As part of the Cerritos College Faculty Inquiry project (SPECC), participating faculty began a process of thinking deeply about their teaching practices within a selected developmental class. Throughout the semester, participating faculty researchers were mentored in a sequence of guided reflections by faculty outside their disciplines and experienced with SoTL. The mentors assisted the faculty researchers in both thinking through the process and articulating their thoughts in writing. The mentors worked in pairs, each pair being assigned either the math faculty researchers or the English faculty researchers. The guided reflections addressed faculty interpretation and understanding about the:

• Description of Course, including a description of prerequisite knowledge, course content, students, and their satisfaction and frustration with the selected developmental course;
• Teaching Methods, including a description of their class organization, assessments, assignments, and intended outcomes;
• Analysis of Student Learning, including examples and their analysis of three levels of student performance; and
• Planned Changes, including a description of what the faculty member plans to do differently as a result of their analysis of student performance.

Responses to each faculty researcher’s reflections were posted to an electronic portfolio. Faculty reflections and responses are available here.

In this presentation, Annie Agard presents a whole range of evidence gathered from her ESL classes. In this PowerPoint presentation, Agard shares many different findings from her classroom research on her ESL. class. The evidence is not only useful for ESL teachers but as a model of going public with classroom research.

The evidence covers many different kinds of methods for gathering student performance data, such as through pre/post data.

Some of her evidence is based on student attitudes and perspectives.

One of the consequences of her classroom research is the ways that she discovers “complicating evidence” from her students. One example of this is her analysis of perforamance and atittudes related to group work, where she discovered in part that some students who performed better through group work actually prefered working alone.

from The Power of the Pursuit, Suzanne Crawford, Lydia Alvarez, and Lynn Serwin (Cerritos College)

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adapted from “Sample Rubrics for Writing Assignments,” by Lynn Serwin

The rubrics below can be modified for any assignment. I used them for the types of assignments listed, but they can be used for anything. The rubrics for adding details and for the writing process are generic and can be used with any assignment.

Each heading on the page links to a pdf for that rubric. Rubrics in clude:

• Summary paragraph rubric
• Example paragraph rubric
• Example essay rubric
• Problem solving essay rubric
• Persuasive essay rubric
• Rubrics for Including Engaging Details
• Rubric for the Writing Process

from The Power of the Pursuit, Suzanne Crawford, Lydia Alvarez, and Lynn Serwin (Cerritos College)

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Two Versions of a Student Self-Assessment Survey, Suzanne Crawford

Surveys mapping student progress in using more effective and detailed language in writing:

2006 survey:

Hello English 20 Students!

As you all know, we have been working this semester to, among other things, improve your word choice when it comes to using more concrete and specific language (the “green” words). Please give me some of your thoughts about your progress with this skill by answering the following questions. Thank you very much.

S. Crawford

1. Do you feel that, as a result of our various efforts, you are more likely to use such better words?

For example, do you see the value in writing like the first of these (A) and not the second (B)?

A. The boy sat down on a chair.

B. Tall, slim Joe plopped himself down on the old wooden rocking chair.

Do you think the various handouts we used were helpful?

Do you think using the markers helped you understand this concept better?

2007 survey:

ENGLISH 52: Self-assessment of your writing progress

Describe what progress you have made this semester in your ability to craft effective essays. Please use specific evidence from your papers to describe your writing improvement. Consider comparing the skill levels of your earlier papers with those of your later papers. In particular, please note any improvement in language use. Do you now, for example, use more vivid or concrete words? Be sure to support your points with direct references from your papers. For example, if you claim that you now use more specific words, give before and after examples.

A Carnegie Perspectives repost

By Pat Hutchings

The author of this month’s Carnegie Perspectives is Pat Hutchings. Pat is Carnegie’s vice president, and among her many responsibilities is her deep involvement in Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC), a joint initiative of Carnegie and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to address basic skills education in 11 California community colleges. This work involves campuses in sustained, reflective, evidence-based ways to improve the teaching and learning of underprepared students. A number of the SPECC reports, essays, tools, and products from this three-year project are available at: http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/previous-work/undergraduate-education#specc

From Special Occasion to Regular Work

For the past several years the Carnegie Foundation has been working with a group of California community colleges to improve student success in pre-collegiate math and English. One of the themes that has emerged as central in this effort—which we call Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges, or SPECC—is the need for different ways to think about and conduct professional development.

