How Can We Teach Material We Know *Too* Well?

This semester, I’ve been participating in a multidisciplinary discussion group with other University of Northern Iowa faculty who teach general education courses. We’re reading How Learning Works by Ambrose et al. (1st edition) and discussing the unique strategies, challenges, and opportunities of teaching gen ed courses. 

We recently studied chapter four of How Learning Works, which is about how students develop mastery of new knowledge and skills. I was struck by a case study the authors discussed at the beginning of the chapter. Students performed well on their individual projects in a management course, so the professor assumed that in group projects, they could exchange ideas and do even better. However, the quality of student work declined steeply after they were put in groups. 

Ambrose et al. suggest a reason for this. The management professor’s assumption that student work will improve in groups “is predicated on the expectation that students will know how to work effectively in groups. In fact, successful teamwork requires not only content skills and knowledge, but also an additional and qualitatively different set of process skills, such as the ability to delegate tasks, coordinate efforts, resolve conflicts, and synthesize the contributions of group members.” Because we (instructors, librarians, workplace professionals) have long since mastered skills like delegating tasks and coordinating multiple people, these skills become invisible to us. We call upon them without thinking, and we forget how hard it might have been to learn them. We forget we even had to learn them. 

Ambrose et al. use the following model, developed by Sprague and Stuart (2000), to illustrate how expertise develops over time:

Students begin in a state of unconscious incompetence; they don’t know what they don’t know. As they begin to learn, they understand the gaps in their knowledge; this is conscious incompetence. At this stage, they can more effectively direct their own learning. Eventually, they develop conscious competence. They’ve acquired knowledge in their field, but they still need to pause and think before exercising their new knowledge and skills. Finally, they reach the expert stage of unconscious competence, able to instinctively make connections, draw conclusions, and exercise skills. This model can apply to both disciplinary knowledge (How do I catalog a book?) and process skills (How do I work in a group?). 

This explains some of the missed connections in the classroom, including the library classroom. Students don’t know what they don’t know, and we’ve forgotten what they don’t know. I began to consider where these gaps might show up in my own work. 

Consider the following task: Identify a scholarly information source to support your argument in this paper. This is a task I might give students in a credit-bearing course, demonstrate in a one-shot, or assist them with in a reference consultation. What are some assumptions we (librarians, faculty, instructors) make about students when we assign this task? Here are two I thought of; you might identify more.

We assume students can read scholarly literature. Reading an article in the American Historical Review is very different from reading a high school history textbook. Before we give students their first peer-reviewed article, we often provide scaffolded practice in the relevant disciplinary concepts, but do we provide scaffolded practice in skills like pre-reading, annotating, or summarizing difficult texts? Usually not. In my experience, instructors generally assume that someone else has already taught their students these skills. If one-third of United States twelfth-graders fall below a “basic” proficiency in reading, why do we expect them to be able to fluently read peer-reviewed scholarship by October of their freshman year? Even worse, without dedicated instruction, students may not recognize college-level reading as a distinct set of skills—they don’t know what they don’t know. When they struggle to understand peer-reviewed articles using their toolkit of high school reading skills, they get unnecessarily discouraged. This experience can reinforce a student’s preexisting self-image of “just being bad at reading.” 

This issue is part of why students can feel so easily frustrated by scholarly literature. Reading is the most fundamental research skill—a skill that’s so second-nature to librarians and non-library faculty, we’ve forgotten how difficult it can be to acquire. If we don’t go out of our way to help students develop this skill, they’re more likely to quote mine or plagiarize to pass their classes.  

We assume students can apply others’ findings to their own work. Ambrose et al. discuss multiple reasons why students fail to transfer knowledge from one context to another. Overspecificity or context dependence is one that particularly resonated with me; I think it explains why students struggle to identify useful scholarly sources for their papers. Overspecificity is when students “associate that knowledge too closely with the context in which they originally learned it and thus [do] not think to apply it—or know how to apply it—outside that context.” They may feel fine answering quiz questions based on the textbook, but identifying and analyzing those same concepts in the abstracts of peer-reviewed literature is another skill entirely. 

I’ve particularly noticed this issue in reference consultations. For example, say a student is researching depression in college students. If we find a peer-reviewed article about rates of depression in community college students, the students I work with are likely to say the article is irrelevant to their research question. Not that the article is suboptimal, but that it is completely irrelevant and totally unusable. Why? Because they are not only researching community college students; they are researching all college students. As librarians, we understand how to read a piece of research and mentally map similar situations where the findings could apply; in fact, we do this unconsciously as we read. However, students have not yet learned this skill—and it is a skill they have to learn. Given the highly specific nature of peer-reviewed research, this can lead to them feeling particularly discouraged. They think that there’s “nothing about their topic,” but there’s actually a lot of research already out there! 

It seems like we’re stuck in a catch-22: Once we’ve mastered library and research skills, it’s harder to use our expertise to guide others. How can we overcome our unconscious competence to help students learn from square one? 

In chapters 4 and 7 of How Learning Works, Ambrose et al. offer a few strategies. Here are three that stood out to me:

Talk to current students, teaching assistants, or recent grads. Since they’re often at an earlier stage of learning mastery (conscious competence, rather than unconscious competence), they may be more aware of each discrete skill that goes into completing a complex task. They’re also more aware of the skill gaps that most frequently impact them and their peers. Their perspective can help us break down our activities into more approachable chunks. 

We should be more explicit than we may think is necessary. When I’m demonstrating how to use the library catalog, I try to describe my every move in enough detail that if someone couldn’t see my screen, they could still replicate what I’m doing. I also verbalize my thought process as I walk through the catalog. For example, instead of “Let’s click on this article and read it,” I say something like, “At first glance, I think this article could help answer my question because . . . when I click on the link, I’m first going to check for . . . then, I’m going to open the article by . . . now that I have a PDF open, I’m going to start reading by . . . I still think this looks useful, so I’m going to save it for later using . . .” This demonstrates a discovery thought process,  which students may be very unfamiliar with. It helps them connect the dots between the new tool they’re learning, the process of college-level research, and the projects they need to complete. 

During hands-on activities, embed opportunities for students to reflect on their own work. What did they do and why? This helps students develop awareness of their own learning strengths, weaknesses, and strategies. When they explain their processes, we can also identify knowledge and skill gaps we might not have anticipated. For example, in a recent first-year writing course, a student shared that they searched “Why do people procrastinate?” in the library catalog and were disappointed by the results. I realized that I’d forgotten to explain that the library catalog is not designed for natural language searching; that knowledge is so second-nature to me, I’d just demonstrated keyword searching without explaining why. I took the opportunity to explain the difference between keyword and natural language searching and demonstrate how to break down a question into keywords, which significantly improved the students’ results.

I anticipate returning to this topic throughout my career, but here’s a complicating thought to close today’s post: How much is it our job as librarians to address these reading, writing, and research skill gaps? Most of us focus our instruction energy on one-shots and reference consultations, not credit-bearing courses. It’s hard for us to address these gaps since skill development requires consistent, scaffolded, guided practice over time. Sometimes, the most effective—and the most difficult—solution is to share our insights with non-library faculty when appropriate. 

That being said, I still find Ambrose et al.’s insights useful for identifying pain points in library instruction. Why are students coming (or not coming) to our reference consultations? Why might they struggle with a particular one-shot activity or assignment? I would love to hear from you: How do you identify and address these gaps in student skill development?

Many thanks to Jonathan Chenoweth, Jeremy Schraffenberger, and all the other members of UNIFIed Academy for our wonderful discussions (and delicious snacks)!