Why Is There So Little Evidence Based Teaching?
Thinking about Learning Incentives
When we think of the word “professional,” we think of someone steeped in a base of knowledge. Your doctor might have just read the latest New England Journal of Medicine, or your attorney just finished a weekend round of continuing education. Educational research and retired academic Thomas Guskey finds that this is not the case. In an Education Week article from last year, Guskey discussed the fact that few teachers or educational researchers spent the time to really learn what has been accomplished in their field.
Guskey examined books in the field of formative learning and found that many failed to cite or even review basic studies in the area:
To prepare for my presentations on formative assessment at these national conferences, I conducted a search for books published since 2000 that included the word “formative” in the title. I was able to locate 56 volumes, and there probably are more. It seems reasonable to assume that in a book on formative assessment, the author would review the literature and refer to the work of the brilliant scholars who developed the term “formative” and initially described how to use formative assessments as learning tools. But among those 56 books, only six cited the work of either Scriven or Bloom.
Would any science expert write a book about the polio vaccine and not mention the work of Jonas Salk? Would any technology expert write a book about Apple computers and not mention Steve Jobs?
This is just one example, but if you’ve ever spent time in a school, you’ll see that many folks don’t consult the most up to date literature. I even include myself. Even though there’s a ton of work on good college teaching, I’ve almost never been instructed on what research shows helps students the best.
The question is why? There are some answers that are clearly not true. For example, you can’t say that we don’t know what works. There’s a ton of literature on good methods for teaching math, writing, and all kinds other college level topics. You also can’t say that we aren’t evaluated on teaching. Most teachers and professors are evaluated all the time.
I think the more profound answer is that evidence-based teaching doesn’t pass the cost-benefit test. In other words, a college or school would need to spend tons of resources to accurately survey some knowledge base and convert it into strictly enforced set of teaching guidelines. I doubt most folks would pay all that much extra to go from a currently “OK” American history class to one taught at the highest standard.
Contrast this with other professions that are constantly learning, like medicine or even construction. Their customers happily pay for the least painful tonsil removal or the latest water pump technology. This contrast leads me to think that education is often a cultural activity rather than one that is strictly technical. For that reason, teachers don’t always have to learn the latest teaching techniques.
Bottom line: Teaching is often a “good enough” sort of business.
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Fabio, I think that you have some unchecked assumptions in your assessment of teaching in higher education.
First — while you are evaluated on teaching — those evaluations are largely ceremonial. This is the case in R1s like IU. I have anecdotal evidence that most professors do not care about those evaluations. In fact, I'm thinking of your colleague, who told us graduate students in a class that she doesn't even read them. My anecdotal evidence is backed up by Derek Bok's "Our Underachieving Colleges," which points out that there is not incentive for the traditional, tenure-chasing professor to innovate practices or align to evidence based teaching. If teaching is a cultural activity, it is only because the majority of tenure-chasing professors think it so.
Second, the SLACs (selective liberal arts colleges) are a testament to the fact that there is a consumer base that will buy the "luxury" item of teaching-focused education. Of course, some of the colleges that are most in trouble with the demographic cliff are teaching-focused institutions that are not selective. My alma mater is one such school — teaching-focused but not recognized by name because it doesn't top the list of US News top schools. This is evidence that for most consumers of higher education, the teaching-focused model is too expensive. However, elites continue to attend the SLACs because they know that there is a return on investment to attending a SLAC. SLAC consumption by elites is evidence of two things: a market for teaching-focused education and teaching-focused education is valued by consumers who are most likely to have the cultural capital to discern between quality institutions and low quality institutions.
Third, I suspect that much like your research, there are likely norms of academic freedom that prevent the adoption of evidence-based teaching. When was the last time that you sat with colleagues to discuss seriously your syllabi or pedagogy? When was the last time that you expressed grave concern to a colleague for using an outdated or counterproductive pedagogical practice? The sociology of science suggests that professors value (maybe even need) academic freedom to conduct their work. Universities largely provide that freedom (we will see how things go with this new political environment), but academic freedom — I argue — has the unattended consequence of hampering teaching because it can fall into academic freedom.
If students in your department came to you and said "Professor X is making sexually explicit comments to students," I'm sure you would have a policy to be able to discipline that person. However, what if students came to you and said "Professor X relies entirely on jargon-filled lectures, two high-stakes tests, and does not provide immediate feedback on our work?"
I agree that scaling quality teaching would require resources — but more than resources, it would require a paradigm change among those trained in traditional models of scholarship. It is not that quality teaching at a mass scale is impossible, it's that not enough intellectual resources have been dedicated to solving that problem. I don't buy the idea that an institution like higher education (filled with people who spend decades on complex problems) are unable to solve the teaching problem because there is some physical law of the universe that prevents us form scaling teaching up. It must be that there is not enough collective will.