• Introduction
• Taking Learning Seriously
• The Scholarship of Teaching
• The Context of Public Discourse on Teaching
• The Language of Teaching
• Student Expectations and Faculty Ideals
• The Character of Knowledge
• Expectation and Assessment
• The Development of a Language of the Scholarship of Teaching
• The Value of Moral Language
• A Common Public Language
• Conclusion
• Notes and References
• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 2000 by Hugh Sockett (hsockett@gmu.edu). The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author.

Student Expectations and Faculty Ideals

The language of educational thought and practice has been dominated in the twentieth century by behaviorist psychology and the ease with which its pseudo-technical language has come to permeate the educational conversation. Feedback and reinforcement (formerly used of vomiting cattle and concrete in buildings) are now in common use to describe aspects of learning.

With the huge expansion of educational opportunity, we use the behaviorist/industrial language of "processing" students through a "system" as opposed to engaging them in the moral and intellectual purposes of the community. This has led to a conventional set of assumptions: about students themselves, and the complex connection between grades, student motivations, attitudes to learning and public accountability statements that "learning has been achieved."

My impression (and it is very much an impression) is that a large number of faculty see the typical George Mason undergraduate student in this way. His/her intellectual quality is reflected by the University's position in the league tables. Though enrolled full-time, the student is working and therefore de facto part-time. S/he reads only what is required and rarely, if ever, outside the chosen major. Student motivation is sometimes found to be intrinsic (driven by a serious interest in the subject) but is mostly extrinsic or instrumental (driven by career expectations).

Instrumental motivation makes the grade much more important to the student than the quality of the work, understandably for those whose grade point averages determine such matters as the retention of financial aid. So faculty are not surprised by a rise in the number of complaints about grades, about the needs to be precise about how points are awarded, facts that reflect the instrumental motivations of students.

If correct, is this the student's fault? Many of them enter universities utterly confused by the question of why education has value. They have continuously had mixed messages -- "You need this to get to college" (the instrumental) and/or "This is interesting, good for you, fun" (the intrinsic). More importantly many have been enslaved by anti-intellectual learning experiences they have had in schools where picking up information rather than playing with ideas (in any discipline) can be the rule. Information is forgotten or mis-remembered. Ideas tend to stick.

The anti-intellectualism of many public school practices which E. D. Hirsch Jr. (1996) deplores arise not because, as he argues, teachers are devotees of romanticism, but because their practice is dominated by a model of instructional design, built on behaviorism, and driven by objectives which can be measured and graded. The student experience of learning in school, not college, is at the root of the pathology Shulman describes: viz., the absence of commitment to ideas among students. Information, not ideas, drives that experience.

Yet ideas are, surely, what a university teacher would most treasure.

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