Category Archives: Teaching and learning

As the new-ish semester kicks her butt, your blogger surfaces for a moment.

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Verily, the new semester is kicking my butt.

Lots of students means lots of name-face correlations to memorize (something I’m still working on), and, of course, lots of papers to grade.

A departmental edict against making more photocopies than are absolutely necessary means I need to spend extra time converting what once would have been handouts into PDFs and web pages, and making sure the links to them actually work. (Also, I need to convince the students for the Logic and Critical Reasoning course to actually bring copies, be they hard or soft, of the homework questions with them to our class meetings.)

It probably doesn’t help that soccer coaching is on my plate and that my team plays weeknight games as well as really-early-Saturday-morning games. (It does help that my team seems to have embraced teamwork from the get-go, so huzzah for that.)

As I’m treading water over here, a couple of things I’m pondering:

  • Sure, I’m saving trees by not duplicating and distributing full syllabi, detailed descriptions of assignments, and such. Probably without all those handouts more students are actually accessing the course websites (where I have always mounted electronic versions of the handouts). However, now I’m wondering whether the barrage of handouts at the first class meeting actually helped to scare away people who didn’t really want to take my class, thus freeing up spaces for the scores of people who were telling me that they were desperate to add it — not just because it filled a requirement for graduation, but because the subject matter really speaks to them.*
  • For a long time, I have graded student work in ink that is not red whenever possible, on account of gestures some of my pedagogical mentors have made to research suggesting that red ink on work they are getting back conveys to students OMG I did it WRONG! and am STOOPID!. This is not, as you might guess, a mindset that is conducive to learning more stuff. However, now I’m starting to wonder if we may be training a new generation of students to recoil from comments written in purple ink.

Things have to settle down soon. Right?

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* I have my suspicions that the extent to which any of my courses “speaks to” people who want to add it might be contingent on how badly they need it to graduate, how swiftly their planned graduation date is approaching, and how nicely my course fits in their schedule. Not that I’m cynical or anything.

Back-to-school crankiness.

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For the Free-Ride offspring, this is only the seventh school day of the new academic year, and already the weekly newsletter from their elementary school has achieved a tone that could most charitably be described as weary:

This is a large school with over N students. Please consider the priorities of the school staff when making personal requests. It is unreasonable to meet with staff 3 times to make the same request, after you have been denied in person. Thanks you for considering the needs of the other N-1 students when making personal requests for your child.

My thoughts:

  1. If this (or really, anything the school does) succeeds in cultivating a bit more empathy and altruism from the parents, I will be impressed. And surprised.
  2. Was this item in the newsletter prompted by multiple parents engaging in this kind of won’t-take-no-for-an-answer behavior? Or just one child’s parents?
  3. If just one child’s parents, I’m suddenly curious about just what they were requesting, and why that request was shot down so decisively (not to mention why it was so important to keep asking after the first denial).
  4. Also, if just one child’s parents, I wonder if those parents recognize that this paragraph in the newsletter is about them.
  5. Finally, given the priorities of school staff, is what may amount to an admonishment to one set of parents (out of something on the order of magnitude of N sets of parents), a good use of scarce staff time?

Fasten your seat-belt. It’s shaping up to be one of those school years.

The future of higher education, according to the rumor mill.

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I’m getting this third-hand, and I’m always cautious about predictions of future events, but here’s someone’s vision of higher education yet-to-come:

  1. Professors will totally need to incorporate online elements, especially social media elements, into their courses if they are to have a prayer of engaging their students.
  2. They will also need to get students to accept the idea that since the jobs are being outsourced to other countries, they (the students) will need to be ready to move to those countries. (No word on whether students are to be prepared for the prevailing wages in those countries, or on whether those countries are likely to welcome our students as job-seeking immigrants.)
  3. The end of new tenure track faculty.

Excuse me, but I was promised a zombie apocalypse.

Start-of-semester mad dash.

