FOR WELL OVER 30 YEARS, RUSSELL EDGERTON has been at the vanguard of innovation and change in American higher education. As deputy director of the Fund for Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), president of the American Association of Higher Education (AAHE), and, most recently, director of the Pew Forum on Undergraduate Learning, Edgerton's thinking has shaped policies and practices that have dramatically improved undergraduate education.
Charles Schroeder, About Campus executive editor, recently caught up with Edgerton to get his views on a number of important issues, including the status of the undergraduate reform movement, the role of assessment in performance improvement, and the emergence of “deep learning” as a new focus in the undergraduate experience.
CHARLES SCHROEDER: RUSS, during the past two decades there have been at least two dozen reports on the status of undergraduate education, all of which emphasize the need for major reforms. Where does higher education stand at this moment? What has been accomplished and what needs to be done?
RUSSELL EDGERTON: The interesting thing about the reports is how little evidence there was to back up the claims they made. The first report, the NIE [National Institute of Education] report in 1984, “Involvement in Learning,” set forth a cogent argument about the importance of high expectations, involvement, and feedback. But there was no evidence in the report that enabled anybody to see the gaps between what was called for and what the present reality was. If you look at all of the other reports, they combined bombastic rhetoric with occasionally cogent arguments and also gave little evidence on the gaps. Partly for this reason, it seems, the reports and the critiques never really resonated with the broader public. That is, they never generated any real demand from the public for reform.
SCHROEDER: What does the public want?
EDGERTON: If you look at the polling data, the public has one issue with higher education: how to get in. They are quite satisfied with the overall quality of the experience. According to George Kuh's and Sandy Astin's surveys, 80 to 85 percent of students are satisfied with the experience they've had with higher education. So the public and the students don't represent—and you can't build a case for reform on—customer dissatisfaction. Opinion leaders, policymakers, the press, and business leaders are more critical, but their criticism runs to issues of cost and management, not quality.
SCHROEDER: So how would you describe what's happening currently?
EDGERTON: I wouldn't characterize what's going on as much of a movement; it's more like waves of activity around particular interests. I am very delighted and impressed with the National Survey of Student Engagement's findings that such things as service learning, engaging pedagogies, and capstone requirements for the senior year are on the upswing. But I think we have to put this in perspective. That is, there are important things going on, but they still involve a minority of the faculty. The majority are still doing what they have traditionally done, and there is no powerful demand on the part of the larger public that things be changed. There is real pressure for accountability, but it is not tied to any specific problem of collegiate quality. Rather, outsiders feel that accountability is good for its own sake. You have a lot of mindless policies in the name of accountability, particularly from states, but these policies don't reinforce the work of internal reformers.
SCHROEDER: Well, Russ, let me ask you this. In the last ten years we've witnessed tremendous shifts in the economic agendas at the state level. And higher education, in terms of funding priority, has often dropped to fifth, six, or seventh on the list. Part of this change seems to be driven by legislators’ skepticism about and mistrust of public higher education, and maybe that is part of the accountability focus. But another more recent concern seems to be the incredible financial distress that states are experiencing, which is leading to their inability even to maintain existing funding for their colleges and universities. So when we've got consumers who are relatively satisfied but parents and others who are having to pay more than ever before, how do these issues coalesce in your mind?
EDGERTON: I think the public is beginning to ask tougher questions, but again I would separate the afford-ability concerns, which are widespread and deep, from concerns about quality, which are relatively mild on the part of the general public. It seems to me that the public defines quality as the absence of obvious defects. For example, if students have teaching assistants who can't speak English or if colleges graduate athletes who can't read and write, the public gets upset. But otherwise the public is not dissatisfied with the nature of the overall undergraduate experience, just with the affordability of the experience.
SCHROEDER: But is part of the accountability issue a reflection of concern about stable and unimpressive graduation rates at a time when costs are rising dramatically?
