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Would College Students Retain More If Professors Dialed Back the Pace?

107 points by AceyMan 9y ago

adamnemecek 9y ago
Yes. They might also get more sleep and sleep is pretty important for cognitive functions. The fact that sleep deprivation is a normal on campuses and even in hs is a travesty. Not sucking at scheduling would also do wonders. Also, some space to interact with the topic the way I want. Tell me whats needed by the end of the semester and let me study for it my way.
- jasperry 9y ago
  > Also, some space to interact with the topic the way I want. Tell me whats needed by the end of the semester and let me study for it my way. As a professor, I so wish we could do this more. But realistically, it seems that we just can't afford to let students fail who aren't yet equipped to learn that way. But I do try to allow for this while still staying within the bounds of fairness, for example, giving students a grade based just on exam scores when that would be a higher grade, so they can blow off homeworks that other students really need credit for to shore up their grade.
  - adamnemecek 9y ago
    > let students fail who aren't yet equipped to learn that way This is a failure of the system tho. It's my understanding that e.g. in Czech Republic failing actually isn't a big deal as you can retake the exam (same material, different actual exam) shortly after the first one. This can make a huge difference. I can go into more detail. I realize that things probably won't change but small changes can have big impact.
  - avani 9y ago
    My best strategy for this is to push for more acceptance of pass/fail courses. The main downside is that I find myself having to take better notes for future recommendation letters.
Jormundir 9y ago
People tend to forget information that is not useful to them. The age old problem with school curriculum is so much of it doesn't apply to day to day or even professional know-how. Getting students to retain more information is pointless if there is no value in retaining the information beyond final exams. The better pursuit is for schools to work on constantly realigning their curriculum towards what is necessary for modern life and employment. Drop the overpriced, poorly executed general education classes and stop hindering students from learning more about what they're interested in.
- rayiner 9y ago
  The fundamental problem with schools is that they’re run by professors and teachers, who have almost a pathological aversion to teaching people anything useful.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- vkou 9y ago
  > Drop the overpriced, poorly executed general education classes and stop hindering students from learning more about what they're interested in. I remember more from my first-year philosophy/communications/ethics classes then I do from half of my CS curriculum. I didn't have much of a classics education, but presumably, the value of it is not in learning the classics (Nobody actually gives two rat's asses about the the themes of the Illiad), but in learning how be analytical. The purpose of general education classes is to turn us into better people, and the purpose of specialization classes is to make us employable. I think Silicon Valley could use a lot more of the former.
  - eli_gottlieb 9y ago
    >I remember more from my first-year philosophy/communications/ethics classes then I do from half of my CS curriculum. Davka to disagree with you, I think that might just mean you had more life experience before going into those classes than most people do. IME, formalized humanities material really needs to build on, well, some basic foundation of personal worldliness.
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
I'm not sure that slowing things down would necessarily work well in science or math fields, but I can name what I think would: focus on doing rather than reciting. The best calculus courses twin it with basic physics, showing not only how the material is used in-context, but its aesthetic qualities and what it sets the stage for.
- cowsandmilk 9y ago
  I agree strongly. As an example of a major doing things correctly, in my opinion, is MIT's aerospace engineering with their "unified engiineering" course that covers the basics in a highly integrated fashion. My experience in a different engineering program was that I learned some sophomore math freshman year (because I had placed out of "freshman calculus"), then didn't use it at all until junior year when I had forgotten it. And then things tried to be integrated senior year when we had a senior design project that tied all our random classes together. I turned out alright, but I think an integrated approach would be much more fruitful. All that said, I do think there is some value in having the purely mathematical ability to look at an equation, classify it as a certain type, and then know how to solve it. Not every problem you face in life will be an application that existed when you were in college.
  - harrisjt 9y ago
    My uni (Wisconsin), in the engineering program, apply some old philosophy of a ratio of time in class to time in lab. It's something like 50/50 or 40/60, I think a lot of students prefer it that way.
- baby 9y ago
  I've had one math class that intertwined short exercise sessions with short lecture sessions and it was the most amazing class I ever had. I still remember everything I learned there. It was so interesting that the professor would do theorems walkthrough classes which were optional and everyone would attend them.
  - aethertap 9y ago
avs733 9y ago
