Center for Teaching and Learning

In the New York Times book review “The Chess Master and the Computer,” former world chess champion Gary Kasparov outlines the history of chess grandmasters vs. computers and what that history has revealed about humans’ and computers’ capabilities. Some of his observations offer us possible insights not just about chess, but also about teaching and learning.

Kasparov was the world champion who oversaw the dramatic transformation of technology that has lead to computers’ surpassing humans in the game of chess. He has worked closely with programmers both to develop computers’ capabilities and to challenge them. In 1997, Kasparov lost the human vs. computer battle — but to the dismay of A. I. advocates, not via computer self-consciousness.

This difference between computer processing and human reflective thinking has produced some interesting chess experiments. In 1998, Kasparov hosted and participated in a computer-assisted tournament. Each player had access to the software of his choice. In Kasparov’s words,

Having a computer partner also meant never having to worry about making a tactical blunder. The computer could project the consequences of each move we considered, pointing out possible outcomes and countermoves we might otherwise have missed. With that taken care of for us, we could concentrate on strategic planning instead of spending so much time on calculations. Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions.

Kasparov discovered the extent to which his advantage in chess depended on his having the upper hand in memory and performing calculations with fewer errors. As Kasparov explains of his games with Veselin Topalov, “since we both had equal access to the same database, the advantage [now] came down to creating a new idea at some point.”

We all know that technology levies an equalizing force onto performance. I will never forget exam monitors’ checking the aisles for hidden calculators. In fact, I have a confession. My memories of exam monitors encourage me to refer to the above tournament as “assisted chess,” as if an unassisted game were somehow tougher or a more authentic measurement of capabilities. The real title of the tournament, however, was “Advanced Chess.” And the tournament took place twelve years ago.

Kasparov is discussing a new era, an era in which computer assistance is not cheating — and moreover, is expected. We live in a world not only of ever-improving immediate access to vast information and processing capabilities. We live in a world also in which we demand from each other immediate recourse to more than the human mind can memorize or process. This new era has brought about more than new learning objectives and pedagogies in chess — or in the college classroom. It has promoted changes in the way the human mind performs even an “unassisted” game — or unassisted learning.

Schools of thought have broken down. Bricolage has become the norm. According to Kasparov,

The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn’t care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn’t good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn’t been done that way before. It’s simply good if it works and bad if it doesn’t. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.

This loss of allegiances, norms, or even what an older generation might refer to as “standards of play” has not impeded the younger generation. On the contrary, players reach the level of grandmaster at younger and younger ages — and not because of their unparalleled genius:

Bobby Fischer’s 1958 record of attaining the grandmaster title at fifteen was broken only in 1991. It has been broken twenty times since then, with the current record holder, Ukrainian Sergey Karjakin, having claimed the highest title at the nearly absurd age of twelve in 2002. Now twenty, Karjakin is among the world’s best, but like most of his modern wunderkind peers he’s no Fischer, who stood out head and shoulders above his peers—and soon enough above the rest of the chess world as well.

Technology has leveled the playing field by facilitating access to information. Even in areas where there are not a lot of chess players, children pick up the game online. The normal child whose attention span is not ready for complicated books on chess tactics or theory still learns that information, only now in more abbreviated forms on websites and in podcasts. On their own, children study parts of games. When it comes to study, their attention is limited. But in the name of their entertainment, they assemble those parts into wholes.

What about in the learning of course material for a college class? I’ve known students who watched YouTube podcasts to gleam information they didn’t adequately understand in the classroom. Some have admitted openly to relying more on random, online content than on their professors or textbooks — because they didn’t understand or were bored by those more traditional engagements with the material.

But what about students’ accessing the internet on their phones or laptops during a lecture? What if they’re on Facebook?