EDGERTON: Well, it could be fueled in part by that, although my sense is that people don't quite know what graduation rates to expect in the first place. If you look at the actual policies that state governments have come up with in the name of accountability—performance reporting, performance funding, assessment demands, and so on—these policies don't seem to be driven by a clear-eyed view of the kind of performance they want to elicit. The states get credit for putting assessment on the agenda. But performance reporting and performance funding haven't really accomplished very much. If you look at Joel Burkes's analysis (he's got two books out on performance funding and performance reporting), the message is that these policies affect the behavior of institutional administrators. But deans and department chairs—faculty down in the pit—are hardly aware of those requirements, even in states like Tennessee and Missouri, which arguably are the states most strongly committed to assessment.
SCHROEDER: Let's discuss the assessment issue in a little more depth. During your tenure as president of AAHE, you, Pat Hutchings, Ted Marchese, and others were quite vocal and very visible proponents of assessment. As I recall, AAHE started the first Assessment Forum, with Pat Hutchings as the coordinator. Where are we with assessment and what are some of the next steps?
EDGERTON: I think we have to remember that the assessment movement has always been fueled by two major forces. One is the position championed initially by the NIE report “Involvement in Learning,” which advocated assessment as a key to effective teaching and learning and hence provided the educational argument for assessment. The second was the National Governors Association report “Time for Results,” written by members outside the academy. If you look at these two reports as the twin beginnings in the mid-eighties of the modern assessment movement, and fast forward almost two decades, you find that relatively small numbers of institutions have undertaken deep commitments to assessment. The majority of institutions have made a rather thin commitment to assessment in response to external mandates. And as our colleague Peter Ewell has said repeatedly in the last year or two, the movement seems to be stuck there, but it won't go away because external accountability issues are building and driving the conversations. That's a major challenge because when assessment is advanced in the name of external accountability, it is often viewed internally as a hostile gesture. Also, it is an issue that has been particularly and uniquely dependent on institutional leadership. Assessment, if it goes against the grain of the faculty, is highly dependent upon strong leadership from a provost or a president. Given the endemic problem in higher education of the transitory character of leadership, a president or a provost will come in and put it on the agenda, work on it for two or three years, and then leave. So then assessment languishes until, ten years later, somebody comes and picks it up again. At least that is what Cecilia Lopez at the North Central Association found when she did a study of institutional assessment practices in the north central region [of the United States].
SCHROEDER: YOU don't paint a very rosy picture, Russ. What needs to happen to move ahead?
EDGERTON: Whether assessment gets unstuck will depend on two things: first, whether the states will ever realize that mandating reports that no one reads and other forms of bureaucratic regulations aren't accomplishing very much, that a more effective role would be to develop policies that strengthen the collective responsibility of the faculty for student learning. Suppose, for example, the states insisted that institutions have a guiding framework of the learning outcomes students should strive to achieve, and that all faculty syllabi contain information not just about what material would be covered but about what abilities the students who took the course were likely to acquire. The state in this instance would be establishing ground rules that in my view would create better conversations between students and faculty about what matters in student learning.
A second way to unstick assessment is to come at it through the grassroots faculty interest in inquiring more deeply into the impact of their teaching on student learning. In the last twenty-five years the cognitive sciences have come up with revolutionary findings about the mental life of our students—how quickly, for example, they forget factual knowledge and how diffi-cult it is for students to come to really understand the concepts they are exposed to. There's a rich, intellectually fascinating conversation to tap into now that just wasn't there before. The work of the Carnegie Foundation on the scholarship of teaching is a leading example of that kind of possibility. Somewhere in the evolution of the academic fields, fields such as biology and chemistry and history punted the study of teaching over to the departments of education and psychology. So instead of having chemistry departments where a few faculty might have a scholarly interest in the teaching of chemistry, teaching became something that only the education folks think about. Well, Lee Shulman and Pat Hutchings at Carnegie are turning this around. There are now Carnegie fellows all over the country inquiring into fascinating issues about the teaching and learning of their particular disciplines. Faculty can get attracted to assessment because they become intellectually interested in whether their teaching is making a difference. So there's a bubbling-up strategy to be pursued.
