Month: September 2023

In 2011, Richard Arum found that college students weren’t learning much.

Posted on by Amadeo Rodriguez

A dozen years ago, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa published what was–as academic books go–a blockbuster. In it, they argued that students weren’t learning a whole lot during their first two years of college. And, beyond that, they weren’t particularly engaged with their professors. Indeed, they often drifted through campuses, anchored neither by academic knowledge nor by relationships with potential mentors. 

Richard Arum, MEd, PhD

Academically Adrift not only captured the attention of those in higher ed; it also garnered national headlines. The book tracked more than 2,300 students at 24 four-year colleges and universities who took the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) in the fall of 2005 and again in the spring of 2007. Nearly half of them showed no improvement at all on critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills.

It raised deep concerns for lots of folks. If students weren’t learning, and didn’t feel engaged, what was going on? Those concerns have shaped Arum’s thinking, though his quest to understand the undergraduate experience has become more multifaceted in the years since.

Arum is now a professor of sociology and education at the University of California, Irvine, and has devoted a large part of his career to sorting through massive amounts of data, trying to understand what makes college meaningful, useful, and enduring. At UCI, he’s working on an enormous data collection effort, which aims to understand what decisions contribute to undergraduate flourishing. 

And he’s come to the conclusion that colleges have lost a sense of purpose, and their unmooring has, to some degree, also unmoored students. Many colleges, he argues, have become less connected to their communities and to the world around them.

When Academically Adrift came out, one of its striking findings was that student disengagement went far beyond standardized tests. Multiple surveys found that time studying had declined radically between the 1960s and the early 2000s, dropping from roughly 25 hours a week to 12-13 hours a week. 

Arum says that some who heard those numbers wondered whether technology might have changed things (students can look things up more quickly), or whether students in the 1960s tended to inflate the amount of time that they studied. Arum thought neither of those theories were particularly likely. In a follow-up book, Aspiring Adults Adrift (2014), he and Roksa tried to contextualize US college students by examining international data on studying. “And the US was lower than almost every country,” Arum says. “Rock bottom.”

Aspiring Adults Adrift also addressed the question of whether focusing on the first two years of college might be misleading. Perhaps students were skating through freshman and sophomore years, but then buckling down after that? Perhaps junior and senior years were when the real learning and engagement took place? It was a hopeful notion, but wrong, as Arum and Roksa discovered. Indeed, the drift not only continued through junior and senior years, but it kept right on going after graduation.  

And where does that drift come from? The top, Arum argues. “I think there has been institutional drift, in terms of what college means and how students understand and experience it. The institution is focusing a lot more on a lot of other stuff, and a lot less on the traditional academic function. And that’s true if you just look at higher ed budgets.”

Arum says that colleges frequently talk about “career preparation” – and that has always been true, to some degree. But he worries that “credentialism,” as he puts, is not a positive development and tends to exclude higher ideals. “College is about finding meaning and purpose in life and developing orientations around civic engagement and civic responsibility,” Arum notes. “If it’s just about making extra money, it may not be sufficient in terms of meaning and purpose for all students.”

“What we know from research is that when people find meaning and purpose in their work, and in their studies, they persist. They achieve. It’s central to understanding people’s behavior. And the institutions that have dropped that discourse have done a real disservice to students.”

To Arum, this has had a profound spillover effect on civic engagement. His research found that more than a third of college graduates said they read the newspaper either monthly or never. Even more graduates said they discuss public affairs with family or friends either monthly or never. 

“Where does that drift come from? The top, Arum argues. “I think there has been institutional drift, in terms of what college means and how students understand and experience it.’”

And feeling adrift in the world–not anchored to a community or the civic debates within it–can play into deep feelings of loneliness. It’s a phenomenon that the political scientist Robert Putnam famously explored in his 2000 book Bowling Alone, and that has become commonplace in America over the past few decades. 

At colleges, between 2013 and 2021, students reporting anxiety and depression almost doubled. “Campuses have responded by increasing the number of counseling support services on campus,” Arum says. “But guess what? They can’t increase them enough to deal with the increasing problems. So the solution can’t simply be that–it has to also be helping the students find meaning, purpose, community, connections, and attachments that will lead to mental health wellbeing and flourishing.”