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Well, summer sure ended quickly (although suddenly the weather is downright summery — thanks, irony!). Less than 48 hours from the beginning of classes, my to-do list looks something like this:

  • Update syllabus for the “Philosophy of Science” class I’ve taught for several semesters.
  • Update web pages for that “Philosophy of Science” class.
  • Set up materials in Desire2Learn* shells for the two sections of that “Philosophy of Science” class that I’m teaching this term.
  • Finish writing syllabus for the “Logic and Critical Reasoning” course I’m teaching for the first time this semester.
  • Create web pages for “Logic and Critical Reasoning”.
  • Set up materials in Desire2Learn shell for my section of “Logic and Critical Reasoning.”
  • Update my homepage (primarily to reflect/link to courses I’m teaching this term and to list my current office hours).
  • Find out what the heck my college’s official policy on add codes is this semester, the better to inform the throngs of people turning up wanting to add my courses what (if anything) I can do for them.
  • Verify that textbooks are actually available in the campus book store (and not mislabeled and/or mis-shelved).
  • Verify that necessary classroom equipment is functional in my classrooms.
  • For each of my courses, create 1-page handout giving overview of course requirements and URLs for detailed syllabi, assignments, etc.
  • Make offerings to the deity that controls department photocopier in order that I may successfully photocopy the 1-page handout for each of my courses.
  • Put in request for the courses I’d like to teach spring semester.
  • Try really, really hard to dodge any new committee assignments.
  • Brace self for inevitable unpleasantness of the details about what else needs to be cut this semester in light of the fact that the budget assumed a 10% increase in student fees** and that student fees actually only increased by 5%.***
  • Bring a sweatshirt to office, which seems at present to be a full 30 oF colder than the ambient temperature outside. (Bring thermometer to office, to track meat-locker-like temperatures in which it seems I’m expected to work.)

By the way, these are just the items requiring the most urgent attention — the full to-do list is much longer.

We’ll see what I can get done before the last minute has passed.
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*Desire2Learn is a course management system, like Blackboard or WebCT (which Blackboard bought and assimilated). My university adopted it because it seems to do better on accessibility issues (like making content easy to navigate for students with visual impairments with a screen reader).

**In the California State University system, of which my university is a part, “student fees” is the euphemism for tuition. Tuition is spoken of euphemistically because until the early 1990s there wasn’t any. Now there is, and it seems to increase substantially every term.

***That 5% increase, however, is enough to make life really hard for a lot of our students.

Friday Sprog Blogging: Kids Day at SLAC 2010 hazards and mitigations.

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Longtime friend of the Free-Rides LO has been instrumental in hooking the Free-Ride offspring up with Kids Day @ SLAC. Finally the year has come when the younger Free-Ride offspring meets the age requirements to join the elder Free-Ride offspring. As is our practice, we prepared by reviewing the safety information:

Dr. Free-Ride: So, we’re talking about Kids Day @ SLAC. I’m showing you the logo for this year’s Kids Day @ SLAC. There seems to be some sort of — I don’t know if that’s a laser beam or something. Looks interesting. But, the part we need to discuss has to do with the safety information. “All children must wear long pants, Kids Day T-shirts” — which you guys will get from LO and put on when you get there — “closed-toe shoes, no jewelry, and long hair must be pulled back. Please review the hazards and mitigation information on the workshops.” Younger offspring, let’s look at workshop B.

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More on strategies to accomplish training.

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Earlier this week, I mentioned that I had powered through some online training courses that I needed to complete by the (rapidly approaching) beginning of my academic term. In that post, I voiced my worries about how well I’d be able to retain the material I took in (and, one hopes, absorbed to at least some extent) in one long sitting at my computer.

As it happens, I am spending today and tomorrow at full-day training sessions (about nine hours per day, including breaks) covering related material at much greater depth and breadth. Obviously, this affords me the opportunity to compare the two modes of content delivery.

One thing I’ve noticed is that I seem to have retained substantial chunks of the material presented in the online training. (Sure, retaining it for two days is maybe not a huge accomplishment, but these have been subtle details — and I’m pretty sure I have students who can forget material more rapidly than this once the quiz on the material is behind them.)

It’s possible, though, that my retention of that material will be better because I’m using it in this live training. I’ll really have no way to tell which bits of the overlapping material stick in my head because of the online training and which stick because of the live training since I’m doing both in rapid succession. (Too many variables!)

