Learning Productivity News
Spring 1997 Vol 1.3

The Learning Productivity Network
University at Buffalo

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Learning Productivity:
Studies Underway in Calendar Year 1997

Learning Productivity is enhancing the productivity of an educational enterprise not through reducing inputs or cutting costs (although cost cutting may--or may not--be called for in particular instances), but through increasing outputs, or student learning, per dollar of costs incurred. Whereas cost-side approaches seek to cut the numbers and/or the average compensation of faculty and staff, or to increase class sizes or teaching loads, or to reduce student and faculty support services, the learning productivity approach seeks to:

Ÿ increase student time-on-task and the effectiveness of his or her learning,

Ÿ minimize curricular redundancy and "drift,"

Ÿ make better use of the teaching (and learning) day, week, and year,

Ÿ enhance self-paced learning (possibly through technology), and

Ÿ increase college-level learning in high school.

Faculty colleagues and advanced graduate students of Bruce Johnstone, University Professor of Higher and Comparative Education and author of the 1992 monograph, Learning Productivity: an Imperative for American Higher Education, are engaged in a number of studies designed to increase our understanding of learning productivity as applied to higher education. Special emphasis in 1997 is being given to the advancement of college-level learning in high school.

1. College-level learning in high school: A study of college and university policies and procedures with respect to the acceptance of various forms of college-level learning from high school

College-level learning in high school takes three principal forms: (a) the Advanced Placement Program, distinguished by the external validation of the AP examination; (b) concurrent or dual enrollment, by which a high school student takes college courses, taught by college faculty, generally on the college campus (although perhaps by distance leaning), for which both the high school and the college award credit; and (c) credit validation, where a college or university validates high school teachers and high school courses as equivalent in content and rigor to its courses and awards credit accordingly.

The college or university where the student will eventually matriculate, however, needs policies and practices to deal with these learning experiences: whether to accept them at all, whether to accept them but only toward "elective" requirements and not toward general education or major requirements, or whether to encourage their application toward the credits required for graduation. For any courses accepted, policies need to specify what grades, and how many credit hours, should be entered on the college transcript. From such policies and practices, one can infer the extent to which a college or university actively encourages its entering freshmen to have earned college-level credits in high school and to apply such credits toward early graduation or early entry into graduate or advanced professional study.

A survey instrument is being prepared to go to colleges and universities for the purpose of discerning: (a) the extent of college-level learning credits brought in by entering students; (b) policies, practices, and institutional patterns for the treatment of college-level learning in high school; and (c) the encouragement of, and/or receptivity to, enhancing the productivity of learning, as inferred, for example, by the willingness to count such credits toward the total number required for graduation, or for entry into graduate or advanced professional study.

2. College-level learning in high school: A study of state policies to enhance college-level learning in high school

A number of states (e.g., Minnesota, Georgia, Florida, Utah, Virginia, Oregon, Wisconsin) have made the encouragement of college-level learning in high school a matter of state education policy. Preliminary study reveals policies that include: (a) state school aid provisions to shift base school aid to colleges according to student attendance in college dual enrollment programs; (b) regulations limiting (or permitting) the counting of FTE dual enrollment for both school and college aid; (c) regulations and sometimes funding to require the provision of AP courses in high school; and (d) laws or regulations requiring the acceptance of certain types of college-level learning for credit by public colleges and universities (e.g. specific courses at public colleges, and certain levels of AP scores).

The principal academic officers of the State Higher Education Executive Office (SHEEO) and other state sources have been contacted. Site visits will be made to at least three of the lead states--Minnesota, Virginia, and Utah--to investigate further the origins, rationales, designs, and modes of evaluation of major state models for furthering college-level learning in high school.

3. College-level learning in high school: A study of the actual baccalaureate degree credit use of college-level credits earned in high school

A major question about college-level learning in high school is the actual use to which such credits are put. Do the credits earned count toward graduation credit, potentially facilitating early graduation? If so, do they replace courses that would have been taken in general education, or in the major, or in electives? Or, do the credits "count," but have the effect principally of allowing an easier semester or two of college, rather than earlier college graduation? Or do the credits carried in from high school simply allow earlier entry into advanced courses in the major, or additional credits earned for the baccalaureate, or go more toward advanced placement and testing out of certain requirements rather than toward actual graduation credit? Finally, do different patterns reflect institutional policy, student interest, or merely the random choice of the student?

Transcript and degree audit data bases are being examined to study the ultimate use of college-level learning credits, controlling for such variables as institution, area of study or major, and type and subject of the college-level learning (e.g., AP biology, or calculus by dual enrollment).