I have an interesting anecdote to relate. My sister-in-law is an undergraduate at a different university. One morning she initiated a live chat with me through Facebook by asking a question about a particular philosophy. After telling her that I didn’t know the philosophy but would look it up, I started with Wikipedia and then worked my way up to quick skims in Google Scholar to provide her with a piecemeal answer that at least acknowledged some debate — and then sent her links so she could research the nuances more fully on her own. Our online conversation took less than ten minutes with a lot of extended pauses. When I asked her if she was writing a paper on the subject, she said no, that she was currently in class, the professor had mentioned the philosophy as if everyone knew what he was talking about, and she needed a little more information in order to understand the rest of what he was saying.

This is not an entirely isolated incident. I’ve had multiple law-school friends initiate online chats with me while they were in class — usually to debate about real-time course content because the lecture format prohibited them from immediately discussing or challenging the professor’s statements.

There are a plethora of negative and positive ways of describing these occurrences. Maybe my sister-in-law and law-school friends have grown so accustomed to immediate satisfaction that they lack the attention span for sustained engagements with a lecture. Perhaps their experiences with mobile technology have enabled them to acquire the multitasking skills for multiple, simultaneous engagements with the course content. Possibly they prefer social learning to more solitary experiences like that of sitting quietly in a lecture. Maybe they’re bad students. Maybe they are taking a more active approach to their learning. Perhaps they are developing a more nuanced understanding. Possibly their multitasking is forcing them to miss the overarching narrative forest for incidental trees.

Just as with daydreaming, their online activities might cause them to lose track of the course narrative, a particular theory, or a greater concept. However, maybe they’ll pull their disjointed understandings together when confronted with an engaging objective.

If their attention is limited, but in the name of their entertainment they’ll assemble those parts into wholes, then maybe the pedagogical response isn’t necessarily to restrict “assisted” learning in the classroom.  If we prohibit their digital escapism, then not only do we  increase the likelihood of their mentally shutting down (daydreaming) during the lecture. We also eliminate the possibility of their escaping to more engagements with course content.

What is a student-centered approach to designing and teaching a course? From a student-centered perspective, how does a teacher determine learning outcomes? How can she build assignments that facilitate the students’ achievement of those outcomes? How might a teacher write lectures and other supplemental materials that keep the students productively engaged with those assignments — that is, how does a teacher do this from a student-centered perspective? Obviously these questions are open to debate. And even more to the point, there is no one answer for any one of those questions.

So what are some of the debates?

A growing number of teachers imagine how and why different types of students encounter and relate to each learning opportunity: communal learners, solitary learners, visual learners, kinesthetic learners, millennial learners, adult learners…. Although the list is potentially endless, ultimately arbitrary, and likely inaccurate, even the most avant-garde, student-centered teacher often relies on some working list as a starting point for rethinking the course from multiple points of view.

Those points of view are cookie-cutter interpretations. Human eyes — specific students’ eyes — don’t look through them. And yet, is not this initial stage of designing a course the central crux of student-centered pedagogies — if not in the ways those pedagogies are practiced, then in the ways they’re written, published, and otherwise presented?

For a proponent of the above pedagogical approach to claim that what a more traditional teacher does is not student-centered — well, that’s just offensive. What even the most avant-garde teacher has to remember is that the more traditional approaches are also student-centered.

Yes, the traditional course-designing process may lean heavily on the teacher’s side of perceiving the course and its delivery systems: what a student should accomplish, how a student should accomplish it…. But even the more radically student-centered teachers have to determine learning objectives from additional perspectives, not just from the students’. In other words, the pedagogical debate about student-centered teaching is not between opposites. There’s no such thing as pro- or anti-student-centered teaching.

Once a more traditional teacher gets to know his students, he contemplates the specific problems certain students are having — only without referring to generalizations or types.

So where’s the argument?

More traditional teachers object to the reliance on stereotypes about students. Not every student of a certain age is a “millennial student.” Not every student of a certain age fits the description of an “adult learner.” A teacher’s reliance on those inevitably false categories can hurt students more than help them.

Even the most avant-garde teacher has to agree with those claims. Regardless of how different articles or guest speakers may define our students, we ultimately can’t define our students. We have to know them.

