A Comparison of Pedagogical Approaches to Teaching Graduate Students in Educational Administration

Journal of Instructional Psychology, Dec, 1999 by Gwen Schroth, Anita Pankake, Gordon Gates

One set of findings that particularly intrigued us was the lower rankings of the Information Processing and the Social Families. It was not surprising that students ranked the Information Processing Family activities as the least enjoyable. After all, we almost expect students to dislike listening to lectures, reading, and writing papers. But, as instructors, much of our time outside of class is spent with the products related to these activities--planning lectures, reading papers students have written, and selecting appropriate reading assignments. However, like Joyce and Showers (1987), we believe in the power of direct instruction; it assures us we are covering the basic material students need to learn for their professional applications and, more immediately, to pass the state certification test. While we would have preferred that students placed relatively more value on these instructional activities, when frequencies of responses were tallied, lectures alone were ranked among the top four for value (mean = 4.5) and even exams came in at 3.76 our of a possible 5.

The Social Family includes activities where students are highly involved with their peers. In the courses we taught some of the activities in this family included student conducted class quizzes, small group discussions, role playing, and "bag reports". Interestingly, the rankings for this family of activities received the lowest of the four family groups. This surprised us given the recent stress on peer learning. One interpretation for this may be that, after a long day of teaching, students prefer to sit, listen, and take notes rather than engage in peer interactions. Or, perhaps, after their isolated existence at work, classroom teachers find opportunities to interact awkward. Graduate classes may provide one of the few opportunities these professionals have for developing and practicing skills of interacting with peers. The lower ratings could signal a need to do more activities in this family rather than fewer of them.

Table 1 displays the highest and lowest mean responses for both fun and value by activity. An examination of these means shows that students do not particularly enjoy or highly value taking exams and/or writing papers. Yet, exams and written assignments provide us, as instructors, with a major source of material for evaluating our students. (In fact, exams are required by our university.) We have obviously not succeeded in helping students make the connection between the written work we assign and their need to communicate well in an administrative position in schools. Nor have we helped students view exams as an opportunity to gauge their increase in professional knowledge. These findings present us with the challenge of making these activities (i.e., exams and papers) more meaningful to the students. We need to find ways to select topics and frame the purpose of the written assignments that are more valuable to students. Additionally, we need to help students understand the importance of exams in assessing their knowledge and understanding of the educational theory and research as professionals.