TITLE: What Motivates Kids These Days
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: November 05, 2008 8:04 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
Who am I being when I am not seeing
a connection in the eyes of others?
-- Benjamin Zander
I was all set to write an entry about "students these
days", but I see that Mark Guzdial
beat me to the punch.
Two
earlier
entries
chronicled my experience in class this semester. This
is a course I have taught every third semester in recent
years, and before that I taught it every year or even
every semester for a few years stretching back to the
mid-1990s. This has given me a longitudinal view of
our student population as it has performed on common
content, with common materials and a common approach
in the classroom. Certainly the course has evolved
a bit in that time, as I
try to keep the course forward-looking
as well as grounded in basic content. But with all
those changes, I don't think the course's fundamental
character has changed. If anything, I'd be inclined
to say that I do a better job now than way back when,
because I've learned how to do a better job. (That
may be wishful thinking, of course.)
Yet this semester has felt more challenging than I
remember. If I look back at this course over the
years, though, can see that there have been signs
of change.
The last time we offered this course,
I noted that students seemed less obviously engaged
in the material than in recent times. That group
turned out to be well-prepared and thoughtful, but
with a quiet personality and a need to see how the
course fit into their goals before they made an
observable commitment. Maybe in the three years
since the last offering before that we have begun
to see a different kind of student in CS.
Guzdial describes one of the changes that may be
responsible: the broadening of the population that
attends college and, indeed, is expected to. With
the widening of the pool, we are likely to see more
students with varying commitments to the academic
enterprise. We might also see students who are
less well-prepared. A common hypothesis among
faculty I know is that the CS student body we have
built up since the dot.com bust has been different
from the group we encountered before.
Maybe that's just another example of old fogies
wishing for the good old days, but I don't think so.
I think we have seen a much wider range of ability,
preparation, and motivation in the newer student
body than we had back in the "good old days" of
the 1990s. With a larger, more diverse set of
students attending college now than then, this is
a natural outcome.
I don't think today's students learn differently,
or have diminished capacity to learn, from exposure
to the internet, iPods, and Wiis. And these students
are, for the most part, as well-prepared as students
before, at least when we account for the increased
diversity of the pool. I do think that students
have different motivations and different levels of
motivation than previous classes.
One of our undergrads tells a story consistent with
my observation. He runs free tutoring sessions as a
public service to students in our intro programming
courses. He wrote recently that he doesn't get as
much traffic from CS majors (his primary audience)
as he had hoped. On a
particular night:
Interestingly enough, all three students were non-CS
majors. I'm not entirely sure what that means overall.
They are taking a class they don't need -AND- they are
seeking help outside of class hours. That alone is
unusual. We also discussed all the concepts on paper
and each student hand wrote their own notes, which was
surprising to me as well.
This tutor is one of our most talented and self-motivated
students, so I'm not surprised that he would notice an
apparent lack of motivation among his peers. Asking
for help is an odd one. In my class, I have several
strong students who are scoring lower than they do
in other courses, yet only a very few have asked any
questions. A couple have, but not until after a quiz
that deflates their spirits. I've asked them why they
haven't asked questions about the puzzling material
earlier. The answers are a mix of optimism ("I just
assume that I'll be able to figure this out"), pride
("I don't want to give up and ask for help"), and
poor time management ("well, I didn't start the
assignment until...").
I was a pretty good student, but I have vivid memories
of getting up early one day my sophomore year, picking
up a box of punch cards, and heading over to see my
Assembler II prof promptly at the start of his 8 AM
office hour because I was struggling with a
now-forgotten JCL issue. (8 AM?! Many of my students
say that 10 AM office hours are too early!) I'm
optimistic and proud, but I was also motivated to
succeed -- grade-wise, if nothing else. But I suspect
that I probably wanted to learn more than I wanted to
save face.
As Guzdial says, it may be that today's students are
motivated by different things.
... the case for why something is
worth learning is increasingly borne by the teacher,
... and the sense of value for what's to be learned
is increased based in vocational terms.
This has always been an issue for me when teaching
functional programming and Scheme, where the language,
style, and ideas are foreign to what students tend
to experience in the intro course language du jour
and current professional practice. But I would think
it'd be easier to motivate many functional
programming concepts in a day when Python, Ruby, and
even serious languages like C# and Java are bringing
to the masses. (Maybe that says something about my
skills as a motivator...)
In any case, rather than leave the burden for what's
different now at the feet of our students, we CS
instructors face the challenge of figuring out how
to teach differently. Add this to changes in the
discipline and the need for more non-CS students
to incorporate computing into their professions and
lives, and the challenge becomes even more
"interesting".
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