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\nBrian Martin  \nUniversity of Wollongong  \nUniversities seek to promote student learning, but assessment and credentials can undermine students’ intrinsic motivation to learn. Findings from research on how people learn, mindsets, expert performance and good health are seldom incorporated into the way universities organise learning experiences.  \nIntroduction  \nAfter decades of undergraduate teaching, I retired in 2016. It seems an appropriate time to reflect on the positives, negatives and fundamental issues concerning undergraduate education.  \nIn 30 years at the University of Wollongong, I taught a variety of subjects in the humanities and social sciences, for example environmental politics, computers and society, scientific controversies,happiness,and media,war and peace. Before that, at three different universities, I dida limited amount of teaching in physics and mathematics.  \nThe positives of being a university teacher are easy to identify. For me, they were engaging with students eager to learn, helping them gain insights about subject matter and life, and designing courses to help students become self-motivated learners. A bonus for me as a teacher was learning the subject matter and being continually refreshed by contact with student learners. Also positive is interaction with colleagues with similar passions for helping students learn.  \nThe negatives are equally easy to identify, including dealing with students who care more about getting by than learning,coping with ever larger classes,and handling the administrative tasks associated with teaching, which seem to become ever more onerous. Marking can often be tedious, even though I managed to design assignments that made it more pleasurable (Martin, 2014) .  \nThe day-to-day experiences of teaching, positive and negative, are one thing. But underlying the experiences are deeper processes. Some of these I knew about from the beginning, whereas others I only discovered during my teaching career. It is these deeper processes that I address here, in the following sections: credentials and assessment; how people learn; mindsets; expert performance; and health.  \nCredentials and assessment  \nStudying at university is supposed to be about learning, about acquiring understandings and skills valuable for later in life or for their own sake. Ideally, assessment tasks are supposed to provide both an incentive to learn and feedback on learning. Credentials provide a certification of achievement.  \nThe trouble is that assessment and credentials often undermine learning (Kohn, 1993) . Let’s take a step back: ideally, students should be or become selfmotivated learners, pursuing their studies with focus and determination, even enthusiasm.This is certainly possible as shown by the energy with which people learn about topics they care about outside of formal education, for example sport, hobbies or diseases. However, when students come to university, they are subjected to a syllabus designed by others, and the symbols of learning can displace learning itself.  \nvol. 60, no. 1, 2018 Promoting learning: what universities don’t do Brian Martin 45  \nA U S T R A L I A N U N I V E R S I T I E S ’ R E V I E W  \nAssessment can be disastrous for self-motivation. Instead of studying because of intrinsic interest, students are driven by assessment tasks. When exams are over, few students continue to study. Many students have no interest in anything not assessable. Universities are not solely responsible, because assessment-driven studying is cemented through years of prior schooling, but universities do little to counteract reliance on assessment as a motivator.  \nUltimately, most students want degrees, the culmination of years of assessment-driven studying. Again, the symbol of learning displaces the substance. Imagine what would happen if degrees were abolished – perhaps repl","cbCaifEVMGEotUot","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaifEVMGEotUot","pdf",118192,"English","# Introduction\n## Positives and negatives of university teaching\n## Deeper processes behind teaching\n# Credentials and assessment\n## Assessment undermining learning\n## Degrees and potential alternatives\n## Long-standing problems with credentials\n# Learning\n## Key research findings on how people learn","[{\"question\":\"Why can assessment and credentials undermine learning, according to the document?\",\"answer\":\"Assessment and credentials can replace intrinsic interest with external incentives, driving students to study mainly to satisfy tasks and exams rather than to learn for their own sake.\"},{\"question\":\"What does the author suggest is missing from how universities organize learning?\",\"answer\":\"Research-informed insights about how people learn, appropriate mindsets, expert performance, and health are seldom incorporated into university learning experiences.\"},{\"question\":\"What evidence does the author cite to illustrate how learning can still be strongly motivated?\",\"answer\":\"The author points to the energy with which people learn about topics they care about outside formal education, such as sport, hobbies, or diseases, showing self-motivation is possible.\"}]","Promoting learning: what universities don’t do | PDF",1792079701,13]