Yes. This goes to basic misunderstandings of the goals of education. At the collegiate level, the goal (opinion statement) of education is creating deep understanding, higher level thinking, and life-long metacognitive and learning skills. While this may incidentally occur via a philosophical model of pedagogy that is driven by transmitting information, that approach is massively inefficient. Giving more information is not the same as creating better understanding. Creating better understanding requires time and practice. The phrase of art in educational research is Deliberate Distributed Practice...DDP. But you have to structure courses around it. The best method known is backwards design. Backwards design involves clearly identifying learning goals in advance and then backing out from that the appropriate content, pedagogical approaches, and assessment measures to achieve those goals. These things must by systematized and cannot be simply flipped on by teaching a faculty member basic elements of using active learning in the classroom. That won't work because such faculty members still hold a view of education as transmitting content, which is an entirely different paradigm in which lecturing actually makes rational sense.
- chongli 9y ago
  At the collegiate level, the goal (opinion statement) of education is creating deep understanding, higher level thinking, and life-long metacognitive and learning skills. Nominally, yes. In reality? No. The reality of higher education is to act as a preliminary screen for employers. Few people who apply to well known schools get in. Fewer still survive to complete their degree. Many switch programs (to a less competitive field), drop out, or even commit suicide. I wish universities were as committed to education as they say they are. But we wouldn't have people failing right out of school if that were the case.
throwaway44443 9y ago
Or maybe you could do the opposite, and just shrink down the important info so it all fits in working memory? Throw away account because I made this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMyAzUai9V3ox_LDwl54GRkNxovx6NqQX https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMyAzUai9V3ox_LDwl54G...
madengr 9y ago
You don't learn from reading, you learn from doing; i.e. working problems. Even then it usually takes doing something 3 times for it to sink in. The point of the fast pace is to weed people out. At least that is my take from engineering courses.
- saint_fiasco 9y ago
  Why do they want to weed people out?
  - ThirdFoundation 9y ago
    I think it is for the same reason that many STEM programs require their undergraduate students to "apply for entry" to the STEM part of the program. For example, at $GenericUniversity all CS students are listed as pre-engineering until completing calculus, data structures, discrete math, and a few introduction to programming courses. The school then "weeds" out students by making the initial coursework high-paced and somewhat difficult. After each round of courses a few "weaker" students drop out of the program. Eventually, the students that make it through the pre-engineering curriculum apply for the engineering school and are admitted, assuming they have the right grades. The school now hopes that the students who have made it this far will be be the "better" students and thus will get better grades and be more likely to graduate. By weeding out the "weak" students before the students are in the Engineering School, the school can report a higher graduation rate and overall GPA for students in the program. Though everyone knows that many engineering students failed (or were failed by) the program, it doesn't go into the School of Engineering's reported stats. I don't have any sources on this, but I do have numerous friends who work for universities and have heard this same story in varying capacities over the years.
  - revelation 9y ago
    Teaching students and teaching in general is time not spent writing that paper that gets you your PhD / postdoc job / tenure. Eliminate as early as possible to make sure 1) the load from incompetent students does not potentiate and 2) to spend more time with & recognize the ambitious students that you can recruit for free work on your PhD / postdoc / tenure paper or as TAs if your department is rich. Also, in Germany, university is free and publicly funded. There is only a small incentive for universities to pass as many students as possible and almost none for the immediate professors and doctoral candidates that do the teaching. Alongside with the public funding comes the implicit understanding that not everyone, for whatever reason, is meant for a college degree and so 40-50% of certainly engineering related students will drop out. No biggie, you are not 150k in debt, just do an apprenticeship.
seabird 9y ago
Taking things slow is good under certain circumstances. You have to ask yourself whether or not the content of the class is disjointed from the rest of the curriculum for most of the students that are taking it. A computer science student will be constantly using basic programming skills, giving it time to crystallize into long-term memory; introductory programming classes can be rushed and still effective, as long as the content is constantly reused. The same goes for many other skillsets. In my anecdotal experience, learning things slowly is most effective when studying content that doesn't have a convenient connection to a current understanding, or even no connection at all. The biggest problem with this approach is that general education requirements in modern education strongly disincentivizes taking things slow. Most universities I know of bog students down in 2 or more semesters of classes entirely irrelevant to their field of study. Although taking another 2+ semesters of relevant study would definitely improve understanding, very few students are going to eat thousands of dollars going out of their way to make up getting shafted by gen-ed classes.
- derefr 9y ago
  What would be the correct pace for a classical liberal-arts education, do you think? The subjects are weakly related (you can reuse things you learn in studying philosophy or a language like Latin in the study of history) but they don’t really build any of the same skills. Did the classical Universities teach more slowly when trying to imbue such knowledge?
