Question 3: How does HI 132 affect subject specific knowledge?
- Do students feel shortchanged when the past is not “covered”?
- How does my “uncoverage” approach affect what students retain of subject-specific knowledge?
Data I collected for this question was of two types: 1) surveys to measure perceptions; and 2) performances on course examinations and on a certifying examination administered to history/education students by the Illinois State Board of Education.
What I Found
Student Perceptions
After the fall 2000 course, a senior taking HI 132 for a general education requirement wrote: “I come out of this class feeling that I didn’t learn that much about historical events. I did learn how to think in a new way and how to look at things, but I disliked the assignments [because] I didn’t know about the actual events beforehand, and the movies didn’t do it.”
How general is this reaction to my “uncoverage” survey? In the post-course survey, I asked students to indicate on a 5-point Likert scale their agreement/disagreement with the following statement:
This course put too much emphasis on learning to think historically at the expense of learning facts about history.
Where 1 = strongly disagree and 5 = strongly agree, the average response to the question was 2.0. More students “strongly disagreed” (7) than even just “agreed” with the statement (2).
Conclusion
The student who felt shortchanged by “uncoverage” seems to be an exception, not the rule. Most students think the balance between thinking skills and learning “facts” is just about right, or even that the distinction is meaningless in the sense that neither facts nor skills are meaningful without the other.
Student Performances
Learning subject-specific knowledge is an important goal of my uncoverage survey. Thus, when I shifted from textbooks and lectures to uncoverage methods in the course, I continued to give multiple choice and short answer examinations twice a term. What I noticed, though, was that student performances on the exams did not change either for better or for worse after I redesigned my course. I also noticed that student performances on exams seemed to correlate very highly with performances on the Workshop assignments and papers. That is to say, if a student was writing A-quality Workshop papers, they were very likely to be making As on the exams, too, and so forth for B, C, and D-level students. The correlation was so striking I eventually decided to exchange the subject-specific examinations for two additional days of class time to be used for other purposes. Students had to know facts to write good papers. If there was any research to suggest that students remember for very long what they “learn” for exams, then I would have kept the exams. But all the research on this question goes the other way.
As it happens, my decision to stop giving subject knowledge examinations still leaves me with a “canary in the coal mine” to alert me to problems with students not knowing what they should know in terms of facts. In any given year, about a third of my department’s students are future history educators at the secondary level. In Illinois, those who want to teach history in middle school or high school must pass a certifying examination in history/social studies. Records for how our students do on these exams predate my arrival at the college. It is an imperfect indicator, to be sure, but if my uncoverage surveys are harming students by depriving them of essential subject knowledge about American history, it should register to some extent in diminished student performances on this examination. So far, however, this has not been the case. Student performance on the certifying examinations was high both before and after I redesigned my survey courses; from 1996 to 2004 no change can be detected. (In 2005, new state standards dictated a new certifying examination, which in the first round seems to be causing problems for some of our students. But it does not seem to be U.S. history portion of the test which is giving them fits.) The truth is, students pass these tests not because they remember facts from a course taken years ago. They pass these tests because they attend cram sessions in the weeks before taking them. Then, when the examination is behind them, they forget most all they “learned” in a matter of days. (For a summary of the research on this matter, see Fink (2003, pp. 3–4).