SCHROEDER: YOU mentioned that presidents, provosts, and others need to champion assessment if it is to be institutionalized. That brings to mind the ongoing revolution over the past four decades at Alverno College, where the emphasis has been on teaching for abilities and assessment as learning. Haven't Alverno's faculty assumed the collective responsibility you advocate? Don't they constantly look at what they do and how well they do it, and use assessment data to change when they are not achieving their objectives? Why is it so difficult to apply this approach in other settings?
EDGERTON: Getting innovations to scale is an endemic problem, not only in American higher education but also in American society at large. We are a country that is highly decentralized, where nobody can tell anybody else what to do. This means that there's a lot of room for local entrepreneurship. But at the same time there's nobody to say: this works, let's adopt it! Look at K—12 education, health and social welfare policy, and all other arenas and you'll find isolated models there, too. In higher education this endemic problem is worsened by the leadership issues I mentioned earlier. But at the same time I would not underestimate the impact that Alverno College has had. Nobody has adopted the model in a wholesale fashion, but the language, the interest in abilities that are learned in the context of the disciplines, the awareness that it's not just writing across the curriculum but quantitative reasoning across the curriculum and ethical awareness across the curriculum and respect for diversity across the curriculum and so on—all these developments have been nourished by Alverno's example.
SCHROEDER: I just visited an open-access institution in North Carolina where the NSSE [National Survey of Student Engagement] scores for both first-year and senior students are much higher than predicted. When I talked with faculty about the way they approached the teaching-learning process, their comments were fascinating. They said, “If you don't find a way to engage these students, you are going to lose them immediately and be very dissatisfied as a faculty member.” More and more students who are not as prepared as students were perhaps thirty or forty years ago are coming to us now. Will the need for pedagogical approaches other than traditional lectures drive more experimentation on the part of faculty in terms of assessment and feedback for their own performance improvement?
EDGERTON: I certainly hope so. You've got several things going on. One is, as you put it, the changing characteristics of the students and the fact that the old methods don't work. Second, you've got the accumulative impact of the effective practices research reflected in the Principles of Good Practices developed by Chickering and Gamson. If you are not engaging in effective practices, it is easier now to say that you are doing something wrong. I'd also raise the flag for the work I mentioned in the cognitive sciences. Whether students are engaged is one standard to live up to. Whether students are learning with understanding is another—and higher— standard. Students can be engaged and yet not be learning with understanding.
SCHROEDER: Let's return to my first question about the reform movement. The various reform reports challenged us to put student learning first, and I recall that when you were at AAHE, Change magazine published a controversial essay by Bob Barr and John Tagg called “From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education.” Do you think that Barr and Tagg got it right? And what impact has that essay had on the whole teaching-learning process in undergraduate education?
EDGERTON: Their essay has had an enormous influence. Just look at the themes of national meetings, and at AAHE's current strategic plan, which is organized around learning. It is now politically incorrect to say teaching without adding the words and learning. The effect of the original article was to put learning on the agenda in a really remarkable way. At the same time, institutions are still in the early stages of working through what it means. I don't think you can get too far down the road of organizing around learning without facing up to the question, What kind of learning do you really care about? And I think it is possible to differentiate an institution that is committed to learning from one that is not—by looking at such things as, What learning outcomes do they care about? How aligned are the processes that link to those outcomes? How committed are they to continuous improvement? and so on. But these are kind of abstract notions, and it's necessary to get to the point of saying, “What we care about is deep learning and not surface learning” or “What we care about is quantitative reasoning and some of the other outcomes in concrete terms,” and then ask the central question, Are we producing those? I don't think that many institutions have gotten to that point. By the way, John Tagg has now written a marvelous new book called The Learning Paradigm. I've just read the manuscript and it is wonderful. I'm looking for that book to create another wave of interest and excitement.
SCHROEDER: What did you find particularly interesting about this new book?