So what does Arum believe would work to amp up student engagement? For teachers, he says, it’s essential to explain why a course is relevant. Many students sign up for courses to check a box; they don’t arrive with a sense of the potential impact of various bodies of knowledge. Less lecturing and more active learning are also critical, he believes. 

But he argues that institutions also have to talk about meaning and purpose as a central rationale. They should answer questions like: “What are you doing for the community? What are you doing for the schools that are struggling down the street? What’s your responsibility to them? How are you engaging with local industry? In a society that’s plagued with mass incarceration, what are you doing about getting into the prisons and educating incarcerated individuals there, so that they can lead productive, meaningful lives in the future?”

With his new project at UCI–Measuring Undergraduate Success Trajectories (MUST)–Arum is diving deeper into the question of how you make college work for students. How can it make their lives better? MUST started in 2019, with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Arum hopes it will prove to be a model for colleges and universities across the US.

The project merges a huge variety of data, including info from a student’s college application, courses that a student takes, who takes those courses alongside them, when they use academic support, who their roommates are, what clubs they’re joining, and who’s in those clubs. Plus, there’s clickstream data from Learning Management Systems like Canvas. 

Then there’s a subset of students who are frequently questioned on topics like friends, mentorship, experiences with discrimination, critical thinking, and problem solving. And a couple of weeks a year, some students will get texted 50 times a week to find out: Right at this moment, what are you doing? Who are you with? Do you feel psychologically engaged or disengaged?

In 2021, Arum noted that President Biden has talked frequently about infrastructure. But, he said, the “infrastructure we need in this country today is… infrastructure about how to deliver, measure, iterate, and improve higher education. I can think of no greater infrastructure need than that. Because individuals alone can’t do this.” He believes that the federal government is missing an enormous opportunity to improve education, and to ensure that it does what every other industry does: “use data to better improve its performance.” 

Trying to understand well-being and progress during college, Arum argues, is essential to both expanding access and ensuring success. He notes that “our country is falling behind in educational completion rates, relative to other advanced economies.” And as more Americans question the value of higher education, it’s imperative to understand what works and what doesn’t. If we don’t use data to improve outcomes, Arum says, “it’s a failure of imagination.”

Kara Miller writes The Big Idea column for The Boston Globe, which examines game-changing ideas in everything from traffic, to education, to housing. Kara has worked across radio, TV, and print for the past 15 years. From 2011-2021, she hosted and served as the Executive Editor of the public radio program Innovation Hub, which she launched. She has taught at Babson College and at the University of Massachusetts.

The Practical Wisdom of Elizabeth Cracco, PhD

Posted on by Amadeo Rodriguez

Elizabeth “Betsy” Cracco does not take herself too seriously, avoids jargon, and explains public health and community wellbeing strategies with analogies involving frogs and ponds and building houses.  

Cracco’s plain-speaking approach may serve her well as she continues her role as assistant vice chancellor for Campus Life and Wellbeing, a newly-created position at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, aimed at one of the biggest challenges facing higher education today — improving wellbeing among a generation of students reporting high rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Cracco’s office oversees Recreation and Wellbeing, Residential Life, and the Center for Counseling and Psychological Health, a three-legged stool supporting students’ psychological and physical health.  She said the nexus of all of these domains underpins her mission.  

“One of the biggest prescription pads we have is making connections and creating a sense of belonging–and you can’t do that from a seat in the counseling center alone,” she said. 

Cracco said cabinet-level wellness positions like hers are becoming more common on college campuses, due to the increased concern over student mental health and the growing acknowledgment that what has been called the campus mental health crisis is more of a public health problem, meaning multiple departments need to get involved to address it. In many ways, Cracco’s professional trajectory aligns with this expanded view. 

After graduating from College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, Cracco received a master’s degree in counseling from Boston College, then a doctorate in counseling psychology from the University of Wisconsin Madison.  Holy Cross, a Jesuit school, had a strong sense of community and it was there that she took an interest in mind-body practices and attending retreats. Her first job was in residential life, living in a dorm, where she quickly learned that the position functioned as a way for students to share their personal stories, from eating disorders to relationship issues.  Her professional training included the relational culture model out of Wellesley College, a feminist ideology that puts the emphasis on the individual in context within the community. This led her to apply a public health approach to her work. 

“It occurs to you after you go from client to client in direct care that something else is wrong,” she said. “There is a systemic problem here we need to think about.  In other words, if all of the frogs in the pond are sick, why are we still asking, ‘What’s wrong with this frog?’” 

