Originally posted on July 10, 2014, on LindaSuskie.com
I love Alison Head and John Wihbey’s piece, “At Sea in a Deluge of Data” in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education. They talk about a particular skill that’s growing in importance in the 21st century, what I call seeing the 30,000-foot picture: taking a lot of information, seeing the big ideas from all that information, and communicating the big points clearly and understandably.
Many colleges have a hard time helping their students develop this skill. Traditional library research papers may help, but they don’t give students the real-world integrative skills that employers are looking for: separating the information wheat from the chaff (the relevant from the irrelevant and the credible from what I like to call the incredible) and communicating big points in short, succinct ways that people can quickly and easily understand (see my earlier blog on infographics).
One reason that I think we have a hard time helping students develop this skill is because so many of us struggle with this ourselves. Seeing the 30,000-foot picture doesn’t come naturally to most people. David Keirsey has found that only about 5-10% of the population has the inherent temperament for big-picture analysis; people are far more likely to be detail-oriented. (You can take the Keirsey Temperament Sorter at www.keirsey.com and see where you fit.)
I see this a lot in work on assessment and accreditation. People are good at saying, “We used this rubric and here are the scores,” “Students took this survey and here are their responses,” “Here are grade distributions from key gateway courses.” But people often struggle to connect those pieces. What do your rubric, survey, and grade distribution results each say about students’ writing skills, for example? What are they telling you overall about students’ writing skills? Are the survey results and grades helping you understand why you’re getting your rubric results? Accreditors are less interested in a table of results than in what the results are saying to you. What overall conclusions can you draw about your students’ writing skills?
We need both detail and 30,000-foot people working on assessment and accreditation activities. Make sure you’ve got both on your team.