student learning

Derived from the authors’ year-long research study of a fifth-grade classroom’s experience with blogging, this work suggests that integrating student blogs into a curriculum is an effective way to promote student writing. According to the authors, requiring students to blog not only enhances their written communication skills by making writing a priority, but it also increases student investment in learning by providing a space for them to share their opinions, build content literacies across the curriculum, and learn in conversation with one another.

Overall, this book provides educators with an accessible guide to incorporating student blogs into the classroom. It is divided into six chapters, plus a brief review of relevant works in digital literacy.

In the first two chapters, the authors focus on how to integrate blogging. Chapter 1 highlights several important decisions that educators interested in teaching with blogs must consider – namely, how will student blogging contribute to one’s overall learning goals, what blogging platform to use, and whether the student blogs will be public or private. Once the answers to these questions are in place, Chapter 2 suggests effective methods for introducing students to the practice of blogging, as well as the importance of creating guidelines and procedures for safe and responsible online writing.

Chapters 3 and 4 look at student blogging in action, suggesting that when students can practice and experiment with their writing in a low-risk environment they become more effective writers. Whereas Chapter 3 gives an inside view of the blogging instruction and learning that occurred in the authors’ fifth-grade classroom, Chapter 4 considers the importance of creating an interactive learning community that encourages dialogue and fosters student excitement for writing. Because digital spaces require students to engage with an audience beyond their teacher or peers, the authors contend that students are better able to engage their ideas in conversation with others and to see value in their writing.

Finally, Chapters 5 and 6 outline several logistical concerns around student blogging. In Chapter 5, the authors cover basic tenants of copyright and fair use issues to help prepare teachers and students for the responsible use of the copyrighted works and images created by others. Following this discussion of digital citizenship, Chapter 6 discusses the importance of offering formative rather than evaluative feedback throughout the blogging process. The authors claim that regular, low-stakes assessment is foundational to supporting and developing successful student writers.

Given the authors’ focus on elementary school writers, this book is perhaps most useful for K-12 educators who wish to begin incorporating student blogs into their classrooms. Nevertheless, those in higher education who are aspiring to improve student writing will also be able to glean sound pedagogical reasons for incorporating student blogs into our classrooms, as well as a helpful framework for how to do so. Unfortunately, several of the activities and examples provided by the authors throughout the book will be unhelpful given their primary and secondary school context.

“Stop telling your children that they are smart,” is the new rage in parenting advice. Research has demonstrated that praising children for their smartness tends to undermine their performance. Kids who believe that success is due to innate ability also tend to think that failure is caused by innate inability. When they encounter hard tasks, they are prone to give up and to view themselves, or the task, as inept. Nearly every college professor has experienced the frustration of such students, who often feel that their smartness entitles them to automatic A’s on every assignment, regardless of the effort, accuracy, or sophistication of their work!

In Are You Smart Enough? veteran educational researcher Alexander W. Astin calls upon college faculty to recognize that our institutions have helped to create this problem. Looking at the primary measures that colleges utilize to evaluate their success – standardized test scores, retention and graduation rates, course grades and GPAs – Astin’s central claim is that postsecondary institutions are more focused upon identifying smartness than developing it. College rankings, for example, are heavily weighted toward the standardized test scores for incoming classes. Course grades and GPAs mainly serve to mark students’ progression toward degree completion, to identify low-performing students who may need to be dismissed, and to aid in admissions for graduate and professional schools. Standard metrics do not assess the information core to colleges’ mission: what students learn and when they acquire the knowledge. Postsecondary education, consequently, has become more concerned with identifying and acquiring smart students than with developing students’ intellectual and academic capabilities.

Astin places much of the responsibility for this preoccupation with smartness upon faculty. While faculty often complain about the culture of entitlement that exists among undergraduate and graduate students, we create this culture through our admissions and grading standards, which imply that our job is to reward – rather than enhance – smartness. Many faculty view their jobs primarily as imparters of specialized content knowledge; we expect students to already possess the analytical and communication skills necessary to acquire that knowledge when they enter our classrooms. Astin claims that faculty preoccupation with student smartness is a product of our preoccupation with our own, as evidenced by institutional processes for hiring, tenure, and promotion. Just as colleges expect incoming faculty to be fully formed experts capable of displaying our smartness, faculty expect students to be sufficiently formed when they enter our classrooms.

Astin does not merely critique the institutional culture; he provides concrete guidelines for shifting our focus to growing and developing student learning. In particular, he recommends utilizing narrative evaluations in course grading. He also advocates expanding our assessment of student development to include the affective outcomes that are often central to college mission statements: leadership, citizenship, and service. He writes that colleges should pay particular attention to students’ spiritual development, given that a central component of the college experience is students’ exploration of their sense of purpose, their moral and ethical commitments, and their self-development.

Astin’s text is a significant contribution to the emerging literature critiquing our culture’s obsession with innate ability. It explores themes similar to those in Carol Dweck’s bestselling book, Mindset (Random House, 2006), but unfortunately does so with less substance and more redundancy. It would have been helpful if Astin had integrated evidence from educational and neurological research to support his core assumption that intelligence can be, and should be, developed among young adults. He could also have provided more substantive suggestions for changing academic cultures, with attentiveness to not only admissions and grading, but also to student support services, academic advising, institutional effectiveness, faculty governance, development, and alumni relations.

