What makes a course “rigorous”?
If you asked this question to a handful of your faculty colleagues, you would likely receive a handful of responses.
Academic rigor is tricky to define. Does it refer to the cognitive demand of the course, where higher-order skills on Bloom’s taxonomy reflect a greater degree of intellectual “rigor”? Does it include pace? Time and energy that a student devotes to the course? The number of fancy-sounding letters after the instructor’s name?
My general sense of academic rigor has certainly changed since I first started teaching. In my early years, my students enjoyed a winning combination of cognitively complex but underscaffolded work, rapid-fire pace, and dense readings. Rigorous, right?! Thankfully, my pedagogy has evolved.
But the biggest shift in my thinking about academic rigor came just a few months ago, when I discovered an 2018 article on students’ perception of academic rigor.
Like faculty, students also struggle to articulate what makes a course “hard” or “easy” for them. Could it be the complex mental gymnastic feats they perform on each exam? Could it be the weekly 10,000-word essays? Were they scheduled to give an oral presentation immediately after Sparty weekend?
The authors surveyed students in 100- and 300-level biology courses about their perceptions of what made each class “hard” or “easy.” Then, students’ responses were coded into categories: cognitive demand, preparation/interest coming into the course, workload, pace, relevance of content, alignment between content and assessments (e.g., did exams cover key content), and faculty support.
They found:
- Students perceive a course to be rigorous (or not) for many reasons. Only one of them, cognitive demand, is relatively specific to the intellectual, Blooms-type work they’re doing in the course.
- Many students reported that courses were “hard” or “easy” based largely on how the course was designed or conducted. Specific examples include course structure, pace, assessment design, and so forth – in other words, all pedagogical decisions that we make when we design our syllabus, choose course materials, craft assignments, and conduct each class.
- Students were able to identify “hard” or “easy” aspects of the same course, using these categories. For instance, students in an active learning course could discriminate between aspects of that particular course that made it hard (cognitive demand) and aspects that made it easy (instructor support).
- Students’ responses on many of these categories changed between the 100- and 300-level course. For instance, more 300-level students reported their course was hard because of the “high cognitive demand” than did the 100-level students. While many students said that a “low/manageable workload” made a course easier, this was more pronounced in the 100-level students, many of whom were first-year students and thus more likely to be adjusting to college.
I found this framework so valuable, I now include it in my anonymous midterm feedback. After asking my typical start-stop-continue questions, I ask students to sort these “rigor” items into categories of “this makes our course harder for me,” “this makes our course easier for me,” or “not sure/it depends.” Not only has this provided more specific and actionable feedback to me, but it also (hopefully) presents a new schema for our students to use to reflect on their classroom experience.
So, as we enter our final few weeks of the semester, join me in a quick thought-experiment:
How can we make our courses easier for students via appropriate scaffolding, transparent guidelines, and non-traditional approaches to assessment? To what extent do these efforts signal our growth mindset regarding students’ abilities, and thus contribute to students’ sense of belonging and self-efficacy in our courses? Could making our course “easy” in select ways actually enable us to engage our students in cognitively “harder” coursework?
I wonder if such changes might ultimately make our teaching easier, too…
Kate Cammack, Department of Psychology