The Library Effect
By Clifford Abbott
Abstract
Several instances of instructors providing study-guide materials to students are met with increased student satisfaction but not necessarily increased learning. The explanation may be in the way these materials are viewed as storable meanings, a phenomenon here labeled the library effect. It is argued that this effect comes from a perspective reinforced by common ways of talking about communication. Several possible responses to the effect are considered.
Keywords: student satisfaction; library effect; communication; study guides
The assessment movement in higher education and much scholarship of teaching have warned educators about the limitations of teacher-centered instruction (Huba and Freed, 2000). Many thoughtful instructors respond by finding ways to clarify their expectations, to articulate learning outcomes, and to open feedback channels so students can offer suggestions on what will help them learn. A common suggestion from students is that the instructor should provide study-guide materials, lecture notes, or copies of PowerPoint presentations used in class.
This work is concerned with cases in which instructors do provide such materials but although these efforts may meet with student satisfaction, they do not have much effect on student learning. Three specific cases of this phenomenon are offered as evidence of what may be a common pattern. The question of why providing students with additional study-guide materials may not result in increased learning is then faced. The answer proposed here is that there is a metaphorical framework we all use for talking and thinking about communication, including obviously the communication in lectures, texts, and study-guide materials. The use of this metaphorical framework, called the conduit metaphor (Reddy, 1979), produces an effect, here called the library effect, that explains the lack of increased learning. Finally this work asks what can be done about this. The problem may be intractable but three response options are explored.
CASES
Consider the following three instances of instructors attempting to enrich their students' learning environments. All three cases come from personal communication with the instructors and the third case has been presented in Noppe, Achterberg, & Beyer (2004).
CASE 1
In an introductory communication class the objectives are: 1) to learn the basic concepts and vocabulary of the field and 2) to develop skills in solving communication problems and presenting the solutions. Class activities are lecture/discussion/readings for the basic concepts (1) and group projects for solving the communication problems (2). Evaluation of the basic concepts (1) is through testing (short answer format) and evaluation of the skills development (2) is through peer and instructor judgments of performances (presentations of solution to the communication problems). Feedback from students about the class is generally positive for presentation projects but there had been complaints that the exams were vague and ambiguous so that it was unclear "what the instructor wants." To clarify this the instructor produced a guide to the basic concepts and to the types of questions to be asked on exams. The guide listed all the concepts (some are covered in lectures, some in the readings, and many in both). Five types of exam questions were also identified in the guide. They were: definitions (define X), requests for examples (provide an example of X), requests for labels for given examples (what is X an example of?), discriminations (what is the difference between X and Y?), and requests for significance (why is concept X valuable to communication study?). These five types of questions embody a theory of what it means to learn a concept and they are meant to counter a more naïve, but widely-held, theory among students that learning is simply a matter of memorizing definitions. Students were told that exams would consist of a certain number of questions of each type and the questions would be about the listed concepts. The guide was given out with the syllabus at the first class. The results of comparing several years of the course with the guide to several prior years without the guide show a decrease in student complaints about vague exams but no appreciable improvement in exam scores.
CASE 2
In an upper level course on information technology two instructors team up to share instruction and separately provide evaluative feedback for the large enrollment. One of the instructors maintains a personal website and posts on it supporting materials presented in the class. The other e-mails supporting materials to students, typically after they have been presented in class. Periodically the instructors check to see if the posted materials are consulted and have any significant effect on student learning measured by the exams. Although students provide some positive feedback for the availability of these materials, there is no significant effect on learning.
CASE 3
In a large human development course, two sections are taught by a single instructor. The instructor used PowerPoint presentations for visual support in both sections. Hardcopy versions of the PowerPoint slides were given to one section. Initially the students provided with the slides express satisfaction but did no better on the exam. In fact they did slightly worse on the final exam than the control section. A survey of students at the end of the course showed mixed satisfaction with the hardcopy distribution but the course overall was rated more positively than the control section.
