In which the author proposes that total student effort cannot be increased
My university uses a web platform software called Moodle. Moodle does for free what other software can do for a price: provide an easy way for instructors to make material available online. It is often used for courses that are entirely online but a lot of profs use it to supplement their on-campus courses. This year, I decided to try it out. I’m beginning to regret it.
The main thing I use Moodle for is to post images based on the Powerpoint slides I use in class. As I keep telling my students, getting the slides form the web is not substitute for coming to class because the slides give only the basic ideas and key terms. They are there to provide reminders in cased you missed something or wrote something down wrong. Despite all that, today I learned that some students have stopped taking notes since they can just get the slides. Then I made a sighing noise.
I’m beginning to fear that this is a pattern: students struggle with something, professor does something to help; students don’t try as hard because they have the help. If I’m right, this phenomenon creates a sort of upper-limit on learning since for every pedagogical action there will be an equal and opposite laziness. Allow students to rewrite their papers and they do less work on the first version. Allow them class time to work on research and they do less research outside of class. Make assignments flexible and they leave everything to the end of he year. In short, there will always be a constant total effort from any group of students, and nothing can be done to increase it. Call it a theorem of maximum effort.
I hope I’m wrong about this, and I’m sure in particular cases it’s certainly not. But in the grand scheme of things, I suspect that Pettigrew’s Theorem of Maximum Effort will prove to be a law.