The live training has so far been more interactive during the presentation of material, with speakers taking questions and asking us questions. (They’ve also distributed clicker-like devices that we’ll be using during the presentations after lunch.) There haven’t been any quizzes on the material (yet), but there will be breakout groups in which our active participation is required.

We’ve also been presented with gigantic binders containing handouts with slides for each of the presentations (complete with space for our own notes), related articles, and extensive listings of additional resources (including online resources). These binders have been adding to my sense of actively engaging with the information rather than just having the information wash over me. Plus, my binder will now be my first stop if I need to look up a piece of information from this training, which I personally will find easier than digging through my Firefox bookmarks.

A disadvantage of this training is that it eats up two calendar days set far in advance by the trainers, in a particular location far enough from most of the participants’ home bases that they need to book lodging for a couple nights. As well, owing to the A/V needs of the presenters and the aforementioned gigantic binders, the cost per participant of the training session is significant.

Why, you might ask, am I doing both of these overlapping training programs in rapid succession?

Strictly speaking, the live training sessions I’m doing today and tomorrow are not required of me. However, given responsibilities that stem from my committee appointments, this training is a really good idea. It will help me do my job better, and I’m bringing home resources I can share with other committee members who can benefit from them. The training may be taking up eighteen hours of my life right now, but I anticipate what I’m learning may save me at least that many hours of spinning my wheels just in the coming semester.

The online training was something I was required to take, but it strikes me as the minimal amount of information adequate to prepare someone for my committee duties. Plus, the online training is being required of a larger population at my university than just members of my committee, so we committee members are also doing the online training to ensure that we understand how well it’s working for the other people taking it.

One thing I’m thinking in light of this week of training is that my committee might want to find a way to offer periodic opportunities for live training on campus (at least as a companion to the online training if not as a substitutable alternative). If we want the people who are partaking of the training to have more than a minimal grasp of the material on which they’re being trained, recognizing different learning styles and building in more open-ended interactivity might bring about better results.

The value of (unrealistic) case studies in ethics education.

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Dr. Isis posted a case study about a postdoc’s departure from approved practices and invited her readers to discuss it. DrugMonkey responded by decrying the ridiculousness of case studies far more black and white than what scientists encounter in real life:

This is like one of those academic misconduct cases where they say “The PI violates the confidence of review, steals research ideas that are totally inconsistent with anything she’d been doing before, sat on the paper review unfairly, called the editor to badmouth the person who she was scooping and then faked up the data in support anyway. Oh, and did we mention she kicked her cat?”.

This is the typical and useless fare at the ethical training course. Obvious, overwhelmingly clear cases in which the black hats and white hats are in full display and provide a perfect correlation with malfeasance.

The real world is messier and I think that if we are to make any advances in dealing with the real problems, the real cases of misconduct and the real cases of dodgy animal use in research, we need to cover more realistic scenarios.

I’m sympathetic to DrugMonkey’s multiple complaints: that real life is almost always more complicated than the canned case study; that hardly anyone puts in the years of study and training to become a scientist if her actual career objective is to be a super-villain; and especially that the most useful sort of ethics training for the scientist will be in day to day conversation with scientific mentors and colleagues rather than in isolated ethics courses, training modules, or workshops.

However, used properly, I think that case studies — even unrealistic ones — play a valuable role in ethics education.

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Some thoughts on online training courses.

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I don’t know how it is where you are, but my summer “break” (such as it is) is rapidly winding down. Among other things, it means that I spent a few hours today in front of my computer completing online training courses.

I find myself of two minds (at least) on these courses.

On the one hand, many of these courses do a reasonable (or even excellent) job of conveying important information — broken down into modules that convey reasonably sized bites of content, enhanced with videos, case studies, and links to further information which one might bookmark for future reference. Indeed, the online training courses themselves can be accessed as a source of information later on, when one needs it.

It’s hard to beat the convenience of the online delivery of these courses. You start them when you’re ready to take them, and you can do a few modules of a course at a time, or pound through them all in one sitting. You don’t need to show up to a particular place for a particular interval of time, you don’t need to find a parking space, you don’t even need to change out of your pajamas.

