(De)Motivation Through (Lack of) Feedback: US vs UK Teaching Styles
The majority of my education has been in the US. I attended American schools from kindergarten up through my undergraduate degree. There’s a certain consistency in culture across US education — a rhythm to homework with quizzes, tests, midterms and final exams distributed across the terms. You learn how to adjust for individual teaching styles through the initial homework assignments and tests. As a student you gauge what amount of work you need to put into the class by how you do in the first few weeks. It’s a fairly tight feedback loop, even if you have a professor that is a bit slow in getting graded assignments back. As education is as much about learning how to learn and how to handle being assessed on that learning as it is about the content, it’s important that the student and instructor understand each other as quickly as possible.
That all was thrown out the window for me when I moved to the UK to do my Master’s. Relative to my previous education in the US, the English system had no feedback loop. Very little work is assessed before you are thrown into the exam and your final mark for the module is decided. (And this wasn’t only the University of York where I did my Master’s, but also at Queen Mary, University of London where I did my PhD.) I found this incredibly difficult to handle and very demotivating during the taught portion of my Master’s. I was told that what I did wasn’t sufficient, but had no opportunity to redeem myself.
I think time to assess yourself and truly gauge if you are grasping the material to a reasonable level is important. Only being told after the final exam that you didn’t quite understand what was going on is not constructive for a student. I feel bad for struggling undergraduates that I’ve worked with who don’t understand the basics of what they are studying, but haven’t had adequate time to realize that and adjust what they are doing. Instead they find themselves at the end of a term still struggling with weeks 3-4 when a formal test or quiz earlier in the term would have flagged up issues for them and the instructor.
Motivation Through Applied Projects
One of my favorite classes from my undergrad was acoustics. Over the term we learned about the physics of sound in rooms and the construction techniques for building acoustically-pleasing spaces like recording studios and concert halls. The final project was to design a building on a plot of land on campus. Everyone in the class knew that they would have this as the final assignment as it was the same each year, with just a different plot of land and building requirements. This certainly motivated me to pay attention and consider each new concept that we learned and how it could play a role in my own design.
My professor was also good at bringing together the surrounding real world into the lectures. The school was building a new library in the lot next to the classroom where our lecture was. My professor would point out different points in the construction of the building and how it tied into the lesson. He also would bring in blueprints of some of the very expensive homes in Miami to point out certain details. It gave a great grounding for a class that could have entirely been equations and theory.
Online
I personally have found online courses to be difficult to stay motivated through. I have started several Coursera and MIT online courses and have yet to actually complete one. I don’t have any good answers for it. I think anonymity of the online courses lets you feel less accountable and can stop doing the work without anyone noticing.
Time
It’s been a little bit of a struggle to catch up as I joined the study group only this past week. I haven’t yet caught up on the reading, but hope to do that this weekend. I spent about 4 hours this week on reading and writing the intro post and this post.