Cracco said her metaphorical move up-stream started early. When she was head of counseling at the University of Connecticut, she began a retreat program called C2 for “Connect and Challenge,” involving whitewater rafting, storytelling, and meditation. When the new position of (then called) executive director of wellness opened at UMass Amherst, the state flagship campus, Cracco went for it.  In her pitch presentation, her first slide included Maya Angelou’s advice on what we need to ask each other when we move into any social setting:  “Do you see me? Do I know that you care about me? Is it important I am here?” 

“If all of the frogs in the pond are sick, why are we still asking, ‘What’s wrong with this frog?’”

“If we could enact this same approach at a community level, it would mean that no matter what your struggles are, you would be held and you would not be alone because your community mates would be there, many going through the same struggles,” said Cracco. 

When she got the job in 2019, Cracco asked herself, “Am I hired to create a cohesion across three units on a campus, or am I hired to promote wellbeing across the entire campus?” She figured, either way, it was about crossing silos and making connections, something that became surprisingly possible during the pandemic and would lead to UMass signing on to the Okanagan Charter: An International Charter for Health Promoting Universities and Colleges. 

“During the pandemic, we really demonstrated how we could work together as a campus and how the academic side of the house can provide real, on-the-ground services. The public health students, the nursing students, they ran the clinics, gave the vaccinations, all of it.  After that, our dean of public health, dean of nursing, and vice chancellor of student affairs got together and said, ‘How can we keep this going?’  We figured the starting point was signing on to the Okanagan Charter.” 

Having the buy-in from then Chancellor, Kumble Subbaswamy, a prerequisite in signing the charter, meant that everyone on campus had some responsibility to promote wellbeing, including faculty.  Cracco said the tie-in to student success helped make the case.  

“You are not going to do well academically if you never sleep, eat trash, and have no social life, and we need to communicate that to students,” she said. “We all need to get out of the boxes we’ve made.” 

As an example of out-of-the-box thinking, Cracco’s team introduced a curriculum developed by the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Mass General Hospital, called Positivity and Relaxation.  The nine-session, credit-bearing course is taught in small groups and helps students self-regulate around anxiety in particular, but also depression.  It is not an alternative to therapy for those who need it, but an option for all students on campus. Cracco said they are running 300 to 400 students a year through these small group sessions and they’re receiving data on its effectiveness from the school of public health. 

“You are not going to do well academically if you never sleep, eat trash, and have no social life, and we need to communicate that to students.”

“We are seeing tremendous reductions in stress, increases in wellbeing, even increases in sense of belonging,” said Cracco.  

The course is funded by her office, but not owned and operated by any one department.  As she tinkers with its scale, Cracco is working with professionals within and beyond campus on developing other courses, some involving storytelling, and working closely with a colleague on courses specific to building resilience and belonging in students of color. As big a fan as she is of retreats, she said representation is an important consideration to watch in mind-body practices. “Who is teaching these practices?” she asks. “How do students feel when they are in them? There’s definitely a privileged, “Lululemon” subculture that exists here and we need to be aware of that.” 

As far as other programs go, whether it’s pond fire chats or another unnamed project involving swings she is secretly plotting, Cracco is full force as long as it is about making connections and forming relationships.  One of her latest efforts is to create quiet dining spaces for groups to eat “family style.”   

“We should be structuring connections at every turn,” she said. Asked about how this work plays out in the classroom, Cracco made an interesting point about technologies like ChatGPT. 

“We are no longer in a system where we have a person who has all the knowledge and people who receive that knowledge, because knowledge is everywhere,” she said. “Now, the process of learning is the process of learning together, like we do in the real world, and that is going to force a structure that is more communal, more experiential.”  

Cracco is optimistic about the wellness work taking place at UMass: “I think people are getting the upstream thing,” she said.  At the same time, the down-to-earth Cracco is realistic about how much can be done, given what she calls “the tyranny of time.” As an example, she leans into her first higher ed job in residential life and compares that to the myriad of duties and trainings that those professionals now need to complete.   

“What these people really want to be doing is making space for students,” she said. “We need professional staff to attend to those crisis situations, and these can be incredibly time consuming. How do we develop the human capital to make space for connection beyond, before and apart from the crises?”

