LiberalArtsOnline Volume 1, Number 12
November 2001
by Dave Burrows
Dean of the College
Beloit College
Liberal arts colleges are champions of interactive teaching strategies, small classes, and active learning. We struggle to determine why these ways of learning are most effective, and are often challenged with the question of if they are superior. We need a framework that will help us organize our ideas about teaching, define research questions about effectiveness, and generate new teaching techniques. I suggest such a framework, based on a powerful resemblance between learning and the process scientists call hypothesis testing. Both learning and hypothesis testing are ways of understanding the world, particularly the relationships between actions and consequences. Both start with formulations of new concepts, involve testing, and depend on feedback. Both are prone to disappointments, but can result in new knowledge.
Hypothesis testing starts with the generation of a tentative idea, such as, "A major cause of racism is lack of self-confidence". We test the idea by constructing predictions: "If we raise self-confidence, then racist behaviors will become less frequent". Observation and measurement provide feedback, leading to a judgment: the hypothesis is provisionally accepted, rejected, or refined and re-tested. In this process, concepts go through a series of stages: generation, testing, feedback, and refinement.
If we adopt the learning/hypothesis-testing analogy, these component stages become a model of the learning process. The analogy can help explain the effectiveness of liberal education. Because hypothesis testing is a procedure, its mastery requires skill-learning pedagogy. Liberal arts colleges, where small classes permit continuous alternation between the active construction of ideas and the interactive testing of them, are powerful settings for learning the hypothesis testing process.
The model of learning as hypothesis testing is not new; its value is in generating useful ideas. I suggest three:
--Self-initiation: Learning starts with self-initiated concepts that are tested later. The idea of active learning as effective pedagogy follows naturally. However, successful learning need not be overtly active. The idea simply must start from within, rather than being imposed from without. "Passive" pedagogies, such as lecturing, can be effective, provided they stimulate self-initiated idea construction. In creating new forms of active learning, we should focus on their self-initiation properties.
--Faculty as Role Models: Faculty can facilitate learning by being models of learning through hypothesis testing. This suggests the importance of active faculty scholarship, and the value of involving students in scholarship through such activities as collaborative research. Modeling the process of learning shares the stage with presentation of the contents of learning.
--Connecting Knowledge and Action: Acquisition of new knowledge and its application are closely connected. Testing an idea by interacting with the world can come very close to testing a new way of acting effectively in the world. The dichotomy between theory and application breaks down in this model; we should seek ways to connect what we learn about the world with what we do in the world.
Clearly these ideas need elaboration. I present them to demonstrate the potential usefulness of the hypothesis testing model.
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LiberalArtsOnline is an occasional email essay on the liberal arts, provided as a public service of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.
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The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author, LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.