Earlier today, I decided two write two articles. One was on mandatory group work, and the other was on controlling the pace of learning. Now I have a third topic, which is withholding feedback. So, I decided to just write a single article on commonly used ineffective teaching methods.
Mandatory Group Work
I was once a student, and I was required to work in groups in some of my classes. I am something of an introvert, I am a very fast learner, and thus far, I have taken only a few classes where I did not already have a strong background in the subject being taught. (Welcome to an education system where the paper matters more than the actual learning.) In a few classes, the mandatory group work was legitimately necessary due to the subject matter. In most, however, it was an artificial construct based on the misapplication of school guidelines. The college I graduated from and now teach at has formal guidelines teachers are very highly encouraged to follow. One of those guidelines is that students should teach each other. This is based on very solid research indicating that when one person teaches something to another, the teacher will learn the subject better as well as the learner. In other words, when students teach each other, everyone benefits. In addition, this leaves more time for professors to spend helping students that need help specifically from the professor. In other words, the school's policy is backed by solid science.
Most classes I have taken with mandatory group work did not actually need the group work to be effective. In all, I recall only one where the group work was actually beneficial to me, and that was partially because there was more work involved than was reasonable for a single person to do, and the other person was a fast enough learner to catch up with me (the other person was a woman; I have not had a similar experience with male students). There were maybe two other instances where working as a group helped the other members of the group, but, ironically, I knew the material so well that teaching them did not actually benefit me significantly. All of the other instances of mandatory group work I was required to do for my college classes actually made things more difficult for everyone. In one case, where we got to choose our own topics, the other members of my group thought they understood the topic I suggested, and in the end, because they did not, one member of the group left in a fit a rage, because myself and the third member would not let him present incorrect information in the group presentation. The group ultimately fell apart, because neither of the other members understood the topic that I found interesting, but they did not realize that until it was too late. I could easily have gone solo on both the research paper and the presentation, but that was not allowed, due to a misapplication of the school's teaching policy.
The big problem with mandatory group work is that it is almost impossible to group people in a way that works well for everyone. Some people just work better on their own (I am one of these people). Some people need to work with people who have complimentary personalities. Some people work best when they are ahead of others in the group, and some work better with those who are ahead of them. And of course, some people work better with those close to the same level as them. This does not even account for differences in personality or those students who are lazy and freeload off of the rest of the group. The fact is, for most topics, group work is not the best arrangement for everyone. Yes, I understand that most work in the real world is group work, and I even point this out to my students when I encourage them to work in groups. Don't forget though, school is not the real world workplace, and it is not appropriate to treat it like it is. Students recognize this, which is why many complain about mandatory group work. When group work interferes with effective learning, it is a bad idea, no matter how common group work is in the workplace. School is not the place to learn to get along with others. To be totally frank, I think the workplace is a better place to learn this skill, for those who have not already learned it.
There are some places where group work is valuable or even necessary. Certain types of creative design benefit significantly from collaboration. I teach video game design, which is one of these types of creative design. The value of collaboration is so high that collaboration is an essential skill for good video game design. Even then though, I don't require group work. I strongly encourage it, and I require students to present their ideas and listen to feedback, even if they are not part of a group. This is not always a good solution, but it is a way of getting some of the benefits of groups without having formal groups. Another case I have seen where group work is appropriate is when the class size is too big to be reasonable to grade students individually for all of the work. Ideally, this should be a temporary situation, where additional sections will be added to distribute some of the grading burden. The last place where group work is appropriate is when a project is necessarily too large for a single student (interestingly, this is the reason group work is necessary in the real world as well).
The takeaway here is that group work is not necessary for students to teach each other, and it is often a hindrance to effective learning. When considering requiring students to work in groups, serious thought should be given to the value of doing this, as the cost to students is almost certainly going to be high. There are places where it is appropriate, but there are perhaps more where it is not. My personal solution is to encourage students to self organize into groups but allow them to work solo if they prefer. I find this works better on two levels. One is that when students self organize, they are more likely to form groups that work better. The other is that some of the students who work solo do so because they learn so much faster than everyone else. The benefit to this is that no one is holding them back, and they are not pulling anyone else in deeper than they can handle. I also find that these solo students are more likely to and more capable of helping people in other groups. Mandatory group work not only hinders effective learning, it also tends to hinder the ability of students to teach each other, because they feel partitioned.
Pace of Learning
It was recently suggested to me that allowing students to work at their own pace hinders their ability to teach each other. Unfortunately, this is an attitude I have seen a lot. Most classes I have taken or otherwise been involved with limit the dispensation of knowledge, in the attempt to enforce a particular pace of learning. The theory is, if everyone is at the same place, they will be more able to help each other. To me, this is totally counter-intuitive. It does not make any sense to me that a collection of people who all have the same level of knowledge would be able to effectively teach each other, because if they all know the same stuff, what is there to teach? There are, of course, some teaching opportunities, as some students catch on to the subject at hand faster and are able to help those who catch on slower, but in a traditional setting, there is not much time for this, because the class just keeps progressing. If a fast student for a topic spends time teaching a slower one, they both get behind on whatever is taught next.