Part of what needs to be different is language. Though most educators aspire to be life-long learners and to improve in the various facets of their professional work, being “developed” is not an altogether appealing prospect. For starters, it sounds like something that happens to you; even worse, there’s a sense that something’s broken and needs to be fixed. In contrast, many of the SPECC sites have adopted the language of “faculty inquiry,” pointing toward a process that begins with the questions that good, thoughtful teachers have, and need to understand more fully, about their own students’ learning. In this spirit, SPECC campuses have created Faculty Inquiry Groups (FIGs) that illustrate powerful professional growth and learning characterized by three key principles.

First, opportunities for teachers to grow and develop must be sustained over time. Professional development often takes the form of one-time workshops and presentations by outside speakers that may or may not be related to the campus’s goals for student learning. SPECC participants have been energetic in pointing out the limitations of this model. “We believe that the one-hour, lunch-time faculty development workshop has little impact on the transformation of faculty attitudes and behavior,” one campus team reported. In contrast, they noted that their work in the Carnegie project “has taught us that if we are serious about making radical changes to the way we deliver instruction, we must work intensively with a select group of faculty over an extended period of time.” Some FIGs established in SPECC have continued for more than a year now.

A second principle is the importance of collaboration. One of the most persistent impediments to educational improvement is that teachers have—because institutions provide—so few purposeful, constructive occasions for sharing what they know and do. Thus, one of the most important moves a campus can make is to create occasions for educators to talk, to find colleagues, to be part of a community of practice. As an administrator at Merced College remarked during a SPECC site visit, “Good things happen when teachers talk.”

Of course talk is not enough, and not all talk is created equal. With this in mind, some campuses have worked their way toward carefully structured routines and protocols for collaboration. At Los Medanos College, for instance, a group of English instructors organized themselves as a kind of graduate seminar, with clear tasks in preparation for each meeting and an emphasis on developing new tools and materials—course assignments, for instance, and assessment instruments. At City College of San Francisco, several faculty groups employ a carefully structured process of classroom observation, which is then grist for discussion during their meetings.

The third defining feature is a focus on evidence about student learning. SPECC campuses have served as laboratories for exploring how to bring different kinds and levels of evidence more effectively to bear on the improvement of teaching and learning.

Most important, certainly, is information at the classroom level, generated through the regular routines of teaching and learning: student performance on exams, projects, papers, problem sets, office consultations, and grades. This kind of information is at the heart of powerful feedback loops. But an important lesson of SPECC’s work is the power of viewing classroom data through the lens of larger institutional trends and patterns. Most campuses have a good deal of such information: data about student demographics, enrollment, retention, and the like. What’s needed are occasions to raise questions that fall into what might be described as the “missing middle”—the gap between information from individual classrooms and institutional data in the form of big-picture, aggregate trends and patterns. The power of focusing between and connecting these two is nicely illustrated by a story from Los Medanos College where the Developmental Education Committee realized that their efforts to reshape curriculum and pedagogy needed to be informed by evidence faculty members did not have, including—and especially—patterns of student course taking and success beyond the level of individual courses. The Committee approached the Office of Institutional Research, and the two groups worked together to develop a data-gathering plan that would address the questions faculty wanted to understand more fully. The result was a report tracking students from pre-collegiate courses in English and math into the first level of transfer English and math courses. This was not the kind of information Institutional Research staff members were in the habit of preparing; nor was it a perspective that faculty were accustomed to seeing. But it turned out to provide a powerful rationale for redoubling efforts that keep students moving through the developmental sequence without stopping out.

Fortunately, the three principles proposed here are becoming increasingly commonplace; some readers will recognize them from Carnegie’s work on the scholarship of teaching and learning. But it’s worth remembering that this different way of thinking about professional development really is different—maybe even radical—predicated as it is on an understanding of teaching not as a matter of individual expertise employed in the privacy of one’s own classroom but as a set of practices that have and need a social and organizational context. Seen through this lens, “professional development” should not be a separate or special occasion but an integral feature of the way educators do their work everyday. What matters in such work is who talks with whom, how often, with what information in the picture, and around what shared questions, processes, and goals. These turn out to be hard things to change, which is why having new models—like the ones developed on the SPECC campuses—is so important.

