Weekly Briefing

Immersive education can help students and instructors. How can it become the norm?

Anuj Shrestha for The Chronicle

Since students returned to campus after the worst of the pandemic, instructors have been noticing a change. While some students jump back into in-person learning, others have trouble connecting with their peers or engaging in academic life.

Many students still show signs of disconnection and hopelessness. One professor called this “militant apathy.” But when students are told that a college degree is the only thing that can help them move up the economic ladder, it’s easy for the campus experience to feel transactional. And given the rising cost of nearly everything, including tuition, students may also fear the steep price tag that comes with failing.

Now, immersive education, including service learning, common-reading programs, internships, study-abroad opportunities, and other experiential-educational programs, is getting a closer look, to help drive home the value of college and improve student learning.

For years, higher-education leaders have told the public that college is necessary for getting a job and social mobility. In part, this is how policy makers, families, and politicians show that the cost of a degree is worthwhile in the long run.

But colleges also give students a counterpoint, saying that critical-thinking and communication skills are an important part of the higher-education experience.

Research on student brain scans confirms this, showing that immersive-learning programs help students process information.

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience at the University of Southern California, told our Beth McMurtrie that after examining neural images, she saw how parts of the brain associated with social and emotional processes lit up when students were learning new and complex ideas, particularly when they were self-reflecting or drawing meaning from the topic.

She also found that how students engage in this type of learning can predict their longer-term development better than other metrics like socioeconomic status and IQ. During the pandemic, when students were cut off from one or more of these parts of the learning process, their learning became “narrowed and impoverished.”

We rely on different facets of our brain to process and understand what we learn, Immordino-Yang said. Many students had to fill in the gaps on their own — even if they were not yet well-equipped to do so. In many cases, parts of their brains would overactivate or underactivate, prompting some student to ruminate, become more anxious, or withdraw.

Many institutions have had immersive-learning programs for years. Now, they may be a more urgent antidote to the “militant apathy” colleges are seeing today.

Read our Beth McMurtrie’s full story here.

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Lagniappe.

• Learn. The next time you watch a movie, stick around for the credits. You never know what name, filming location, or music title you’ll spot. (The New York Times)
• Read. In the novel Trust, by Hernan Diaz, you get to know a fictional financier through four different perspectives. Which one is right? (NPR)
• Listen. Why does reading different economic news stories feel like watching a tennis match? First, the economy is bad, then things are good. This podcast episode explains. (The Wall Street Journal)

—Fernanda