Overall, Are You Smart Enough? is an important and thought-provoking text for postsecondary faculty. While primarily focused upon undergraduate institutions, its central argument is just as relevant to graduate and professional programs.

Habits of the Heart (Bellah et al., U C Press, 1985) was required reading in my first-year seminar in the late 1980s. That book, and the liberal arts education into which I was being initiated, changed my life profoundly. It introduced me to new modes of thought (sociology, philosophy, religious studies), instilled a critical sensibility (concern about individualism in American culture), and planted a seed about the importance of religion within a culture (and why it is worthwhile to study it). When I saw the name of one of Habits’ authors attached to a new book on integrated learning, something my own institution takes very seriously, I was intrigued.

Sullivan is a senior scholar at the New American Colleges and Universities consortium, and on one level this book merely reports on distinctive activities and programs at some of the member institutions. Those brief descriptions can be helpful and inspiring, especially if your school is embarking on similar programmatic development. A sizeable appendix offers short campus profiles of the twenty-five institutions. In the introduction, Sullivan addresses his readers as people (parents, prospective students, future faculty) who may be “looking for a college that seriously tries to integrate the liberal arts, professional studies, and civic responsibility” (1). There is a dizzying array of initiatives, but the book succeeds in its agenda of persuasion: that the ideals of integrated learning are significant and worthy.

Yet, there is a second aspect to Sullivan’s agenda, and at that level the book is a lot more interesting to those already situated in higher education. Woven throughout the book, Sullivan offers insightful commentary on the significance as well as the effectiveness of integrated learning. For example, at the end of the first chapter Sullivan connects the importance of service learning with emerging research in developmental psychology. Drawing on the work of William Damon who writes about the importance of forming a sense of “life purpose,” Sullivan argues that “growing into a mature, educated person committed to significant purposes requires living in a community where values are taken seriously and structure behavior in everyday life” (27). That is precisely what our more innovative programs can do: cultivate that needed sense of purpose, which in turn fosters resilience. But in Sullivan’s hands, resilience is not just about retention and graduation rates – it is part of a larger mission to produce a healthier civic culture with an engaged, proactive citizenry. Later, Sullivan posits, “the key factor is that the members of such societies share a sense of membership in some larger whole. This gives them an ability and willingness to recognize that the well-being of each group depends on cooperation with the others. Such shared expectations and bonds are the prerequisite for a functioning, pluralistic democracy” (60).

For those in theology and religious studies, this book offers a larger context in which to understand the work of instilling the virtues of tolerance and understanding. Those involved in service learning, study abroad, civic engagement, or vocation-related programming will appreciate that such initiatives are celebrated in these pages. At this level, the book can be a needed tonic for beleaguered faculty. If you share Sullivan’s ideals and his sense of the role liberal learning can play in that vision of a pluralistic, democratic society, then this book serves as a reminder of how your work contributes to that mission.

Inquiry-Based Learning for Multidisciplinary Programs is the third volume in this series that addresses inquiry-based learning (IBL). Appropriate to its subject of multidisciplinarity, this book’s contributors are from a wide variety of academic disciplines, work in different institutional contexts, and approach IBL in different ways. The strength of collecting together such variety is that almost any teacher interested in IBL can find inspiration and practical resources for teaching that empowers students and connects to their experiences outside the classroom.

In introducing IBL, Blessinger and Carfora write, “IBL, as an approach instead of a specific method, is a cluster of teaching and learning strategies where students inquire into the nature of a problem(s) or question(s). The problem or question scenario thus serves as a mechanism and catalyst to engage actively and deeply in the learning process” (5). Ways to implement IBL include “case analysis or case creation, research projects, field word investigations, laboratory experiments, and role-play scenarios” in which students collaborate and become self-regulated learners (7). Readers who are unfamiliar with IBL can quickly grasp the concept, thanks to the editors’ opening chapter and to the other authors who explain the meaning of IBL in relation to other pedagogical concepts and movements. Readers who are familiar with IBL will find the case studies interesting because they show a common approach used in different countries, in undergraduate and graduate education, and in online and face-to-face education.

Instructors of religion will find several ideas of interest here, especially but not only if they teach in interdisciplinary programs. For instance, William E. Herman and Michele R. Pinard point to how IBL connects with environmental and gender issues (51). The perspective on folknography illustrated by David M. Lucas and Charles W. Jarrett will be relevant for some courses in religious studies (67). Nicholas J. Shudak develops an approach of resonances for students learning about another culture, which would be applicable to learning in religious studies. He explains how finding connections between students’ own context and another helps them to develop a deeper understanding but also may water down some differences (91-98). Alia Sheety and Nicholas Rademacher, from departments of education and religious studies, describe their use of a flipped classroom, off-campus experiences, and student research projects for a collaborative course on social justice (124-130).

After reading about the variety of approaches to IBL in different contexts, it is striking how many different learning activities fall under IBL. The editors point out that the case studies show how IBL in multidisciplinary programs enhances both student learning and instructor teaching (9). Indeed this book gives the impression that IBL is very appropriate for multidisciplinary teaching and learning, since its use of real world or multi-faceted problems necessarily asks students to learn outside the confines of one discipline. The book would have been enhanced by adding a conclusion in which the authors respond to each others’ analyses since, despite their different contexts, they offer an interlinking set of insights for contemporary higher education.