Real-world rigour

Rigour and learning

‘Rigour’ is a term commonly used in higher education in relation to increasing the industry preparation of graduates and academic quality, yet it remains ill-defined across stakeholder groups and is implemented in curricula in various ways (Sztabnik, 2015). According to Williamson and Blackburn (2010) and Colvin and Jacobs (2010), students, parents and teachers all define rigour differently; parents believed that it included less actual but more in-depth work, while teachers conversely believed that it included more work in general. Homework thereby is often built on the incorrect idea that more work means more rigour, and this idea is reinforced by some educators in that lessons are considered rigorous if they make students suffer. As a result, from a student perspective, rigour is often associated with pain and suffering, and a poorly taught course furthers pain and suffering, whereas a well-taught one reverses the perception of a rigorous course in that students easily learn and apply the information. A demanding curriculum may become less demanding if it is taught in a way that enables students to learn the material more readily. Conversely, a demanding curriculum is not demanding if it is taught in a way that students cannot learn the material or are tested on material that has not been taught properly (Colvin and Jacobs, 2010; Williamson and Blackburn, 2010).

Similar to teachers, researchers have also focused on the differences between rigour and relevance. Researchers are empowered to experiment with ideas and generalize theories through rigorous review without the necessity of immediate practical relevance, and the output supports the discipline and academia. Practitioners are empowered to identify solutions with direct industry relevance, and the output supports emerging professional programmes in higher education (Finch et al., 2018). A low-dimensional rating on both rigour and relevance is considered to signify that the work is puerile or trivial. Rigour without relevance is also pedantic or trivial academic learning; relevance without rigour is support without an underlying basis. The goal is to attain both rigour and relevance such that the work is pragmatic and sensible (Geng et al., 2017).

Rigour can therefore be described as the fine line between challenging and frustrating or as a way to make students perform at a level of thinking and understanding beyond their previous achievement (Allen, 2012). Grades, for example, do not have as large an effect on how students rate instructors as on how much they feel they have learned, how much they feel stimulated by the course, and whether the class has been appropriately difficult – courses that are either too easy or too hard are similarly rated lower for the instructor (Wode and Keiser, 2011). A destructive teaching method leads to frustration in the learner and causes students to believe that the learning goals are out of reach. A productive teaching method leads to learning, makes learning goals attainable and gives students a sense of empowerment (Allen, 2012).

Rigour may also be described as an environment in which students are expected to learn and are helped to learn and in which they demonstrate learning at high levels (Blackburn, 2008). It also includes what is taught, how it is taught and how it is assessed. To gauge rigour in the classroom, experts recommend verifying whether students are engaged and answer questions in the classroom when solving problems (Colvin and Jacobs, 2010). Additional ways of validating rigour include judging the student’s ability to connect taught material to real-life examples and scenarios, getting students to produce a project report, ascertaining that they are not giving up or feeling overwhelmed and asking them to reflect on their learning progress and efforts (Catapano, 2017).

Rigour is founded on the belief that all students can be successful with additional levels of teacher support; in other words, it does not require some students to be successful and others to be unsuccessful (Williamson and Blackburn, 2010). The goal is to provide students with the skills to be productive citizens and for them to be well-prepared for graduate school, careers and civic life. For the teacher, the design of challenging lessons requires additional scaffolding of support; students often report that they were at first unsuccessful in performing challenging tasks, but had overcome the difficulty with additional teacher support (Williamson and Blackburn, 2010).

Traditional attempts to help struggling students use post-failing interventions. However, if classroom teaching methods allow an awareness of difficult concepts ahead of time, confusions or misperceptions can be addressed pre-failing. An organized lesson provides the students with advance information on key concepts, skills and information, while also allowing the instructor to clarify the lesson plan. Formative assessments are made through class participation, assignments, quizzes, tests and other mechanisms. Struggling students often need help in organizing information in a coherent fashion to show how different parts relate to the whole and to understand other relationships and connections (Allen, 2012).

Relevant rigour: Empowered and engaged learning

Historically educators have focused on the three ‘R’s – reading, writing and arithmetic. However, given our rapidly changing and complex world, these skills alone are no longer sufficient (Jenkins, 2015). Boston’s Chief of Education, Rahn Dorsey, has challenged educators to infuse a new set of three ‘R’s into education: rigour, relevance and real-life (see Smith, 2016). This may be achieved through the development of engaging and personalized curricula, offering credentials such as badges or certifications and blending in-class experience with out-of-class experience (Smith, 2016). Engaged learning allows students to be interested in and excited about the curriculum content; empowerment provides them with the knowledge, skills and abilities to pursue their future career interests (Ferriter, 2014).

Student empowerment, as described by Weimer (2014), means that the student is motivated, confident and capable of completing the task. Often students do not exhibit traits of empowerment, believing that the task will be too hard, and they will not enjoy completing it, will worry that they are not clever enough and, if they do not succeed immediately when learning a new task, will often give up. Teachers can create an empowered learning environment by the creation of intrinsic task motivation, through which self-efficacy and energy are increased continuously. Students will be empowered if they are assigned tasks that have meaning to them; if a task has no meaning, it will inspire little motivation in the learner to complete it. Teachers can instil confidence in students; empowerment grows from the feeling that one is qualified and capable. Demonstrating the impact of learning particular skills will also increase motivation and empowerment. Finally, teachers can offer choice, so that the student is able to determine how the task will be accomplished (Weimer, 2014).

Empowered and engaged student learning occurs over three continuous learning loops:

capturing initially difficult concepts and rephrasing them in one’s own words;

The third phase is mental model building, in which learning is connected to new domains and existing knowledge (Woodside, 2010).

