to address how they felt about their student life and challenges within Central Michigan University.
“I think that this information is applicable to some students, but not all of them,” said Talia Rybak, a graduate student in the school of music. “I am a graduate student at this university, and I feel very overwhelmed. I guess I feel that college is really what you make of it, and sometimes that results in students not showing enough effort.”
The lack of dedicated learning on campus may not entirely be the fault of the students. Faculty members who spoke during the conference said some students simply have different learning processes that may come across as being less advanced as universities would like to see.
With the addition of these changes in the curriculum, Koper, along with other faculty members, believe they will begin to see exactly what should be happening: students working hard, buckling down and preparing for their futures.
“The sorts of things described in ‘Academically Adrift’ need to become the normal way of teaching classes on this campus,” Koper said. “This means more reading, more writing, more serious studies and more intensive development of critical skills.”