4 College-level learning in the high school: student motivations

Why do some high school students participate in AP, or university-validated credit (e.g., Syracuse University's Project Connect), or the International Baccalaureate, or "concurrently enroll" in courses at a local college or university? To what extent, and for whom, is the promise of a earlier and less expensive baccalaureate a motivating factor? Is applying the credits to their college or university transcript even significant? Is participation in college-level learning at a particular high school, or among a particular group of students, simply part of a "smart kid culture" and what good college-bound students are expected to do? Such questions will be probed in a qualitative study of student attitudes toward college-level learning at selected high schools in Western New York.

5. Productivity and self-paced, technology-aided learning

Most productivity advances in the goods-producing sectors of the economy have increased the units of output per unit of input (especially labor input) with capital and technology. Much of the "productivity talk" in education has similarly called forth visions of teaching machines, or personal computers with asynchronous, self-paced learning software, or televised courses stored on video cassettes, or distributed synchronously through satellite transmission or terrestrial wire (preferably fiber optic to permit all digital, multi-way, high resolution transmission.) Yet experience shows that most instructional technology allows teacher and/or learner to do more, or to do things more pleasantly or interestingly, but almost never more inexpensively.

The advancement of learning productivity needs studies of actual circumstances in which technology has led to some kind of measurable productivity enhancement--i.e., lower unit costs or unambiguous, measurable advances in learning. We will be looking at theoretical models or empirical studies dealing with this critical link between instructional technology and constructs of productivity.

6. Learning productivity and early entry into graduate and advanced professional education

American higher education is unique in the world in the postponement of most graduate and advanced professional study until after the four years of undergraduate study and the awarding of the baccalaureate. One obvious way to shorten the time to the last degree, reduce redundancy, and encourage earlier entry into the more productive and higher earning years of professional practice is to provide early entry--i.e., before completion of the baccalaureate--into graduate and advanced professional training. At the same time, some advanced professional programs, particularly those oriented to business or management, want at least some years of work experience before the commencement of the advanced studies.

For years, there have been programs to provide early entry into advanced professional or graduate study; indeed, most institutions will claim some such program availability. However, there has been little recent research on the patterns or curricular designs of such programs (i.e., what learning is to be eliminated or compressed?) or on the motivating factors at both the student and institutional levels, the attitudes toward such programs on the part of faculty (both undergraduate and advanced professional), the financial consequences to students or institutions of such programs, or their evaluation.

A study is being planned to survey institutions and schools on such programs to discover their extent and current growth, measured both in the number and availability of opportunities and in actual student participation. We are also interested in the goals of such programs as held by different actors (e.g., students, graduate and advanced professional faculty, administration, practitioners, etc.), the place of "productivity" within these goals, and experiences with assessment of such programs.

7. Learning productivity and the need to earn: The effect of more-than-incidental-employment on academic loads,, time-to-degree, total credits for the degree, persistence and academic success.

Much of the increased time-to-degree is attributed to the need to earn money, and much of this observation is undoubtedly correct. Americans have ascribed a particular virtue to the practice of "working one's way through college," and studies have shown that students who work part-time persist and achieve better than those who do not. At the same time, conventional academic wisdom says that students learn and develop in part through a critical mass of involvement, both in course work and extra- and co-curricular activities, and that "excessive" time away from the college experience (earning money, for example) diminishes something important about the collegiate experience. In addition, there may be thresholds of time spent earning money, beyond which additional hours worked diminishes the time available for study, and therefore either reduces the quality of the academic work or increases the time needed to graduate. A study is being planned to explore the relationship between time-to-degree, total credit accumulation, and academic success, and student financial obligations, debt loads, and hours worked at outside employment during presumably full-time (i.e., minimum 12 credit hour) undergraduate study.

8. Making better use of the academic day, week, and year: Learning productivity and the academic calendar

Most learning productivity proposals make better use of student and/or institutional time: year-round calendars, fuller use of Fridays and Saturdays, better use of the late afternoons and evenings, etc. However, many measures to implement year-round calendars or to force provision of courses in afternoons or evenings have failed, at least for traditional-age undergraduates, either for lack of student interest, or because of faculty opposition, or because the--proved, perhaps because of certain costing assumptions--to be more expensive.

A comparative case study is being planned to examine financially successful and unsuccessful calendar changes and to seek lessons for colleges and universities considering ways to increase the productivity of learning through adjustments to their academic calendars.

9. Learning productivity, the college student, and measures of "study effort"

Colleges and universities have been harshly criticized for the presumed lowering of standards, as "proven" by high attrition, high proportions of entering students requiring remedial courses, and low scores on normed tests of knowledge and aptitude. Remedial programs are designed to deal with deficiencies in entering knowledge and skills. But to what extent is the key to low achievement, academic failure, and attrition to be found not in low measured aptitude or lesser acquired knowledge or even low learning speed, but in low and/or ineffective "time-on-task:" i.e., the inability to concentrate or to maintain attention on studying for substantial periods of time? Answers to such questions may require measures of "study time" and of its quality or efficiency. A related study could look to students admitted under the Educational Opportunity Program, presumably with some deficiency in traditional academic readiness, and examine time-on-learning-tasks, academic success, and persistence within this population.