A Carnegie Perspectives repost

By Vincent Tinto

Over the past several years, the Carnegie Foundation has had the privilege of working with community colleges in California. That work has brought home both the great strength of these institutions and the challenges they face. It has also created occasions for us to interact with others working in this arena, including Vincent Tinto, distinguished university professor and chair of the Higher Education Program at Syracuse University, and a visiting scholar here at the Foundation last year.

In this piece, Vincent shares insights informed by his long interest in student success, especially student retention, and by his recently completed four-year study of basic skills learning communities on 19 campuses across the country, including 13 two-year institutions.

Pat Hutchings
August 2008

While many observers applaud the fact that the access to higher education for low-income students has increased over the past two decades and the gap in access between them and higher income students decreased, few have pointed out that the gap in the completion of four-year degrees has not decreased. Indeed, it appears to have increased somewhat. That this is the case reflects a range of issues not the least of which is the well-documented lack of academic preparation which disproportionately impacts low-income students. The result is that while more low-income students are entering college, fewer are able to successfully complete their programs of study and obtain a four-year degree. For too many low-income students the open door to American higher education has become a revolving door.

What is to be done? Clearly there is no simple answer to this important question. Yet it is apparent that unless colleges are able to more effectively address the academic needs of low-income students in ways that are consistent with their participation in higher education, little progress is possible. But doing so will be not achieved by practice as usual, by add-ons that do little to change the experience of low-income students and the ways academic support is provided. Too many colleges adopt what Parker Palmer calls the “add a course” strategy in addressing the issues that face them. Need to address the issue of student success, in particular that of new students? Add a course, such as a Freshman Seminar, but do little to reshape the prevailing educational experiences of students during the first year. Need to address the needs of academically underprepared students? Add several basic skills courses, typically taught by part-time instructors, but do nothing to reshape how academic support is provided to students or how those courses are taught. Therefore, while it is true that there are more than a few programs for academically underprepared students, few institutions have done anything to change the prevailing character of their educational experience and therefore little to address the deeper roots of their continuing lack of success.
Fortunately, there are currently some who have, and their efforts could point the way for other colleges to follow. These are efforts that take seriously the task of reforming existing practice. Among these is the use of supplemental instruction that connects academic support to the classrooms in which students are trying to learn. For example at El Camino College in California, where students—particularly low-income students—approach college one course at a time, supplemental instruction is aligned with a specific class and its goal is to help students succeed in that one course. In other instances academic support is embedded in a course as is the case in the iBest initiative at Highline Community College in the State of Washington.

The adaptation of learning communities for underprepared students in which basic skills courses are linked to other courses in a coherent fashion is another effort that seems to pay off. At LaGuardia Community College in New York, what is being learned is that basic skills courses can be applied to the task of learning in the other course(s) to which those courses are linked. Students participating in LaGuardia’s learning communities support one another, while faculty also work with each other and the students, ensuring that assignments across courses are related. The result? Students are more likely to improve in both performance and persistence.

Other efforts that focus on the teaching of basic skills courses are also bearing fruit. In California and in several other states, faculty are coming to together to explore how they can restructure the teaching of basic skills to better promote the success of their students. An initiative by the Carnegie Foundation and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC), is one of these. At the SPECC institutions, collaborative faculty inquiry groups are exploring different approaches to classroom instruction, curriculum, and academic support. Their inquiry into the effects of these approaches engages a wide range of data, including examples of student work, classroom observations, and quantitative campus data.

What these and other efforts have in common is the recognition of the centrality of the classroom to student success and the need to restructure our efforts and the support students receive in those places of learning which, for most low-income students, may be the only place on campus where they meet each other and the faculty and engage in learning. Lest we forget, most academically underprepared low-income students do not think of success as being framed by the first year experience, the second year experience and so on as do many academic researchers. Rather it is, in their view, constructed one course at a time. You succeed in one course, then move on to the second course, and so on. If our efforts to promote the success of low-income students, especially those who enter college academically underprepared, are to succeed, our efforts must be directed to those courses and the classrooms in which they take place, one course at a time.
What these and other initiatives also demonstrate is that the success of academically underprepared students does not arise by chance. It does not arise from practice as usual, but is the result of intentional, structured, and proactive efforts on their behalf that change the way we go about the task of providing students the support they need to succeed in college. Without such support, the access to college we provide them does not provide meaningful opportunity for success.

