Ohmer Milton Revisited
[Edited for the 2005 Lilly Conference Program]
Linc. Fisch
Underlying all of Milton’s lifelong efforts have been two fundamental concepts:
- improving learning through application of research-based principles, and
- seeking betterment, rather than accepting the status quo—even if most people find it satisfactory.
In March 2001, several of us were eying darkening snow-bearing clouds and saying quick good-byes at the end of a regional conference in Chattanooga. I happened to mention that I was planning to spend a couple of hours on my trip home that afternoon visiting with Ohmer Milton, and my comment was accorded blank stares by my colleagues. Finally someone asked, “Who’s Ohmer Milton?”
WHO’S OHMER MILTON? How quickly they forget! Or how uninformed are my colleagues of the younger generation!
Here, in brief, are some of Ohmer Milton’s credentials: Author of several significant books on college teaching and evaluation, one of the three keynoters at the second Lilly Conference on College Teaching at Miami University almost 25 years ago, stalwart presenter at many subsequent Lilly Conferences, founding director of the University of Tennessee’s Learning Research Center (in 1965, only the second such facility in the U.S.), recipient of a distinguished psychologist award from the American Psychological Association, now UT Professor Emeritus, and, by his own designation (delivered with devilish twinkle of eye), venerable curmudgeon and cynical psychologist.
Probably my first exposure to Milton was through On College Teaching, the 1978 collection of essays and research findings that he edited for Jossey-Bass. As I reviewed it again for this article, I found the concepts contained therein as sound today as when they were written. In his editor’s notes, Milton pleads for active learning, rather than better “educational delivery systems.” In typical Miltonesque style, he asks, “Pray tell, when was an education ever delivered to anyone?”
Milton’s earlier book, Alternatives to the Traditional: How Professors Teach and How Students Learn (Jossey-Bass, 1972), pleads for research-based teaching behavior to “guide us out of the overgrown thicket of dogma which surrounds current ideas about instruction and learning.” He examines learning research and selected practice—particularly such fundamentals as feedback and practice—“to inspire new questions about the arrangement of learning.” And as would be expected, Milton stresses, “The technical jargon of statisticians and researchers has been assiduously avoided.” His epilogue poses three timeless questions:
- How can institutions be reorganized to allow educational issues to become paramount and theories about undergraduate learning [to become] a reality?
- How can undergraduate faculty members be helped to oppose graduate school domination of curricular affairs?
- How do we encourage the weaning process so that the responsibility for learning is assumed by students?
In 1986, Milton, along with Howard R. Pollio and James A. Eison, reported on their national survey in Making Sense of College Grades (Jossey-Bass). Their concluding recommendations are to
- clarify what we want grades to do;
- improve the quality of classroom tests;
- supply considerable information to students about their performance;
- use less, rather than more, differentiated grading systems. Do not reify grades or any other metric used to describe academic performance; and
- abolish the GPA: It is a useless and misleading statistic for either teaching or research purposes.
That was only one of many times that Milton attacked the Grade Point Average (“the meaningless mean,” he called it). Once at a Lilly Conference he prodded me to expand upon his “well-point-average,” which poked fun at the GPA by proposing that we “Simply add temperature, diastolic blood pressure, white cell count, and cholesterol level—then divide by four to get an index that’s useful in a wide variety of interesting studies and medical decisions” [see my Chalk Dust column, in JSPOD, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 60-62 (Spring 1990)].
Perhaps Milton’s publication that I enjoy the most is his modest monograph Will That Be on the Final?! (Charles C. Thomas, 1982). In that title, he employs for the second time the interrobang—a combination question mark and exclamation point—which Milton, ever the scholar, purports “to be the first punctuation mark to enter printed language since the late 1600s.” (I suspect that my journal publisher will accommodate it only with a question mark or double punctuation, as library catalogues do. My own computer is similarly deprived.) Milton estimates that the typical student in four years of college will encounter at least 120 classroom tests, most of them poorly constructed in some respect. He devotes an entire section of the book to flaws of his old nemesis, the multiple-choice test, and provides pointers for improving such tests. When the monograph was still in manuscript form, I borrowed Milton’s concocted six-item multiple choice test of nonsense material, all of which could be responded to appropriately because of flaws in construction of the items. For example:
A fribbled breg will snicker best with an (a) Mors (b) Ignu (c) Derst (d) Sortar.
I gave this test to an unscientific sample of my students at the time, with mean scores ranging between three and four. (It was interesting that the graduate students scored lower than the undergraduates.)
Among Milton’s more recent articles is an essay, “Course Tests: Integral Features of Instruction,” in the POD Network’s Teaching Excellence series (1991).
Ohmer advises faculty members of the salutary effects of trying to master something that is non-verbal, and he recounted trying to learn how to play the organ at his son Tom’s urging. “I’m still working on it; I played as recently as a month ago.”
