Excerpts from Bok's Annual Report

The following is excerpted from President Derek C. Bok's annual report to the Board of Overseers released yesterday. This portion of the report is an analysis of Harvard's teaching situation, identifying some problems and including recommendations for reforms:

Favored with an outstanding faculty and an exceptional student body, Harvard rarely experiences much pressure from competitive forces or outside agencies to work systematically at enhancing the quality of its education. The motivation to improve must come from within, generated by a love of learning, a concern for students and a strong sense of professional responsibility. The question we must ask ourselves periodically is how well this challenge is being met.

Traditionally, the collective energies that universities devote to education have gone first to reviewing the curriculum. Harvard is no exception to the rule. Within the past few years, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has produced its Core Curriculum, the Medical School has developed a New Pathway, the Divinity School has revamped its curriculum for preparing ministers, and other faculties have reviewed and improved important parts of their teaching program...

The quality of instruction poses different questions. On this score, it is fashionable to condemn Harvard and other leading universities for neglecting teaching in favor of an all-consuming preoccupation with research. Much of this criticism focuses on the methods used in making faculty appointments. In fact, appointments procedures throughout the University make provision for considering each candidate's teaching skills. Nevertheless, critics often reply that if Harvard really cared about instruction it would award tenure to outstanding teachers even though they have not produced distinguished research. This reaction fails to take account of all that is involved in making wise tenure decisions. In universities, teaching goes on at many levels--in undergraduate classrooms, in the mentoring of new generations of teachers and scholars and through the dissemination of published scholarship to audiences beyond the campus. Each of these functions is important, and each must be respected in building the faculty if a university is to make its full contribution to learning and discovery...

What is needed now is a careful effort to identify the methods [now used at Harvard to evaluate quality of teaching and education] and to employ them more systematically. For example, there is no reason why every school should not offer its faculty some means of helping to fund promising new courses or innovations in teaching. Nor it is too much to expect that all new assistant professors and teaching fellows should have some form of orientation and assistance to help them develop their abilities in the classroom.

Still greater opportunities exist to help students learn more effectively, for this is a field to which few universities have devoted a great deal of attention. In some schools, students have not even received any thoughtful communication to inform them of what they are supposed to accomplish through their course of study. In most, faculty members do not make it a regular practice to come together and consider how they might adapt their teaching, their class assignments, and their methods of evaluation to help their students achieve the goals toward which their education is supposedly directed...

Since academic life is strongly individualistic, faculty members are understandably wary of efforts to encourage more collaboration; any hint of regimentation encounters immediate resistance. Even so, we need more opportunities to address common educational questions, for problems that do exist that cannot be resolved in any other way. For example, everyone would agree that teaching students to reason carefully and systematically is an important aim of undergraduate education. Yet a survey conducted last year revealed that, despite the popularity of the Core Program, students felt that among the more than one hundred new courses, only two or three actually helped them develop their abilities to think critically. Clearly, there is a problem here that calls for some collective deliberation.

The quality of feedback to students represents another opportunity for creative thought. In some cases, such as a well-run studio course in the School of Design or a good tutorial in the College, immediate feedback is built into the very method of instruction. In many instances, however, the process does not work so well...

Because it takes time to evaluate peers and communicate the results to students, the problem of feedback poses special problems in the hectic environment of a research university. Yet ingenuity may produce ways of improving feedback without requiring unreasonable amounts of faculty time. Greater efforts can be made to train graduate students to give more helpful, detailed comments on papers and exams. Professors can supply model answers or analyses of exam questions to explain the elements of a competent answer. Computers open up impressive opportunities for allowing students to test their comprehension of new and difficult material. These possibilities only underscore the need for more collective thought to find ways of giving adequate feedback that do not make excessive demands on faculty time.

Of all the opportunities for improving teaching and learning at Harvard, the least developed is undoubtedly research on the process of education itself. Like other universities, we have not succeeded in establishing a strong research program, responsive to deans and curriculum committees, where investigators can examine questions of practical significance to the faculties...

This is not to say that no work has been done along these lines....For example, a study comparing the writing abilities of freshmen and seniors disclosed that science concentrators often regressed, since they received so few writing assignments and often lacked an incentive even to express themselves in complete sentences. Following this study, several professors of large science courses increased the number of their writing assignments. In yet another study, surveys of students a year after completing the basic course in economics disclosed that most of them had retained the concepts they had learned but had forgotten much of the terminology and had spent little time reading articles about economic questions in newspapers and magazines. These results led to course revisions which weeded out some terminological detail, emphasized the conceptual material, and substituted contemporary issues on place of the abstract, classical problems previously given to the class.

These efforts are suggestive. They indicate that research, even in its current state of development, can still throw valuable light on specific issues of immediate practical significance. Yet a comprehensive program of educational research cannot dwell only on current questions. We must also develop more reliable techniques for evaluating educational programs and teaching methods. To that end, we hope to launch next year a faculty seminar on assessment under the leadership of Professor Richard Light, an expert in problems of evaluation. This seminar, which will include representatives from other universities, will consider the current state of educational research. In time, it will also design and sponsor some specific projects to investigate issues of particular interest to Harvard and similar institutions.

The importance of such work is already great and promises to grow even greater in the future. If government officials insist on assessing the quality of higher education in ways that will affect the lives of students and the welfare of institutions, it is essential that the means of evaluation be more sophisticated than the standardized tests currently used for these purposes...

Of course, we know efforts to evaluate education will be very difficult. Even so, they are no more difficult than many other problems to which committed scholars devote their professional lives. It would be anomalous not to pay the same, serious attention to understanding a process so central to the purposes of the University. Rather than hesitate, therefore, we should take inspiration from the story President Kennedy used to tell about the French General Louis Lyautey who once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow-growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. "In that case," Lyautey responded, "there is no time to lose. We must plant it this afternoon."