The Norm of the Consolidation of Responsibility

As I begin a new semester, it’s good to be reminded of how to maximize classroom time to engage students in dynamic discussion. Hence I’ve been reading Jay Howard’s excellent Discussion in the College Classroom. The third chapter titled “The Challenge of Dominant Talkers” discusses the very common phenomenon where only a small number of students will actively engage and speak more than once. This seems to hold true even for small class sizes, unless the class is tiny (in the single digits). My classes are typically in the 20-40 range and I’ve certainly observed this to be the case. But I learned from Howard that there’s a name for this phenomenon: the norm of the consolidation of responsibility (started by Karp and Yoels in 1976).

Since there’s now a body of research into this norm, it is interesting to note some of the key findings. I’ll quote several sentences from Howard. “Students, particularly male students, have a tendency to significantly overestimate their level of participation in class discussion.” Apparently this can lead to “the perception that males dominate class discussion, which is not supported by the evidence.” Taking into account many studies, it turns out that student participation is overall similar regardless of gender.

Here’s another gender related observation. “Students will claim that instructor gender is not related to their level of participation in a course.” However it turns out that courses with women instructors have higher student participation in class discussion. Some suggested reasons to explain this include “female faculty members may be less likely than male faculty to rely on lecture as their sole pedagogical strategy.”

There are several other interesting correlations that Howard pulls together, but what was particularly useful in this chapter is his suggestions of how to overcome or reduce the norm of consolidation of responsibility. There are a few strategies on how to slow down dominant talkers, encouraging quiet students, creating an environment that aids non-native speakers, and making large classes feel smaller to the students. All these tips are familiar to those who read the literature on teaching and learning so there’s nothing earth-shattering here – but it’s a great reminder. So if you find this interesting, I encourage you to read Howard’s book.

A final interesting nugget in the chapter provided by Howard: In at least one study, “the great majority of questions asked by college professors were at the lowest cognitive level – memory-oriented questions.” Furthermore, “faculty in science, math, and engineering courses asked significantly more of these lower-level questions than did faculty in the humanities, sciences and arts.” This has now made me more conscious about the type of questions I ask in class. Turns out that the same study “did not find any significant differences by disciplinary area in the number of higher-order questions asked.” I’m not sure how to interpret this except that it might suggest that STEM professors ask more questions overall in class.

The next chapter is on “Students’ Differing Definitions of the Classroom”. I’m guessing that this means differing with faculty. I’m looking forward to reading it and being reminded of the student perspective!