Are students learning? Should we care?

As always, James Lang has something interesting for me in his latest column in the Chronicle of Higher Education, where he inquires into why students do not seem to apply what they learnt:

In their excellent book, How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching, Susan Ambrose and her co-authors describe the cognitive activity of applying learned material from one course to another and beyond as "far transfer." They note correctly that it might be the most fundamental expectation we have for our students.
"Far transfer is, arguably," they point out, "the central goal of education: We want our students to be able to apply what they learn beyond the classroom."

Yes, of course, the central goal is not about tests, but about students learning to apply their knowledge.  To apply them in the class they are in; to apply them in other courses; and, more importantly, to apply them outside the formal classroom environment.

Lang adds:

But in practice, as How Learning Works makes clear, "far transfer" turns out to be a much more complicated process than many of us might expect, or that I might imply in my blithely hopeful syllabus talk.
"Most research has found," the authors explain, "that (a) transfer occurs neither often nor automatically, and (b) the more dissimilar the learning and transfer contexts, the less likely successful transfer will occur. In other words, much as we would like them to, students often do not successfully apply relevant skills or knowledge in novel contexts."
In short, the further we move students away from the very specific context in which they have learned some information or skill, the less transfer we should expect to see.

It is terrible that we--students and teachers--spend quite some time and money, and then we find that education and knowledge takes on a variation of the old Vegas line: what happens in the classroom, stays in the classroom!

My hypothesis is that such a situation exists because, well, that is how most of us engage with students.  Well, "we" in the global sense of faculty--my approach is so off the traditional teaching and testing that I like to think that the outcomes in my classes will reflect the students' abilities to transfer knowledge.  But then, maybe not eh!

I remain convinced that student learning will be enhanced--and this includes their ability to transfer and apply the knowledge gained--if faculty operated like public intellectuals in the classroom.  As Tim Clydesdale observed:

We need to teach as if our students were colleagues from another department. That means determining what our colleagues may already know, building from that shared knowledge, adapting pre-existing analytic skills, then connecting those fledgling skills and knowledge to a deeper understanding of the discipline we love. In other words, we need to approach our classrooms as public intellectuals eager to share our insights graciously with a wide audience of fellow citizens.

Instead, we enter the classrooms erroneously believing that our job is to merely lecture and test them on whatever they had memorized.  We even bullshit pontificate in the classroom, falsely convinced that students wouldn't know the difference between analysis and opinion.  Well, some of them do not, and that is a different story all together.  If only faculty kept in mind an advice to students from centuries past:

In one of Plato's dialogues, Socrates warns a student that teachers can be dangerous. "You do not even know to whom you are committing your soul," Socrates says, "and whether the thing to which you commit yourself be good or evil."

I am trying my best not to be dangerous, Professor Plato!