Transitioning History Students into Higher Education: The Problem of Factorizing Open Access

On 5 September 1939, just 2 days after Britain declared war on Germany, Mass Observation diarist Christopher Tomlin began a year long Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) course on ‘The Problem of Central Europe’. The tutor’s opening gambit was to tell the class that the WEA ‘will show you how to think, not what to think, for yourselves’.¹ As a method of socializing students into the purposes of Higher Education, this statement seems both succinct and sufficiently thought-provoking to prompt discussion. It certainly seems to have made an impact on Tomlin, who took the time to make a note of it in his diary. Clearly, the challenges of socializing students into the goals and approaches informing Higher Education are not new, but in Britain, the sector has evolved rapidly since Tomlin’s experience, with the foundation of many more institutions, the inclusion of far greater numbers of students, the professionalization of academic teachers (Tomlin’s tutor had an MA, not a PhD), and the commercialization of the sector with the introduction of tuition fees. In addition, students are educated in a school environment where there is a National Curriculum, Ofsted inspections, and an expectation that responsibility for learning rests with the teacher, not the student. The delivery of History teaching in schools, especially in recent years, has changed drastically, and the assumptions informing learning in schools will be unfamiliar to most academic historians. Teachers in Higher Education bring assumptions and practices to their teaching, which are not necessarily shared by their students, so there is a risk that these two groups are simply talking past each other. In Higher Education, students are adults who are responsible for their own learning, and the concept of the academic as a facilitator for learning, as well as someone who is exploring their discipline as part of an academic community which includes students, has become deeply embedded since the 1990s, as my former colleague Alan Booth has noted.² A key problem, then, is that the gap between A level and degree is now a chasm, not so much intellectually but in terms of the assumptions about learning that are being brought to bear. The result is bafflement, confusion, and often resentment, on both sides, with students sometimes disengaging from their studies. As Jones et al. have noted in reference to Tinto’s ideas, ‘students become despondent when their anticipated goals clash with the university’s expectations’.³ This reflection will focus on a particular aspect at the centre of student confusion, namely assessments, not least because students have been taught in environments where poor results can impact on teachers’ careers, and in consequence teaching to the test is the norm. Strategies have been developed involving the creation of formulae, and an emphasis upon keywords, which is alien to Higher Education. This piece is not primarily about strategies for teaching what Carless and Boud refer to as ‘student feedback literacy’.⁴ Instead, it seeks to identify some of the ‘tacit knowledge’ discussed by Mansi, which students bring to their degree-level assessments.⁵

To be clear, this is not an attempt to mock confused students, to attack school teachers, or to suggest that those of us teaching in Higher Education are in some way superior beings who know best. This is not about replicating the ‘deficit’ model outlined by Wolscheid et al., in which responsibility for preparing for assessments rests solely with students.⁶ On the contrary, the aim is to identify a key problem for History student transitions into Higher Education in a sympathetic way, because without identifying it, we cannot hope to address it. There are good reasons for the emergence of instrumental approaches to learning within the school context, including the use of formulae within assessments, which do not translate readily into the context of a History degree. Responses such as induction sessions, peer mentoring schemes, and a focus on ‘the student experience’ have been widespread. There has also been an awareness that students struggle conceptually, with Arthur Chapman’s work providing the insightful observation that ‘students often think in naïve realist ways about historical interpretations and assume (a) that the past has a fixed identity and meaning, (b) that interpretations should ideally mirror this fixed past and, therefore, (c) that historical accounts should be singular and there will, in principle, be one ‘best’ account.’⁷ Chapman has argued that ‘a primary and ongoing pedagogic task is to challenge these assumptions and help students develop more powerful ideas’, not least because the study of the past in a university context places much greater emphasis upon a more fluid and contested view of the past, where a key part of the historians’ role is the critical evaluation of differing, competing, and perhaps complementary interpretations. Such issues are central to the following discussion of factorizing. Much of what follows is a case study which is based on informal discussions with students and direct observation of essays over a period of several years. In the absence of direct experience of the processes, which are current in History teaching in schools, it has taken time to disentangle the various elements of the situation, and this piece is the result.

