Learning-Skills Course Appears to Help Students Succeed
By DAVID GLENN
A learning and motivation course at Ohio State University appears to have succeeded in improving students’ grades and retention rates, according to a study scheduled to be presented today at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Diego.
The elective course, which modestly promises to teach students to “manage their lives,” offers a familiar array of note-taking and reading-comprehension tips. But it also includes less-familiar lessons designed to encourage students to take responsibility for their actions and to avoid procrastination and other self-defeating behaviors.
“There are 216 exercises in this course, so the students are getting a strong dose of these skills,” Bruce W. Tuckman, a professor of education at Ohio State, said in an interview this week. Mr. Tuckman created the learning-and-motivation course in 2000, and he is the lead author of the new study. The co-author is Gary J. Kennedy, a graduate student in Mr. Tuckman’s department.
Roughly 1,000 Ohio State undergraduates take the course each year, according to Mr. Tuckman. Most take it in the second or third quarter of their freshman year, often after referrals from advisers who are concerned about weak grades. But the new study looks only at students who took the course during their very first quarter at the university. That group is relatively small; between 2000 and 2006, a total of 351 students took the course during their first quarter.
Because it was impossible to set up a true random experiment, Mr. Tuckman matched each of the 351 students with a student who entered Ohio State during the same quarter but who did not take the course. In each matched pair, the students had similar high-school grades, standardized-test scores, ethnicities, and other characteristics. (In general, these students had weaker high-school backgrounds than did the typical Ohio State student.)
Positive Results
The course’s strongest effect appears to have been on retention. Among students who took the course during their first quarter, 93.4 percent were still enrolled at Ohio State a year later. Among the comparison group of non-course-takers, only 85.5 percent were still enrolled.
The course-takers also earned higher grades than the non-course-takers during each of their first four quarters at Ohio State. (During the fourth quarter, the course-takers’ median grade-point average was 2.78, versus 2.66 for the non-course-takers.)
Mr. Tuckman and Mr. Kennedy also sought to measure the course’s effects on students’ odds of graduating from Ohio State within six years. For that analysis, they looked only at the 140 students in the first three cohorts—that is, those who took the course in the fall of 2000, 2001, or 2002.
They found an interesting pattern. Among students who earned decent grades during their first quarter at Ohio State, course-takers and non-course-takers eventually graduated at almost the same rate. But among students who struggled during their first quarter—those whose first-quarter grade-point average was below 2.0—the course seems to have had a powerful positive impact. In this group, 48 percent of the course-takers graduated within six years, but only 10 percent of the non-course-takers did so.
One potential caveat: Mr. Tuckman acknowledges that the effects he found in this study may be somewhat exaggerated, because the course-takers and non-course-takers may have differed in hard-to-detect ways. For one thing, the course-takers may have been urged to take the course by a zealous parent or academic adviser, and that person’s support might also have helped them more broadly in college.
But Mr. Tuckman pointed out that this is just one of several studies that have suggested that the course is effective. “The findings have been consistent, so we have some confidence here,” he said.
Computer-Learning Component
A major strength of the course, Mr. Tuckman said, is its hybrid format. Students take the course in a computer laboratory. The course instructor—typically a graduate teaching assistant—lectures for 15 or 20 minutes, and then the students work at their own pace on computer-based exercises.
“The students really hunker down,” Mr. Tuckman said. “They know what they have to do, and take the time they need to get the exercises done.”
The course teaches four basic strategies for college learning: Take reasonable risks, take responsibility for your outcomes, search the environment for information, and use feedback constructively.
Ken Bain, vice provost for instruction at Montclair State University and the author of What the Best College Teachers Do (Harvard University Press, 2004), said in an interview on Wednesday that “study skills” courses can be important tools, but that he has two general qualms about them.
First, Mr. Bain said, such courses should encourage “deep learning” and not simply offer strategic tricks that can help students earn high grades.
“We have to be careful not to create a situation that implies that the entire game is memory,” he said. “Students need the capacity to apply their knowledge and to extend it into new domains. People are most likely to learn deeply when they are trying to solve problems or answer questions that they, the learner, have come to believe are important or beautiful or intriguing.”
Second, Mr. Bain said that he worried that study-skills courses are sometimes offered in a vacuum. Colleges should do a better job, he said, of marrying faculty-development projects with student-affairs programs. All faculty members, and not just those who teach study-skills courses, need to be engaged with improving student learning, he said.
Mr. Tuckman echoed both of those concerns. He said that his course is designed to “help students contextualize for themselves, rather than simply relying on someone else’s ideas.”
And he said that while he has received “tremendous support” from Ohio State’s administration, he has sometimes seen a lack of coordination between the university’s faculty-development and student-affairs wings.
“We have a learning center and a teaching center,” he said. “And there’s a certain territorial divide.”