A Carnegie Perspectives repost

By Pat Hutchings and Lee Shulman
It’s hard to find a campus in these days of number crunching and accountability that doesn’t have some kind of office of institutional research. These offices vary a lot, with large research universities supporting a staff of a dozen or more, and small colleges sometimes relying on a person—or half a person—to get the job done. But what exactly is the job? Traditionally, institutional research has been treated as a kind of company audit, sitting outside the organization’s inner workings but keeping track of important trends and facts—about enrollment patterns, student credit hours, graduation rates, peer institutions, and so forth—requested by both internal and external constituencies.

But imagine a different way of thinking about institutional research as a capacity to work closely with faculty to explore questions about what students are actually learning. Such a shift would mean asking much tougher, more central questions: What do our students know, and what can they do? What do they understand deeply? What kinds of human beings are they becoming—intellectually, morally, in terms of civic responsibility? How does our teaching shape their experience as learners, and how might it do so more effectively?

As part of a Carnegie Foundation project focused on pre-collegiate, developmental education in community colleges (in partnership with The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, we are working with 11 institutions in California), we recently brought together a group of institutional research directors and faculty to talk about the kinds and sources of data that are needed to improve teaching and learning for the many students who are unprepared to enter college-level courses and who often fail on the long road through one remedial course after another. On the one hand, institutional research is an underfunded, undervalued function on many two-year campuses, and we heard from those who work in IR offices about the frustration of spending scarce time and resources generating information that faculty never see. At the same time, we heard from faculty who wish that the kinds of evidence that are most important for making changes at the classroom level could be made more readily available, and be more valued, at “the top.” But we also heard about some encouraging efforts to bridge these gaps.

At Los Medanos College, for example, getting better information to guide improvement has been part of a shift of focus from “the underprepared student” to “the prepared institution.” The college’s Developmental Education Committee works with staff from the Office of Institutional Research to develop a research agenda that yields data faculty members can use to monitor improvements in student learning. Recently, the Committee asked the IR office to study the relative success rates in elementary algebra of students who had different levels of preparation—requiring data much more specific than what is usually provided by the IR office for program review. “We gathered this data over a two-year period and discovered significant differences in success rates based on type of preparation,” Myra Snell, a professor of mathematics, told the group. “This information was instrumental in several changes: We established a prerequisite for elementary algebra, changed scheduling patterns in the math department, and are now experimenting with different modes of instruction for basic skills curriculum.”

City College of San Francisco—a much different, much larger institution—has developed a Web-based Decision Support System. The DSS contains data from 1998 through the present on student enrollment, student demand for classes, departmental productivity, student success as measured by grades, course completion, degrees and certificates, and student characteristics, all of which are available in response to queries from faculty and staff. Thus, an instructor of pre-collegiate English might use the system to find out if different student groups—by race or age—are particularly at risk in a key sequence of courses in which he or she is teaching. The department might use the system to see how changes in teaching and curriculum are reflected, or not, in patterns of student success over time. Importantly, we heard from CCSF institutional research staff about the need to work directly with faculty—one-on-one, in small groups, and by departments—to help them envision ways to use the information; the promise, that is, lies not only in supplying good information but in cultivating a demand for it. A study of the DSS system found that the increased availability of data has produced a shift in how individuals imagine their role in using information for decision making.

The Carnegie project meeting generated enthusiasm for further bridge-building, as well. As more and more faculty embrace the scholarship of teaching and learning and begin gathering evidence about their students’ learning, it’s exciting to think about how rich, qualitative classroom-level information can be captured and integrated into larger data systems that others on the campus can access and build on. What may be needed is not an information superhighway but a friendlier set of neighborhood paths and backstreets that take people where they need to go as educators. This, in turn, may require a different way of organizing the work of institutional research—and resources to support its more central role.

To readers who do not work on a campus, all of this may sound like inside baseball. It’s not. Questions about who talks to whom, and about what kinds of information are institutionally valued and available, are central to an institution’s capacity to improve. And while the availability of data is never a sufficient condition for improvement, it is certainly a necessary one. Community colleges—with their “can do” attitudes, and their willingness to experiment—may well have things to teach the rest of higher education about the best ways to think about the evidence needed for improvement.