More traditional teachers disagree with the abandonment of the lectern and other time-weathered course-delivery systems for ultimately untested pedagogical fads.

The avant-garde teacher might cite data to show that time-weathered course-delivery systems are no longer working. And the traditional teacher might point out that a lot of these avant-garde techniques infiltrated the secondary educational system in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s; he could argue that consequently, today’s college students are inadequately prepared. She might identify that if incoming students are under-prepared, classroom sizes and the need to teach to standardized tests play a role: they restrict students’ abilities to practice critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. She could argue that, meanwhile, the student body has diversified in ways that traditional teaching methods haven’t been able to accommodate. But no one will win this argument. The data tells us only what, not why.

Traditional teachers often see redesigning a course from the students’ perspective as essentially dumbing down the course. Forfeiting the dissemination of facts for building students’ abilities and attitudes, according to the traditional perspective, does not adequately prepare students for the next course in the curriculum: We’re doing them a disservice by not providing them with the basics. And often because of this line of reasoning, many traditional teachers interpret the political, social, and administrative calls for educational reform as in fact encouraging lower educational standards.

The more avant-garde teacher might argue that one can always look up facts. Google on a web-based phone replaces encyclopedic memories. True understanding, which has less to do with what than with how and why, is more important for the next course in the curriculum — not to mention, for our current students’ future professions and lives.

I’ve tried to polarize this debate as much as possible. But in truth, most of what occurs in classrooms are compromises. Even those who make any one of these arguments will appropriate ideas and practices from the other side. The dividing line no longer exists. But the divisive conversations still do — and should continue to — until the data catches up with the interpretations.

Both at Austin Peay and nationwide, course redesign has become a popular means of improving the retention of students. The idea behind course redesign is not to lower our expectations of students so that more students pass, but rather to rethink the ways we teach a course in order to better accommodate our students’ learning processes. So how do we brainstorm a redesign proposal? What should we take into consideration?

A standard way we can increase our students’ access to course material is to offer them many points of entry into that material. We can provide visual, auditory, read/write, and kinesthetic options for our students to satisfy each learning objective. Some students have even undisclosed learning disabilities that impose obstacles to one particular learning style. Other students prefer one learning style over another. Often, students require the use of multiple learning styles before they can put all the pieces of the puzzle together. How can we provide these multiple options for our students to satisfy each learning objective?

It is true that most redesign efforts broach differences in students’ learning styles by hosting the course material in a variety of media online — or through purchased computer programs that purportedly resolve those differences. These technological approaches, however, do not always work.

What if a D2L shell becomes a mere repository for uploaded materials? Only those students who are already motivated to take the learning process into their own hands will bother with the uploaded resources. Moreover, not even those more motivated students are guaranteed to benefit from those resources. Without guidance, even motivated students can experience what we might call a “Baskin-Robins paralysis”: When there are a 101 options, many people don’t know which ones to choose and become paralyzed with indecision and inaction. Uploaded materials do not inherently encourage the students’ engagement, especially when those uploaded materials are not interactive.

Let us not forget the social element. No matter how good they are, neither digital resources nor purchased computer programs can resolve learning differences without a teacher’s drawing those diverse digital examples and exercises into class discussions. Most students learn socially. Until they experience other people’s interest in a topic and associate that topic with their own personal objectives (classroom social status or some higher objective), information remains meaningless to them. It lacks social signification.

The simple solution to all of these problems: departmental workshops.

1.) The more faculty members discuss how to encourage students to access learning resources, the more their students might use those resources.

2.) The more faculty members share with each other strategies for guiding students, for teaching them how to choose appropriate resources for their own specific learning habits, the more their students might discover an intimate relationship with learning.

3.) The more faculty members experiment with creating interactive course materials, the more their students might interact with those materials and retain some of that material under their fingernails — and perhaps more importantly, bring it with them, even beyond the confines of the course.

4.) The more faculty members explore how to take students’ solitary learning activities and transform them into social engagements, the more their students might engage the material while alone, specifically in order to interact better with their peers in the learning community.