- jacobolus 9y ago
  Non-major courses are an amazing opportunity for students to learn about a wide variety of scholarship from some of the top experts in those fields. The cognitive strategies / methods of inquiry of various fields vary significantly, and learning to “think like a historian” or “think like an ethnographer” or “think like an economist” or “think like a philosopher” or “think like a mathematician” etc. is incredibly valuable for future work and also for becoming an informed citizen and an inheritor of the richness of human culture. Liberal arts degrees are not supposed to be narrow job training. The problem here is the debt students need to take on to go through college, not the college content per se (at least at the level of which courses students need; some of those courses themselves could use better content and pedagogy).
deleted 9y ago
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peterjlee 9y ago
I think the point of undergrad is to have as much exposure to relevant material in the field, so later in their professional life if something relevant comes up they'll at least remember that they learned about it and know where to look. Also, if the students find one particular thing interesting and want to learn more about it, that's what grad school is for. I don't remember the details of every algorithm I learned in college, but if a need arise, I know what my options are and the details are usually one Google search away.
- emsal 9y ago
  Also, the organization of the massive amount of information available out there into a nicely sequential curriculum is understated when talking about the benefits of college.
sevensor 9y ago
Slowing things down implies selectivity. If you have time to talk about fewer topcis, you'd better be quite sure they're more important than the ones you've omitted. It's a high-risk endeavor for the instructor. What if you pick the wrong topics? You have to have a lot of confidence in your judgement to teach a slow class. Much safer to cram as many topics as possible into the semester.
Hasz 9y ago
As an undergrad, what's honestly needed is a variety of pace. I don't mind sprinting through a topic, but I can't do it for a whole class all semester. Students become complacent if you slow down permanently, but also fail to absorb information if you constantly push. Run the blitzkrieg, but give me a week every once in a while to catch up and consolidate the knowledge.
- Balgair 9y ago
  Ar you in a quarter or semester system? I've found semester systems to much better for STEM classes, while quarter systems are better for humanities, at least for me.
  - Hasz 9y ago
    Semester -- I would agree.
thearn4 9y ago
I've taught some undergrad courses, and unfortunately in practice this is a bit of an upstream problem. The pace of main line non-remedial courses is often set by the scope of course objectives, which in many cases are tied to accreditation. For higher-level more specialized courses, there is at least more freedom. Basically, even something that seems like a simple shake-up in education often would require a top-down redesign when considering actual implementation. Higher education is highly conservative and bureaucratic in its processes.
vortico 9y ago
Universities try to shoot for 90% correctness/retention for students. In almost every post-college career, that number is 70% or even less in order to be a successful employee. Being correct about facts 90% of the time is less valuable than having a better overview about more topics. I think schools should speed up in information rate but decrease the required retention for excelling. The most useful classes I had for my career were the ones taught at 900mph where I thought I understood nothing, yet I learned the most from them.
jbarciauskas 9y ago
This article is untethered from the mammoth amounts of research that's been done specifically on how people learn. The answer to this question doesn't lie in anecdotes about various professors' "philosophy", in fact that kind of approach is a huge barrier to actually improving the learning that occurs on college campuses. This is an opinion article, so I understand it's not thorough reporting, but the author should familiarize herself with the literature. A book like https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013 https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learnin... is accessible and provides a good survey of what we know about how the brain learns and remembers things, and how it relates to existing practices.
- anonemouse145 9y ago
  This. For instance, we all probably had to go through math classes where the professor writes so fast that it's a hand cramping race just to even scribble together enough notes to follow each gigantic derivation later for learning purposes. Nobody in that class is retaining any of that. The kid who aces that class, is almost invariably someone who likes to to play with the equations in their free time at their own pace, so they get a feel for what process they need to employ toward a solution rather than brute forcing it. (When applicable, sometimes brute force is the only tactic.) Math classes in general really, desperately need to slow down and let students grasp higher-order concepts. The number crunching method is stressful, and all it does is massively discourage bright people who may be geniuses in their field but flee University because the school made Calculus their "breakout" class. Anecdote. When I went to University, I had a professor who graduated MIT tell the class that he'd realized how much pressure we were under in our Calculus class trying to keep up, that this was deeply unfair, and that he was erasing our last test score because they were unreflective of the performance that he knew we were capable of if we had any time for his class. Calculus was a core requirement, his class was elective, so almost every student had been forced to ignore his class, and we were amazingly lucky that he was good enough to sympathize. This man used to work at Bell Labs and swam 200 laps a day to keep fit. And he was telling us we had it rough. I saw people cry out of gratitude.
