Kali Tal

What Are College Students Thinking #2

At the soon-to-be-defunct college where I teach (Arizona International College of The University of Arizona), we have a requirement that all students complete senior "capstone" projects before they graduate. These capstones range from six to twenty-four credit hours, with the size and scope of the undertaking varying accordingly. It's a good idea in theory, but it's been notably disastrous in execution, with the majority of students producing and presenting under-par capstone work. By the mid-point of my office hours today I've already counseled three students who have reacted to the capstone assignment with varying degrees of panic. Their terror stems from the fact that none of them have ever successfully tackled a project that requires sustained research, analysis, and writing or production effort. Training in research methods (at least at AIC) is sadly deficient, or entirely absent, so the capstone looks like an insurmountable obstacle to many of the students who must complete one.

Much of the time I spend with such students is taken up by soothing and reassuring talk to alleviate their fears. After a self-esteem booster, we break the capstone down into a series of manageable steps, to be taken, one after the other, on the path to completion. Often we have to refine and narrow the topic area, so that the student won't be overwhelmed. I'm all for undergraduate research projects, but it's becoming more and more clear to me that certain types of research are most commonly done at the graduate level for a reason. We do want to train undergraduates in research basics, and there are opportunities for incorporating undergraduates into our own research projects. But very few undergrads have the educational foundation, the expertise, or the self-discipline to undertake full-scale solo research projects unless their training in such areas was exceptionally thorough, or unless they are non-traditional students with a great deal of previous training or life experience.

One of the most popular capstone components is administering some sort of survey, with the intent of procuring quantifiable results. I occasionally encourage students to pursue surveys, but only if the instruments they use are already proven in the field. I'm not sure what makes most students (and a lot of other professors) think undergrads should be capable of coming up with their own original instruments without any training in the area, though I suspect that it's because those members of both groups are ignorant of the amount of work and time that goes into developing a suitable survey and administering it under properly controlled conditions. My work as an advisor to undergraduates requires that I frequently and in great detail describe the amount of work it would actually take to create a working instrument. Once they understand, most students drop the survey component, often because they can see that it's neither essential nor ultimately useful to their end product.

But the most important thing that I do is explain, again and again, to students that education is an ongoing process, and that it takes active time and effort on their part. The goal, I underline, is not to complete a capstone project in order to fulfill the capstone requirement: the goal is to acquire enough knowledge (through research) to make the leap from being an absorber of knowledge to becoming a producer of knowledge. That's what expertise is all about. Properly handled, a capstone, or senior thesis, can give a student a taste of what it means to be an expert.

It's the proper handling that gets to be the problem. The panic my students feel isn't because they understand what they're getting into, but because they don't. They don't understand that research is an incremental process, and knowledge is accrued little by little over a period of time. (After all, they've written few papers that couldn't be pounded out overnight or, worse yet, purchased over the internet.) They don't understand that the eureka moment is that moment at which one's accumulated knowledge reaches critical mass, and one spontaneously generates an original idea or insight. They don't know how to generate bibliographies, or create outlines, or extract the relevant quotations from their readings. They lack the tools that can take them to the point of that eureka, and they don't even have a way to describe what they don't have.

And that's usually the last part of our talk: a discussion of the missing pieces that they must find and internalize before they'll be able to make progress on their capstones. Missing piece #1: a sense of agency; the belief that they are undertaking this project of their own free will, and out of a personal interest and stake in its success. Missing piece #2: an understanding that even the biggest project can be broken down into discrete tasks that can be accomplished, one after another. Missing piece #3: the acceptance that insight depends on a solid foundation of knowledge and research, and that there are no shortcuts to the eureka; but, on the other hand, the eureka is inevitable once critical mass has been reached.

This strategy seems to work, and, historically, I've been quite pleased with the capstone projects completed by the students I advise. But it makes me sad that college students can reach their senior year before making meaningful connections between their own lives and their educations, between knowledge and growth, and between hard work and sudden insight. If such connections could be made earlier, I think that there would be more joy in learning, and more sense that education has the capacity to be empowering and liberating.

Posted by kalital at February 11, 2003 4:49 PM

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