Regular departmental conversations are important for a successful course redesign.

What if the departmental culture opposes a technologically enhanced course? Neither targeting different learning styles nor any of the four points outlined above requires technology. Technology is a tool, not an objective.

Student engagement with the material is the objective. An increase of student engagement will improve retention and graduation rates and enhance student learning. Brainstorm how to achieve the objective, not how to use technology in the classroom. Both your peers and students will thank you for it.

In a previous post, I introduced Classroom-Assessment Techniques (CATs) as opportunities to improve both lectures and student engagement:

CATs are routine, often anonymous, and non-graded snapshots of the students’ relationships with the lecture material. They help a lecturer assess and revise his or her lectures. But they also help students both learn and increase their involvement in the learning process. In other words, CATs not only help the lecturer cater the material to the students, but they also promote active learning.

In form, CATs are not unlike quizzes or other in-class assignments. However, the anonymity of a CAT enables at-risk and other students to participate freely without fear of judgment. That is, CATs can promote memory and critical-thinking and problem-solving skills even more than document them.

Of course CATs raise a pedagogical question we should consider before constructing any in-class activity: What is the objective of the activity? Are we assessing the lecture’s effectiveness? Are we also trying to encourage students’ background knowledge, information recall, conceptual understanding, critical-thinking skills, problem-solving skills, or some other learning skill? Often, teachers rotate different types of assessments throughout a course, and ideally, the activities improve the students’ relationships with the very lectures or learning skills that are being assessed.

But there is one type of assessment that many teachers forget to include: an assessment of students’ motivation. Motivation is essential to learning. If an assessment enhances the students’ relationships with what it measures, then a course should include routine assessments of motivation. So how do we assess motivation?

Obviously, an infinite number of ways to assess motivation lurks in the Platonic ether for you to develop. Yet, before we consider even one possibility, perhaps we should think about what motivates our own recall, conceptual understanding, critical-thinking skills, problem-solving skills, etc. We should ask ourselves, in other words, What motivates our learning?

I personally don’t remember much from my undergraduate years that isn’t tied to some greater objective which I have elevated in some way onto a pedestal: the improvement of my understanding of the world, communication skills, interpersonal relations, etc. These heightened objectives determine the value or lack-thereof that I attribute to the information I encounter. In other words, if I interpret a connection between information and one of these objectives — the information as means, obstacle, or otherwise related to the objective — then I retain that information, and the inconsistency of that retained information leads me to contemplate it, think critically about it, problem-solve with it….

In short, I learn thanks to a narrative: “X is important to me. Y enables or prohibits me to achieve X. I now think about Y in order to achieve my goal of X.”

In order to assess my own motivation, I would have to ask myself, “What do I value or hope to achieve in my life that has a connection to this information? What would I have to be able to do with this information, specifically in order for it to improve my relationship with what I value or to help me achieve my greater goal?” The more I can explain, the greater my motivation will be to think about that information.

This reflective process then leads me to create a new assessment question for students:

What do you value or hope to achieve in your life that has a connection to this information about________? Explain what you would have to be able to do with this information, specifically so that it improves your relationship with what you value or otherwise helps you achieve your greater goal.

It is possible you won’t see a connection between this information and what you value or hope to achieve in your life. If this is the case, then thoroughly explain what you value or hope to achieve. Next, clarify what you will have to do to improve that relationship with what you value or to achieve your greater goal.

If I were to evaluate at least a sample of the students’ feedback, I could revise my lectures to cater the course material to these specific students’ values and objectives. That is, I can tie information to students’ lives in such a way that likely increases the students’ motivation to think about the course material.

Obviously, we do not experience motivation in the same way. I included my own reflective process not to impose my learning style onto others, but rather to encourage that reflective process in the creation of classroom activities. What do you remember from your undergraduate education? Which course was that in? Who taught it to you? How does it relate to what you’re doing now? Do you value that information? Why or why not? What motivated you to remember that information?

And how can you transform what you just learned about your own motivation into an assessment that might improve your students’ motivation to learn?