  - Balgair 9y ago
Cofike 9y ago
The biggest issue for me was that it was hit or miss if my professors were going to actually teach or if they were going to power through powerpoint slides for 50 minutes. Mostly research heavy professors that are just doing classes because of contractual obligations. The best professors I had did not read exclusively off of the projector.
_rpd 9y ago
Is the ability to memorize as important in an always connected world? A broad overview means that you at least know what to search for when it is time to study something in depth.
deleted 9y ago
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WalterBright 9y ago
I deliberately selected a college where I knew I would be pushed hard. And I was. The first year was pretty hard, as I thought I could wing everything like in high school. By my junior year, things got a lot better. I was learning more at a faster pace, and it was good. It depends on what you want. I didn't want to waste time in college. I wanted to get all I could out of the 4 years. As for sleep deprivation, sure that happened, but it was my choice. There were too many fun things to do! I was never bored in college.
- SebNag_ 9y ago
  > I deliberately selected a college where I knew I would be pushed hard. Learning a lot in a short period of time is strongly coupled with coping strategies and discipline due to time pressure and the high requirements. After this process you probably have gained some insights about yourself and further, confidence to have capabilities to read and learn through whatever comes your way. At least to a certain degree. > It depends on what you want. I didn't want to waste time in college. I wanted to get all I could out of the 4 years. However, I think there's still a lot of space for improvement. Especially towards technical or math expertise. A lot of students even lack of the bare basics just a few months after the exams are over. And even more importantly, problem solving skills and critical thinking are, at least in my experience, neglected. One of the main reasons therefore is the lack of time. Thinking and solving a problem _yourself_ instead of looking up the solution or being able to reproduce a solution at your exams are two different things. With the former being the critical point at which universities currently fail the most.
  - deleted 9y ago
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cJ0th 9y ago
I retained the most when the prof actually enjoyed teaching. I retained the least when I was forced look at 80 powerpoint slides within 90 minutes.
alphaalpha101 9y ago
I personally found that I retained much less when lecturers were slow, because lectures were just so utterly boring when lecturers went really slowly. And by the end of the semester you've covered barely anything.
jonbarker 9y ago
The whole "that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger" and "in order to learn about how much there is you don't know and thereby develop a lifetime love of learning you should drink from a firehose for approximately four years" set of arguments is probably just producing a lot of semi burned out college grads IMO.
geebee 9y ago
I'd like to see computer science taught at a slower pace, especially in the beginning. I know, I know, standards. And they do matter! But when I was a grad student at Berkeley (not in CS, I just knew someone taking the course), I saw what undergrads go through in their second course in CS (data structures and algorithms), and egads. I see this as particularly worrisome in CS, because I consider the course to be a bit like teaching Spanish to people who grew up hearing Spanish but answering their parents in English. Yes, technically they are taking an intro course on grammar and writing, and maybe even speaking, but there's a gulf of difference between someone like that and someone who is genuinely new to Spanish (or perhaps has grown up in a monolingual environment). The reason this is insidious, in my opinion, is that places like Berkeley take smart young people who would be good CS majors, puts them in an "impacted" major that is deliberately trying to shed students, and knocks them out by teaching Data Structures and Algorithms at a brutal pace. I think this is irresponsible, especially in an environment where 1) industry is braying about a shortage of talent, and 2) there are serious questions about low representation from certain demographic groups. How about you teach data structures form the book, the first time around? Here's a linked list, here's how you code one. Now, let's code a binary tree. Now a hash map. Finally, let's try a graph. Ok, let's redo those an a more interesting context. If you're new to the language we're using, we'll give you the option of taking some time to learn it. I don't want to lower standards long run, and I'm all for CS remaining a very rigorous major, but I think we lose real talent but running the major this way. There's also a possibility that Berkeley is atypical, in that it is a program that draws strong students, but unlike an ivy or Stanford, has a lot of undergrads and is trying to weed them out. That may be a rare combination that gave me an unusual impression of what happens to CS majors. Still, I hear there is a high attrition rate in CS even at elite privates that have more support. I've probably said this enough times, but I'll repeat it once more - I am not in favor of lowering standards too far, just taking it a little slower. I think many students lost to the major would meet these higher standards with a bit more time in the beginning.