EDGERTON: John's answer to the question, What kind of learning do we care about? is deep learning, not surface learning (deep learning being pretty much the same thing as learning with understanding). Using that as his guiding principle, he looks at what differentiates an institution that is committed to deep learning from one that just focuses on surface learning. He identifies five or six arenas of activity that he calls “process frontiers” and then contrasts what a learning college would do differently. For example, one process frontier concerns goals. A learning-focused college would rely much less on extrinsic rewards such as grades and would promote intrinsically rewarding goals. Another process frontier concerns the activities that students engage in. A learning-focused college would shift from drills and exercises and other contrived tasks to continual, connected, and authentic performances. A third process frontier concerns time. In a learning-focused college, students and faculty would be oriented toward long time horizons— rather than the present situation, where everything is focused on the short-term goals of completing the course. This is a fresh way of thinking, and in laying all this out John treats us to some marvelous insights.
SCHROEDER: Do you consider this a new paradigm?
EDGERTON: It is certainly a fresh perspective. But shifting the focus so completely from teaching to learning is like saying, “Well, we've been focused on the earth, and now it is time to focus on the sun”—as if the earth no longer matters. I would prefer an argument that says, “We've focused on the earth, and now we've got to focus on both the earth and the sun.”
SCHROEDER: That's an important distinction because some of the criticism of the essay was that it polarized and separated two very important aspects of the experience.
EDGERTON: Well, in John and Bob Barr's behalf I could argue that maybe there is a Hegelian dialectic at work here, that we need to think through what it means to organize around learning before arriving at a new synthesis. But ultimately the guiding framework that makes sense to me is a teaching-learning vision. By the way, John tells me that it was the editor of Change, Ted Mar-chese, who came up with the title “From Teaching to Learning.” Ted was looking for something sexy. In doing so he may have inadvertently gotten things off kilter.
SCHROEDER: In my work as a teacher of graduate students, I now devote much more time to thinking about how my students will learn something instead of to how I plan to teach it. Naturally I've got to focus on both of those issues, but forcing myself to focus on the former has led me to be much more of an experimenter, not only with what we do in class, but with what students do out of class as well. Do you see faculty and academic administrators thinking about the nature of learning outside of class that leads to more of what you call deep learning?
EDGERTON: I think that in the last five or six years we've come to appreciate that the various streams of pedagogical reform—collaborative learning, learning communities, undergraduate research, problem-based learning, service learning—are all versions of a broader interest in engagement; they are all pedagogies that engage students in new ways. But I'm not sure that many faculty have yet linked these pedagogies to issues of what some people call the “extracurriculum.”You have an excellent point. In The Unschooled Mind, Howard Gardner observes that students often regard extracurricular activities such as joining the debate club as the most rewarding activities they do. Howard says this is because these performances are authentic rather than contrived. This also loops back to John Tagg's point about the importance of intrinsically rewarding goals. We've got a long way to go to create a total environment that engages students in authentic performances.
SCHROEDER: Just so we're clear, is deep learning in part a function of performance? Not simply knowing but connecting knowing and doing in meaningful ways, perhaps systematically, over time?
EDGERTON: Absolutely. As I mentioned before, the distinction between deep learning and surface learning is almost identical to the distinction between knowing something and understanding something. What I was trying to suggest earlier is that this is new. Twenty-five years ago we didn't know what we now know about how hard it is to learn something at the level of understanding as against simply knowing it. And the way to distinguish the two is to ask whether you can use what you know in a variety of situations, give evidence, marshal arguments, represent, replicate, analogize, use metaphors, and so on. The cognitive sciences are also helping us appreciate the importance of prior knowledge. Students aren't simply empty vessels into which you can pour information. Students bring to the classroom their own ideas about the concept of evolution, for example. Unless you engage students at the level of what they initially think about evolution, you never dis-lodge their original misconceptions and misunderstanding. The researchers in this area are very persuasive in showing that students can take an exam and give you back what the disciplinary knowledge answer is and never change their initial prior conception, which may be misguided or wrong.
