Principal Reference: R.M. Felder and R. Brent, Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide, 2nd edn. (2024), Chapters 9 and 10.
STEM instructors tend to have many complaints, a common one being that most of their students can memorize facts and plug numbers into formulas but most of them can’t ______________ (long list of things they can’t do). Some of the most frequently mentioned things they allegedly can’t do are think analytically, think critically, think creatively, think metacognitively, read and comprehend complex technical material, achieve deep understanding of complex concepts, do self-directed learning, speak and write clearly, and work effectively in high-performance teams.
All of the abilities just mentioned fall into the general category of “high-level skills.” When students turn in assignments requiring those skills that fall short of the instructor’s expectations, the common instructor response is to accuse the students of having all sorts of defects (they’re lazy, uninterested, unmotivated, not smart enough to be in a rigorous STEM class, etc.).
We recently had a dramatic demonstration of this phenomenon in a series of 12 monthly teaching webinars presented to several hundred experienced engineering professors. The first webinar defined and illustrated learner-centered teaching (LCT), a pedagogical approach that divides the focus of classroom instruction roughly evenly between the instructor and the students rather than placing it almost exclusively on the instructor (as it is in traditional lecture-based teaching). Learner-centered techniques include active, inquiry-based, and problem-based learning, and flipped classrooms.
In a clever first assignment devised by the webinar series organizer Professor Krishna Vedula, the participants were asked to describe an occasion when they attempted to use LCT and failed, and to speculate on the reasons for the failure. Most of the respondents’ LCT implementations involved active learning (lecture segments interspersed with brief in-class activities conducted by individual students or small groups) or flipped classrooms (course material introduced in online out-of-class assignments and then applied using active learning in live class sessions). In virtually all of those cases, the students’ assignments involved one or more high-level skills, and the failures were that most of the students didn’t participate in the in-class activities and didn’t complete or even attempt the out-of-class assignments. Many of the professors’ explanations of the failures involved the students having some combination of the defects mentioned two paragraphs up.
When an instructor says to one of us, “Most of my students can memorize facts and plug numbers into formulas but they can’t ______________” (high-level skill), our response is always “You obviously think that they were taught to ______________ before they came into your class. Where and when would that have been?” They have no answer, because they know that most teachers—usually including them—never explicitly teach high-level thinking and problem-solving skills in their classes.
Based on what we have learned from the STEM pedagogy literature and our own teaching experience, instructors’ speculations about students’ laziness, lack of motivation, and all that, might be true of some students but the true explanation of most students’ poor performance on tasks requiring high-level skills lies elsewhere. Both cognitive science and classroom research have firmly established the following rule: Two instructional features must be in place to equip most students with high-level skills—challenge and support. Challenge is provided by assignments that require the targeted skills. If you never give students such assignments, most will never engage in the repetitive practice that leads to mastering any high-level skill. Support is provided by the guided practice and feedback that all but the brightest students (who can learn by themselves if necessary) must be given before being sent out to apply high-level skills in assignments and exams.
What the participants in the webinar series were all doing was challenging their students in assignments without first providing the necessary support. They were asking students to do things they had never been taught to do—critical and creative thinking, self-directed learning, applying complex concepts introduced only through passive observation of complex technical documents and recorded lectures, and so on—without first illustrating and providing guided practice on those activities in class sessions. If you do what those professors did, don’t be surprised or disappointed when most of your students can’t do what you asked and quickly abandon their attempts, and don’t blame their failure on laziness or lack of motivation. Teach them first, using active learning in class and not just uninterrupted lectures, and step-by-step instruction in online interactive tutorials (which ask the students questions and provide feedback on the responses) and not just readings and recorded lectures, and then give them the assignments. You’ll be amazed at how much more motivation and skill they will show you when you use that approach.