107 points by AceyMan 9y ago

Yes. They might also get more sleep and sleep is pretty important for cognitive functions. The fact that sleep deprivation is a normal on campuses and even in hs is a travesty. Not sucking at scheduling would also do wonders. Also, some space to interact with the topic the way I want. Tell me whats needed by the end of the semester and let me study for it my way.

jasperry 9y ago
> Also, some space to interact with the topic the way I want. Tell me whats needed by the end of the semester and let me study for it my way. As a professor, I so wish we could do this more. But realistically, it seems that we just can't afford to let students fail who aren't yet equipped to learn that way. But I do try to allow for this while still staying within the bounds of fairness, for example, giving students a grade based just on exam scores when that would be a higher grade, so they can blow off homeworks that other students really need credit for to shore up their grade.
- adamnemecek 9y ago
  > let students fail who aren't yet equipped to learn that way This is a failure of the system tho. It's my understanding that e.g. in Czech Republic failing actually isn't a big deal as you can retake the exam (same material, different actual exam) shortly after the first one. This can make a huge difference. I can go into more detail. I realize that things probably won't change but small changes can have big impact.
- avani 9y ago
  My best strategy for this is to push for more acceptance of pass/fail courses. The main downside is that I find myself having to take better notes for future recommendation letters.

Jormundir 9y ago

People tend to forget information that is not useful to them. The age old problem with school curriculum is so much of it doesn't apply to day to day or even professional know-how. Getting students to retain more information is pointless if there is no value in retaining the information beyond final exams. The better pursuit is for schools to work on constantly realigning their curriculum towards what is necessary for modern life and employment. Drop the overpriced, poorly executed general education classes and stop hindering students from learning more about what they're interested in.

rayiner 9y ago
The fundamental problem with schools is that they’re run by professors and teachers, who have almost a pathological aversion to teaching people anything useful.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
vkou 9y ago
> Drop the overpriced, poorly executed general education classes and stop hindering students from learning more about what they're interested in. I remember more from my first-year philosophy/communications/ethics classes then I do from half of my CS curriculum. I didn't have much of a classics education, but presumably, the value of it is not in learning the classics (Nobody actually gives two rat's asses about the the themes of the Illiad), but in learning how be analytical. The purpose of general education classes is to turn us into better people, and the purpose of specialization classes is to make us employable. I think Silicon Valley could use a lot more of the former.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  >I remember more from my first-year philosophy/communications/ethics classes then I do from half of my CS curriculum. Davka to disagree with you, I think that might just mean you had more life experience before going into those classes than most people do. IME, formalized humanities material really needs to build on, well, some basic foundation of personal worldliness.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago

I'm not sure that slowing things down would necessarily work well in science or math fields, but I can name what I think would: focus on doing rather than reciting. The best calculus courses twin it with basic physics, showing not only how the material is used in-context, but its aesthetic qualities and what it sets the stage for.

cowsandmilk 9y ago
I agree strongly. As an example of a major doing things correctly, in my opinion, is MIT's aerospace engineering with their "unified engiineering" course that covers the basics in a highly integrated fashion. My experience in a different engineering program was that I learned some sophomore math freshman year (because I had placed out of "freshman calculus"), then didn't use it at all until junior year when I had forgotten it. And then things tried to be integrated senior year when we had a senior design project that tied all our random classes together. I turned out alright, but I think an integrated approach would be much more fruitful. All that said, I do think there is some value in having the purely mathematical ability to look at an equation, classify it as a certain type, and then know how to solve it. Not every problem you face in life will be an application that existed when you were in college.
- harrisjt 9y ago
  My uni (Wisconsin), in the engineering program, apply some old philosophy of a ratio of time in class to time in lab. It's something like 50/50 or 40/60, I think a lot of students prefer it that way.
baby 9y ago
I've had one math class that intertwined short exercise sessions with short lecture sessions and it was the most amazing class I ever had. I still remember everything I learned there. It was so interesting that the professor would do theorems walkthrough classes which were optional and everyone would attend them.
- aethertap 9y ago

avs733 9y ago

Yes. This goes to basic misunderstandings of the goals of education. At the collegiate level, the goal (opinion statement) of education is creating deep understanding, higher level thinking, and life-long metacognitive and learning skills. While this may incidentally occur via a philosophical model of pedagogy that is driven by transmitting information, that approach is massively inefficient. Giving more information is not the same as creating better understanding. Creating better understanding requires time and practice. The phrase of art in educational research is Deliberate Distributed Practice...DDP. But you have to structure courses around it. The best method known is backwards design. Backwards design involves clearly identifying learning goals in advance and then backing out from that the appropriate content, pedagogical approaches, and assessment measures to achieve those goals. These things must by systematized and cannot be simply flipped on by teaching a faculty member basic elements of using active learning in the classroom. That won't work because such faculty members still hold a view of education as transmitting content, which is an entirely different paradigm in which lecturing actually makes rational sense.

