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Kelly Ahuna is director of the Methods of Inquiry program
What is the Methods of Inquiry course?
Methods of Inquiry (MOI) is an interdisciplinary undergraduate course in critical thinking, offering students concrete ways to approach their studies by helping them become actively involved in their own learning process. All activities in the course explore the theoretical foundations of effective learning and sound thinking. The curriculum is evenly split between cognitive psychology and philosophy. Half of the course is dedicated to the cognitive psychology topics of learning, memory and motivation, while the other half is dedicated to the philosophical topics of reaching judgments and analyzing arguments. The course is called Methods of Inquiry because it locates the discovery, framing and understanding of questions as central to the learning and critical thinking processes.
Is Methods of Inquiry only for students who are struggling academically, or can anyone take the course?
One of the biggest myths about the Methods of Inquiry course is that it is only for students who are struggling academically. This is not the case. The course, at its core, is a rigorous exploration of the learning-and-thinking processes. The majority of assignments are done in a student's other classes because the way one thinks and learns is often discipline-dependent. Every student is assigned a peer monitor to meet with weekly to determine how well the student's efforts meet the criteria for any given assignment. In this way, the course is individualized to each student and his or her strengths and weaknesses. We have found that students who struggle academically can really change their approach to school and greatly improve their GPA (grade point average), but we have also found that students already in high academic standing can still improve both their GPA and their attitude about learning and thinking. In short, there's something for everyone.
What kind of success rates have you had?
Since Methods of Inquiry is an applied critical thinking course, we keep constant data on the effect of the course on student achievement, with particular attention to GPA and retention through graduation. For GPA, we compare a student's GPA the semester before taking MOI (pre) to his or her GPA for the MOI semester (post). Our data for the most recent seven semesters, to give just a sample of our findings, show significant GPA increases across all semesters. From pre to post, the percentage of students with a GPA in the "A" range tripled and the percentage of students with a GPA in the "B" range nearly doubled, while the number of students in the "D-F" range dropped by 25 percent. Likewise, our most recent retention study compared students in the 1996 cohort who took the MOI course to the students from the same cohort who did not. We found that even though MOI students had lower quantitative and verbal SAT scores, they had a 6 percent higher retention rate to graduation within five years than their counterparts. We are in the process of repeating this study for the 2000 cohort.
What do you think is the most common obstacle to students' learning? Conversely, what is the most important thing that determines academic success?
I think one of the primary obstacles to student success is an unwillingness to take responsibility for what is learned. When students place responsibility for their success or failure on the teacher, the kind of assignments required, their natural intelligence or luck, it can be difficult for them to muster the intrinsic motivation needed to get to the business of learning. On the other hand, one of the primary qualities for academic success is the recognition of the role effort plays in the learning process. In Methods of Inquiry, we stress to students that the "locus of control" is in them, meaning that what makes the difference between how much a student learns in a given course and/or how well a student performs in that course is largely a matter of effort. Recognizing that their effort makes the difference can help students be more motivated. Unfortunately, students often put in a lot of the wrong kind of effort. For example, studying for a class by re-reading notes and textbooks is a passive approach that does not demand much from the student. In MOI we teach strategies and techniques students can implement in their notes and textbooks that make the review process a much more active one. One technique, for example, is to flip notes and reading into questions to be answered. That simple step forces students to interact with the material in a meaningful way and then upon review, actually test their knowledge of the material by studying in a question-answer format.
Can students effectively "multitask"—play music, watch TV, instant message on the computer—while studying?
This is actually a question about learning styles. Some people are most productive and successful completing one task at a time, but others can multitask without compromising quality in their work. Students need to know themselves and understand how they work best. Unfortunately, many people believe they can multitask successfully, but do so at the expense of really understanding what they are studying. This is often an issue of focus. People can only take in and process what they focus on, so if a student finds that reading a textbook with the television on in the background leads to little comprehension of what was read, the television has obviously pulled the student's focus. The challenge for students is to know themselves well enough to know the kind of environment in which they focus best.
What question do you wish I had asked, and how would you have answered it?
I would have liked you to ask how the Methods of Inquiry program is unique. The three-credit course relies heavily on the practice of monitored self-assessment. Students attend two lectures with the instructor and one individual meeting with a peer monitor each week. During the lectures, students are exposed to theories, strategies and techniques that they then apply to their other coursework through assignments that must meet specified criteria. This approach aims to ensure that after a semester of carefully monitored self-assessment, students will be able to judge for themselves how well they meet the criteria set by their various instructors.