Research Trends

Emily Goff

Research Trends in Developmental Education:
An Interview with Prof. Thomas Brothen

Dr. Thomas Brothen has been with the General College since the 1960s, first as a teaching assistant and then as a faculty member. Professor Brothen is widely published in the areas of developmental education and psychology instruction. His research interests include computer-assisted instructional methods and student self-regulation of learning.

 

Emily Goff: How did you become involved with developmental education?

Tom Brothen: I got involved with it by becoming a teaching assistant in the General College while I was in graduate school. I was a teaching assistant for psychology, and I sort of learned about [developmental education] through on-the-job training. We were doing developmental education although that was not what it was called at the time.

Shortly after that, in the early 1970s, the term "developmental education" came into usage. Study skills, reading within the disciplines, ways to help students develop good study habits and to find different approaches to studying have always been a part of what we do at the General College , so it has always been broader than the reading, writing, and math developmental education.

 

EG : How did you become involved in developmental education research?

TB: When I first started [as a tenure track faculty member at GC] in 1977, I worked with a professor named Henry Borow who had come to the college in 1946, very early in its history. He had a very significant research agenda and research history. Research has always been a part of what I've done here.

 

EG: What has been the focus of your research?

TB: The focus of my research early on was on the teaching of psychology and student learning in psychology, issues involving student success in the course that we taught. It has broadened quite a bit since then, but at first it was primarily focused on students learning that particular subject matter.

As time has gone by, some of the issues that we deal with [in our psychology course] have had broader relevance to the field of developmental education. We have looked at what some of the issues in psychology are and brought them to the field of developmental education. An example of this is in testing. Testing, especially placement testing, is a big part of developmental education. I've been involved in looking at some of the issues, assumptions, and principles of testing and how they should be applied. So, we have used [psychology] to focus on what developmental educators think that they are doing and what they think that they are getting in the testing of students with placement tests.

Very early on, I started using computer technology in psychology. Now I'm looking at issues in computer-assisted instruction. Specifically, I've used the personalized system of instruction (PSI), which came out of psychology. We've joined the computer technology with PSI, and we are doing something that uses computers to deliver PSI in a developmental context. This gets us into study habits and personality characteristics and helping students to develop certain aspects of their personality, such as conscientiousness and motivation.

My research centers on the field of psychology, either teaching it or applying it. Very much of what I've done is applied psychology, I suppose.

 

EG: How can the research that you do here at the General College be shared with other places where developmental education happens, such as community colleges?

TB: We've made efforts to connect with other community colleges in this state, through MNADE and other things that CRDEUL is involved with, and we've had some success with that. [The problem is] technology transfer. We hope that some of the things that we publish are read and that somehow, someone will read that and say, "that's a good solution to a problem that I have." This is the technology transfer piece that everybody at the university is trying to figure out. How do you get the things that are going on in a chemical engineering lab into a medical device company? And [developmental education] isn't big business so we are at a disadvantage in some ways.

 

EG: How would you like developmental education research to look in the future?

TB: We are in the process of really upgrading the research in developmental education. I think that the General College is leading this process of upgrading the research. It is a field that has been mostly atheoretical and not research-based. Of course there has been research, but when you get down to practice, not much has been based in theory or research that people could point to. Consequently, what you have-across the board-is a level of sophistication and quality that needs to be increased. I'd like to see us continue to upgrade the research standards of the field; that is how you make a field legitimate at a university, especially a research university.

How do we do this? How do we upgrade a field? We have to send out quality articles, do reviews that are good [for academic journals], and do everything that we can to try to raise the boats in this lake that we call developmental education.