chongli 9y ago
At the collegiate level, the goal (opinion statement) of education is creating deep understanding, higher level thinking, and life-long metacognitive and learning skills. Nominally, yes. In reality? No. The reality of higher education is to act as a preliminary screen for employers. Few people who apply to well known schools get in. Fewer still survive to complete their degree. Many switch programs (to a less competitive field), drop out, or even commit suicide. I wish universities were as committed to education as they say they are. But we wouldn't have people failing right out of school if that were the case.

throwaway44443 9y ago

Or maybe you could do the opposite, and just shrink down the important info so it all fits in working memory? Throw away account because I made this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMyAzUai9V3ox_LDwl54GRkNxovx6NqQX https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMyAzUai9V3ox_LDwl54G...

madengr 9y ago

You don't learn from reading, you learn from doing; i.e. working problems. Even then it usually takes doing something 3 times for it to sink in. The point of the fast pace is to weed people out. At least that is my take from engineering courses.

saint_fiasco 9y ago
Why do they want to weed people out?
- ThirdFoundation 9y ago
  I think it is for the same reason that many STEM programs require their undergraduate students to "apply for entry" to the STEM part of the program. For example, at $GenericUniversity all CS students are listed as pre-engineering until completing calculus, data structures, discrete math, and a few introduction to programming courses. The school then "weeds" out students by making the initial coursework high-paced and somewhat difficult. After each round of courses a few "weaker" students drop out of the program. Eventually, the students that make it through the pre-engineering curriculum apply for the engineering school and are admitted, assuming they have the right grades. The school now hopes that the students who have made it this far will be be the "better" students and thus will get better grades and be more likely to graduate. By weeding out the "weak" students before the students are in the Engineering School, the school can report a higher graduation rate and overall GPA for students in the program. Though everyone knows that many engineering students failed (or were failed by) the program, it doesn't go into the School of Engineering's reported stats. I don't have any sources on this, but I do have numerous friends who work for universities and have heard this same story in varying capacities over the years.
- revelation 9y ago
  Teaching students and teaching in general is time not spent writing that paper that gets you your PhD / postdoc job / tenure. Eliminate as early as possible to make sure 1) the load from incompetent students does not potentiate and 2) to spend more time with & recognize the ambitious students that you can recruit for free work on your PhD / postdoc / tenure paper or as TAs if your department is rich. Also, in Germany, university is free and publicly funded. There is only a small incentive for universities to pass as many students as possible and almost none for the immediate professors and doctoral candidates that do the teaching. Alongside with the public funding comes the implicit understanding that not everyone, for whatever reason, is meant for a college degree and so 40-50% of certainly engineering related students will drop out. No biggie, you are not 150k in debt, just do an apprenticeship.

seabird 9y ago

Taking things slow is good under certain circumstances. You have to ask yourself whether or not the content of the class is disjointed from the rest of the curriculum for most of the students that are taking it. A computer science student will be constantly using basic programming skills, giving it time to crystallize into long-term memory; introductory programming classes can be rushed and still effective, as long as the content is constantly reused. The same goes for many other skillsets. In my anecdotal experience, learning things slowly is most effective when studying content that doesn't have a convenient connection to a current understanding, or even no connection at all. The biggest problem with this approach is that general education requirements in modern education strongly disincentivizes taking things slow. Most universities I know of bog students down in 2 or more semesters of classes entirely irrelevant to their field of study. Although taking another 2+ semesters of relevant study would definitely improve understanding, very few students are going to eat thousands of dollars going out of their way to make up getting shafted by gen-ed classes.