Plus, many of these online training courses simplify record-keeping for whomever is responsible for ensuring that the folks who are supposed to take the course have actually taken it (and performed to the specified level on the accompanying quizzes) by emailing the completion reports to the designated official.

On the other hand … if you’re pounding through a 26-module course in one sitting (as I did today), you have to wonder a little about retention. Passing a quiz on a module immediately after you’ve read through that module may be do-able, but I’m less certain that it would be as easy to pass a month later. Indeed, if there had been a single big quiz after the 26 modules (rather than a quiz on each module that you take immediately after the module), I’m not sure I would have scored as well.

I imagine, too, that this mode of training is not necessarily beloved by people who have not made their peace with multiple choice tests. As well, for people who need to discuss material in order to understand it, the online delivery of modules may be a lot less effective than a live training with other participants.

What have your experiences with online training courses been? To you find them an adequate tool for the job, a poor fit for your learning style, or a big old waste of time?

Building a critical reasoning course: homework.

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I’m still working on planning that “Logic and Critical Reasoning” course I mentioned in an earlier post. As I noted there, the course is meant to give the students exposure to symbolic logic (looking at the forms of the arguments expressed with Ps and Qs, using rules of inference and truth-tables to evaluate the validity of those arguments, etc.), as well as to help them grapple with the arguments people make in natural language. While there’s clearly a connection between argumentation in the wild and formal arguments, students frequently need some time to get used to the Ps and Qs and not-Ps and backwards Es and upside down As.

In the normal course of things, getting used to symbolic logic means homework, and homework means grading. But, I’m looking at an enrollment of about 65 in a semester where there’s no earthly chance of money for graders. And, as you might recall from the last post on the course, the students are also required to write argumentative essays totaling a minimum of 3000 words. Among other things, this means I already have a substantial grading load for this course before the students do a speck of symbolic logic. However, symbolic logic is one of those things that seems to require practice if it’s to stick in your brain.

Luckily, my colleague Anand Vaidya shared a strategy with me that I hope will give the students the practice and feedback they need without drowning me in additional grading. We’re going to do “homework” in class.

The idea will be to save time at the end of each class period to work problems. Maybe there will be a set of five for the students to work individually, after which they will tell me how to do them at the board (asking questions as needed). Then there will be another set of five problems for the students to work in small groups, after which the groups will explain how to solve them and more discussion will follow. Maybe we’ll conclude by tackling some especially challenging problems together.

None of the problems will be handed in or graded. However, every two weeks we will have a quiz covering material that includes such problems. Presumably, this will give the students a strong incentive to come to class, do the problems, participate in the discussion, and ask questions until they understand. (Anand’s experience with has been that the students discover by the second quiz that they cannot blow off the problems worked in class, at least not if they want to do well on the quizzes.) I’ll probably make the problems available on the course website for those who might miss the class meeting (or who want to recapture the magic by working the problems again later), and I’ll entertain further questions on them during office hours, but it will be the students’ responsibility to make sure they know what we go over in class.

I am assuming here that grading quizzes will require less labor than grading homework assignments would (at least for the amount of homework required to master the material in advance of the quizzes). I’m also assuming that actually making up (and photocopying) the quizzes will be less work than grading all that homework would be. (There’s probably also a subconscious calculation about the amount of paper I’d be schlepping back and forth, one that favors the quizzes slightly.)

That’s my plan for the symbolic logic course content. The argumentative papers obviously won’t work this way. More on them in an upcoming post.

Building a critical reasoning course: getting started with the external constraints.

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My Fall semester is rapidly approaching and I am still in the throes of preparing to teach a course I have never taught before. The course is called “Logic and Critical Reasoning.” Here’s the catalog description of the course:

Basic concepts of logic; goals and standards of both deductive and inductive reasoning; techniques of argument analysis and assessment; evaluation of evidence; language and definition; fallacies.

The course involves some amount of symbolic logic (and truth-tables and that good stuff) but also a lot of attention to argumentation “in the wild”, in the written and spoken word. My department usually teaches multiple sections of the course each semester, but it’s not the case that we all march in lockstep with identical textbooks, syllabi, and assignments.

