Archives
FSEC hears benefits of "Methods of Inquiry"
By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor
Want to raise your students' GPAs? And give them better odds that they will graduate?
Encourage them to enroll in the Methods of Inquiry (MOI) course (GSE 155), open to all undergraduates and graduate students alike, and you just might have those things happen, Kelly Ahuna, director of the MOI program, told the Faculty Senate Executive Committee yesterday.
In fact, one faculty senator, who shall remain nameless, after "failing" a short numbers quiz Ahuna administered, inquired whether the course admits students over age 50. Yes, it does, he was told, amid much laughter.
The MOI program was begun in 1987 by Susan Shapiro to offer UB students a chance to learn how they learn.
"It's a course that any undergraduate can take, regardless of major, regardless of year in school, regardless of GPA," according to Ahuna, who took the course as a graduate student and took over as director in 2000 when Shapiro stepped down. "It's a unique class, both in mission and design. It's a critical-thinking class. The title sometimes makes people think it's a statistics class or it's a research-oriented class. It's interdisciplinary in that it combines cognitive psychology and philosophy."
The class meets twice a week for 50-minute lectures that cover myriad issues, including how to take better notes in classes, how to think more clearly and critically, even how to predict what questions will be on the next exam. What Ahuna and Christine Gray Tinnesz, MOI associate director, strive for is to teach students that they are in charge of their own learning.
"We all know that all learning and all thinking has to take place in the head of the student...no matter how smart faculty are and how entertaining and how funny we can be in the classroom," Ahuna said. "We also know that college...is very learner-centered. What I mean by that is high school is a very teacher-centered place where teachers are held accountable for how well their students do. In a place like UB, I could fail all my students this semester and I don't know if anybody would know or care or keep track. So really, the onus falls to the students to be autonomous. That's our primary goal. The mantra that we use again and again in the course is that the locus of control is in them."
Student effort makes all the difference, Ahuna said, but it has to be "the right kind of effort."
"Whenever students have to learn something new, we want them to know the kind of effort they have to put in to really learn it. It's too late to wait for the exam feedback or for the professor to tell you. We fight against something called the 'illusion of knowing.' In the experience of studying for something, you might read your notes 10 times, 20 times, 30 times, memorize the notebook. So students might come into a test and they can rewrite their whole notebook for you. But if you ask them a question on the exam to apply what you talked about in lecture a little bit differently or take what they learned and apply it to a real-life situation, and they can't do it, it's because they were familiar with their notes, they memorized what they had written, but they didn't really understand."
Apparently, MOI alumni now understand much better than before. The department's Web site ( http://www.gse.buffalo.edu/cap/moi/) boasts that recent students improved their GPA by a whole letter range during the semester they took the MOI course, including 86 percent of students in the D-F range, 55 percent of students in the C range and 11 percent in the B range.
At yesterday's meeting, Ahuna distributed another chart that showed smaller increases in GPA from semesters prior to a student's taking MOI to the semesters in which the student enrolled in the course. For example, the chart detailed GPA increases from 2.22 to 2.36 for students who were enrolled in MOI this past spring, and an increase from 2.28 to 2.49 for students enrolled during the spring 2004 semester.
Another study in 1991 showed that incoming students at UB who took MOI had a higher graduation rate compared to the rest of their incoming class.
"We found that even though the students who took 'Methods' had lower scores in both verbal/math SAT scores coming in, they had an 11 percent higher graduation rate within five years than the rest of the cohort," Ahuna said.
Although many students take MOI in their freshman year, some faculty members, such as Henry J. Durand, director of the Center for Academic Development Services in the Graduate School of Education, recommend that students wait until the spring semester of their freshman year or sophomore year to enroll.
Ahuna agreed that is a good strategy in many cases.
"Often, first-semester students come in thinking they know everything and when you try to tell them 'you can understand better, you can learn better,' they are a little closed off to it. And sometimes, it takes students a semester or so to not do as well as they thought they would to really be open to it," she said.
In response to a question from H. William Coles, assistant vice provost for the Educational Opportunity Program, regarding teen students' multitasking while studying—playing music and keeping computers on while reading, for example—Ahuna called the practice difficult to master.
"Some students might think they can (study that way), but don't," she said.
In other business, Mitch Green, executive director of Campus Dining & Shops, presented the FSEC with his department's new "carry-out catering" menu and price list, which offers "a quick, cost-competitive alternative to local supermarkets" for on-campus events. When asked if his services would be available on weekends, Green said they would, but that pick-up locations might be limited to the Center for Tomorrow or the Ellicott Complex on Saturdays and Sundays. Green said his department brings $2.2 million in revenue to the university each year.
Following his presentation, Green fielded complaints about the shutdown of most campus dining facilities during holiday breaks. He encouraged faculty to contact dining managers at the facilities that are open if there is a lack of adequate or fresh food available.
Green said he plans to obtain a beer and wine liquor license that could be used by Pistachio's and the Tiffin Room on the North Campus. He also noted that a dining facility will be included in the renovation plans for Acheson Hall on the South Campus, the future home of the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.