Poor examination performance is often blamed on either poor
content knowledge and poor exam technique. Students often accept the first but
exam technique is underpinned by a skill of critical thinking which is a much
more troublesome skill. From the student’s perspectives, poor content knowledge
is known-unknown, but critical thinking is an unknown-unknown. Content knowledge is declarative knowledge
but exam technique is a tacit know-how.
Consequently students tend to fixate on the tangible and visible symptoms, thus
naturally believe more rote is the correct solution to compensate for that
which they don’t know how to learn. Unfortunately these two skills
are synergistic rather than additive, and thus over-compensation in shallow
learning will yields little additionally when compared to a deeper approach to
learning.
Teachers frustrated attempt to teach exam technique, but
many find their results are often disappointing. This is because teachers
mistakenly use declarative teaching techniques to address what is a tacit
problem. It is not that the student’s do
not know how to write and thus ought to learn, but rather they do not know how
to think, and thus they struggle to express clear thoughts. A behaviourist approach ignores the weak
internal thought processes that caused the poor performance. Essentially, both
teachers and students fixate on the wrong tool to address symptoms and ignore
causes.
Students need to understand that when they try and fail it
is often not because they didn’t study hard enough, it is because they failed
to think differently. Education is what remains when the learning content has
been forgotten.
The ability write clearly depends on the ability to reflect
on one’s own performance and compare it with that of other reference points. Essentially all good writers are ‘self-taught’ as
they benchmark and reflected on their writing against those of others.
Typically undergraduate students are only given unreachably high reference
points such as peer reviewed journals or textbooks and lower points of
reference such as Wikipedia (seen as weak) or peer’s work (seen as plagiarism
or cheating) are to be discouraged. Yet the ability to self-critique depends on
the ability to compare it with useful reference points, but these benchmarks
are not provided to students.
Academically weak students (Biggs’ “Roberts”) are unable to
see any resemblance between their
performances with that of a peer reviewed journal, and consign the task to be
insurmountable. Indeed, the whole point
of peer reviewed work is that it is the highest claims to truth in terms of
reliability. Weak students feel are ill equipped to critique that which has
been produced by an academic god, and been subjected to the a gauntlet of other
academic gods. The weak student will not
find any weakness, and so never practices or learns the ability to provide a
critique. Without the ability to
critique others, they can never hope to critique themselves and so are doomed
to actively avoid self-reflection.
Teachers’ other prescription to simply “read more” is
ineffective because no amount of reading declarative content will magically
teach the shallow learner to suddenly become self-reflexive. The teacher’s call
to read alien works sound hollow because there is a complete disconnect between study and final performance. If a
student does not know how to critique others, they cannot do so for themselves.
Students would be able to critique their own work better if
they had practice in critiquing someone of a closer reference point. Luckily
such a close reference point is handy - it is sitting next to them in class.
Teachers have critical this ability to make judgments because they exercise
judgment all the time. Why not let students have this same opportunity; the joy
of grading papers.
This post is a follow on from a previous reflecting on my own practices. http://www.tetracarbon.com/2012/06/am-i-really-teacher-centred.html
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