derefr 9y ago
What would be the correct pace for a classical liberal-arts education, do you think? The subjects are weakly related (you can reuse things you learn in studying philosophy or a language like Latin in the study of history) but they don’t really build any of the same skills. Did the classical Universities teach more slowly when trying to imbue such knowledge?
jacobolus 9y ago
Non-major courses are an amazing opportunity for students to learn about a wide variety of scholarship from some of the top experts in those fields. The cognitive strategies / methods of inquiry of various fields vary significantly, and learning to “think like a historian” or “think like an ethnographer” or “think like an economist” or “think like a philosopher” or “think like a mathematician” etc. is incredibly valuable for future work and also for becoming an informed citizen and an inheritor of the richness of human culture. Liberal arts degrees are not supposed to be narrow job training. The problem here is the debt students need to take on to go through college, not the college content per se (at least at the level of which courses students need; some of those courses themselves could use better content and pedagogy).

deleted 9y ago

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peterjlee 9y ago

I think the point of undergrad is to have as much exposure to relevant material in the field, so later in their professional life if something relevant comes up they'll at least remember that they learned about it and know where to look. Also, if the students find one particular thing interesting and want to learn more about it, that's what grad school is for. I don't remember the details of every algorithm I learned in college, but if a need arise, I know what my options are and the details are usually one Google search away.

emsal 9y ago
Also, the organization of the massive amount of information available out there into a nicely sequential curriculum is understated when talking about the benefits of college.

sevensor 9y ago

Slowing things down implies selectivity. If you have time to talk about fewer topcis, you'd better be quite sure they're more important than the ones you've omitted. It's a high-risk endeavor for the instructor. What if you pick the wrong topics? You have to have a lot of confidence in your judgement to teach a slow class. Much safer to cram as many topics as possible into the semester.

Hasz 9y ago

As an undergrad, what's honestly needed is a variety of pace. I don't mind sprinting through a topic, but I can't do it for a whole class all semester. Students become complacent if you slow down permanently, but also fail to absorb information if you constantly push. Run the blitzkrieg, but give me a week every once in a while to catch up and consolidate the knowledge.

Balgair 9y ago
Ar you in a quarter or semester system? I've found semester systems to much better for STEM classes, while quarter systems are better for humanities, at least for me.
- Hasz 9y ago
  Semester -- I would agree.

thearn4 9y ago

I've taught some undergrad courses, and unfortunately in practice this is a bit of an upstream problem. The pace of main line non-remedial courses is often set by the scope of course objectives, which in many cases are tied to accreditation. For higher-level more specialized courses, there is at least more freedom. Basically, even something that seems like a simple shake-up in education often would require a top-down redesign when considering actual implementation. Higher education is highly conservative and bureaucratic in its processes.

vortico 9y ago

Universities try to shoot for 90% correctness/retention for students. In almost every post-college career, that number is 70% or even less in order to be a successful employee. Being correct about facts 90% of the time is less valuable than having a better overview about more topics. I think schools should speed up in information rate but decrease the required retention for excelling. The most useful classes I had for my career were the ones taught at 900mph where I thought I understood nothing, yet I learned the most from them.

jbarciauskas 9y ago

This article is untethered from the mammoth amounts of research that's been done specifically on how people learn. The answer to this question doesn't lie in anecdotes about various professors' "philosophy", in fact that kind of approach is a huge barrier to actually improving the learning that occurs on college campuses. This is an opinion article, so I understand it's not thorough reporting, but the author should familiarize herself with the literature. A book like https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013 https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learnin... is accessible and provides a good survey of what we know about how the brain learns and remembers things, and how it relates to existing practices.

anonemouse145 9y ago
This. For instance, we all probably had to go through math classes where the professor writes so fast that it's a hand cramping race just to even scribble together enough notes to follow each gigantic derivation later for learning purposes. Nobody in that class is retaining any of that. The kid who aces that class, is almost invariably someone who likes to to play with the equations in their free time at their own pace, so they get a feel for what process they need to employ toward a solution rather than brute forcing it. (When applicable, sometimes brute force is the only tactic.) Math classes in general really, desperately need to slow down and let students grasp higher-order concepts. The number crunching method is stressful, and all it does is massively discourage bright people who may be geniuses in their field but flee University because the school made Calculus their "breakout" class. Anecdote. When I went to University, I had a professor who graduated MIT tell the class that he'd realized how much pressure we were under in our Calculus class trying to keep up, that this was deeply unfair, and that he was erasing our last test score because they were unreflective of the performance that he knew we were capable of if we had any time for his class. Calculus was a core requirement, his class was elective, so almost every student had been forced to ignore his class, and we were amazingly lucky that he was good enough to sympathize. This man used to work at Bell Labs and swam 200 laps a day to keep fit. And he was telling us we had it rough. I saw people cry out of gratitude.
- Balgair 9y ago

Cofike 9y ago

The biggest issue for me was that it was hit or miss if my professors were going to actually teach or if they were going to power through powerpoint slides for 50 minutes. Mostly research heavy professors that are just doing classes because of contractual obligations. The best professors I had did not read exclusively off of the projector.