The downside of academic freedom, when applied to teaching a course like this, is that you have to figure out your own plan.

Nonetheless, since critical reasoning is the kind of thing I think we need more of in the world, I’m excited about having the opportunity to teach the course. And, at Tom Levenson‘s suggestion, I’m going to blog the process of planning the course. Perhaps you all will have some suggestions for me as I work through it.

Part of why my department offers multiple sections of “Logic and Critical Reasoning” is that it fulfills a lower-division general education (G.E.) requirement. In other words, there’s substantial student demand for courses that fulfill this requirement.

For this course to fulfill the G.E. requirement, of course, it has to meet certain pedagogical goals or “learning objectives”. So, where I need to start in planning this course is with the written-and-approved-by-committee learning objectives and content requirements:

Course Goals and Student Learning Objectives
“Logic and Critical Reasoning” is designed to meet the G.E. learning objectives for Area A3.

A.
Critical thinking courses help students learn to recognize, analyze, evaluate, and engage in effective reasoning.

B.
Students will demonstrate, orally and in writing, proficiency in the course goals. Development of the following competencies will result in dispositions or habits of intellectual autonomy, appreciation of different worldviews, courage and perseverance in inquiry, and commitment to employ analytical reasoning. Students should be able to:

  1. distinguish between reasoning (e.g., explanation, argument) and other types of discourse (e.g., description, assertion);
  2. identify, analyze, and evaluate different types of reasoning;
  3. find and state crucial unstated assumptions in reasoning;
  4. evaluate factual claims or statements used in reasoning, and evaluate the sources of evidence for such claims;
  5. demonstrate an understanding of what constitutes plagiarism;
  6. evaluate information and its sources critically and incorporate selected information into his or her knowledge base and value system;
  7. locate, retrieve, organize, analyze, synthesize, and communicate information of relevance to the subject matter of the course in an effective and efficient manner; and
  8. reflect on past successes, failures, and alternative strategies.

C.

  • Students will analyze, evaluate, and construct their own arguments or position papers about issues of diversity such as gender, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.
  • Reasoning about other issues appropriate to the subject matter of the course shall also be presented, analyzed, evaluated, and constructed.
  • All critical thinking classes should teach formal and informal methods for determining the validity of deductive reasoning and the strength of inductive reasoning, including a consideration of common fallacies in inductive and deductive reasoning. … “Formal methods for determining the validity of deductive arguments” refers to techniques that focus on patterns of reasoning rather than content. While all deductive arguments claim to be valid, not all of them are valid. Students should know what formal methods are available for determining which are which. Such methods include, but are not limited to, the use of Venn’s diagrams for determining validity of categorical reasoning, the methods of truth tables, truth trees, and formal deduction for reasoning which depends on truth functional structure, and analogous methods for evaluating reasoning which may be valid due to quantificational form. These methods are explained in standard logic texts. We would also like to make clear that the request for evidence that formal methods are being taught is not a request that any particular technique be taught, but that some method of assessing formal validity be included in course content.
  • Courses shall require the use of qualitative reasoning skills in oral and written assignments. Substantial writing assignments are to be integrated with critical thinking instruction. Writing will lead to the production of argumentative essays, with a minimum of 3000 words required. Students shall receive frequent evaluations from the instructor. Evaluative comments must be substantive, addressing the quality and form of writing.

This way of describing the course, I reckon, is not the best way to convince my students that it’s a course they’re going to want to be taking. My big task, therefore, is to plan course material and assignments that accomplish these goals while also striking the students as interesting, relevant, and plausibly do-able. In addition, I want to plan assignments that give the students enough practice and feedback but that don’t overwhelm me with grading. (The budget is still in very bad shape, so I have no expectation that there will be money to hire a grader.)

I have some ideas percolating here, which I will blog about soon. One of them is to use the blogosphere as a source of arguments (and things-that-look-like-arguments-but-aren’t) for analysis. I’m thinking, though, that I’ll need to set some good ground rules in advance.

Do these learning objectives and content requirements seem to you to call out for particular types of homework assignments or mini-lecture? If you had to skin this particular pedagogical cat, where would you start?