As I waited in an airport for a delayed flight a few days ago I was watching a little boy about 4 years old. He had two, almost-empty bottles of water. First, he twisted off the cap of one, then the other. Then he carefully screwed the cap from one onto the other. Success!
Then he unscrewed both again. Next he began to pour the remaining water from one to the other, first with the destination bottle upright and the pouring bottle at about a 45° angle. To my amazement, his hand was steady and little water spilled. Then he tried another combination. The destination bottle upright and the pouring bottled completely upside-down, with the two bottle mouths adjacent to one another. The water started to spill, and he quickly stopped. He then repeated the original plan; it worked. Then he tried to second plan again; it failed again. He then screwed the bottle tops back on.
Next he tried to squash one bottle with the top on. It resisted. He took the cap off and squashed it, but it bounced back to original shape. He tried that on the second bottle with the cap partially screwed; it held squashed for awhile. He then screwed the top tight and it held permanently. He was so thrilled he showed his parents what he had done.
Research is sometimes defined as the creation of new knowledge. Over time, each of the disciplines has developed frameworks that define its research methods. When the frameworks are followed well, the discipline approves the new knowledge after rigorous peer review and critique.
In contrast, learning in the university classroom has often seen faculty deliver the pre-digested knowledge of a field. This is a very compact way of transmitting information, but strips the student from exciting step that created that knowledge. For many students it also makes it difficult to remember the information. It has been abstracted from the excitement of discovery.
The little boy in the airport was a scientist, forming alternative hypotheses, collecting observations, testing the alternative explanations, replicating measurements, making conclusions. He thereby experienced the pure joy of discovery. I suspect his learning was deep and permanent.
Outside the university, adults learn in ways not possible as little as 10 years ago. When I need to learn about a new area quickly I turn to internet search engines first. I type in a short phrase and within a few iterations I’m exposed to essentially all human knowledge associated with that phrase.
The information I receive is generally overwhelming in its scope. It comes from all disciplines simultaneously. It includes both the simple and the complex. It is “noisy” in the sense that there is a lot that is only tangentially related to what I need; it is unfiltered.
Clearly this is the kind of experience that will dominate the life-long learning experience of Georgetown graduates in the future. It will be a world where data will be the cheapest commodity.
So, how do we best prepare them for that world?
Looking over my own shoulder at those moments of internet search, I’m struck at how much they resemble the act of research. They begin with a question (a field of inquiry). We collect observations in that domain (data collection). We study the different observations to seek synthesis (data analysis). We often invent alternative conclusions (hypothesis generation). We seek more data to help us choose the correct conclusion. We draw inference about the truth. And then, like all good scientists, we make deductions for our own individual purpose.
I suspect that it’s useful for a Georgetown undergraduate to go through these steps over and over again, in courses on the arts, humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. Repeated exercises of question formulation, observation acquisition, analytic synthesis, hypothesis formulation, inference, and deduction provide a powerful conceptual framework. Research-based learning can provide tools used throughout a lifetime.
Thinking of the little boy in the airport, that kind of learning is great fun, too.
Are we still talking about it in the era of AI?
I never doubted the benefits of research and strongly agree with the article. Interesting read.
Some thoughts:
While most of us turn to Internet search engines for preliminary research and background information, we quickly find that we must pay for the information or go to the Library Web site to access commercial resources. The Library tools present opportunities to do deeper research and discipline-based research. As well, the Library tools help the user to filter their research and find the best resources.
Data is not necessarily cheap. Access to online resources, especially scholarly resources, often comes with a hefty price-tag. Publishers are getting more adept at charging for access, not less.
Internet search engines have algorithms that favor certain sites over others, thus putting their own lens on the order of the search results presented and influencing the researcher.
Perhaps at some point all human knowledge will be available online; at the moment it certainly is not. There are vast archives of print materials that have not yet been digitized, and even if they have been, they may not be available on the open Web.
It is true that vast quantities of government data and some other sources of big data are freely available online. However, to process vast amounts of data, researchers use filters, search limits, and other querying techniques. These tools are often commercial products.
Relentless application of a trial and error method of learning, driven by unwavering determination to succeed, can generate findings of great objective measure. ” He was so thrilled that he showed his parents what he had done” – Oh, how my thinking grew reading this observation of a young little boy!
The example of the four-year old scientist in latency is both amusing and telling and it is certainly of some urgency that in our age of instant definitional gratification we reexamine the various ways in which we humans discover, process, evaluate and invent information. I would simply wish to add that in the area of theater research with an emphasis on the dialectic between thematic analysis and creative exploration, it is important to not forget the crucial role of the noetic. By this notion of noesis as used by French intellectuals, I wish to stress the fundamental issue of vision as a research tool, balancing the inductive with the deductive to constantly rejuvenate the interpretation of works being taught and studied.
Internet search engines have algorithms that favor certain sites over others, thus putting their own lens on the order of the search results presented and influencing the researcher.