MEANINGS EXTERNAL TO MINDS
What is going on here? Why in all three cases when students are given material they themselves believe would help their learning is there no actual improvement in learning? While there may be nothing inherently wrong with the techniques used in these cases, some might argue, following Noyd (2005), that in context they are examples of overteaching where the instructors are assuming more responsibility for learning than the students do. I wish to argue, however, that these results should not be surprising since they follow from a very common perspective on what ideas are and how people have them. That common perspective includes a systematic distortion of reality and the key question is how that distortion is maintained. This common perspective holds that ideas are mental objects of some sort that can be put into language and transferred to other people. The distortion is that ideas (or thoughts or meanings or any other mental objects) can exist outside of minds when in fact outside of minds the best we can do is symbolize or otherwise represent them. One of the most important forces that maintain this distortion is how we typically talk about communication by using what Michael Reddy (1979) calls the conduit metaphor.
THE CONDUIT METAPHOR
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have argued that metaphors are not just rhetorical instances of language, but they can constitute the conceptual basis through which we make sense of much of the world. They argue that we tend to see arguments as wars because that is how we talk about arguments (we attack and defend positions; we shoot down arguments; remarks are on target). We see elections as races, countries as people, minds as containers, lives as stories all because these metaphors have become part of our language. Such metaphors have become somewhat automated in our language use, in the sense that we are not always aware of them as we speak. The consequences of using these metaphors are often even less obvious.
The argument here is that the metaphor most responsible for how we talk and think about communication is one that Michael Reddy (1979) calls the conduit metaphor and an important consequence is what this work calls the library effect. In essence the conduit metaphor sees the words and sentences of language (and we could probably extend this to nonverbal and visual communication as well) as containers for ideas and communication as the act of transferring those containers from speakers and writers to listeners and readers, who remove the ideas from the containers and put them in their minds. Reddy lists over 140 English predicates that are part of the conduit metaphor. Some examples: putting (packing, loading, cramming) an idea into words; language carries (transfers, gets across, sends, contains, displays, brings, has) meanings; people extract (uncover, see, find, expose) ideas from language; meanings are in (buried in, hidden in, lost in) language; people get meaning out of words; put thoughts on paper.
To make the claim that a conceptual metaphor exists is not necessarily the same as to make the stronger claim that we can only think about a topic through the metaphoric frame. In fact for many concepts we have competing metaphors, e.g. love can be madness (I'm crazy for her) or a journey (our relationship is at a crossroads) or a war (the battle of the sexes). The competing metaphors for what a teacher is (e.g. coach, facilitator, judge, and guide) have played an important role in faculty development discussions. Certainly not every expression we use in talking about communication belongs to the conduit metaphor but Reddy estimates that more than 70% of them do. It clearly is the dominant perspective. With some effort it is possible to escape thinking in terms of the conduit metaphor, that is, to remind ourselves that words and sentences are not containers for ideas and meanings but just signals we use to try to represent them, but if we are going to talk about communication at any length, we will find it difficult to avoid at least some use of the conduit metaphor.
SPEAKING IS HARD – LISTENING IS EASY
Reddy identifies one important consequence of the conduit metaphor as how we ascribe responsibility in communication. Most of that responsibility falls on the individual selecting a meaning and putting it into language because within the perspective of the metaphor that is where all the effort is. To be on the receiving end and take the meaning out of the words seems, again within the perspective of the metaphor, to require minimal effort. Outside the perspective of the metaphor, there is no reason why an act of decoding is any less work than an act of encoding. All the efforts to get people to be better listeners and to work at it are up against the ubiquity of the conduit metaphor telling people if they do not understand, it is because the speaker did not put the meaning in the right words.
THE LIBRARY EFFECT
The conduit metaphor also has important implications for the way we think about the storing of ideas and meanings. If meanings can somehow be contained within language, then language can be stored in physical formats outside of people. When we fill our libraries with books, films, tapes, diskettes, and the like, the conduit metaphor convinces us that we are treating libraries as cultural and intellectual warehouses. The implication of having warehouses is that access to them can be postponed, that the meanings will keep in storage until we need them. Once the hard work of getting meanings into language is done, then storage becomes valuable and as long as the conduit metaphor minimizes for us the efforts involved in extracting meanings (after all, it is just reading or listening), getting meanings into language and storing them will continue to be seen as much more valuable.