SCHROEDER: Isn't this represented in Robert Kegan's research and the work of Marcia Baxter Magolda? They emphasize the importance of anchoring new information in students’ experiences and validating students as knowers up front.
EDGERTON: Yes. This work is very exciting, and it seems to me that if regular faculty were introduced in the right way to these issues, they also could get very excited about them. Let me make one more point about the stakes in all of this. If there is a breakthrough of some sort in the medical field, the public will demand that they have access to it. Well, we now have all this knowledge about how learning actually takes place, and we are waiting for the outcry: Why doesn't higher education make use of this knowledge? If we don't, isn't this a form of educational malpractice? That's a little strong. But one of the reasons this is becoming ever more important is that the quality of the undergraduate experience is no longer just a higher education problem. The American public isn't very exercised about higher education, but they are very exercised about schools. And policymakers realize that higher education has a major role in shaping the quality of schools because colleges and universities train the teachers who teach in the schools. There's a lot of public pressure for the reform of schools and departments of education. What isn't yet fully appreciated is that school teachers learn how to teach not only in their education courses but also from how they were taught in their arts and sciences courses. Parents and taxpayers as well get their images of what good teaching is from their undergraduate experience. So what I'm saying is that if colleges practice a dull and lifeless form of teaching, this isn't just a higher education problem. It contaminates the whole educational system. I've been amazed that the school reform community has been silent about this. There was a major report in the mid-nineties by the National Commission on Teaching, led by Linda Darling Hammond and former governor Jim Hunt. It called for the professional-ization of teaching and emphasized major reform in teacher education. But it was silent about the issue that much of the way teachers learn to teach comes from their experience in the undergraduate curriculum. Maybe it just seemed too daunting a task to take on the whole reform of undergraduate education at the same time as the reform of the narrower field of teacher education. But the truth of the matter is that we really can't improve the schools in a long-term, fundamental way until colleges model a very different kind of teaching.
SCHROEDER: We've mentioned this issue of student engagement a couple of times, and I know you have been a big supporter and fan of the NSSE. Was your concern about the college rankings the catalyst that led to the development of NSSE, and was this part of the Pew Forum on Undergraduate Learning that you created?
EDGERTON: No, NSSE was part of the agenda I introduced when I was director of the Education Program at the Pew Charitable Trust. I left AAHE and joined the Pew Trust in January 1997. I left the Trust in January of 2000 and created the Pew Forum in Undergraduate Learning as a way to continue the agenda I had introduced to the Pew Trust. The original interest in NSSE came out of a “white paper” I wrote when I first arrived at Pew.
You're right about the origins of NSSE. What was most on my mind was how to shift the public view of quality. I viewed the U.S. News rankings as a chief culprit because those rankings turned largely on measures of an institution's resources and reputation rather than on what it was contributing to student learning. So I convened a group of colleagues at the Trust to brainstorm what might be done to improve or create an alternative to the rankings. The group concluded that we should try to open up a new source of evidence about quality that was based on effective practices research. I then asked Peter Ewell, who had attended the meeting, to chair a design team and see if he could invent an instrument that would measure the extent to which students at a given institution were engaged in effective practices. From this point forward my role was pretty much to hold Peter's coat. Peter is the true godfather of NSSE. Once the instrument was designed, we turned to George Kuh to conduct a pilot—and the rest, as they say, is history. As things turned out, institutions were not willing to participate unless they could be assured that they were in charge of deciding whether or not to release the evidence about their own performance. So NSSE was launched as a tool for institutional improvement rather than a tool for gathering evidence that could automatically provide a better basis for rankings. Meanwhile, I've come to realize that rankings have flaws that go way beyond the evidence on which they are based. So I'm delighted with the direction that NSSE is taking and now see NSSE as a tool for benchmarking rather than ranking. Funny how these things turn out, isn't it?
