Reckoning with Big Data in Little Classrooms

(cross-posted at the Stanford CMEMS)   

How much do we know about the students we teach? How much should we know? Our optimistically named "Spring" semester has just started at the University of Iowa, and this semester I asked my students to complete an online pre-course survey (through Surveygizmo.com) to find out more about their goals, their preparation, and their reasons for taking my Milton class. Some of the results were really surprising, others were disheartening, and all of them challenged me to rethink my syllabus and my approach.

Which raises a question: literary scholars like Franco Moretti have proclaimed that the age of "big data" will change the way we do literary research -- but should it also change the way we teach? It strikes me that the typical university English classroom is in many ways a data poor environment. Or rather, it is an environment rich in data that we never quantify: we constantly gauge our students' reactions -- we even collect their evaluations at the end of the semester -- but then after gaining an impressionistic sense of those evaluations, they usually go into a drawer.

 So what do you learn from surveying an incoming class like mine and then crunching the numbers?

In this case, that most of my students (63%) feel their research skills are their weakest academic area, as well as that 51% of them have never had a university class in early modern literature, including Shakespeare.

And then there's this: 

Remember, these are mostly English majors, in Iowa City, the only UNESCO City of Literature in the United States, a place where we erect sculptures of books and literally have poems engraved into the sidewalks. Yet a third of my students read books for less than 30 minutes per day -- and this led to a frank and, hopefully, productive discussion with them about how they'll have to change their reading habits to do well in a class on Milton.

Now for another unexpected result, but one that will be less likely to depress your spirits:

When asked what would improve the English courses they've taken so far, more students said "More theory discussion" (34.3%) than any other category -- although "more discussion of close reading" was a close second. I think the conventional wisdom in my department is that students have lost interest in theory (after all, it's pretty tough to digest Heidegger in 20 minutes a day!). But that response was strong enough to revise my syllabus: as I told my students, the critical history of Paradise Lost is in some sense the history of critical theory, and it is a history I'll be happy to explore with them.

I know that many of us probably consider teaching to be a bit like dancing or conducting an orchestra -- an art exempt from the age of big data. Of course, we used to think of baseball like that too, before Billy Beane showed what could be done with sabermetrics.  And this makes me wonder what might be gained, and lost, if we mined our classrooms for data in the same way we're beginning to mine the archive. 

Tweet