He described faculty members as models of clear, rational thinking. “But when they step out of their own field, they’re just as dumb as anyone. Reasoning is a thin veneer. The same is true in other fields—look at the U.S. Congress.” He sometimes has made the same point by quoting Will Rogers: “There is nothing so stupid as an educated man, if you get him off the thing he was educated in.”
Ohmer has had a knack for quotations by great thinkers, which he has sprinkled liberally through his writing to embellish his viewpoints. Two of my favorites are the following:
Kenneth Boulding: Perhaps the greatest superstition in the world today is numerology, the belief that somehow numerical information is always superior to qualitative, structural, and topological information. The plain truth is that numbers are a figment of human imagination... There is nothing wrong with evidence as long as it is not mistaken for truth.
George Bernard Shaw: There is no harder scientific fact in the world than the fact that belief can be produced in practically unlimited quantity and intensity, without observation or reasoning, and even in defiance of both by the simple desire to believe founded on a strong interest in believing.
But Ohmer Milton himself is no slouch when it comes to producing pithy statements that cut to the point. Here are four from Will That Be on the Final?! that you might want to tuck into your reference file of quotable gems:
- Americans are numbed by the numbers that are used to describe the abilities of people in general and college students in particular.
- Not only is college learning twisted by poor quality tests, but far too many life-direction decisions are based on numbers derived from classroom tests constructed hurriedly, administered carelessly, and treated cavalierly.
- The American mind seems extremely vulnerable to the belief that any notion that can be expressed in figures is in fact as final and exact as the figures in which it is expressed.
- All classroom tests are subjective in one way or another. As a major start toward clearer thinking about classroom tests, I suggest we cease using [the word “objective”]. It bestows an unwarranted respectability and hides the frailties and deficiencies of those tests to which it is applied; we are deceived by the term.
Ohmer is a goldmine of interesting stories, and his daughter Carol once encouraged him to set some of them to paper. In the introduction of an unpublished essay of “professional recollections,” he says, “Generally speaking, I observed over the years that about the same percentages of students resisted vigorously being deprived of their ignorance and that similar percentages demonstrated the Freudian principle of ‘conservation of energy’ when it came to studying. Faculties seem to be technicians increasingly and more and more beholden to external funding agencies. Administrators are swelling in numbers and are burdened by federal meddling and by a litigious society. Some of them appear to possess inadequate comprehension of the fundamental missions of a university.”
In one of his recollections, he speaks of the mysteries of motivation:
Trying to determine how to motivate undergraduates to study was always puzzling, challenging, and a formidable task. The cry by them has been that personal attention by the faculty would help. Over a period of several quarters I called failing students to my office for visits as a way of possibly urging them along. I was unimpressed with the results of my efforts in most cases. One day a coed came in at the appointed time. As I searched the files for her exams, she asked unexpectedly something to this effect: “What do you know about boys?” Although taken aback, I replied, “Well, I was a boy once and I have two sons. Why do you ask?” She went on to tell me about a very important forthcoming date and wondered about wearing perfume. I encouraged her to do so, but to use it sparingly. She thanked me and left the office. Not a word had been said about academic affairs, but she continued in the course and performed quite well thereafter.
Late that March evening, I slowly drove north through the blinding snowstorm I could have avoided had I not stopped to visit my favorite cynical psychologist. His hearty chuckles still resounded in my head and his spirit warmed my heart as I traveled the slick, tortuous road over Jellico Mountain. And I thought of the lasting legacy of Ohmer Milton.
Many years ago, Milton warned us about questionable practices in higher education at a time when it was not fashionable to do so. The problems he attacked are still all too common today, despite others having finally taken up the cry. (Indeed, a major theme at my Chattanooga conference was not to let technological capabilities override educational principles.) Underlying all of his lifelong efforts have been two fundamental concepts:
- improving learning through application of research-based principles, and
- seeking betterment, rather than accepting the status quo—even if most people find it satisfactory.
Ohmer still contributes occasionally to higher education, even though his active teaching career ended over 15 years ago. I hope my modest tribute to him will both recognize the significance of his work and remind us that we have still to accomplish much that he strove for. And I hope that my brief retrospection of his career will be one small step toward reducing the frequency of the question “Who’s Ohmer Milton?” He, and all our good teachers, needs to be revisited and remembered often.
[The above memoir was written in August 2001. Over the next few years, Ohmer Milton and I talked by telephone several times, but the envelopes containing copies of his acerbic letters-to-editors came less frequently and finally stopped. In July 2005, I received an e-mail message from Ohmer’s son Jack bearing the sad but not unexpected news that complications following hip surgery had transported Ohmer to that Great University in the Sky. The vigorous stirring-the-pot place he occupied with us in higher education will likely remain unfilled, partly in his honor and partly because lovable characters like Ohmer come by all too seldom. He was truly sui generis.]
Linc. Fisch, actively retired in Lexington, Kentucky, draws upon his 40-some years’ experience as college teacher, administrator, and program developer to write this piece. He may be contacted via e-mail at <lincfisch@insightbb.com>.