SCHROEDER: During the last three or four decades, charitable organizations have viewed higher education in a relatively favorable light. Is that still the case? Do funding organizations like Pew and others still see higher education as a worthwhile investment?
EDGERTON: Since I left, the Pew Charitable Trust has substantially reduced its commitment to higher education and turned its education program toward early childhood learning. Another major foundation called the Atlantic Philanthropies (AP), which did a lot of funding in higher education, is now phasing out its higher education programs. So two major players are out of the game. And most foundations are of course reeling from what the stock market has done to their portfolios. I also think there is a new climate out there—a desire among all foundations to be more effective, to get a better return on investment, to make a splash. When institutions feeling that kind of pressure look at higher education, they don't see a demand for reform that would enable them to get “traction” with a grant-making program. But apart from this general climate, I would caution against the conclusion that the cases of Pew and AP are signs of a more general trend. When you work inside these institutions you realize how human they are and how the views of one or a handful of people can make all the difference. Things could have gone differently at both Pew and AP, and then we'd be wondering if that were a general trend.
SCHROEDER: People are very nervous about the future of the country and the future of their institutions. What signs of hope and optimism do you see for the future of higher education? Where do you think we'll be in the next ten to twenty years?
EDGERTON: I work with a biased sample. I see the people who come out of their foxholes to attend national meetings and work on national projects—people who are already excited about things like the scholarship of teaching and service learning, or whatever their work is. I'm told that back at the ranch there are many others who are much more gloomy, but I don't spend time with these folks. So I'm not very well tuned into the campus mood. As to the next ten to twenty years, I have a general feeling about what's needed, but whether what's needed will actually take place is another matter. I think that since the mid-eighties we've been in a period of incremental improvement. More faculty are teaching in more effective ways, and so on. In the next ten to twenty years we need to move from incremental improvement to genuine reform—meaning that we have to take on things like the way instruction is organized, the way faculty are trained in graduate school, and the incentives that are built into public policies. But I can envision this agenda more clearly than I can see where the leadership and funding are going to come from to take it on. At the turn of the last century, university leaders like Charles Elliot and Nicholas Murray Butler were deeply engaged not only in building the modern university but also in inventing infrastructures—regional accreditation, the College Board, national associations, and so on—through which the industry could take responsibility for its affairs. We need new infrastructures and new tools like NSSE today but, except for episodic initiatives like Dick Atkinson taking on the SAT, I don't see leadership emerging to take these things on. There's an awful lot of inertia in our affairs. Am I optimistic? Sure, I'm optimistic in the sense that we live in exciting times and there are developments like new technologies that open up possibilities we never dreamed of before. I just wish I could see more clearly where the next generation of leaders is going to come from to move us from here to there.
SCHROEDER: Where do you see technology headed in the next ten to twenty years as it relates to the undergraduate experience and to improving teaching and learning?
EDGERTON: The choice is ours to make. It all depends on how we decide to use this new capability. The largest grant I ever recommended to the Pew board was a grant to establish the Pew Learning and Technology Program directed by Carol Twigg. Carol did a fabulous job in demonstrating that institutions can take high enrollment introductory courses—like introductory chemistry at Madison or statistics at Ohio State—and redesign these courses in ways that will both save significant amounts of money and improve student learning. But are institutions beating on her door to know how to do this? Last time I asked, they weren't. There's no doubt in my mind that technology can be used in ways that represent stunning contributions to quality, not only in teaching but also in areas such as assessment. Electronic portfolios have the potential of making the whole journey through higher education for the student a much more reflective process. I can envision a situation in which a student who graduated from college would send out not a transcript of the courses taken but instead a brief statement of what they know and can do that is backed by an electronic portfolio in hypertext where you can get further into the sort of details of what a student has actually learned and experienced. If we are creative enough to use technology in those kinds of ways and bend it to our purposes, we can do incredible things. But it is never simply the issue of technology; it is really an issue of whether or not we are smart enough about building a system that is designed to facilitate deep learning and then introduce technology as an enabling mechanism. That is where we need to go.