I coined the term ‘factorizing’ several years ago, after noticing a trend towards identikit essays in which students simply listed a set of factors. In essence, factorizing is a tool for allowing students to develop a standardized History essay structure, on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Factorizing acts as a kind of safety net for students, allowing for a greater feeling of control in an environment where the requirements of assessors can feel opaque. Yet, it is more than this, since it encompasses both a method of writing assessments and an approach to learning. Not surprisingly, students who have learned this approach then apply it to degree-level History assessments, and it takes the following format, more or less: a student looks at an essay question and produces an arbitrary list of factors which they think to answer that question. They then find some bits of reading which back up their ideas and ignore anything which disagrees. The essay is then structured with a factor per paragraph, sometimes naming a historian in the first line whose ideas will not then be explored or even mentioned in the rest of the paragraph. They are there to back up the assertion being made, and the complexities and context of their ideas, the ways in which other historians have responded, and so on are glossed over. There is then a sentence with some exposition of this factor, often with a footnote, along with perhaps a broad example, to ‘back up’ the point. Then there might be a quotation or the name of another historian to ‘prove’ the point and hammer home its correctness even more. This is followed by a sentence, often quite a long one, which is there to provide some exposition on why the student’s point is correct, but this generally features no discussion of the evidence or the wider debate. Finally, there is a concluding sentence that summarizes why the student is correct, often beginning with variations on ‘this shows that’ or ‘this demonstrates that’. Often the preceding discussion has done anything but show that such sweeping assertions are correct, but the aim is to project confidence rather than to get bogged down in nuance and complexity. This formula is then pursued in each of the paragraphs in the essay. Highlighting the limitations of this formula to students, and particularly presenting them with alternatives, can be a transformative moment. This is done in assessment workshops on my modules, including a second-year option on Britain’s Home Front during the Second World War and a final-year Special Subject on the 1960s. Students in such workshops often express fear of the risk of abandoning familiar approaches, and particularly of making mistakes. A further approach is to discuss past assessments from across different modules with students, in one-to-one meetings, in order to identify trends. This has proven to be a highly effective approach which, in several cases, has resulted in a radical transformation in marks, and a sense of intellectual liberation for the students concerned.

Other formulae have also emerged within students’ work in recent years, sometimes in addition to the use of factorizing. For instance, some A level students are told that they must make three points in their essay, and these are often very broad, in order to allow students to include as much as possible in their view on a topic, on the assumption that quantity is better than quality of analysis. Alternatively, some students are advised that when they make a point, they then need to provide one aspect with which they agree and one aspect with which they disagree. This formula became clear to the author after a conversation with a very stressed finalist on my Special Subject, who had spent the bulk of her degree following this formula and getting low marks as a result. During a long conversation about her approach to writing essays, a chance remark gave an indication of the tacit assumptions that were holding the student back. Discussions with subsequent groups of students have indicated that the use of this formula is widespread and that it needs to be highlighted explicitly for students to realize that it is problematic in a university context.

The consequences of factorizing are many and varied and again reflects the problem that it encompasses more than just a formulaic structure. Instead, it is part of a package of assumptions that often run counter to those informing History in a Higher Education context. Students arrive at university to be confronted by a demand that they abandon their assumptions about the past and about learning, in favour of a completely different worldview, which emphasizes an evaluative, contested, and interpretive approach. Moreover, that demand is rarely articulated explicitly, either because academics do not have any experience of the current A level regime, or because there is an emphasis upon other aspects of transitioning into university. Further, McGrath et al. have argued that academic teaching currently focuses largely on imparting ‘content knowledge’, and academics have little experience in teaching about their own tacit values and assumptions.⁸ The result is that academics and students are bringing fundamentally different assumptions to the discussion. A central consideration here is that transition periods should not be conceptualized as encompassing just the first few weeks of a new student’s academic career and that in fact ongoing assessment periods are crucial to the process of allowing students to reposition their approaches to learning. The move away from one set of tacit assumptions to another is unlikely to happen quickly.

If factorizing is not addressed directly as part of the effort to transition History students into degree-level learning, it is then repeated in assessments. Students mine library resources in order to find quotations, examples, or just the names of historians who support their ideas, meaning that they tend to ignore historians’ views who do not agree with their own. Evidence, which is incomplete, contradictory, or problematic, is swept under the carpet in the hope that it will go away. Further, assessments are viewed as an opportunity to show that students know lots of ‘stuff’ and so the mark is the only concern. This is to assume that the university experience is about demonstrating what one already knows and can already do, that the degree does not represent an opportunity to learn new skills or approaches, but that at most History students need to learn about different events in the past, usually by cramming information by rote. This is a thoroughly goal-centred approach, and it ignores the process of getting towards the goal. As one finalist memorably put it ‘I’m not here to learn, I’m here to get a 2.1’. With an educational background that privileged unthinking acceptance of anything which would get a good mark in A level assessments, the contradictions inherent in this statement were completely lost on this student and not surprisingly she did not cope well with degree-level study. As a teacher, seeing a student like this who was clearly frustrated and confused to the point of being reduced to tears, was a distressing experience, and she was far from alone. When confronted by the different requirements at degree level, numerous students, quite understandably, want the degree experience to change so that it is more like the familiar A level approach. When academics refuse to plan essays, to correct drafts, or to provide the ‘answers’ in seminars, this often results in resentment, anger, or confusion, or even all three.

It seems likely that this scenario plays a part in the crisis of non-attendance and non-engagement which is currently a feature of higher education across disciplines and institutions. The ability to embrace doubt and nuance, an evaluative approach, and actually reading for a degree, needs to be nurtured explicitly by academic tutors. This can only be done in an incremental way, since as Mansi has argued, ‘there is a clear argument that moving students from tacit to explicit knowledge of assessment expectations within a specific discipline goes beyond just telling them what to do’.⁹

Students need to learn how to be students, as well as curious and inquisitive historians, over the course of their degree.

Footnotes