When we escape the perspective the conduit metaphor pushes on us (Reddy does this by building the perspective of radical subjectivism into a world where decoding messages becomes almost impossibly difficult), then meanings are no longer seen as being in language but in people's minds. Now extracting those meanings becomes quite effortful and depends on a whole repertoire of interpretive skills such as understanding context, recognizing association patterns in language, creating and testing hypotheses about intent, making connections and discriminations, and often a fair amount of interaction. These interpretive skills are not as amenable to storage or postponing. They only work when enacted.
Students have a choice of perspectives. If the conduit metaphor prevails as the default perspective and an instructor encodes some important meanings into a physical format that students can treat as being storable in their libraries, then for them storing the material amounts to having meaning. If the perspective of meanings being only in people's minds prevails and an instructor offers some storable language as supplementary in a course, then it adds meaning only to the extent students have skills to interpret it. Instructors may prefer their students take the latter perspective and may even explicitly encourage it, but they face powerful opposition. Analogously, we may want to think of our political campaigns and elections as opportunities for national dialogue and discussion, but we talk about them most of the time as races (along with other allied sports and military metaphors). The elections-as-races metaphor is as entrenched as the conduit metaphor. It should be no surprise that during political campaigns we are so interested in who is ahead, who is winning (not normally the top concern in dialogues and discussions), and it should be no surprise in classrooms that students think they have the instructor's meaning when they can store the instructor's language. That assumption is the library effect.
RESPONSE OPTIONS
How can one respond when a powerful cultural metaphor threatens to undermine the teaching process? Countering any well-entrenched metaphor is not easy but there are three options:
1. One can expose the conduit metaphor to students and hope that will deflate some of its power.
2. One can embrace the metaphor and attempt a repositioning within it.
3. One can battle the metaphor with an alternative metaphor.
The first strategy involves explaining that the conduit metaphor exists and that one of its consequences is the library effect. Will awareness of the problem change behavior? Possibly, but it may be like trusting that explaining the concept of peer pressure to teens will make them more resistant to it. The effect may be minimal. After all, the conduit metaphor gets reinforced nearly every time we talk about communication.
The second strategy is one Fernandez (1971) calls "repositioning". In this case it involves accepting the conduit metaphor, that is, allowing that speakers and writers do package their meanings into language and transfer those packages to their audiences. The repositioning comes in suggesting that it is not easy to "get meaning out of" those packages, that in fact unwrapping the packages and extracting the meaning may require quite a bit of effort and probably some special tools or skills. This means a campaign to convince students that listening and reading require more effort, attention, and training than they may think. It also means that instructors may have to give as much thought to how a student will decode the instructors' PowerPoint slides, notes, outlines, study questions, and handouts as they do to how best to create them. The difficulty with this strategy, and this may well be a further consequence of the conduit metaphor, is that too much time spent helping students in how to read, take notes, study, and review is often seen as either remedial or patronizing.
The third strategy is one Fernandez calls a "change of venue" and it involves offering the conduit metaphor a little competition. In general the less competition a metaphor has the more likely people are to mistake the metaphor for reality. The more alternative metaphors we have for a concept the less likely we are to be trapped within any one. The dominance of the "elections-as-races" metaphor makes it harder to think about elections in any other way. The fact that a concept such as love is available to us through many metaphoric alternatives (journey, magic, disease, physical force, etc.) means we are less likely to get locked within any single one of the alternative perspectives. The conduit metaphor is a fairly dominant metaphor for communication but it does not have a complete monopoly. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) cite the ideas-as-food metaphor as one that gets realized in quite a few common expressions:
What he said left a bad taste in my mouth. All this paper has in it are raw facts, half-baked ideas, and warmed-over theories. There are too many facts here for me to digest them all. I just can't swallow that claim. That argument smells fishy. Let me stew over that for a while. Now there's a theory you can really sink your teeth into. We need to let that idea percolate for a while. That's food for thought. He's a voracious reader. We don't need to spoon-feed our students. He devoured the book. This is the meaty part of the paper. Let that idea jell for a while. That idea has been fermenting for years. (p46-47)
This can be coupled with the fact that perception specifically and acquisition generally are seen as eating to give us a learning-as-digestion metaphor.