Welcoming Wellbeing into the Classroom

Posted on by Amadeo Rodriguez

In 2005, Georgetown professor Joan Riley was walking across campus when she had an epiphany that would change the way she thought about teaching.  Riley has just been to an evening meeting of the “Friends” group—an intradepartmental team of administrators, students, and faculty members who were working together on harm reduction strategies to combat student alcohol misuse.  The silo-crossing activity was unusual for higher ed and got Riley thinking from a different perspective.

“I remember stopping in the middle of campus and asking myself, ‘What can I, as a professor, do to help address this problem?” The next day, she told the undergraduate students in her Health Promotion and Disease Prevention course to throw away their syllabi. For the rest of the semester, they studied the effects of alcohol throughout one’s lifetime, from the metabolic breakdown of alcohol, to familial alcohol patterns, to binge drinking, all in a way that engaged students both academically and personally.

“When you bring topics like these into the academic setting and use evidence to describe them, students listen in a way they don’t with other interventions,” said Riley.  “I started asking, ‘Why aren’t we talking about these subjects inside the classroom?’”

Riley’s seemingly simple question would lead to a precedent-setting initiative in curriculum infusion called the Engelhard Project for Connecting Life and Learning. Launched in 2005, out of Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), the Engelhard Project engages faculty in making connections between students’ academic studies and their broader life experiences, especially in the areas of well-being, flourishing, and mental health. You don’t have to be in health studies or psychology to teach an “Engelhard course,” as it is not so much about the topic as it is about the technique of combining learning with personal growth. While this approach is often touted, it is reluctantly applied in higher education, even at schools like Georgetown that seek to teach to the whole person.

“The tradition of academe, especially in highly competitive settings, was the radical mind-body split,” said Randy Bass, who led the creation of Engelhard as executive director of CNDLS and now oversees an education innovation unit at the school. “Classrooms were places for your head and the rest of the campus was the place for your body and soul.”

Building the Bridge

For Georgetown, the Engelhard Project’s effort to fuse these personal dimensions has been a steady progression, starting shortly after Riley’s course shake-up, and continuing to this day with the full weight of the president’s office behind it.  Georgetown President John J. DeGioia sees the project as the embodiment of the Jesuit school’s mission and is quick to thank the other woman who made it possible. Sally Engelhard Pingree funded CNDLS’ first proposal to infuse wellbeing into the classroom through Bringing Theory to Practice (BT2P), a fund she launched with Don Harward, who was, at the time, president of Bates College. Motivated by the personal experiences of Pingree’s daughter when she was a student at Bates, BT2P seeded campuses with the support to craft programs that focus on the intersection of student well-being, engaged learning, and civic engagement.

At an early BT2P conference, Riley met a faculty colleague in the Department of Philosophy named Alisa Carse and learned that she, too, was doing similar integration. Together with a student and the head of the counseling center, the Georgetown team began to explore how to make curriculum infusion its own program.  Under the leadership of Professor Randy Bass and Todd Olson, who was then vice president of Student Affairs, and others, Georgetown sought and received two rounds of multi-year funding to establish the framework, staff, and criteria for the new inter-disciplinary program. They named the program the Engelhard Faculty Fellows, with a nod to the professors who were recruited to mold the classes to their own design and comfort level. In 2010, they received an endowment gift from Pingree for what is now called The Engelhard Project for Connecting Life and Learning.

“The tradition of academe, especially in highly competitive settings, was the radical mind-body split. Classrooms were places for your head and the rest of the campus was the place for your body and soul.”

“I wanted students to be healthier and supported and Georgetown was a perfect fit as a campus already dedicated to looking at the whole person,” said Pingree. “I feel very lucky to be included and able to interact with faculty and staff doing this work in the Engelhard community of practice and to witness the positive impacts on faculty and the Georgetown community.”

“Georgetown leaned into something that was deeply connected to their mission and then went about engaging faculty in ways that honored their time and seeded ownership,” said Ashley Finley, who was a national evaluator for BT2P and is now vice president for research and senior advisor to the president for the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U).  In addition to the “faculty first” mentality, Finley said the intra-departmental nature of the work, led by an advisory committee of faculty, staff, and administrators, created a unique and powerful learning community.  

What began as five original classes has grown to over 500 courses in a wide variety of disciplines, with a combined student enrollment of 25,000 and the involvement of over 150 faculty members. Joselyn Lewis was a graduate associate at Georgetown when Engelhard first launched and she now leads the project as part of her education development work for faculty and graduate students at CNDLS.

