I have some posts gestating on ethical issues in science, but I have to clear a bit more grading and committee work before I can do them justice. In the meantime, I want to pose a set of questions to those of you who teach labs and/or supervise laboratory research:
Have you been asked to adapt your laboratories for students or researchers with disabilities?
Category Archives: Teaching and learning
What exactly are grades supposed to mean?
I’m just back from a committee meeting at which the subject of grades and grade distributions came up, and it became clear to me that academics (even at the same institution, even in the same field) have wildly different philosophies about just what grades ought to mean.
Is solving the absenteeism/attendance issue really a matter of framing?
After I posted on the issue twice and Julie posted on it once (although she might blog further on it), I got a brainwave about what’s at the core of our frustration with our students who ditch lots of classes.
At bottom, it’s our feeling that we are not succeeding in our attempts to communicate with them — about why being in class can help them succeed in a course, about the value that course could have beyond filling a necessary requirement for graduation, about the larger value a college education could have in their lives. We’re trying to get all this across, but sometimes we wonder whether we’re the grown-ups in a Charlie Brown special; to the kids, what we’re saying might as well be “WAH-WAH WAH WAH WAH” (as played by a trombone).
And perhaps the reason our attempts at communicating with our students are failing is that we are not framing these attempts as well as we could.
A few more words on the class-attendance issue.
The reponses to my earlier post on an admittedly nutty idea to get students to come to class seem, so far, to hold that the choice of whether or not to attend class ought to rest solely with the college student, and that he or she ought to live with the consequences of that choice. (Also, there was a fair bit of reminiscing about pointless class meetings that had been attended and about classes aced despite chronic absenteeism.)
I don’t disagree that cultivating a sense of personal responsibility is a good thing (nor that poorly planned or poorly delivered lectures are bad). But how to cultivate that sense of responsibility is the head-scratcher, especially when one’s students seem to have a very different motivation structure than one remembers having when one was a student.
Incentivizing class attendance.
Over sushi last night, Julie and I had one of those “kids today!” discussions so common among people teaching college students. The locus of our old-fart incomprehension was the reluctance of a significant number of students to actually attend class meetings, even when not attending class meetings has disasterous (and entirely predictable) consequences. (For example, some significant number of Julie’s students are now at the point where it is numerically impossible for them to pass the course, and this is strongly correlated with their absenteeism — not their writing skills.)
We didn’t ditch our classes when we were undergraduates. Wasn’t that where the learning was going to happen? Wasn’t there a reason we weren’t just buying textbooks and trying to teach ourselves? (And what would our professors have thought of us if we had cut more classes than we attended? Who would want to carry around that kind of shame?)
Clearly, our students are making decisions differently than we used to. Just as clearly, they seem to miss — to their detriment — that class meetings are frequently essential to their academic success. What could we possibly do to help them get themselves to class?
How important are labs for learning science?
Steve Gimbel has a provocative post that suggests the costs of undergraduate lab classes may outweigh the benefits. Quoth Steve:
[E]verything I know about physics, I learned from my theory classes. You see, science classes come in two flavors. There are theory classes where a prof stands in front of the room and lectures and then there are lab classes where for many hours, students walk in ill-prepared and tried to figure out which one of these things we’ve never seen before is a potentiometer, fumble their way through procedures that yield results that are not even close to what they were led to expect, and then plug and chug their way through scientific and error calculations that frankly mean little to them. I will freely admit that all my experiences in lab classes were a waste of intellectual time and curricular space that could have much better utilized.
Now, I’m supposed to be writing a serious academic paper right now*, but Steve, as a fellow philosopher who is well aware of my misspent scientific, actually emailed me to see if I’d weigh in on the (as did another blogger coming at the issue from the perspective of a working scientist). And, coincidentally, just the night before Steve published his post, my better half and I were reminiscing about our undergraduate experiences with laboratory classes. So really, what choice do I have but to respond?
Basic concepts: intermolecular forces.
As promised at the end of my post on polar and non-polar molecules, here’s a basic concepts post on intermolecular forces. Intermolecular forces are the forces between molecules, whereas intramolecular forces are those within molecules. (The bonds that hold the atoms in a molecule together are intramolecular forces.)
Basic concepts: polar and non-polar molecules.
What list of basic concepts would be complete without a primer on polar and non-polar molecules?
You’ll recall that chemists live in a world made up of atoms and various assemblies and modifications thereof, which are, in turn, made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons (which have positive charge and some mass) and neutrons (which are just a squosh more massive than protons) hang out together in the nucleus of your atom, while electrons can be thought of as zipping around the nucleus.
When multiple atoms are part of an assembly in which they are bonded to each other, you have a molecule. For the moment, consider the “bond” between atoms in a molecule to be an electron-sharing arrangement that maintains a certain (average) spatial configuration between the nuclei of the bonded atoms. [1]
Students learn less from ‘cookbooks’ than from working out their own approach.
Score another point for my mother.
My mother is a really good cook. She is also an unrepentant violator of recipes. My earliest cookbook related memory involves noticing that, while Mom had a recipe in front of her, she was flagrantly measuring different amounts of ingredients than those called for, and combining them in a way that clearly contravened the method described on the page.
It turns out that this manifestation of her issues with authority may also explain why she has such a good understanding of what she’s doing in the kitchen.
At least, that’s a conclusion I’m inclined to draw from research done by Ohio State University professor Steve Rissing on two different approaches to an enzyme laboratory experiment in an introductory biology course:
Basic concepts: elements.
I figured it was time I weighed in on a basic concept from chemistry, so let’s talk about what defines an element.