Another alternative metaphor could be learning-as-construction. Many of the elements of construction (architects, engineering, design, subcontractors, building materials and styles, clients, environmental impacts, zoning regulations, etc.) can be mapped into elements of learning (you have to build your understanding on a solid foundation; we want to make you a more skilled architect of your own learning; sequencing is important – you can't put in the wiring before the walls are built and you can't wait until after they are plastered; when you're engineering a way to use class materials, remember a good engineer is very familiar with the strength of materials used; it may look nice, but you're creating a fire hazard; the context provides your zoning regulations).
Any metaphor highlights or foregrounds the ground in the metaphor (the similarities between the topic and the vehicle of the metaphor) and backgrounds or hides the tension (the differences between the topic and vehicle). The learning-as-digestion metaphor thus highlights a more complex process (digesting) than the conduit metaphor (receiving) and the learning-as-construction metaphor highlights a more active process (building). While the eating metaphor provides many ready-made expressions for a teacher to use (this is an idea you'll have to chew on for a while; don't let this get stale; if you cram the night before, you won't be able to digest this material), the metaphor has enough structure to be extendable to new expressions. One can invoke nutrition, balanced diet, learning styles as food preferences, learning barriers as food allergies, minimum daily requirements, the food pyramid, eating disorders, cooking techniques, regional cuisines, organic food, poisons, fad diets, and on and on. This is clearly a rich terrain to map learning onto. The construction metaphor may not have as many ready-made expressions, but it is similarly expandable as seen with the examples above.
What are the prospects that using such alternative metaphors can manage student expectations and remind them that reading and listening require effort? The experiment has not been done, but it is unlikely to be an easy one. The conduit metaphor, after all, has a serious head start and its many expressions have woven themselves into our language so thoroughly that it is unlikely to go away. For another metaphor to offer a realistic alternative would probably require a fairly concentrated campaign and not just an occasional reference. Language engineering is not easy. Even if it were successful, there is also a certain amount of risk in any rhetorical use of a metaphor. People can be remarkably creative and individualistic in their interpretations of metaphors and there is plenty of room for unintended consequences in a campaign large enough to battle a well-entrenched cultural metaphor. Awareness of the problem may be a more realistic outcome.
Works Cited
Fernandez, J. W. (1971). Persuasions and performances: Of the beast in every body…and the metaphors of everyman. In C. Geertz (Ed.), Myth, symbol, and culture.
Huba, M. E. and J. E. Freed. (2000). Learner-centered assessment on college campuses. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Noppe, I. C., J. R. Achterberg, & L. Beyer. (2004). The effectiveness of handouts on PowerPoint slides on college students' test performance. Poster Presentation at Annual Meeting of American Psychological Society, Chicago.
Noyd, R. K. (2005). Applying Aristotle's Golden Mean to the classroom: Balancing underteaching and overteaching. National Teaching and Learning Forum Newsletter,14, 3.
Reddy, M. (1979). "The Conduit Metaphor" in Anthony Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. (2nd. ed. 1993).
Copyright UW SystemClifford Abbott is Professor of Information Sciences at University of Wisconsin – Green Bay. The author wishes to acknowledge helpful discussions of this paper with Regan Gurung, Phillip Clampitt, and Tim Abbott, as well as the supportive environment of the Teaching Scholars program at UW- Green Bay. He may be contacted about the content of this article at MAC 310, UW Green Bay, 2420 Nicolet Drive, Green Bay, WI 54311, 920-465-2451 or electronically at abbottc@uwgb.edu.