Lewis is responsible for a large portion of faculty coming into the program and is adept at identifying the “sweet spot” that might get them engaged in designing or redesigning their course to integrate an element of student wellbeing.  Part of the recruitment involves reassuring faculty members who worry they will cross a boundary by bringing personal issues into the classroom or will “screw up” the unfamiliar approach.  Lewis addresses this by offering a robust orientation session and continued support along the way.  Monthly meetings and social gatherings for all Engelhard participants, past and present, are another level of security and offer friendships with colleagues one might not otherwise get to know. 

Part of reducing the barrier to entry is the program’s intentionally simple criteria. Faculty are asked to choose a wellbeing topic that connects to the course they teach. For one course meeting, they bring in a partner from a student-facing service area. This can be a clinician from Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), an expert in healthy eating, a Title IX coordinator, a DEI officer, even a financial aid advisor.  They then ask students to do a reflective writing piece about the experience.  

What does this look like for students? Lewis said most are unaware that they are in an Engelhard course as the wellbeing topics are so well integrated into the subject matter. They may study mental health within Foundations of Biology; examine sexual assault as part of Introduction to Ethics; or discuss anxiety in The Physics of Climate Change. The difference, whether they know it or not, is that the courses are designed to make connections that build relationships with their professors and with each other. 

Lewis said while the student affairs professionals appreciate the effectiveness of sharing important information inside the classroom, the program’s effects on teaching and learning at Georgetown have been profound. She said some faculty choose to do just the basics which allows students to make a connection between the content they are learning and their own wellbeing. Others do “All Engelhard, all the time,” embracing a full pedagogical shift that welcomes students’ interior lives into the learning process.

“I have faculty say to me ‘Engelhard gives me permission to teach the way I’ve always wanted to,” said Lewis. “I just didn’t know that it would be valued.’”

Just Breathe

Jennifer Woolard was one of the first faculty members to teach an Engelhard course at Georgetown and continues to do so today. As a psychology professor, she was eager to find a way to humanize mental health topics and found that forging a partnership with a professional from CAPS was a powerful statement that said, “Mental health is part of life.”  She begins every class with a breathing exercise as a way to ground students and ask that they pause and be present. For high achieving “perfectionists” like many of those who attend Georgetown, taking a moment like this can mean a lot.

“For me, Engelhard is about modeling,” said Woolard. “Taking the time out of class to discuss these issues, to invite colleagues from other departments in to join me, says to my students that I care about their wellbeing.”  Woolard said that the student reflections confirm this. One student reported, “I felt cared for—like the professor was genuinely interested in our wellbeing rather than us just churning out good grades.”

“I think the most powerful thing about being an Engelhard faculty member is that it allows you to communicate to your students that you care about them as people,” said Bass.

“I have faculty say to me, ‘Engelhard gives me permission to teach the way I’ve always wanted to,’” said Lewis.  “‘I just didn’t know that it would be valued.’”

In the near two decades since Engelhard was launched, rates of anxiety and depression reported by college students have nearly doubled.  During the 2020–2021 school year, more than 60% of college students met the criteria for at least one mental health problem, a near 50% increase from 2013, according to the Healthy Minds Study.  The stress and isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated these issues.  A 2021 survey of over 1,000 faculty across 12 diverse institutions by the Mary Christie Institute, the Boston University School of Public Health and the Healthy Minds Network found a strong majority (87%) believed that student mental health had “worsened” or “significantly worsened” during COVID-19. Almost 80% had one-on-one phone, video, or email conversations with students about their mental health. 

“There isn’t a faculty member in this country that doesn’t see that our students are struggling,” said Riley, pointing to a list over her door of the mental health issues she asked her students to identify having experienced. Loneliness topped the list.

“At the beginning, we didn’t talk a lot about addressing mental health issues in recruiting professors,” said Lewis. “They were really concerned about crossing that line into counseling, which is why our early work focused more on awareness of the campus safety net and referring students to CAPS.” Now, she said, faculty are becoming more comfortable with discussing mental health with their students; many open up about their own struggles. “A lot of our faculty say, ‘If I’m asking my students to come as whole people, I have to be able to model that.’”