The story of the four-year-old is a good one, and perhaps focuses some of the reservations I had about the Provost’s last post, with it’s emphasis on “efficiency” and “instilling” knowledge in the minds of students. That is, the story represents not the most efficient means of instilling knowledge in the mind of the boy, but rather seems to show how “inefficient” processes (the slow working of experience) sometimes work better for genuine education.
I also balk a little bit at the notion in the present post that the scientific (and social scientific) method of research is the defining paradigm for higher education, either in terms of learning or of the scholarly work of professors. I think of the distinction Robert Scholes makes between “research” (a term appropriate to the sciences and social sciences) and “scholarship” (a term more appropriate to the humanities). Scholarship can be more about recovery, Scholes writes, than discovery. It is not necessarily about the production of knowledge and the generating of results, but can be biographical, historical, interpretive, editorial, etc.
Besides giving students assignments that require online research–googling information on a topic of which they would not hear prior to my class — and then verifying what they have googled with a possible bibliographical reference, I sometimes require the same activity in the classroom. They are all sitting in the classroom with their laptops–not even because I assign them to but because of the way today’s students are–and when I ask a question, say, on who Nikolai Karamzin, or Mesmer, or Jean Jacques Rousseau, was, I expect them not to know who they were was bit to immediately start searching. I tell them, “when you do that on a test it is cheating but right now I want you to be able to find out what you need to know. Since you have such powerful tools of information at your fingertips, you no longer have any excuse to ignore my question or a reference you encounter in the text we are studying at the given moment. If you don’t know the answer to my question, it is because you are lazy, not because it is impossible to find that answer.” What a relief internet is! I can be an intellectual snob around my students again, and they can now learn out of a need to overcome their own embarrassment at their ignorance! A little teasing does wonders for the intellectual development of young people. Moreover, sometimes teasing is the only way to counter peer pressure among them, a pressure which is more often than not ANTI-intellectual, at times even aggressively so.
This announcement may be of interest as a key researcher in the field of education and science, Kevin Dunbar University of Maryland emphasized in a Psi Chi Induction address that not only do undergraduates gain a great deal from being in a lab environment where they go through the research process over and over but also make great contributions to ongoing science as well. See psi chi lecture link.
Exciting to reflect on what we trends we might discover, when we have data on the process of how 10,000 4-year-olds learn to “effectively squash a plastic bottle” — where there are struggles or failures and how they turn them into lessons for success.
Our society is often driven by getting to an end-goal as quick as possible. The little scientist at the airport discovered that true learning requires experiencing both successes and failures. This is often lost in many freshman/sophomore science labs, where students expect that a given experiment should work immediately, assuming all steps were diligently followed. Given a recipe and a procedure, students often blindly write down “results” because the lab has to work the first time! If this were only true – the same can be said for baking a cake or making a souffle, but chances are, it will fail on the first go-around. But you learn from those mistakes.
I think the web has certainly revolutionized how we gather information, assess the value of that, and begin the process of assembling it into worthwhile knowledge. But I am always reminded of the saliency of Sonia Nieto’s observation: that our work must not be about “covering” (information, knowledge, course materials etc) but about “un-covering.” If we look through the lens of un-covering, I think a lot of this shifts.
If juniors and seniors are expecting a perfect result on the first “trial”, just imagine how adult learners, who have become competent in their respective fields, behave when faced with an experiment that challenges their competence. The next generation of adults from the “teach to the test” system will be even more hardened to getting it right. If only we can be child-like in our learning, like the 4-year old, and realize that having a beginner’s mind is what allows learning and generates excitement.
As we move toward this brave new world, we must keep in mind the contrast between open-ended and close-ended learning. The internet search often becomes close-ended learning: it does not have to be, but in practice most often ends up that way. Lectures also belong primarily to the world of close-ended learning. The contemporary obsession with teaching to the test in primary and secondary schools, in which given tests (in VA, the state-run SOLs) dictate the curriculum, has turned the K-12 educational experience into a completely close-ended “jellied path” (to borrow a phrase from Seamus Heaney). Education has become drone training, an exercise now being extended to the tertiary level. With its close-ended focus, this educational system will develop drones capable of following orders, or company protocols, but incapable of independent thought based on open-ended inquiry. All of us have already had innumerable encounters with workers at large companies (say, United Healthcare, or “tech support” for your laptop computer) who simply cannot step outside protocols. Our students will have to live in that world, and so must understand it, but they will be expected to lead it, too: to do that, with any success, they will have to learn how to think, not what to think (to paraphrase Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s wonderful summation of the purpose of a university education). The how requires both learning approaches, but the rush to emphasize online learning and technology as a substitute for real, intensive teaching poses an existential threat to the combined approach.
I agree that having the internet and the availability of so much information is extremely valuable, not only does it make the student think and synthesize information, it also requires teaching that is more about guiding students through the information, the different ways it can be interpreted and then how this translates into the the real world. Using discussion boards can be an extremely helpful way of doing this, but it requires frequent feedback to the students and conducting multiple conversations over a prolonged period. Using these types of exercises with students are extremely valuable but also require us to think differently about how we work and how we plan assignments as well as making us rethink what our expectations are when students respond .