December 2011: Diffusion, Education, and Hume

December 2011: Diffusion, Education, and Hume

I thought I will depart from the SoTL literature for this month’s reflection and focus on an article on education that appeared in the CAUT Bulletin (October 2011). The original article is here: Hume’s Diffuse Effects Cannot Be Reduced to a Narrow Vision. This essay clearly brings home the pitfalls of obsessing on measurement and impact, a sign of modern academe.  The author says “Incalculably diffusive processes are real enough. Education is one of them.” One can view the teaching in the same way, especially when we are interested in measuring its immediate impact, document/publish it. The master stroke to me is in the following “But nobody can calculate the effect that just one work had, any more than they can calculate just how much of the growth of a flower, or how much of its beauty, was the result of any one raindrop falling on any one day.” Hume’s  ideas still are relevant even after nearly 3 centuries. This impact of his work might well have been unimaginable at the time. Such is the power of great ideas and philosophers.Their diffusion time scales far outweigh the measurement time scale.

In our modern times, it is required of us to demonstrate  productivity, measure its impact, and make it visible. One may point that over reliance on Student Evaluations of Teaching (SEoT) to measure the impact of teachers and H-indices to measure the impact of researchers is one of the many modern tendencies invented by  academic  apparatchiks.

An interesting point to ponder, though, is this: how reliable and robust are our measures of impact (visible discussions in the classrooms, increased grades, student satisfaction, SEoT etc.) to judge the effectiveness of educational interventions? What is the signal to noise ratio? These questions are important to SoTL projects too.  Are our measurement time scales to measure teaching and learning –on the order of a term or a year– adequate?