10. "Excess" credit accumulation for the baccalaureate

Conventional wisdom says that learning productivity can be enhanced for the benefit of students, parents, or taxpayers by restricting or otherwise discouraging excessive course-taking. "Excessive" in this context may mean courses taken not because they are required, or because they fit into a coherent pattern of need or interest, or even because they reflect a genuine intellectual or academic curiosity, but because of the unavailability of truly needed (or even truly desired) courses, or the need to accommodate to the schedules of full-time jobs and other commitments, or merely because the course was essentially "free" and there was no other good use of the student's time.

Some institutions are addressing the problem of "excessive" course taking by trying to get students more quickly into a well-thought-out major. A number of states are adopting policies to discourage "excessive" credit accumulation--for example, by charging out-of-state tuition for credits above, say, 140 credits for a baccalaureate. However, there does not seem to have been adequate work on what ought to constitute "excess," or why some students take excess courses, or the financial impact to student, family, institution, or taxpayer. We hope to begin a study that would survey current practices and plans for their assessment.

11. The "credit validation" model of college-level learning in high school

Syracuse University's Project Advance has pioneered the awarding of university credit for courses taken in the high school and taught by high school teachers, but supervised by the university for the content of the curriculum and the quality of the instruction. This model has spread to hundreds of colleges and universities, many of them community colleges, that give full college credit, appearing on the college or university transcript like any other credits, for courses that were taken by students prior to high school graduation and taught in the high school by high school teachers. With proper oversight such as provided in the Syracuse University program, the credit validation model provides an alternative to the Advanced Placement model: credit based not simply on a single externally-constructed and graded examination, but on performance throughout an entire course, evaluated by the teacher/professor who did the teaching. And if the content, text, rigor, quality of instruction, and learning is equivalent to that which would have occurred in the college course, it would seem appropriate for the college to award credit and to document such on its transcript.

At the same time, it is probably fair to say that the faculty and the academic officers of most four year colleges and universities are not aware that some--perhaps many--of the courses being presented for transfer credit from another college, often a community college, were not awarded in a "regular" college classroom taught by that college's "regular" faculty, but by a high school teacher in a high school classroom. Our interest is neither to pass judgment upon, nor to discourage, this model of college-level learning in high school, but to assess its extent, both in practice and in recognition, and to examine the existing and emerging policies at the high school, college, and state levels with regard to funding and quality control.

For further information on these studies in progress, or if you have information or ongoing research that might be shared with us, please contact:

One aspect of learning productivity concerns the connection between schools and post-secondary education. The Education Trust seeks to promote collaboration between schools and higher education. According to Thinking K-16, the quarterly newsletter of the Trust, collaboration can be implemented by following four principles:

• American students can achieve at much higher levels; minority and low-income students can achieve at the same high levels as other students.
• To be successful with all students requires more than just add-on programs; whole schools, colleges, and systems must be overhauled.
• Improving teaching and learning must be at the center of the improvement effort; key tasks include agreeing on desired outcomes, developing better assessments, decentralizing authority, and establishing results-oriented accountability systems.
• Serious reform of each system--higher education and K-12--will take root with
• the active participation of education and community leaders working together to implement K-16 reform efforts.

Has your campus undertaken to increase productivity through reorganization of the administration, the curriculum, classroom pedagogy, or technology? How did it go? If you have experiences that you can share with a wider audience, you may be the author(s) we are looking for!

Informed and inspired by our experience in managing and externally-supported project to increase educational quality and faculty productivity at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, we are editing a book on the topic of productivity in higher education. Publication is scheduled for 1998.

We plan to include major chapters on the following topics:

• administrative and organizational approaches to increasing productivity;
• curricular reorganization;
• pedagogy; and
• technology.

Cornerstones, a two-year project that involving an examination of issues affecting major change in the California State University (CSU), has been designed to address the needs of the system as it enters the next century. Cornerstones has developed from ideas generated by the Association for Governing Boards and the Pew Charitable Trusts, through their higher educational roundtables. Cornerstones is expected to "generate concrete steps to meet the challenges of the next decade."

Cornerstones is organized around four non-negotiable commitments, or cornerstones:

• First, we have promised the highest standards of undergraduate education. We must define what the public can expect from a CSU education; what we expect our graduates to have learned and how well we will assess that learning.
• Second, we have promised to meet the demand for higher education in California with the available resources.
• Third, we are answerable to the people of California, and accountable for our performance.
• Fourth, we have a non-negotiable commitment to serve the changing educational needs of the state and its people.

