Does collaborative learning foster empirical attitudes over faith-based convictions?

Very interesting. From Bringing the Institution into Focus: NSSE Annual Results 2014 from The National Survey Of Student Engagement.

One thing that has been notable over the past twenty or thirty years is the extreme cognitive pollution from select departments within universities. Cognitive pollution being the ideological advancement of certain beliefs without supporting logic or evidence and in defiance counter-evidence. This has been most associated with very particular department such as English, Anthropology, Sociology, and Studies departments such as gender and race. This concentration of cognitive pollution, or more politely perhaps, faith based epistemology was probably most on display during the infamous Duke Lacrosse Rape case when the professors in the named departments were vastly overrepresented among the 88 signatories to the letter demanding punishment without due process or evidence (recollecting that the case turned out in the end to have been entirely based on false testimony and electoral considerations of the since disgraced and disbarred District Attorney). Professors in the more traditional humanities such as Economics, History, and all the sciences and engineering departments were notably absent in the petition to condemn the students on the basis of Gramscian mythology.

I had always assumed that this outcome was a function of 1) traditional sciences and humanities being more accustomed to evidence-based approaches to questions, and 2) the infection of the named departments with the Gramscian memes of postcolonialism, postmodernism, third wave feminism, and critical theory.

The NSSE Annual results suggest that perhaps there is another, or an additional mechanism in play.

Students majoring in engineering evidenced the highest overall level of collaborative learning, and when examined at the institutional level, engineering showed relatively little variability among institutions—suggesting that collaborative learning is a widely implemented engineering pedagogy. Collaborative learning was less evident for arts & humanities majors, but with a similarly tight clustering of institutional averages—again suggesting widespread pedagogical norms and practices, in this case with less emphasis on collaboration. Greater variability among institutions on collaborative learning existed for business and social service professions (e.g., social work, criminal justice, public administration).

Engineers experienced nearly 50% more collaborative learning than did social sciences and arts & humanities. Why would collaborative learning make a difference? I suspect there are multiple causative mechanisms in play.

1) Engagement - There is a difference between learning something from books and learning something through experience. Simply the anticipation of having to defend a view based on shared information forces a deeper engagement with material than simple reading it and accepting it as reasonable. You don't see the flaws in an argument until you have to defend the argument.

2) Variability and Refinement - Once you engage with others around an idea, they bring a wider range of knowledge and interpretations than you likely have within yourself. Being forced to engage with different knowledge sets and acknowledge alternate interpretations (which might have equal explanatory power) is both humbling and educational. It encourages more of an attitude of wait and see rather than blind faith conviction.

3) Chance - Collaborative engagement also forces a higher recognition of chance. If you have five teams of five people each, even in a highly empirical course, you are likely to experience the considerable impact that chance has on interpretative outcomes. There is no way to ensure every team is identical and the knowledge, skills and experiences that might contribute to a more accurate outcome are going to be unequally distributed between the teams.

If collaborative learning does have these effects, then a 50% differential in the degree to which a student participates in collaborative learning is likely to have an outsized difference on their respect for procedure, process and method over simple enthusiastic faith-based conviction.