A really interesting discussion and thanks to all who have posted
comments.
My thoughts are that students generally read far less than they once
did. The newspaper of choice seems to be the Sun and students rarely
read any kind of fiction for fun. If we couple this with students' lack
of ability at academic reading, we have a real problem. It is a while
now since I asked a tutorial group of undergraduates to read and make
notes on a fairly simple academic paper to bring in to discuss. I had
expected them to say that it took a couple of hours ( I had read and
noted the paper myself to show them the product in about 45 minutes).
Typically they took between 3 and 6 hours and often they managed to miss
quite central points, let alone distinguish the author's opinions from
those the author cited or quoted. The whole notion of the topic
sentence in paragraphs was alien. Subsequently I used to set a precis
task where the number of words I allowed was a multiple (usually of 12
or 15) of the number of paragraphs, so that students would be able to
develop the topic sentence art, both in their reading and their writing.
I used to do this as a subject tutor. I would not say that the other
subject tutors were doing this and many were clearly in the ' blame the
illiterate students' camp. So as I head into retirement I am more
convinced than ever of the need for academic literacy to be built into
disciplinary courses and taught by disciplinary tutors.
I take the points about modularity and the assessment treadmill.
However, the theory was that students did the same amount of study in a
modular structure that they did in the traditional (around 40 hour per
week). Now, the problem seems to lie in two places:
first, we chose too small a basic building block for the modules. At
Portsmouth we went for 10 credits (ie 6 per semester) and have edged
towards a mixture of 10 and 20 credits after the first year. This does
lead to a proliferation of assessments and a real crowding out of
formative work.
second, people like me in staff and academic development have had one
success. We convinced the average academic that assessment drives
student learning. So what does the typical academic do, but assess
everything!
My final thought is that actually we now have a rational system.
Students lack practice in reading and are lacking confidence and ability
and are very slow. We are seasoned academic readers, reading quickly
and accurately. So it is really rational behaviour for students not to
read but expect us to provide potted summaries in lectures (or on Web
CT) and to fill the embarrassed silences in seminars with summaries of
the reading we expected the students to have done. I know, from
classroom observations, of one Faculty in this University where the
students have successfully re-structured seminars so that staff do all
the work.
John
John Bradbeer
Principal Lecturer in Higher Education
School of Education and Continuing Studies
University of Portsmouth
St George's Building
141 High Street
Portsmouth
PO1 2HY
phone: + 44 (0)23 9284 5203
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