While many professors value the Engelhard Project’s role in prioritizing mental health issues amidst alarming prevalence numbers, others resonate with decades of strong evidence on the impact of relationship-based learning on a range of positive student outcomes.  In their book, Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College, Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert cite ample evidence of this, including Mathew Mayhew’s book How College Affects Students, and write, “Students’ interactions with peers, faculty, and staff positively influence the breadth and depth of student learning, retention and graduation rates, and a wide range of other outcomes, including critical thinking, identity development, communication skills, and leadership abilities.”

Lewis said referencing literature on the strength of the pedagogy has convinced many professors to join the Engelhard Project and is one reason its appeal has crossed over into numerous departments.  While the faculty representation skews heavily female, the program has a good ratio of humanities and STEM courses.  One neuroscience professor told Lewis, “It’s not my job to know who my students are, but I am open to doing this because I believe it will make them better scientists.”  

Randy Bass said that some of the places the Engelhard Project has worked the best are those that are the least obvious, like in the sciences.  “If you ask students to examine the biological basis of any mental health issue,” as they do in a long-running Engelhard course taught by Heidi Elmendorf, “they will choose topics such as their mother’s alcoholism, their brother’s autism, their own eating disorder, or someone they know who was suicidal.  These are unbelievably personal connections that deepen their knowledge and appreciation of what it means to study biology.”

Can this Idea be Scaled?

Engelhard leaders are not aware of the existence of another wellbeing curriculum infusion program, to this degree, on any other US campus. They receive a fair amount of requests for information from other schools and try to respond among limited time and information. Outcomes for the project are largely anecdotal, but they have begun a check list for other schools on what needs to be in place for a program like this to gain traction, starting with a multi-stakeholder leadership team, an academic orientation, and the availability of willing student affairs professionals. This last category can be a problem for schools with fewer resources, but for the most part, the project is low cost, particularly when compared to more direct mental health interventions.  It is an important equity consideration as advocates like Felton and Lambert argue that high-impact practices, like those within the Engelhard Project, are particularly beneficial for first-generation, low-income students, and students of color.

At Georgetown, enrollment in the project has stayed about the same for several years despite a growing acknowledgement of its many benefits. Part of the plateau may be a continued reluctance, on the part of some faculty, to embrace the personal side of students. While this appears to be changing, Woolard says professors who view Engelhard as too “touchy feely” should probably sit out.  “There may be some faculty members for whom this is not a good option,” she said. 

Riley, who also recruits for the Engelhard Project, said professors are worried the project will take time away from their many responsibilities.  “The irony is the Engelhard method makes you a better teacher—like exercising over time—and that works in your favor when it comes to managing multiple roles.”

Another theory is that the Engelhard Project may still be ahead of its time. “I think what education will become about is the development of the inner self in relationship to the capacity to do external work, what we’ve called “the inner/outer” problem,” said Bass.  “That’s the next frontier in higher education, but most of higher education doesn’t know that yet.”

New Classroom Tech Tool Gets Students Talking

Posted on by Amadeo Rodriguez

As faculty consider which technology tools to try this school year, they may be interested to know there is now one available that helps their students speak up in class. AskClass is a simple teaching tool that gets students talking and lets professors know who to call on next.  Part AI and part behavioral science, AskClass may appear rudimentary, but founders hope that it can help higher education address new concerns about academic disengagement and social anxiety among Gen Z students. 

Damon Moon, a management consultant turned adjunct business professor at San Jose State University, created AskClass with a development partner.  He uses the tool in all his classes and has made it available as a commercial product for professors across the country. Moon said the absence of normal conversation caused by students’ preoccupation with phones and social media, coupled with the emotional side-effects of the pandemic, served as motivation to create a tool that would bring robust conversation back into the classroom.  

“Today’s students can go for hours without talking and the first thing they’ll likely ask is, ‘Do you have a charger?’” Moon joked, though he believes the ramifications of this are serious from both a teaching and a mental health perspective.    

He described the tool as a combination of gamification, data analytics, and a little bit of nudging. The formula is simple and straightforward.  When students enter class, they are met with classical piano music and an “icebreaker” question projected on the AskClass screen, often side-by-side with class content.  The question could be anything from “If you have $100 to donate, where would you give it and why?” to “What is your favorite movie?” Students are asked to discuss their answers with their classmates, as music continues in the background.  Those that share with the entire class are given points that are tallied in real time on the roster on the AskClass screen which displays all of the students’ first and last names.