_rpd 9y ago

Is the ability to memorize as important in an always connected world? A broad overview means that you at least know what to search for when it is time to study something in depth.

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WalterBright 9y ago

I deliberately selected a college where I knew I would be pushed hard. And I was. The first year was pretty hard, as I thought I could wing everything like in high school. By my junior year, things got a lot better. I was learning more at a faster pace, and it was good. It depends on what you want. I didn't want to waste time in college. I wanted to get all I could out of the 4 years. As for sleep deprivation, sure that happened, but it was my choice. There were too many fun things to do! I was never bored in college.

SebNag_ 9y ago
> I deliberately selected a college where I knew I would be pushed hard. Learning a lot in a short period of time is strongly coupled with coping strategies and discipline due to time pressure and the high requirements. After this process you probably have gained some insights about yourself and further, confidence to have capabilities to read and learn through whatever comes your way. At least to a certain degree. > It depends on what you want. I didn't want to waste time in college. I wanted to get all I could out of the 4 years. However, I think there's still a lot of space for improvement. Especially towards technical or math expertise. A lot of students even lack of the bare basics just a few months after the exams are over. And even more importantly, problem solving skills and critical thinking are, at least in my experience, neglected. One of the main reasons therefore is the lack of time. Thinking and solving a problem _yourself_ instead of looking up the solution or being able to reproduce a solution at your exams are two different things. With the former being the critical point at which universities currently fail the most.
- deleted 9y ago
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cJ0th 9y ago

I retained the most when the prof actually enjoyed teaching. I retained the least when I was forced look at 80 powerpoint slides within 90 minutes.

alphaalpha101 9y ago

I personally found that I retained much less when lecturers were slow, because lectures were just so utterly boring when lecturers went really slowly. And by the end of the semester you've covered barely anything.

jonbarker 9y ago

The whole "that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger" and "in order to learn about how much there is you don't know and thereby develop a lifetime love of learning you should drink from a firehose for approximately four years" set of arguments is probably just producing a lot of semi burned out college grads IMO.

geebee 9y ago

I'd like to see computer science taught at a slower pace, especially in the beginning. I know, I know, standards. And they do matter! But when I was a grad student at Berkeley (not in CS, I just knew someone taking the course), I saw what undergrads go through in their second course in CS (data structures and algorithms), and egads. I see this as particularly worrisome in CS, because I consider the course to be a bit like teaching Spanish to people who grew up hearing Spanish but answering their parents in English. Yes, technically they are taking an intro course on grammar and writing, and maybe even speaking, but there's a gulf of difference between someone like that and someone who is genuinely new to Spanish (or perhaps has grown up in a monolingual environment). The reason this is insidious, in my opinion, is that places like Berkeley take smart young people who would be good CS majors, puts them in an "impacted" major that is deliberately trying to shed students, and knocks them out by teaching Data Structures and Algorithms at a brutal pace. I think this is irresponsible, especially in an environment where 1) industry is braying about a shortage of talent, and 2) there are serious questions about low representation from certain demographic groups. How about you teach data structures form the book, the first time around? Here's a linked list, here's how you code one. Now, let's code a binary tree. Now a hash map. Finally, let's try a graph. Ok, let's redo those an a more interesting context. If you're new to the language we're using, we'll give you the option of taking some time to learn it. I don't want to lower standards long run, and I'm all for CS remaining a very rigorous major, but I think we lose real talent but running the major this way. There's also a possibility that Berkeley is atypical, in that it is a program that draws strong students, but unlike an ivy or Stanford, has a lot of undergrads and is trying to weed them out. That may be a rare combination that gave me an unusual impression of what happens to CS majors. Still, I hear there is a high attrition rate in CS even at elite privates that have more support. I've probably said this enough times, but I'll repeat it once more - I am not in favor of lowering standards too far, just taking it a little slower. I think many students lost to the major would meet these higher standards with a bit more time in the beginning.