What do Students Need to Learn?

This is a question I think about and wonder about quite often, partly because of the huge emphasis nowadays on the workplace skills that our students are supposed to need to help them succeed in the world of work (what we sometimes call, 'the real world'!) once they've graduated. The required attributes include well developed literacy, report-writing, and presentation skills, as well as softer skills to do with communication, team work, and the like.

Besides these undoubtedly useful practical skills - to which no one paid any attention whatsoever in the distant past when I was a student at university myself - I'm also quite keen to see our students learning something about the discipline I have always taught, namely economics. I like to think that when students leave us, they take with them both an interest in and a fairly extensive knowledge of economics, and even better, the ability to think like an economist. Probably I'm being over-optimistic to imagine that everyone we teach manages all that, but I think our better students do so.

However, a book I've been reading in the past couple of weeks has set me thinking afresh about this whole area. The book in question is Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, University of Chicago Press, 2011). Through surveying a large sample of US college students, Arum and Roksa find that for many of them, distressingly little learning seems to take place, despite the fact that modules are mostly passed and normal academic progress is maintained. The survey showed that students prefer to get lots of pre-digested course handouts, and that they don't much like modules where the instructor expects them to do a lot of reading (yes, really!). And as soon as a module is done and passed, it's best forgotten so that attention can be focused on the next ones. Overall, the widespread student goal seems to be to secure the paper qualifications needed by the job market, without great concern to learn much along the way. Such an instrumental approach to university education is a bit worrying though not, I must admit, wholly unfamiliar on this side of the Atlantic either; and institutions apparently collude in their students' chosen approach because they are unwilling to devote more academic staff time and effort to the teaching function.

All this has led me to re-visit the modular structure of our courses. For students, this way of structuring our teaching offers a lot of flexibility, in that credits for modules already passed can often be transferred when a student wishes to shift to a different degree programme, or even to a different university.

But I do wonder how well the modular approach facilitates and supports the sort of learning I would like to see. Think of my own subject, economics, for instance (I could also comment on mathematics, but leave that for another occasion). It seems to me that we want our students to learn three things: (a) a body of knowledge about the subject; (b) the ability to apply that knowledge to new issues and problems as they arise, in other words problem solving; and (c) the ability to extend and develop their knowledge into new fields. Our modules do a decent job as far as (a) is concerned, are mixed as regards (b), and quite poor with (c) - though sometimes the experience of writing a dissertation can push a student into new areas of study and hence develop (c).

The trouble is that our modules are supposed to be both self-contained and, more importantly, complete in the sense that nothing can be examined that is not somewhere in the course material for that module. On the face of it that sounds totally reasonable, and fair to the students, but it's actually quite restrictive in my view. For example, in a highly practical subject like economics I think it is perfectly reasonable to tell the students that some questions in the exam will be drawn from topical issues (related to the theme of the given module) that have come up in the media - and there are usually lots of such issues. Doing that forces the students, especially the better ones, to read around the subject far more than they might otherwise do, and that is surely highly desirable. But these days we don't do that, since the general view seems to be that we cannot set an exam question on a topic that has not been covered in the lectures. Absurd!

And what if we want to set a question that draws on parts of micro- and macroeconomics in the same problem? That too is quite difficult under current arrangements and module structures, though it would be fine if we simply had final year modules in advanced economics, rather than treating micro and macro as separate. The point here is that many practical problems out there in the 'real world' do require bits and pieces of knowledge from several areas to be brought together, so it would be good if our students developed the facility to handle this (a mix of my (b) and (c) above). At present, our course structures tend to divide knowledge up into too many distinct pieces, and aren't too good at fostering integration across modules.

So when it comes to student learning, we still have some way to go before we get it right, assuming there is a 'right way' out there, waiting to be discovered!

Who should go to university?

The short answer, I suppose, is 'anyone who is suitably qualified and who can benefit from the experience of studying for a degree.' The required qualifications depend on the chosen degree programme and university, and these days can easily be found on institutional websites. As for the second part of the answer, 'who can benefit....', one would think in terms of motivation, willingness to work hard (no one ever said that university study was supposed to be easy - though occasionally I have encountered students still harbouring such a misconception), and a fair amount of self confidence. One should also never forget the crucial factors of luck and serendipity in influencing both which university to apply for and attend, and the course to pursue.

In my own case, for instance, no one in my family had ever been to university before and it was hard to find out much about them in pre-internet days - I was applying in 1963 to start university in 1964. So where should I go? The only university I knew anything about was Hull, my local institution, but most of us at that stage at my school were thinking of going somewhere away from home. I don't think we were especially rebellious, but getting away was definitely seen as an important part of growing up. So we had nothing against Hull except that it was home.

As it happened I had two particularly good maths teachers, one who had studied at Cambridge, the other with a degree from Manchester. They each told me that their respective universities were good for maths, and as I certainly had no reason to dispute their judgement, I applied for both. My school qualifications (including Latin, still needed for Cambridge then), all top grades, got me a quick offer from Manchester, but Cambridge turned me down - in those days no reasons were ever given, and perhaps that is still the position. However, I still had the option of applying for Cambridge directly and taking their own entrance examination, and this is what I decided to do. This, and my entrance interview, took place in Cambridge on a couple of damp, cold, November days that made the whole place look quite grim and unwelcoming. Some weeks later I heard that I had been accepted. I immediately left school, got a job and worked for nine months before starting my studies - more on this in a later post.

My parents were delighted as Cambridge was a university they had heard of, so they thought it was probably OK to go there. My mother even thought that I might meet a princess, but I never did - in that respect my years in Cambridge were not a success.

Not everyone follows the conventional route into university that I did. All sorts of personal, family, health and other reasons can get in the way of gaining the standard qualifications at the 'normal' time. At age 18 or 19, some people simply lack the motivation to take their studies any further, even if they clearly have the necessary ability. Many people lack the confidence, or imagine they might not fit into a university environment. Some schools - that should know better - are reluctant to encourage even their better pupils to apply to university, let alone to the top institutions. And without that crucial support, opportunities are missed, talent wasted or not developed to its full potential.

For these reasons, the widening availability of so called 'access courses', mostly run in Further Education (FE) colleges and often in partnership with a local university is a hugely important step forward. Lots of people who didn't do well enough at school - for whatever reason, it doesn't really matter - get a second chance to gain the qualifications needed for university entry. Access courses don't generally seek to replicate the material that would have normally been done in secondary school, but they do develop English, Maths, IT and other foundation subjects that are vital for most university courses. Successful students from these programmes are older and usually more mature than the typical school-leaver students, and are often very highly motivated to succeed. They do well.

This part of the 'access agenda' is therefore very valuable and easy to support. Another aspect, however, is more problematic, in my view. Our universities, especially the leading ones, are often criticised for taking 'too few' students from state schools as opposed to private ones; and for taking too few from certain relatively deprived areas of the country. Some funding is even available to encourage (or 'incentivise', to use a horrible modern term) them to give more weight in their admissions criteria to indicators of deprivation. It's not hard to see a rationale for this sort of approach, but it seems to me to be a very dangerous, slippery slope, that tries to put right one sort of injustice by creating new ones. I don't think it is, or should be, any part of the duty of a university to assist the government in the conduct of social policy. That's not what universities are there for, surely.

If the government thinks that secondary schools in some areas are failing in some sense, then it should be taking direct and appropriate action to remedy the identified deficiencies. Meanwhile, our universities should concentrate on their core tasks of educating suitably qualified students to first degree level and beyond. That's what the country needs.