A Carnegie Perspectives repost

By Molly Breen

Every year hundreds of thousands of students begin their higher education in community colleges. Of course, these institutions also bring in large numbers of new faculty. For both groups, students and faculty alike, there are plenty of challenges to go around.

Imagine yourself in the shoes of a newly hired instructor at a community college. If you’re lucky, you’ve landed a full-time position, but more likely you’re working as an adjunct, teaching on one campus in the morning and another in the afternoon. You put in years writing an English thesis on, say, spiritual autobiography in the 18th century, or a math thesis on primal decomposition in modules and lattice modules, only to find yourself teaching basic literacy or numeracy skills in a class three levels below the first course in the transfer sequence. You don’t object to teaching students basic skills; in fact, you find it fascinating. You’ve just never had so much as a day of training on the subject. So what do you do?

Faculty members at California community colleges have been asking that question in large numbers lately, spurred on by numerous reports—from the Academic Senate, from the Hewlett Foundation, from the Chancellor’s office—that all point to the urgency around basic skills education. They have asked it of themselves, certainly, in private moments of bafflement or frustration, but as part of the Carnegie project Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC), they’ve also asked it of each other, transforming the question from “What do I do?” to “What do we do?”

Their work together has led to a number of improvements in teaching basic skills, including the innovative pairing of classes through learning communities and experiments with high-intensity teaching formats, particularly in math. But their initial questions have also led to further, sharper questions: Why do so many of my students earning a C or higher wind up dropping the class? What makes word problems so difficult for so many math students? How much of the homework that I assign do my students actually read? What is going on in my student’s head when he tackles a new equation? Is what I’m doing even working?

The faculty at work on the 11 SPECC campuses have tackled these questions through a variety of methods: observing each others’ classes; creating common finals and assessment methods; devising pre- and post- tests as a way of pinning down desired student learning outcomes; videotaping student “think-alouds” in mathematics; adapting metacognitive or “intentional” reading strategies to math and ESL classrooms, and many more.

Beyond sharing the results of these pedagogical experiments with each other, some faculty have taken the extra step of documenting their work on the web. These websites are rich with data. In one, the instructor posts the results of her department’s common algebra final and reflects on her students’ performance. Another site includes a video of four beginning ESL students, with four native languages between them, working together to unpack a poem in English. Indeed, as well as affording teachers the chance to cringe at their wardrobe choices on the day of filming, video allows instructors to capture student learning in all its compelling complexity, from a single student explaining where he gets stuck on a word problem to an entire class speculating on why an anonymous student from a previous semester had dropped out and what lessons they can take from that experience to increase their own chances of success.

These multimedia sites have been collected in the SPECC Windows on Learning Gallery. The sites can be used in a variety of ways: as archives of teaching and research materials; as hands-on resources for teachers who can download materials and study their implementation in an actual classroom; and as tools for professional development. A number of faculty presented their sites at the annual Strengthening Student Success conference held in San Jose, California in October, among other venues, and have used their sites to forge connections with community college instructors across the country doing similar research and exploring similar formats for making their work visible. An especially nice feature of these sites is that they preserve the trace of both teaching and inquiry, so that the complicated process of properly identifying a problem of learning; designing an intervention to address it; and evaluating the success of the intervention becomes clear.

Through this kind of documentation and exchange questions about teaching that once might have lead merely to migraines—or to a growing sense of isolation and disillusionment—lead to discussion, research, experimentation, data collection and further inquiry. All of these are processes that can be recorded and shared, and it is this act of recording, of making teaching visible, that creates a crucial difference between the sort of teaching that Carnegie President Lee Shulman has described as “evaporating at room temperature” and a more durable alternative. The more visible teaching becomes, and the more durable its best practices, the better for students.

And the better, certainly, for that new hire tackling the risks and rewards of teaching basic skills for the first time.

A Carnegie Perspectives repost

By Rose Asera

If I asked you—as an educated adult—what you remember about learning to read or to do basic arithmetic, you might recall some fleeting images: being read to by a parent or studying a book with big letters and pictures at your school desk. But by now these skills have become part of who we are and how we see the world. In this way literacy and “numeracy” have become automatic and essentially invisible to us, so second-nature that we don’t really understand how someone could have trouble learning something so simple.

