the words decay and fall

[freckles_and_doubt]

Interesting article in the M&G this week, nicked from The Guardian: last week Susan Greenfield gave an address to the House of Lords, questioning the effect of media society on learning patterns and brain activity. (She's a neurobiologist). The paragraph that really caught my attention:

[Greenfield] begins by analysing the process of traditional book-reading, which involves following an author through a series of interconnected steps in a logical fashion. We read other narratives and compare them, and so "build up a conceptual framework that enables us to evaluate further journeys... One might argue that this is the basis of education ... It is the building up of a personalised conceptual framework, where we can relate incoming information to what we know already. We can place an isolated fact in a context that gives it significance." Traditional education, she says, enables us to "turn information into knowledge."

This hits home, because I've spent a lot of the weekend marking second-year essays, and have had my nose forcibly re-rubbed in the perennial and increasing problem that undergrads have no idea how to structure an argument, to relate concepts logically. They don't read, and therefore text, particularly in large, literate quantities, is monstrously alienating to them. Increasingly, year after year, their essays are cobbled-together Frankenstein's monsters of quotes, details and plot descriptions, lurching around in circles with no underlying coherence at all.

We all know how this ends. Torches and pitchforks, and those of us who represent the last bastion of literacy (and a slew of really low essay marks) looking on apprehensively as the mob swarms up the hill.

Comments

[mcmayhem.livejournal.com]

So what's the solution?
I'm unsure it's about them not reading, either; when I was an undergrad, I was pushed to include as many citations as possible in my papers. "Do you have evidence? Back up that claim," they said. That's all well and good, because for a cogent argument you want to use extant research as support- but I felt it was going a bit overboard. At the same time, I recognized that my advisor was trying to mold my writing into that accepted by the scientific community. So is it a matter of students not knowing how to write...or simply that they're being told by the system that a "good" paper is essentially a lit review, devoid of original thoughts?

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

That's certainly a problem, in that many students are over-anxious about critical quotes and hence over-use them. But it's really a separate problem, overlaid on the far more profound problem that they really have no idea how to select and arrange the quotes they use in order to make sense, let alone construct an argument. I've noticed this over, ooh, about thirteen years of teaching now: across the years there has been a significant decline not in intelligence or insight, but in the ability to express them.

The article to which I linked follows up on Greenfield's idea of construction by connection by commenting, "The flickering up and flashing away again of multimedia images do not allow those connections, and therefore the context, to build up. Instant yuk or wow factors take over." If there's a single factor I've noticed in student essays over time, it's fragmentation.

Not just in litracha

[starmadeshadow.livejournal.com]

Over the 5 years that I taught physics and maths I also noticed a steady decline in students' ability to apply knowledge in a logical way to construct a coherent solution to a problem. The problem was generally exacerbated when the question was stated in words rather than as a diagram, as students found it difficult to extract the necessary information from sentences and form a clear idea of what was being asked. I came to the conclusion that as well as teaching logical thought progression reading teaches mental discipline and focus, since it is the reader's responsibility to make sense of the story, rather than having the story explained to them. I found that before I could even talk to them about logic I had to teach them to concentrate on one thing for more than a few seconds.