Real-world rigour: Integrative learning

Criticisms of higher education learning have a long history and often originate from the tension between the academic and professional models – for example, preparing students for future problems as opposed to preparing them for current functional requirements (Capon, 2012; Finch et al., 2018; Miles, 2017). A study by Finch et al. (2018) found that, while the accounting discipline was an exception, other business disciplines had a low percentage of recruitment postings that requested practitioner experience, and business schools were struggling to integrate rigour and relevance into the professional disciplines. Other disciplines, such as law and social work, had a higher integration of knowledge transfer between academia and practice. The authors recommend the development of bridge-qualified (BQ) faculty, or those with a terminal degree and practitioner experience, to bridge the gap between academia and practice (Finch et al., 2018). The BQ faculty support the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) Standard 15, which describes the integration between academic and professional activities to improve relevance in the field of teaching (AACSB, 2017a). Effective and high-quality higher education can be achieved only when the balance of academic and practical professional engagement has been reached and integrated in a meaningful way (AACSB, 2017b). Despite the value of integrative learning across all courses, including general education, these student-centred techniques have had limited adoption in colleges and universities (Hora, 2017). Employers also expect colleges and universities to be responsible for developing the skills their businesses need, but a 2016 study of European companies found that 40% were unable to find workers with the necessary skills, a problem that many employers attributed to the inadequate preparation of graduates (Matsouka and Mihail, 2016).

According to the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U, 2017a), there is an increasing emphasis at the national level in the United States to improve undergraduate students’ integrative learning through engaged and empowered educational experiences. Integrative learning occurs across disciplines and is critical to deeper learning, as opposed to the acquisition of localized competencies for a specific field or role. In addition, learning through engagement and students’ construction of their own ideas is crucial to the improvement of learning, retention and the ability to apply or integrate the acquired knowledge in new areas (AAC&U, 2017b).

In distinguishing 21st-century liberal education, leaders are calling for faculty innovation to cut across disciplines and connect experiences in and outside the classroom so that students can ultimately apply their improved learning to complex challenges in their careers (AAC&U, 2017b). Liberal education is a learning approach that emphasizes the integration of learning across the educational continuum at increasing levels of capability (AAC&U, 2017b). A liberal education is one that empowers students to prepare for the wider world and develops transferable intellectual and practical skills (such as analytical and problem-solving skills) along with the ability to apply them in real-world settings (AAC&U, 2017b). It is estimated, however, that true liberal education and the resulting integrative learning directly applies to only 4% of students in the United States (Shoenberg, 2009).

In the course of their working life, most people will change positions, organizations and even careers. Based on a national US Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, people held an average of 11.9 jobs between the ages of 18 and 50 (BLS, 2017). While they make fewer changes than US citizens, in the United Kingdom, people will still, on average, work for six different employers over their working life (Farrah, 2015). However, this often conflicts with the typical individual’s personal estimate of the total number of jobs he or she will undertake – between two and five (Kurtz, 2013). The number of jobs held is attributed in part to new technology, with online career-oriented sites, including LinkedIn, increasing access to new positions and enhancing the potential for recruitment of new talent, and in part to the exponential pace of change in many industries within the fourth industrial revolution (Kurtz, 2013; Schwab, 2016). To be successful in a varied and changing set of environments, students must develop adaptability in their decision-making capabilities. Integrative, experiential and applied learning facilitates the connection of concepts and experiences and provides students with a better understanding of the world, improving their flexibility and adaptability (Ithaca College, 2017).

In synthesizing and instantiating the defined rigour and learning concepts, a real-world rigour summary has been formulated for improved industry readiness in higher education and is shown in Figure 1. A definition of real-world rigour is also suggested: real-world rigour is the attainable balance between the possible and the impossible, resulting in the constructive conceptualization and realization of student empowerment, engagement and learning through capturing, communicating and connecting real-world industry knowledge, skills and abilities to successfully prepare students for their careers and future work environment.

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Figure 1.

Real-world rigour conceptual model.

Real-world rigour and industry readiness

According to Hora (2017) from the US National Association of Colleges and Employers, the inadequate preparation of college graduates for the workforce, in terms of their career readiness and concerns, has become the defining issue for the future of higher education. Initial attempts to address this challenge have included the development of new academic programmes geared towards in-demand fields and the structural reform of faculty and administration. Unfortunately, many such strategies have proved to be counterproductive and reflect a misunderstanding of how to better prepare students in the classroom. Current technical skills, such as programming, are highly valued by employers, as are habits of thinking such as communication, problem-solving, teamwork and adaptability (Fisher, 2016; Hora, 2017). Blackburn (2011) explains that students often leave educational institutions with notions of a ‘real world’ that does not exist, and most current rigour standards display the opposite of real-world mechanisms (Blackburn, 2011).

On average, only approximately 40% of the skills learned in higher education contribute directly to the success of the employing organization or the individual’s career objectives, and the learning and development of career competencies must take place over time (Deloitte, 2015). In addition, the current workforce is experiencing a major transformation through automation that is altering the skills employers need and that will create major talent gaps, risk and disruption over the next decades (PwC, 2018). Against this background, the real-world rigour approach discussed in this article may be of use in future assessments of student learning and in the alignment of learning outcomes with increased industry preparation in higher education. For example, the National Student Survey (NSS) commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) was significantly revised for 2017 to include new questions on student engagement and amended questions on learning resources, assessment and feedback (HEFCE, 2017). The updated survey contains several related statements for rating, including: ‘The course is intellectually stimulating’ and ‘My course has challenged me to achieve my best work’ (empowered and engaged learning); ‘My course has provided me with opportunities to bring information and ideas together from different topics’ (connections); and ‘My course has provided me with opportunities to apply what I have learnt’ (real-world rigour). This real-world rigour integrative learning approach is presented to prompt future discussion, research and measurement of rigour in the critical context of industry and higher education.