But for a significant group of college students these seemingly simple skills are opaque. Although the problem is widespread throughout higher education, it is especially vexing in community colleges. According to data from the Education Commission of the States, 76 percent of all institutions that enroll freshmen offer at least one remedial reading, writing or mathematics course, and these classes are offered at 98 percent of community colleges. When these students arrive on campus, they take a battery of tests—often without realizing that these assessments will seriously affect which classes they are allowed to take. The results place large numbers of first-time students (according to information on the American Association of Community Colleges’ Web site, up to 80 percent) in English and mathematics classes that are below—sometimes way below—college level. Facing a long series of “catch-up” courses, only a small percentage of these students ever make it to college-level work and thus to the opportunities that come with higher education.

Some background about pre-collegiate education at college may be useful here: Originally such programs were designed to reacquaint returning adults with skills that had become rusty over time; what was needed was a “refresher” where they could relearn things they had previously learned in high school. Today, pre-collegiate courses are more likely to be populated by students recently out of high school where, in fact, they never mastered these essential skills of English and math. Many of these students have had years of negative experiences with school and need courses in which they can, in effect, more successfully learn the content and learn to be students. Over the years, the jargon for such courses has changed: from remedial, to basic skills, developmental education, and pre-collegiate education.

What has not changed much is the teaching. The apparent simplicity of the skills in question seems to provoke a simplistic pedagogy: if students don’t understand it, say it louder, say it slower! Too often, that is, basic skills courses are taught through drill and memorization of rules. What’s missing is any sign of intellectual vitality and engagement, the very things that draw many teachers into their academic fields.

This kind of pedagogy presents (at least) two problems. One is boredom. Repetition and practice are good things, but memorization and drill without a connection to big ideas can frustrate students and teachers both. One doesn’t become a writer or reader only by learning grammatical rules, and memorizing a mathematical formula does not alone lead to the kinds of quantitative literacy that is needed today. More to the point, this kind of mind-numbing approach is not necessary. Even at the most fundamental levels of English and mathematics, intellectually engaging problems and issues exist. With a balance of challenge and support, students can engage in lively, authentic debate and intellectual exchange.

But the second problem is the deeper one: these so-called “basic skills” are not, in fact, so basic or simple. As the research on literacy shows, the reading process that most of us take so much for granted is highly complex. As we “decode” a text, we bring to bear a vast reservoir of linguistic and cultural knowledge, connecting new ideas with old ones, figuring out words we may not know, actively questioning what we read as we read it, trying out and refining ideas and conclusions as we read.

The long-term solution to the problem of under-preparation and student failure must be systemic, addressing alignment of curriculum and assessment across the educational sectors. Students who completed their high school mathematics requirements in tenth grade, for example, may not have seen a math problem for two years before taking a college placement test. In that time, all Xs and Ys may have vanished from their minds. Students in high school English classes may focus on literature, but in college they are assessed on composition and rhetoric.

Even as a long-term solution is required, however, the pre-collegiate classroom needs attention now. A different and better way to think about teaching “basic skills” depends on remembering what is actually entailed in successful reading, writing and problem solving—and making the complexity of those processes visible for students so that they can develop strategies for improvement. This means being explicit with students about the assumptions and processes that have become automatic for most of us. It means creating a learning environment where students learn about themselves as learners and develop strategies for success.

And of course it means that leadership is needed. While an individual faculty member can choose to make these approaches characteristic of her classroom—and the Carnegie Foundation is lucky enough to be working with some of these incredibly thoughtful faculty members—the chances of student success greatly increase when campus leaders make pre-collegiate education a campus-wide priority: when the administration takes pride in these successes, when faculty work together to create challenging pre-collegiate programs that are more than a collection of courses. Others on campus have important roles to contribute to student success, as well: tutors, counselors, institutional researchers and student peers.

The ideal of college access for all is essential to the mission of community colleges. The challenge is turning it into success. If this mission is to be real and not just a pipedream, pre-collegiate programs must be a pipeline where students who have not thrived in their K-12 educational experiences can learn and succeed.

A Carnegie Perspectives repost

Michael C. Burke (College of San Mateo; Visiting Scholar, Carnegie Foundation)

In Mathematics and Democracy, Lynn Arthur Steen describes quantitative literacy as “a habit of mind, an approach to problems that employs and enhances both statistics and mathematics.” What characterizes this habit of mind, this way of thinking? Why is it important? How can it be taught?

