Professors Often Fail to Understand Students

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PROFESSORS OFTEN FAIL TO UNDERSTAND STUDENTS' THOUGHTS;
Universities Need to do Better Job of Teaching Real-World Issues, MU Researcher Says

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- A college education is supposed to teach students to think about complex, real-world issues. However, a new study from the University of Missouri-Columbia shows that while college students do make large gains in the cognitive process, they think about problems in a much simpler way than their professors assume.

In research that will be presented at the American Psychological Association annual conference in August, Phil Wood, an MU associate professor of psychology, and Karen Kitchener, a researcher from the University of Denver, assessed student thinking at four universities: MU; Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Mo.; Denver University; and Metro University in Denver. Students were asked to contemplate real-world controversies such as: "Are artificial sweeteners safe?"; and "Does alcoholism have a biological basis?" Based on the results, Wood determined that if higher education institutions want to promote interdisciplinary thinking, their curriculum needs to practice more than have "distribution requirements" across academic departments.

"In our experience, college teachers often forgot that the ways in which experts think about real-world controversies -- usually second nature to the teacher -- are new and unfamiliar territory to a student," Wood said. "When such controversies are presented in college, they often don't have a single right answer the way they did in high school. They may have only better or worse answers. A good college class is a mix of appropriate challenges and supports for students to consider, construct, evaluate and defend their own best answer."

Wood found that when students first arrive at college, they may believe that the single true answer to any real-world problem can be found by listening to the professor. In the study, some students complained that professors should "quit beating around the bush and just tell the answer." Others thought that success in college was achieved by finding out a particular professor's opinion and spitting it back out on tests. By the time students graduate, however, most realize that evidence and rationale is essential for an opinion.

"The good news is that students do change dramatically in their thinking processes during college," Wood said. "However, it also is obvious that most students do not yet think about complex, real-world problems in the way that colleges and universities promise in their mission statements and institutional goals. Given this, a possible solution would be for college instruction to give increased exposure to problem-based learning. This may help students understand that answers often have to be actively produced and not memorized."

Wood's report was based on a larger three-year study funded with a $440,000 grant from the Field Initiated Studies section of the U.S. Department of Education.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Below are examples of the thought processes of colleges students at different stages of their college careers found in the study.

In the study, three general patterns were found:

-- Some students at the beginning of their college careers believe there is only one right answer to a question. When asked, "Are food additives safe?", such students reply with an answer based on what they have been told by a professor, what they've always believed, or assume that there is an expert somewhere who "knows for sure." For example, a typical reply might be, "The government allows (a particular additive) to be put in foods, so it must be safe."

-- Other students, most often near the end of their undergraduate career, realize that evidence must be taken into consideration in order to justify an opinion but don't know how to make a decision, given that qualified experts disagree, evidence is contradictory and/or all of the facts are not in yet. Sometimes this causes students to make a decision based on what they wish would be true, or to rely on what "feels right." Other students might simply count the number of "pro" versus "con" newspaper articles they can find. When asked the question, "Do you think artificial sweeteners are safe?" a typical response might be: "Some people do studies on rats and they say it's not safe. Other researchers do studies on people with lower doses and they say it's ok. However, when you drink something with an additive in it you can taste it, so you know it can't be safe."

-- Advanced students often understand that there are different kinds of experts and different ways to study a problem. For example, if you want to consider research on food additives, this problem is simultaneously a social, medical, legal and educational problem. Sophisticated students are aware of the fact that research and opinion within a discipline can be evaluated according to the rules of that discipline. They know that experts from different disciplines will have different views on what the most important aspect of the problem is, what the relevant data is, and how to judge success. The students that are able to do this understand that their opinions may change based on new evidence or as they better understand the nature of the problem.

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