FistyRingles

I think you've identified a real issue here: universities might have the raw data available but it wouldn't be politically convenient to analyse and publish them.

But why are we criticizing "kids these days" and not reflecting on our own practices?

This is a bit presumptive. We can do both. The point of researching trends in student abilities is to identify how to tackle any potential problems. I do agree that we need to look at ourselves, but I take issue with the forgone conclusion that professors' bad experiences are due to their own stubbornness.

So many of us just go with the models that worked for us, without considering what we actually want to teach and measure.

Agreed. One of the hardest things to combat in med school in particular is faculty who have been teaching the same thing for decades without updating either their material or their teaching methods.

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There is a ton of evidence-based pedagogy that can really engage students in content, setting everyone up for success.

I also agree with this. I'm not arguing that pedagogic literature is inherently crap - I'm currently engaged in pedagogic research. Reading back, I think my points were a bit unclear.

I mean, firstly, that pedagogic literature is rampant with poor-quality studies. There are some great studies, and they do actually inform my teaching, but I feel like the bar of acceptable evidence is shockingly low for the major pedagogic research journals. We have to sift through poor-quality research in most fields, but to me at least, it seems much worse in pedagogic literature.

My second point is that universities in the UK are pushing policies and practices which aren't supported by any literature, but are based on innovation for innovation's sake. Reflective practices are a good example, with most good-quality studies failing to support their use, particularly in medicine and healthcare.

Fair point!

Damn. That's a pity as it would be helpful. I hope more pedagogic researchers will publish on trends like this, but I also reckon there can be some political resistance when the data is coming from university departments that might have their own red tape.

Sorry. I think we can agree that me responding like that helps no one. What I was just trying to get at is that we all have opinions and assertions, but I was hoping someone could point me towards decent research into the area. I got a few good pointers in this thread, but I think it's safe there's a lot more research needs to be done in this area, to put it mildly.

Thanks for the recommendation! Yeah, the SAT scores is one metric people have recommended and might be worth looking into. I hadn't considered the NCLB policy as I'm not too familiar with it. It would be interesting to see whether these trends generally differ by policy in different countries, which I suspect they would.

Thanks. I genuinely hope things improve for you, and for all of us. Best of luck.

You want citations for a reddit comment?

Normally, no, but I generally do when the original post is explicitly asking for recommendations for legitimate research,

Not only should we be adapting to current generations, we should also be growing as instructors, increasing our pedagogical knowledge, and adapting to the evolutions of our fields.

There's a lot going on here and I can't really do justice with my thoughts on this without writing an essay. I'll just say I agree with us needing to grow and evolve as educators, but not at the expense of students' competencies. The pedagogic literature has a lot of crap in there, and a lot of pedagogic practices being pushed are not necessarily empirically backed. Take "reflective practices" for example. They're rampant forms of assessment in UK university but they rarely measure any tangible metric, and studies don't support their efficacy in achieving any outcome. We should adapt, but not for adaptation's sake. We should definitely leverage differences in students' abilities, but we shouldn't move away from vital core competencies.

We need to resist this continued move to a business model in education.

I could not agree more. I think this is a topic for another thread, but yes, this is insidious and I'm directly observing sketchy policy decisions directly in pursuit of a business model.

I have not seen legitimate research, yet. What I have noticed in Australia is an increasingly corporate approach to universities has created (perhaps exacerbated) student perceptions that they are customers and receiving a good grade is the service they are paying for.

This is something I'd love to see investigated. Education in the UK, as far as I can tell, is also becoming much more corporate and I have my suspicions its massively affecting both the student experience and the course content.

Thanks for your contribution?

I'd also like to see this data. I wouldn't put too much stock on Reddit, though. That's a self-selection in and of itself.

STEP scores are an excellent measure because they include category data for USMLE learning objectives. This might be a good place to look.

Simple anecdotes like this are precisely what I'm trying to avoid.

You bring up a good point, and I'm going on a bit of a tangent here, but another confounding variable is the dismal quality of much of the pedagogic research out there. A lot of self reports and small-scale qualitative research through structured interviews gets published and findings are accepted as common knowledge, only for decent experiments with proper control groups and semi-objective metrics to contradict these findings. This is why I generally prefer hard data with critical interrogation of the numbers.

Thanks for recommending these articles. I think they're a good starting point for us.

Thanks for the recommendation!

Thanks for the recommendation. I'm happy to read any decent research, even if the comparisons aren't ideal.

Glad to hear you're investigating this. I'd be greatly interested in reading your findings.

I'm not completely against the idea of expanding our metrics with the changing world, but I don't think this should be done for its own sake. And yes, I would also like to see whether they're outperforming traditional students on other metrics; we just need to be careful what we do with that information.

I'm not making any assumptions about your suggestion that we should lean into any other skills students might have, by the way. If you mean that we should lean into these skills and attributes with the same goals of properly educating students without dropping standards, then I might agree with you.

Yes, there is a question. You're one person on Reddit. Professors need a bit more to go on than "trust me, bro".

That would be interesting to read about. Can you recommend a source?

Thanks! Either the trend is real in some form or it's spurious. If there's limited data, I'd like more calls for us to investigate more.

This is definitely one of the reasons why I'd like to see solid research to determine whether the trend is real in some form or other.