A common faculty complaint is that students don't seem to want to become "engaged" in taking responsibility for their own learning or in going beyond the regurgitation/surface approach to learning. Sometimes, out of frustration, faculty focus mostly on those students who do seem internally motivated to learn, and merely go through the motions with those students that seem to approach learning in a surface manner. This can be seen as a great example of the Fundamental Attribution Error -- a well documented human cognitive bias. When we use the FAE, we tend to see a behavior -- student resistance to our stellar teaching methods -- and attribute that behavior to internal characteristics of the person, e.g. students are lazy (they don't want to work), students are irresponsible, etc. This helps us to not feel quite so frustrated and explains the behavior neatly. However, because the FAE is an ERROR, it is also an over-simplified and inaccurate understanding of student behavior. If we want to make progress in working with students and in helping them to actually become effective, lifelong learners, we need to go beyond the FAE and evaluate the environmental and social forces that are leading to their behavior.
Terry Doyle's new book gives some ideas of how to better understand student resistance to active teaching methods. One of his first points on why students are often unprepared to learn on their own is that students often do not do their assigned readings or other preparatory work because they believe that teachers will cover whatever material is important from those readings in class anyway -- to review ahead of time is just a waste of time. They do not understand the way the brain works, that building an original network of ideas makes it easier to understand later information and to integrate it with prior learning. Why don't they know how the brain works? Because we haven't explained it to them. There are many solutions to this particular problem, but any effective solution has to begin with explaining to students *why* what we ask them to do has learning value and to help them understand how their own brains work.
Doyle also notes that students don't tend to learn well on their own because they have had few opportunities to learn how to do this in their education so far. Their previous experience with "independent work" in high school generally has been highly structured and directed with surface outcomes attached to it (e.g. simple grade). These types of assignments, which they assume are the same as your assignments, do not challenge them to learn how to become truly independent and critical thinkers. We need to take the time in our courses, and in our curricula, to ensure that students develop the skills they need to actually become successful in active learning. Similarly, students often have never been taught how to read a text or journal article to extract information in a way that promotes memory and retention, how to take effective notes (rather than attempts at transcripts of a lecture), how to write true research papers, and especially how to work effectively with other students. Many faculty assume that students already have learned these skills earlier in their education or that they should have learned these skills. Such an attitude is a type of denial; it ignores the reality that students are often unprepared to learn effectively on their own when they show up in our classes, and keeps faculty from designing activities and strategies in their classroom to help our students learn to become independent lifelong learners. It is time for us to cope with OUR own resistance, see past the FAE, and reach out to students in ways that really make a difference.
Doyle, T. (2008). Helping Students Learn in a Learner-Centered Environment. Sterling, VA: Stylus.
