“Students with mastery orientation seek to improve their competence. Those with performance orientations seek to prove their competence.” (p. 122)

Mano Singham (a colleague whose work I greatly admire) makes such an important point in a viewpoint piece published in the October 11, 2009 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. He thinks we are getting carried away with generational stereotypes. Rather than being monnikers that identify whole generations (like baby boomers), they have become trendy labels attached to ever smaller age cohorts (Generation X, Y, the Millenials). But what worries him most is how these stereotypes lump very diverse students together.

I had breakfast with a good colleague this morning. We were following up on a conversation we’ve been having electronically. It started when I recommended a book that my colleague said he’d read; however he objected to all the “pronouncements” made by the author. He was referring to how this author tried to distill research findings on various topics into simple declarative statements and how those statements denied all the complexity and variability of the research. After reading his email, I looked at the blog entry I was working on ... one that summarized key findings from a study. There were pronouncements everywhere. I quickly revised, working to make the statements less definitive and more qualified. When I wrote my colleague and fessed up to what I’d discovered, he responded by saying that he’d just had a conversation with a colleague who asked him for some teaching advice. “All I did was make pronouncements,” he wrote.

I am discovering that overparticipators have been studied quite extensively in the speech communication field. Researchers there refer to these students who contribute more often than they should as “compulsive communicators” and those researchers have developed a “talkaholic” (now there’s some fanciful jargon) scale to determine if a student is. The scale relies on self reports, and, depending on the study, between 4.7 percent and 7.3 percent of students are considered compulsive communicators.

A neighbor of mine has an 18-year-old friend who started his first year of college at the end of August. Last weekend he came home for the first time. My neighbor asked him what he’d learned so far in college. I complimented my neighbor for asking that question instead of the more common, “How are you doing in college?” But my neighbor was troubled by his friend’s response. “What have I learned in college? Gee, I don’t know … I haven’t really thought about it. Lots of stuff, I guess.”

This fall marks Robert Nash’s 41^st year in the classroom. When asked about retirement plans, he reports telling colleagues that he’ll go when they carry him out in a box and bury him on the main university green.

In the process of preparing an article for the newsletter, I came across this observation: “Students who have the impression that nothing they do will alter the results of the learning process, or who attribute success to good luck and failure to bad luck, or who see the pedagogy and didactic practice of the professor as the sole determinant of success or failure, will make little effort to contribute to their own learning.” (p. 244)

The use of PowerPoint is widespread now in college classrooms. Compared with the old transparencies of overhead projector days, it gets all sorts of points for legibility and glitz. But a lot of the problems with the way faculty used overheads still prevail. So please take these gentle do and don’t reminders in the spirit they are given. PowerPoint slides can enhance learning, but that benefit doesn’t accrue automatically. And if the PowerPoints aren’t enhancing learning, they may be doing the opposite.

I’d like to share a couple of the points made by Robert Zemsky in the second part of a two-part essay that appeared in Inside Higher Education. (There’s a link to this second part at the end of this post.) I don’t know if you’re familiar with Bob Zemsky’s work—he’s a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has been on the forefront of efforts to reform higher edcuation for decades, and he’s a superb writer. In this article he put three items on the higher education reform to-do list. The first one is learning—I love that it was listed first.