The point system continues throughout the lecture with many opportunities for students to speak up and get credit.  Professors are encouraged to create class experiences that naturally lead to discussion, like team projects that require a “report out,” providing another chance at points.  A timer helps guide the more introverted students, letting them know there’s a start and finish to their efforts.  Professors, acting more like coaches, yell motivational instructions like “Lucas, you have two minutes to recap the discussion. Go!”

An advantage for faculty, particularly those teaching in large lecture halls, is that they can see who has not participated and can welcome them into the conversation.  Another tactic, the Random Person Selector, calls on students indiscriminately, removing any perception of bias on the professor’s part.

“Raising your hand can be really uncomfortable for some students, particularly those from Eastern Asian countries where it is contrary to our culture,” said Moon, who is from Korea.  “But at the same time, being asked to participate, or having your name randomly come up on the screen, can be the onramp many students need to join the conversation.”

Outcome data from Moon’s classes show that 96% of students said they are more comfortable speaking up in class; and 95% of students said they had better team dynamics compared to other classes. Additionally, 98% of students made a new friend as a result of AskClass.

“AskClass is pretty much your best friend starting the conversation for you in a group of kids,” said Diamon, a senior at San Jose State who is originally from East Africa. “And the points are awesome,” he said. 

Moon said the point system is a reinforcing mechanism that works well with students in direct and subtle ways. Students are familiar with “rewards” programs, like those at Starbucks or their credit cards, and are comfortable competing in digital games.  For classes where professors offer participation credit toward grades, as Moon does, it is a significant motivator.

Outcome data show that 96% of students said they are more comfortable speaking up in class; and 95% of students said they had better team dynamics compared to other classes. Additionally, 98% of students made a new friend as a result of AskClass.

“I am a very competitive person, so for me to be able to see in real time the points I get, made me really want to participate every single day,” said Lily, a student at San Jose State.  “It makes participation fun; It’s like a game.”

Bob DuBois, PhD, known as ‘Dr. Bob,” is associate director of undergraduate studies and a senior lecturer in the psychology department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He said any way to get students talking in class was of interest to him as a professor. When he heard about AskClass from a podcast featuring Moon, he decided to pilot it in his classroom. He now says it has played a big role in building community in his class.   

“It just changed the entire dynamic,” he said.  “What was once the same three or four students dominating the discussion suddenly became everybody wanting to join in because they could see that they were getting credit for that and watching their points go up.”

DuBois believes students learn more as a result, particularly first-generation students (of which he was one), who often lack the confidence to take risks within the classroom.  He also sees AskClass as a way for busy students to make friends in a place where they spend so much of their time.  “I see AskClass as kind of a scaffolding for building relationships, which is incredibly important on modern campuses where students are so busy that they are not prioritizing making friends.” 

Building relationships that lead to better mental health is an intended benefit of AskClass and one that Moon talks about in his sales pitch. Keith, a recent San Jose State graduate who met his girlfriend through Moon’s class said, “Just being able to put yourself out there in a low stakes environment, especially a learning environment, is so good for your mental wellbeing.”  

“You no longer feel like a spectator. You’re not just sitting there, getting the information and storing it in your brain. Instead, you feel a part of everything.”

Nareg, a former student in Moon’s class, said AskClass creates an environment where people can freely share what’s going on in their lives.  “I think it really creates a sense of belonging for students of any kind of background.  Anyone can come into engagement and find something to talk about, something they have in common with the person next to them.  And then when the professor ties it all together, it creates a holistic environment where everyone has a sense of belonging.”

For Julia, who is from Brazil, the five-minute icebreaker that gets students talking doubles as a stress reliever when moving from one content-rich class to the next. But what she appreciates most about AskClass is the way it gives students agency in the classroom. 

“You no longer feel like a spectator,” she said. “You’re not just sitting there, getting the information and storing it in your brain.  Instead, you feel a part of everything.”

AskClass is now being used by 700 professors at 130 institutions across the country, and Moon is eager for it to expand even more. The tech entrepreneur and business professor said generating a profit from the relatively modest licensing fee is not his motivation, and it is unclear if his technology-based engagement tool is the real differentiator in the satisfaction his students so eagerly reported.  Is it good technology or just good teaching?

Dr. Bob said, “AskClass makes the process of asking questions and soliciting answers structured in a way that we don’t forget how important that is.”