In my experience, a collection of students where some are further ahead than others is a good thing, because those who are ahead are better equipped to help those who need it. In fact, before learning was industrialized into an assembly line system (and let me point out that it got significantly worse when this happened), heterogeneous classrooms were the norm, and it was not unusual for more advanced (and often older) students to help less advanced ones. In my mind, this is what teaching each other in a learning environment is all about, and as I mentioned, my experience supports this.
Artificially controlling the pace of learning comes with a plethora of other problems. It destroys motivation. It is hard to stay motivated to learn something when it is dispensed at a slow rate over a long period of time. The best time to teach someone something is when they want to learn it, and that is generally right after they have learned what comes directly before it. Some people can handle the "weekly 1 hour episode" model, but the reason things like Netflix and Hulu are becoming so much more popular than regular television is that people can binge watch. More and more data is showing that people prefer to watch an entire season of a show, one episode right after another, over the course of a few days to a week, and many people have cited this specifically as a reason for dumping cable TV in favor of these online media providers. This is a form of learning, though not as useful, as the learning is almost exclusively about fictional people in varying degrees of fictional settings. Imagine what would happen if we just let students binge learn. Interestingly, it turns out that natural learning favors binge learning over regulated learning. It is common knowledge where I teach that motivated students learn more between semesters than they do during semesters from their classes.
Regulating the pace of learning destroys motivation to learn, it makes learning frustrating, and the end result of that is often that students dislike or even hate learning. Further though, not only is regulating the pace of learning unnecessary, it is actually harmful to the goal of students teaching each other. In both of the courses I teach, students teaching each other happens the most and most effectively when students are not at the same place in the course content. Students who are significantly ahead are almost always better teachers than those who are about at the same level as the students needing help. Allowing students to work at their own pace allows them to stay motivated and help each other more effectively.
Withholding Feedback
I hope this sounds like it is as bad of an idea as I think it is. Withholding feedback from students is a terrible idea. A great way to make sure students cannot learn from their mistakes is to avoid telling them what those mistakes were. If the goal is to teach students, this is a horrible strategy. Just today, I had a discussion with a student on this very topic. She told me that her teacher would not provide test results aside from the final grade of the test. This meant that she would have no idea what questions she got wrong, which further means that she is unable to study and improve her understanding of those things that she is weak on. This is horribly stupid for a course that is supposed to teach students. Now, there is a justification for this. The justification is that this helps to prevent cheating. If test results were provided to the students, they could forward those results to other students to help them cheat on the test. In my opinion, the fact that this is even a concern is a major flaw in the assessment setup for the course. If the course design makes it seem like a good idea to withhold feedback, then the course is poorly designed, and it should not be taught until it is fixed.
When I first took physics, my professor had an excellent policy (which I have mentioned before). If a student scored higher on the comprehensive final than the composite grade for the course, then the grade for the final would be the course grade. Otherwise the composite grade of all assignments would be used. I was the first, and thus far only, student to ever benefit from this policy. The reason I was able to do this, despite years and hundreds of students failing to score better on their final, was that I took advantage of feedback on my tests. When I took the tests, I generally got a good idea of where I was weak, and looking at the test results afterwards (results being what I got right and wrong, not just the grade for the test) gave me an even better feel for where I was weak. Then, I studied those things. By the end of the semester, I had significantly strengthened my understanding in the things I had initially been weak in. The result was that, with a composite grade of B in the course, I was able to earn a solid A on the final, which was my grade for the course. According to a brother who took the same course from the same professor many years later, he now tells students that getting a higher grade on the final has only ever been done once, instead of never. Without good feedback, I could not have done that. Without being able to see where I made mistakes on the tests, I would have gotten a B in the course, because I would not have had the opportunity to learn the material as well as I did. Withholding feedback in the way that was described to me by the student mentioned earlier hinders effective learning!
Good feedback is essential to effective learning. Yes, I understand that teachers have to worry about cheating and making sure that assessments are effective and accurate. If this requires withholding feedback though, there is something wrong. Frankly, there are plenty of better alternatives. The easiest is to have a large pool of questions from which test questions are randomly chosen. This is a good enough strategy for the Ham radio license tests, which have a few hundred questions, where the questions and the answers are public knowledge, because trying to memorize 200 answers for a 30 question test is more work than actually learning the material. Another is to just come up with unique questions each time the class is taught (this is actually a good strategy for building a question pool to use once there are enough). Some kinds of questions are just especially hard to cheat, for example any kind of essay question. For math questions, adding a variable that is randomly changed each semester is an effective way of generating unique questions at very low expense. Alternatively, requiring students to show their work or describe the process they are using can be effective for math and other logical subjects. Personally, I prefer to eliminate tests entirely, and instead grade based on specific proficiencies as well as a demonstration of application. This won't work with every subject, but it will work for a lot.
Courses and assessments should be designed with feedback in mind. Even the final for a class that has one should be made so that it won't compromise security to provide students with the full results, once it is over. Students that fail may choose to retake the class, and knowing where they need to focus their study may be very valuable to them. If good feedback cannot be provided for a class or assessment without compromising the security of the course, then it is poorly designed and should not be used at all. The ability to provide feedback should be a quality metric in course design and teaching. If we cannot provide students with the knowledge required for them to learn and improve, then we have no business telling them that we can teach them.
