COVID, University Teaching, Impact of COVID on thinking
This fall, I taught a course that I continue to enjoy after
teaching it for five years – History
and Systems of Psychology. I have
grown into teaching the course more and more from the perspective of a disparate field that is at odds with itself. It has been an opportunity to
pull together the seemingly disconnected aspects of my
professional identity as I work to help the students understand how this
wide-ranging field belongs under one tent.
The quest to understand
and then articulate this field’s integrity has been mine since I first taught
Introduction to Psychology in 1985. How do
Freud and Skinner belong in the same bed?
Why is it important for our students who, though they are majoring in
psychology, and will mostly end up in business, learn about how the eye
works? How is it that the cold
arithmetic of science belongs in a field that is curious about the warmly
complicated relationships of parents and children; bosses, employees, and
workmates; and the intimacy of both lovers and therapist/patient dyads and
groups?
This fall, the intent at the beginning of the semester was
for all of our classes to be in person, with everyone masked. This was a relief, after teaching classes
last year. Then we wore masks in the
classroom but only half or a third of our students, all wearing masks, were allowed
in the room with us. The unmasked ones
were to be on Zoom and the “privilege” of being in the room rotated. By the end of the semester, though, I was frequently
the only person in the physical room as everyone else opted to stay home.
I was really looking forward to being with the students
again – and they were clearly enjoying being in each other’s company. There was a buzz in the room that I had really
missed. This quickly began to fall apart. Students would come down with symptoms and
ask to be on zoom. The camera was right
there in the room – why not turn it on?
Then someone else had to go home to care for a sick relative, etc.
Fortunately, through the semester most of the students
stayed in the classroom for the regular classes. But, in the age of COVID, testing of students
is a challenge. Our new president noted
that her daughter, currently in college, has been taking open book tests for
the past two years. Why would we do
this, you might ask? When students take
a test remotely, we can keep an eye on them through their computer screen. We can lock the computer they are using, but
when monitoring twenty or thirty students, we can’t make sure they have nothing
else in the room with them, including another computer. So we capitulate to prevent cheaters from
having an advantage and afford everyone access to whatever they want.
So, since it is open book exam, and you don’t have to
be in the physical classroom to take the exam, you just have to be on zoom,
exam days were the only days that I was the only person in the physical
classroom. Everyone else opted to take
the exam from elsewhere. Some were in
the library, some in their dorms or at home, but no one chose to take the exams
in classroom.
One result is massive grade inflation. My students are doing much better on tests
than they ever have. The average grade
for the class has gone from a high C or low B to a high B or low A. The students are pleased by that, but they
don’t realize the downstream consequences (or maybe they do, but don’t care). It becomes harder and harder for excellent
students to distinguish themselves from mediocre ones. Everyone is “above average”. To compound things, there is a movement away
from standardized testing as a determinant of who should be admitted to
graduate school. Partly this is related
to concerns about testing being a measure of privilege rather than
ability. I think this is true – but so
are grades. Partly this is related to COVID,
and I don’t follow this logic. It is
possible to take standardized tests remotely – there are means of having those
exams remotely proctored.
The average GPA of a graduating senior at my University was
a 3.4. This might have made sense if we were a highly competitive University,
but we are not. We have very bright and
motived students, but we also have students how are neither so bright nor so
motivated and all kinds of combinations of the above. When there is grade inflation, there is also
grade compression. In order to stand
out, you have to have close to a perfect record. This means that we are picking students for
graduate school who have not had a bad semester, because this “ruins” their
record relative to others. The students
we are choosing are the students who have not had failed to achieve good grades all
the time.
When we select students with near perfect records to become
clinicians, they frequently focus on grades and other marks of accomplishment
as a means of valuing themselves and, inevitably, others. They work to help their clients achieve
As. This can lead to an insidious
replaying of our clients’ childhoods in which they are once again being
exhorted by parental figures to do better. This is antithetical to the psychodynamic
principle of meeting someone where they are and understanding their situation
so that the tangled web of their lives can be unsnarled. Instead of asking client’s what is wrong, and
tolerating the confusion of not knowing, along with their clients, these
students learn what maladaptive thoughts are and teach their clients to avoid
them.
OK, I seem to have gotten off the track and gone on a
rant. I hope to show you, soon, how this
is relevant.
Part of the problem with the open book tests that I have
given is that a big chunk of the questions are asking about “facts”. My students, and everyone else in the world,
have become really good at chasing down facts.
“Just Google it” is the constant refrain. This semester, for the first time, the upper
level students had electronic text books that are provided by the University
rather than buying paper textbooks.
There are all kinds of problems with this that I’m sure you can appreciate
– e.g., the students don’t start building a personal library in college, and there is a
very different experience of reading a written text and one online. But the problem I want to focus on is
searching the text. Instead of nosing
around in a text for an answer, the students are now able to search for a
term. This gets them to the sentence
with the answer.
So, when I gave as a final exam a paper addressing the
question that was central to course – How do all these disparate parts go
together to be one science? – the students did not treat this as the
integrative assignment it was meant to be.
Instead, they consistently searched the elements in the question and
then pieced them together. For instance,
I asked about the tension between positivism (which is a particular scientific
view) and holistic approaches to the human condition, and asked them to
reference a psychologist who embodied each approach. They searched for positivism in the text and
wrote about August Comte, the philosopher who originated positivism, but they
did not acknowledge that he was writing 100 years before psychology was
invented. They lost track of the big
question as they ferreted out answers to little parts of the question.
Our students, indeed all of us, have become very good at
picking out “facts” and then figuring out which of the options in the multiple
choice is correct. When they sew together
“facts” taken out of context, they create an ill-fitting quilt. The pieces are OK, but the whole does not blend
into a coherent narrative arc.
Creating a narrative arc has always been a challenge. I’ve been working on creating the narrative
arc that holds together my field for most of my career. It’s still a work in progress – a bit of an
ill fit together quilt. But I worked on
helping the students see how the strands came together across the course of the
semester – or demonstrated it. Some of
the students in the classroom were able to engage in a conversation with me
about these issues, and this is the time-honored way to work towards
integrative thinking.
The semester this year was set up so that the students would
go home the weekend before Thanksgiving. They took the final after Thanksgiving. The last class before Thanksgiving was
virtual for everyone. This was the
summary for the semester – and should have helped them prepare for the final
integrative essay. Five or six of them
had their cameras on. Most did not. Were they engaged in the class? Did they think about the issues? Did too much turkey interfere with their
memory? Were they afraid to write out their
thoughts so they looked for the safety of the hunt and transfer means of
addressing questions?
I know that 6 year olds have lost a lot during the
pandemic. So have 9, 12 and 15 year
olds. For each developmental epoch,
there have been losses. My students have
almost certainly had social losses – but I think they have had cognitive losses
as well. Perhaps more importantly, they
have been driven deeper into the morass of determining whether something is
true or not based on whether it meets some external criteria of truth. They are not being driven by, and therefore,
for those who would head into becoming psychotherapists, are not going to feel
comfortable facilitating helping others feel their way into what is true for
them rather than looking around for the proper bar to jump over.
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