I served as our Associate Chair for Undergraduate Education from 2002-2012, then moved to another Associate Chair position for 10 more years. My colleague John Wolfe followed me in the Undergraduate Education position. We wrote this editorial for The Michigan Daily (March 7, 2024).
In her cogent essay “Patching a post-COVID University back together,” Opinion columnist Lara Tinawi described a deterioration of social norms that emerged after the post-COVID return to the in-person University of Michigan. As the former and current associate chairs for undergraduate education in the Chemistry Department, with an educational perspective spanning the past 22 years, we could not agree more. Although the dramatic teaching and learning adaptations required by the COVID-19 response have disappeared, we are now seeing some long-term COVID-19 symptoms in academic culture, creating lingering negative effects and hindering our full recovery.
We have been teaching introductory organic chemistry courses consistently for decades. Each year has had the same curriculum, inscope and depth, the same testing method and same grading scale. We have seen a couple of post-pandemic changes: less participation with in-person and group activities (class meetings, open faculty Q&A sessions, GSI-led sessions), more participation with online and solitary resources and a bifurcation of the grade outcome (about a 10-15% shift to lower scores, an increased D/F/W rate and about a 5-10% increase in higher scores, including a shift the A–B ratio from about 1–2 towards 1–1). Whatever hypotheses we have about these differences, the correlation with post-COVID-19 effects is our first assumption, and research studies are starting to shed light on this global concern.
The Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University has published five consensus panel reports on the state of education post-COVID-19. Although the research reports are mostly from K-12 settings, some are from higher education and consistent with what we have seen, with a few key findings:
“A nationally representative survey … found that 74% of teachers said more students were ‘not finishing schoolwork because of procrastination,’ there were high levels of ‘getting low grades or incompletes,’ ‘not participating/speaking in class’ and ‘skipping or showing up late for class.’ Students confirmed these declines in engagement.”
To date, the panels conclude that “the state of … academic well-being is grim” and that both student engagement and attendance are consistently below pre-pandemic levels. The panel also notes some general grade increases, something they consider to be paradoxical, but which we suspect is consistent with the simple interpretation that not every student has had the same experience, nor do they react monolithically.
The most special feature of a university education is to promote positive agency in learners — the development of independent self-reliance and responsibility. For many years, educational psychologists have used the catchy mantra that developing positive learner agency requires the skill, the will and the thrill.
“The skill” stands for your engagement. The positive outcome from engagement is self-regulation, where a learner can use resources in a proper and productive way, such as attending class, taking-revising-reviewing notes and paying critical attention to developing meaning — not attending to social media, messaging or other distractions that can derive from a false belief in multitasking.
Learning from class recordings is not intrinsically bad, but it requires a significantly higher level of concentration and discipline to get as much out of them compared with in-person instruction. The negative outcome of improper engagement is spent time with no gain at best and self-deception at worst. Studies on the misuse of answer keys, for example, show that students will convince themselves that studying an answer without actually generating it is the same as having done the work to create the answer.
“The will” stands for your actions. Positive commitment is not only having knowledge of the skill but also being able to enact the plan. Knowing how to exercise properly, eat nutritiously or not smoke is easy — but knowledge alone is only the starting point, while the dedicated behavior to pull it off past a good intention is quite another. Negative commitment is procrastination.
“The thrill” is your reward. Here it gets tricky, because rewards can meaningfully derive from both self-satisfaction with accomplishment (intrinsic reward) and from recognition by the system such as publicity, subscribers, “likes,” money or earning participation points (extrinsic reward). As university educators, it is easy to get depressed when we hear — and we have heard — students skip class because there are no points associated with attending. Intrinsic versus extrinsic rewards are aligned with delayed versus immediate gratification, the latter of which, for better or worse, dominates much of our modern culture.
During the pandemic, a false equivalence between online and in-person experiences was inevitable. Because every individual learner develops their sense of agency at different times and at different rates, the injection of pandemic-derived instructional modes that forcibly displace and preclude in-person methods appears to have divided the student population, perhaps according to how well their skill/will/thrill abilities had been developed. Indeed, although agency is typically cast as a wonderful and positive thing, it carries as much risk as reward. When students are in a system that grants them agency, they have as much freedom to fail as they do to succeed.
In higher education, subject-matter mastery and its evaluation are important, but it is simply not the whole picture of our mission. As instructors, we need to redouble our efforts to keep the development of positive agency as a top priority, making this indispensable outcome from a university education an even more explicit and intentional part of our teaching. Because — and this is our main hypothesis — productively and meaningfully navigating the array of post-COVID-19 resources requires a higher level of positive agency to be successful. The unique benefits to a student’s intellectual development from engaged, critical and productive in-person activities need to be rediscovered and restored to the experience of all students.
