Maintaining a high level of academic rigor in our courses is perhaps the strongest shared value amongst educators here at Michigan. Rigor is a vital component of maintaining high standards and encouraging the growth of the future professionals and leaders currently enrolled here. One of the main challenges often cited concerning maintaining a high level of rigor is allowing students flexibility and ensuring equitable opportunities. To discuss the reasons why this is often a false choice, it is important to first define what rigor is and what rigor is not.
The intended goal in a rigorous course is to support students to succeed at academically challenging tasks. A common misconception when it comes to rigor is that logistical challenges and overloading students with work will increase rigor and produce cognitive benefits to students. To quote Kevin Gannon, professor at Queens College and director of its Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence, in his 2021 essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
“The logistical version of rigor, so often deployed, is not correlated with actual learning. Instead, it's nothing more than performative hard assery, meant to convince the public that a "real teacher" is making sure "the kids" are learning without being "pampered," or "coddled," or "let off the hook" from doing the real work of college whatever that may be. Or, as one academic put it, "If an English professor is ever confused about what 'rigor' means I recommend that they speak with someone in the sciences. I'm sorry, but we all know which fields have median grades at the A- or even A level, and it's not any of the sciences."
I see two key problems with that way of framing rigor: (1) It uncouples the notion of rigor from any meaningful act of learning, and (2) It serves to exclude, to gatekeep, to exacerbate the already profound inequities that riddle the entire structure of higher education in this country.
Given this reframing, rigor can be better defined as students demonstrating a high level of learning through challenging work supported by research-backed teaching practices. With this new definition, certain practices become clearly not about the rigor of a course, but instead fall into the logistical difficulty of a course. These practices include, but are not limited to, punitive policies that are not aligned with a learning goal, high-pressure situations, opaque course expectations, lengthy assignments without scaffolding, excessive rote memorization, and in many cases grading on a curve. These practices can often stifle learning and bolster inequities. Student success in courses with this reframing of rigor looks more like students achieving new competencies and pushing the limits of their knowledge and skills to do so.
A course that reduces these excessive logistical challenges to student success can still maintain a high level of vigor by adhering to some key ideas. The first is to ensure that work students complete in the course is challenging academically and not logistically by pushing them to engage with higher order thinking and purposefully designing assignments to deepen mastery and understanding through practice. Second, provide clear educational goals and expectations for the course along with opportunities for support. Lastly, consider testing students using authentic assessment strategies that focus on utilizing their newly acquired skills and knowledge in real-world applications rather than merely testing their knowledge.
If you would like to learn more about how you can apply these principles to your next course, including assistance with assignment and testing design, you can request a consultation with the LSA Learning and Teaching Consultants.
References:
Gannon, Kevin. “Why Calls for a ‘Return to Rigor’ Are Wrong: What’s the Point of Pursuing ‘Solutions’ That Exacerbate Student Disengagement, the Very Problem They Are Supposed to Solve?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2023.
Mandernach, B. J., Ford, D., Xu, Y. & Shi, T. (2022). Post-pandemic teaching and learning: Revisiting common practices. https://sites.google.com/view/revisitingcommonpractices
Wiggins, Grant. (1998). Ensuring authentic performance. Chapter 2 in Educative Assessment: Designing Assessments to Inform and Improve Student Performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 21 – 42.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/zone-of-proximal-development