These are questions much on my mind as a college mathematics teacher, but I believe they matter far beyond my discipline. Quantitative literacy, the ability to discriminate between good and bad data, the disposition to use quantitative information to think through complex problems-these are capacities that educators across fields should be helping students develop. I’d like to lead you to this conclusion through an extended example.

Princeton University economics professor Paul Krugman recently began a blog on The New York Times website. In his first post, Krugman wrote, “I’ll be using this space to present the kind of information I can’t provide on the printed page-especially charts and tables, which are crucial to the way I think about most of the issues I write about.” Krugman then introduces a graph that presents a picture of income distribution in the country by displaying the share of total income earned by the richest 10 percent of Americans.

Income distribution chart courtesy of Paul Krugman

On the basis of this graph, Krugman posits that the “middle class America” period from 1950 to 1970 produced a society “without extremes of wealth or poverty, a society of broadly shared prosperity,” and that this period is, in fact, an aberration. The years since 1970, as Krugman’s graph clearly shows, have been marked by a gradual return to the America that existed before what he calls The Great Compression in the World War II years, an earlier America characterized as the Gilded Age.

How did this shift occur? How did this country decide to return to a Gilded Age in which extremes of wealth and poverty were the norm? The answer, of course, is that we made no such conscious decision. Instead, we made numerous small decisions, without any articulated vision or plan. We did not see what we were doing, and could not therefore really “decide,” because we did not know how to look. There was public discussion, certainly, but it was fragmented, fractious, and marked by a conspicuous lack of grounding in the underlying reality of the America of the late twentieth century and the trends at work that led to the America of today.

In contrast, Krugman’s use of a graph illustrates an especially powerful way to look at and think about our world. The graph, he says, is “central to how I think about the big picture, the underlying story of what is really going on in this country.” Using the tools of economics, he shows us that things that are otherwise difficult to see or understand can sometimes become dramatically apparent when we look at the right graph, table or chart. These visual representations of data are indispensable tools for understanding, and they can often clarify what is obscured by the sound and fury of public debate.

Caveats are in order here, of course. Krugman uses the “right graph,” but it is also possible to construct the “wrong graph.” Graphs, like words, can be used to mislead. There is also a great deal of subtlety involved. As Edward Tufte elegantly illustrated in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, it can be difficult to envision what the right graph for a given situation should look like. Which graph will illuminate rather than obscure, clarify rather than confuse?

But my larger point here is that the content of our thoughts and the depth of our understanding are dependent on the tools we bring to the task. What we think is intertwined with how we think. And the ability to think in terms of quantitative data, in terms of tables and graphs, is indispensable for understanding our modern world. This should be part of what we teach all our students-not just students in selected courses or selected majors.

With that aim in mind, I would propose that we begin by redesigning our freshman and sophomore writing programs in order to place a significant emphasis on working with quantitative data, and on the visual representation of that data. We write, after all, to figure out what we think. And we ask our students to write so that they will learn how to think.

I can imagine that many who oversee our writing programs would not be eager to implement such a program. After all, it is perhaps asking them to teach our students to think in ways that they themselves do not think. That’s a tall order, indeed. Of course, the responsibility for rethinking the way we teach writing on our campuses should be shared. Mathematics faculty, in particular, should take the lead here, but others who view the world through a quantitative lens-statisticians, economists, physicists, biologists, even some psychologists-should contribute as well. It is well past time for those of us with a quantitative cast of mind to become involved in a serious way with the writing programs on campus. For the majority of our students, this is where the action is, and accordingly, this should be one of the places where we concentrate our efforts.

We need to come to terms with some basic questions. Since the ability to think quantitatively is, in fact, essential to understanding today’s world and to acting effectively and wisely as a citizen, we have an obligation to ask: are we teaching these skills? Do we routinely require students to build their arguments on an analysis of the data relevant to an issue? Do we require them to create their own tables and graphs to support their arguments? Are we teaching our students how to get beyond the rhetoric surrounding important issues, how to see the underlying trends at work, and how to cut through the distractions of the often loud, heated debate?

If the answer to these questions is no, then we have work to do.