Feasting and Snacking
During the dry years of this blog I engaged in various activities. Too many too list here. One of those was building better tools and practices to help collect data on student behaviors and analyzing the resulting data, sometimes asking students to help interpret their own data with me. I did this all as course improvement without seeking IRB approval so it is not publishable in any academic venue, but there were various insights I gained from this that I think might be of general interest. This post is devoted to a few of those.
Students have objectives they are trying to get out of courses. And they have behaviors they engage in. Those two do not always align: students aren’t perfect at what they do. A moment’s reflection and you’ll see this in your own life: maybe you wanted to get in shape but didn’t exercise, wanted to learn but didn’t practice, wanted to ace the test but didn’t study, or (if you’re anything like me) all three and more.
The surprising thing to me was how different goals and behaviors are. I talked with students whose stated objective was pass with minimal effort
who engaged much more deeply in the course than students whose stated objective was learn as much as I can.
Outliers on the extremes of student behavior generally expressed intentions that matched their behavior, but besides those outliers there was little correlation.
Additionally, when I asked questions from widely-used survey instruments like DataBuddies and Student Experience of the Major in in-person meetings, I received nuanced replies that showed much more about the students than a survey result ever could.
Takeaway: qualitative, not quantitative, research is needed to understand student intentions.
Making generalizations about people is always a bit chancy, but I found three kinds of student goals to be common, and three kinds of student learning approaches as well. These have a fairly direct matching, but were often matched differently than that.
The goals: pass, acquire, grow
The approaches: snack, gorge, feast
In my schooling there were several courses that I just didn’t care about but took anyway because they were required for my major.11 Oddly enough, many of them were topics I have learned to care about since, while several topics I found interesting then I no longer care about. My goal in doing my schoolwork in those courses was to make the requirement go away with some balance of minimal effort on my part and minimal damage to other things I cared about like my academic scholarship funding and my self-image as a dedicated student.
In my experience, every course has some of these students, even elective courses, though they are more common in required courses and especially in courses that cover topics needed to enable later topics and not self-evidently useful to the students in and of themselves.
Some students approach at least some of their education as if it is a competition. They want more grade, more awards, more tools, more ability to show off. Why they want this varies. Some hope for money through impressing employers or investors; some hope to be admired by peers, parents, or themselves; some get caught up in the game of seeking things others seem to be seeking.
Often students with this goal show little selectivity in topics they study. If I tell them these two assignments cover the same content, just do one of them
they’ll do both if they have the time unless I penalize them for doing so. When a decision must be made they’ll sometimes make it based on some deeper interest, but only if they can’t make it based on the perceived yield of whatever it is they are seeking.
Without any hard evidence, I and several other CS instructors I’ve spoken with have the perception that the this goal is on the rise among students. We’ve speculated on reasons, but none of those speculations have resulted in ideas strong enough for me to want to share here.
Some students want to grow and develop their minds in the classic liberal arts education sense, or to grow and develop their capacity to engage with some specific interest. They wish to engage in courses to the degree that those courses align with their interests and are open to skipping some topics and going beyond the course in others22 Open to, but not necessarily able to; it is not always easy to tell which topics will be of use..
In my experience, teachers talk about these students as if they are the ideal, but when they actually have them in their course they often find them confusing and frustrating unless the students’ interests happen to align with the instructors’.
Snacking is the approach best suited to the goal of passing. I call it snacking because snack foods generally provide calories to stay alive but not the nutrients to create a high quality of life.
To snack on a course,
Gorging is the approach best suited to the goal of acquiring. I call it gorging because gorging on foods gets a lot of food in you without much selectivity or enjoyment.
To gorge on a course,
Feasting is the approach best suited to the goal of growing. I call it feasting because feasting on food takes time and effort, fills you up, and is quite enjoyable to do.
To feast on a course,
Easier Yesterday.
I’ve observed many students who use an approach that is poorly suited to their goal. I speculate that this is because students get approach advice from different places, and few will discuss that there are different approaches for different goals. Professors tend to preach the feasting approach, while snacking and gorging approaches tends to be shared by peers.
I’ve also observed that most students are not given the information needed to do any of these approaches well. It takes instructors significant effort and multiple terms of refinement to provide the information needed to appropriately engage in just one of these approaches, and while some information is useful for all three each also has its own needs. Further, there tends to be a value judgment implicit in instructors’ attitudes that feasting is great, gorging is good, and snacking is bad. I’ve had instructors tell me that they make course design decisions specifically to confound would-be snackers.
I personally believe that student goals are their own, and while I should try to help them find joy in what they are doing and value in what they are learning if they want to snack I should help them do so with minimal pain now and minimal regret later. But I have yet to find course designs that fully reflect this belief.