• To clarify long-term "system" goals for the CSU through the year 2005, to ensure a commitment to central defining characteristics of the CSU that will become the basis for detailed planning.
• To develop plans to show the state and its citizens how CSU intends to achieve its primary goals regarding the substance of a CSU education, enrollment and financing, the organization of delivery of education, the integration of technology into the institution, the fostering of innovation and decentralization of the system.
• To combine a public dialog about the future of CSU with a task-oriented process, to ensure that the change management process is accessible and open, and leads to choices.
• To explore the contribution and implications of seeking truly differentiated campus identities within a state system, thus better defining the process through which individual campus identities are framed and decentralization is balanced with statewide commitments.
• To improve the internal consultative and decision-making capacity of the CSU by strengthening the capacity of the Board of Trustees to provide leadership and remain accountable for publicly recognized objectives and purposes by integrating faculty, presidential, and student involvement in the planning process.

Since late 1995, leaders of the faculty senates and unions of two of the largest public higher education systems in the country, the California State University (CSU) and the State University of New York (SUNY), have met to develop a statement of purpose regarding the role of faculty in public higher education.

After several meetings (see The Learning Productivity News fall 1996 issue), the group has issued a position statement entitled "Higher Education: A Faculty Voice."

The project was initiated by D. Bruce Johnstone, former chancellor of SUNY and current university professor at the University at Buffalo. Professor Johnstone, who is director of the Learning Productivity Network, is also a member of the university's Faculty Senate as well as a voting member of the SUNY's faculty and professional staff union, the United University Professions (UUP).

"Faculty Voice" raises several key points and positions regarding public higher education. Its major points, in brief, are:

• Public higher education must become productive by continuing to improve quality, recognizing that public needs and expectations will likely exceed that which can be provided with the funding available.
• Increasing productivity must focus more on strengthening outcomes such as student learning rather than cheapening inputs such as expenditures on faculty.
• Governing boards, academic administrators, and faculty governing bodies need to be clear about the mix of expectations on the faculty for teaching, scholarship and service, and provide support and rewards accordingly, including compensation and promotions.
• Faculty accomplishments in teaching, scholarship and service need to be evaluated at regular intervals.
• Tenure is an assurance of academic quality and institutional integrity. It is not a barrier to academic productivity or to responsible management.
• Any examination of faculty productivity must address those few individuals whose performance falls clearly short of the reasonable expectations of colleagues, students, and the public.
• Faculty can be most productive only when they participate in establishing the activities and values supported by their institutions.

For a copy of "Public higher education: A faculty voice" please contact the Learning Productivity Network at learning-product-center@acsu.buffalo.edu, or check the SUNY home page at www.suny.edu/Publications.html.
 
 

If "learning productivity" is the enhancement of educational productivity by increasing learning rather than merely decreasing expenditures, we must give attention to student study effort. The effectiveness of such effort will be a function of both time-on-task and the quality-the intensity or effectiveness-of that study time. And clearly, successful efforts to increase either (or both) the time-on-task or the effectiveness of that time will increase the productivity of the higher educational enterprise.

The following notes are some initial thoughts and questions on study effort as an important variable in learning productivity.

• How much time do students study daily? What predicts, or correlates with, this time-on-task? How does time-on-task relate to credit load, or full- or part-time student status? That is, do full-time students put in more or less study time per course credit as part-time students?
• Are other specific scheduled demands on a student's time such as employment, family obligations commuting, athletics, or student politics the main competitor to study time? Or, is the main competitor more "personal" or "unscheduled," such as some might call "wasted?"
• If the main competitor to study time is the former-i.e., employment or other activities or obligations-how can institutional policy lessen these?
• To the extent that the competitor to study time is more personal or discretionary, how can student habits or life styles be altered to make more provision for study?
• How much should students study? Are amount of time, intensity, and effectiveness of study a function of habits and values derived from parents and peers, and thus in important part from social class? Is there an extent to which our emphasis on access (less rigorous standards, and more accommodation to the non-traditional student) needs to make us more accepting of study habits that are shorter (in time demands) and less efficient (in effective concentration or focus), that we would expect?
• Apart from the sheer time spent on study, what do we know of its quality? Does the main difference between effective and ineffective study lie less in the time-on-task and more on the student's ability to focus or concentrate in the time available? What are the predictors or correlates of this quality of study effort? How and when were these habits learned, and how can they be taught to, or enhanced in, college students?
• How much of the difference between highly effective study and less effective study is tied to the student's perception? That is, do students who study very little or ineffectively perceive this to be? Or is the problem that they genuinely that believe that they are studying hard?
• To what degree is the difference between highly effective and less effective study a function of a peer culture that rewards "getting by" and the conspicuous refusal to do what the adult culture (in this case, the college) wants them to do?