teaching naked: designing college more like a video game

What would make post-secondary education more like a video game? Bowen suggests that similar to video games, higher ed needs to be designed so that failure is not the end of the game - you get to try again. This involves lots of feedback and low stakes assessment in which the challenges are interesting but not impossible. In addition, higher ed could be improved by adopting what many current online games do and allow students to have some creative input into what and how they are learning.

Interestingly, when I have implemented frequent low-stakes quizzing in my classes my students don't like it. Their complaint is that the learning environment in this situation requires them to be always "on" and performing. I think this is a result of students thinking that it is ok to continually put off actual learning until later - students think that it is acceptable practice to cram, gorge, or mass their learning just before the exam because this is what they have done before with success. They become frustrated when that approach to learning no longer works in university and college. But it certainly takes time for students to understand that the only way forward to really learn something is through repeated active practice rather than through repeated passive listening/reading. Of course, listening to a lecture and reading a text can be a part of learning. But for deep learning to occur, it is insufficient.

This fourth chapter in Bown's book also advocates for moving first contact with the material out of the classroom. Assign a reading and then have a low-stakes reading quiz online before class. This allows class time to be used for application of the rote learning. In addition, it allows students to reprocess the knowledge by re-explaining it to others during the in-class applications.

So these are all the elements that I have incorporated with Team-Based Learning in my courses. Why do so many students rebel against it when all of the pedagogical literature suggests that this is the right way to go? The research evidence suggests that what I am doing is correct according to how we understand learning to work and the results of implementing these teaching and learning strategies. I suspect that it has to do with something else that Bowen discusses in this chapter: the understanding that both motivation and emotion impact learning. Students need to care about what they are learning and they also need to feel good about the learning process.

I suspect that my in-class reading quizzes and apps may be perceived by some students as being too difficult - and this may be particularly true in my second-year fall term course. I find that students need to significantly up their game - their approach to learning - when transitioning from high school to first-year university and then again from first-year to second-year. This chapter implies that a poor implementation of active and flipped learning occurs when the challenge is perceived by students as being a little too beyond their abilities and this will impact students' affective domain of learning. Students won't feel good about their learning because if the challenge is too great, they feel that they are never able to master the material being learned. This is difficult because what was pitched at an appropriate level last year may not be appropriate for a current cohort of students. How do instructors figure this out from year to year? In addition, in active learning, the in-class application of students' out-of-class preparation needs to be a little beyond what students can accomplish by themselves, but doable when a team effort is applied to addressing the challenge. This is difficult to balance from course to course and year to year as different cohorts with different experiences and preparation populate our courses.

This chapter also discusses Perry's scheme of intellectual development and how students move through dualism, multiplism to relativism. I like how Kuhn (1999) who Bowen cites rewords these as absolutist, multiplist, and evaluativist. These changes in students' intellectual development will certainly be reflected in students' understanding of how learning works and who is responsible for the learning to occur. Instructors can provide the environment in which learning can occur. But students need to do the actual work of reconstructing their mental models of the world to integrate what they are learning. Otherwise, the learning is superficial and doesn't stick - their understanding of their world will not change until their mental models have changed.

Bowen cites the evidence that brains are still developing during young adulthood: in students' early to late 20s synapses are still being formed. But note that the chapter implies that neurons are growing. I thought they were done growing after childhood and what was changing were synaptic connections.

So bottom line from this fourth chapter: carefully consider how to develop our courses so that students feel challenged but that the rewards for learning are not unobtainable. This requires careful scaffolding of what we expect our students to be able to achieve on their own throughout the course. This is not easy as it will change from year to year and we, as instructors, cannot assume that what worked for last year's cohort of students will work for this year's cohort.

Resources

Bowen, J. A. (2012). Designing college more like a video game. In Teaching naked: How moving technology out of your classroom will improve student learning, Chapter 4. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley. p 75-102.

Felder, R. M., & Brent, R. (1996). Navigating the bumpy road to student-centered instruction. College Teaching, 44(2), 43–47.

Kuhn, D. (1999). A developmental model of critical thinking. Educational Researcher, 28(2), 16–46.

Perry, W. G. (1981). Cognitive and ethical growth: The making of meaning. In A. W. Chickering & Associates (Eds.), The Modern American College (pp. 76–116). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Prince, M., & Weimer, M. (2017, November 2). Understanding student resistance to active learning.

Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2018). Reflections on the resurgence of interest in the testing effect. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(2), 236–241.

Seidel, S. B., & Tanner, K. D. (2013). “What if students revolt?”—Considering student resistance: Origins, options, and opportunities for investigation. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 12(4), 586–595.

Smith, C. V, & Cardaciotto, L. (2011). Is active learning like broccoli? Student perceptions of active learning in large lecture classes. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning, 11(1), 53–61.

Taylor, A. (2011). Top 10 reasons students dislike working in small groups … and why I do it anyway. Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education, 39(3), 219–220.

Van Sickle, J. R. (2016). Discrepancies between student perception and achievement of learning outcomes in a flipped classroom. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 16(2), 29–38.