Stop Talking and l e t the- students learn to learn
I Provocative
". . .with the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men. . ..when he had made an end of speaking, he cast away the jawbone."
Judges 15: 1G17
It is taken as axiomatic in undergraduate education in chemistry that if you require a student to know something, you must organize an a p propriate prescribed exposure to it. Until recent years, this meant the student must he seated in a classroom and jawed at by an instructor of high or low degree until the topic had been "covered7'-an interesting choice of word. The principal alternative was the assigning of problems for solution, which were handed in and graded, sometimes even annotated for the student's benefit. Nowadays, modern technology permits us to jaw a t the student by way of film loops, TV tapes, programmed books, CAI programs, etc., with a striking saving in faculty time and a striking cost in money laid out for the equipment. I n general, the student is pleased to be jawed at. He assumes, usually correctly, that unless he's heard it over and over in the classroom or the audio-visual carrel, it won't be on the examination. Every year, in my first lecture, I meet the question, "Which parts of the textbook are we responsible for?" (The answer is, "So far as I know, the author is responsible for the textbook,") It usually becomes clear that the questioner means, "What parts of the textbook are you going to paraphrase in your lectures?" (The answer to that one is, "As few as possible"), and the implication is that the class won't bother with the rest. Every year, sometime between two and four weeks into first term, I meet the accusation, "You're not following the textbook" (I already know that.) A few weeks'later, at the midterm test, it usually becomes apparent that neither are most of the students. You may ask, "What has this to do with the first paragraph?" I propose to show what I think is a connection, and why I think it is worth talking about. Chemistry students may be broadly divided into those who are intending to become chemists, and those who are not. A principal requirement of good undergraduate instruction common to both groups is that they should learn what chemistry is about-how it operates, and how i t hangs together, and how i t grows and develops as a living science. The additional requirement for the former group is that they learn how to participate in the doing of chemistry. A key fault in our systems of instruction for both groups, and one which is not being remedied by the adoption of modern learning systems, is that they teach the student falsely about how chemistry is learned by chemists. The growing short-course industry, both private and society-sponsored, still does not represent the normal means of acquiring day-to-day new knowl-
edge. Programmed texts aimed a t the level of practicing chemists are few and far between. The usual route to daily updating and upgrading of working knowledge for the practicing chemist is private reading and study with what one writer (whose name I've forgotten) has called Bound Optimally Ordered Knowledge (BOOK). The use of books and journals can be streamlined by computerized indexes, awareness services, and similar devices, but it cannot be evaded. We've all watched graduate students learn the perils of believing that if you've noted the reference (and photocopied the paper if important) you've mastered the content. I n the end, one must learn to read and study privately to succeed as a chemist. What does this imply for what we teach, and how? I t implies that we must constrain our traditional tendency to run on a t the mouth in classrooms. The MacPherson Report (Undergraduate Instruction in Arts and Science 1967-University of Toronto) recommends that no course be allowed more than one lecture plus one tutorial hour per week, so students will have time to read. It implies that students should be given progressively more responsibility to master increasingly large and increasingly important topics without classroom exposition of them. Language students in some universities are expected to be ready to be tested on the content of the prescribed texts early in the fall term, prior to discussion in lectures of interpretations and comparisons. Why should students not study on their own the classic "bookwork" set-pieces of chemistry? Why should it not be legitimate to ask on examination for the derivation of an equation because it was expounded on five text pages rather than because it was re-expounded (with transcription errors to and from the chalkboard thrown in) for an hour of class time? I s it better to spend a class hour on the relationship between redox pitentiah and equilibrium constants (derived in almost every full-length analytical text) or on the interrelationships of redox couples displayed by Pourbaix diagrams? It implies that the course should he larger than the series of lectures. It should ideally be the sum of textbook, class assignments, laboratory work if appropriate, lecture material, and the fruits of extra reading and extra thinking by the students. By final year, for students taking honors in chemistry and proposing to proceed to graduate work, the private effort on topics and with a scope selected by the student, should be made a decisive factor in gaining first-class standing. It implies that we must consider with care the adequacy of the supporting tools for private learning which we provide and require the student to learn to use. My undergraduate contemporaries in math and physics were assigned a textbook written in French Volume 47, Number 8 , August 1970
/
561
for a third-year course. How better to learn that sooner or later, you'll have to read other languages? Why not start now? I n my graduating year, I was required to pass an examination in translation from French and German. One hour a week of optional help with German was available. Compare the mathematics presented to undergraduates with that which turns up in the papers in your favorite journals. When will that gap be bridged? Are your students confronted with journal articles so they see why a scraped pass in peripheral subjects like mathematics will not do if they are in the game for anything but a discountquality sheepskin? It implies that no student should pass through our hands without realizing that such cant phrases as "preparing today for jobs which will exist tomorrow" mean in fact learning how to learn by private effort from the standard sources of information in the time remaining after various scheduled obligations have been met. How then shall we decide what to retain in our lecture time? I have referred to the MacPherson Report. Let me offer for discussion its list of reasons for delivering lectures (from pp. 10-12) ( I ) providing nn ovcrvirrr of a iuhjrrt, or hrxnrh of xsublecr, loot rmdilg ot,tainnble in any one or a few printed works (2) conveying to students the professor's enthusiasm and zeal for his suhlect in a way that cannot be done in print
562 / Journol of Chemical Education
(3) showing the students how to tackle problems of interpret& tion, and theoretical or experimental problems generally, so that they can tackle some on their awn (4) showing a scholar's mind at work grappling with ideas, theoretical relations, intractable problems (5) conveying to the students theoretical insights and advanees in knowledge that me unique to a particular professor (6) transmitting information (whether an orderly structure of facts, of theorems, or of theoretical interpretation) which. the student must know in order t o comprehend the subject We argue therefore that some lectures are justified if they perform almost any one of the first five functions, or any comhination of them. But, . . . we do not find that the present system of lecture courses encourages the performance of these functions. What it does is encourage the performance of the sixth function the one function which we regard as least desirable.
.. . .
.. .
You may prefer a list of your own. You may feel you can make legitimate use of large numbers of lecture hours even under the MacPherson criteria. I n any case, I hope you will join the campaign to remove the last vestiges of wry truth from the schoolboy joke about being [intellectually] slain with the jawbone of an ass.
George F. Atkinson University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
