Slides and supplementary material from my CS-AAPT presentation

I presented the lab we recently did in class at the Chicago Section AAPT Spring meeting.  The lab was another one of my "single-sentence labs" which basically came down to:

"Measure the capacitance of a aluminum foil parallel plate capacitor as you vary the separation of the plates by using your textbook."

That may be more detailed than what I actually wrote on the board in class, or it might be less detailed.  I don't really remember.

All we did in this lab was make a capacitor by putting sheets of foil inside the physics textbook and measure the capacitance with multimeters that we had in the storeroom. The meters had the ability to measure capacitance. We were measuring capacitance in the nano-Farad range.

I thought the lab was a great learning opportunity for the students and for me, so I wanted to share that with other physics teachers.  I got a request for the materials and lab instructions that I used for the lab.  Since I do "single-sentence labs" there really isn't a set of lab instructions to share, but I put together my notes from what we did after the first time through the lab.

Here are the slides for my presentation with some extra notes added.

Here are the notes I used in class for discussing aspects of uncertainties in measurement.

Thanks to @DrDawes for the suggestion of the lab!  I'd love feedback from anyone who does this lab (or similar) since I plan to do this again in future semesters.

What am I trying to encourage with my exam policies?

I'm trying to figure how to handle giving quizzes and exam next semester in my algebra-based physics courses, my intro astronomy course and my general education course in musical acoustics.

There has been much talk online recently about Standards Based Grading (SBG) and related assessment strategies. I'm not diving fully into the SBG waters, and currently my issue isn't directly related to going towards SBG.  The reason I mention SBG is to give some context.

Introductory Physics Courses

A few years ago when I learned about SBG, I sort of had the wrong idea of how it was supposed to be implemented. I liked the philosophy which allowed for students to learn at their own pace and to be reassessed on understanding of the standards.  I also liked the idea of using student-made screencasts (Thanks to Andy Rundquist for leading me down this path) as assessment methods.  Because I get to hear the students explain the physics in their own words, I can really find out what they understand and what they are simply regurgitating from class or the book.

Grades in intro physics are made up of the following parts: online reflections of what they did in class and read in the textbook, screencasts done for homework, lab reports, weekly quizzes, midterm exams and a final. I consider the lab reports to be drafts which can be corrected and submitted until they are satisfactory. I also consider the screencast homework assignments to be practice for taking quizzes and exams, so I provide feedback on the screencasts and allow them to be resubmitted as many times as needed until correct.

Quizzes and exams are done in a traditional way - all the students spread out as far away from each other in the classroom and work independently on the quiz or exam for a set amount of time. For quizzes, I provide relevant (and sometimes not-so-relevant) equations, but for the exams students prepare their own equation sheet. I usually give 20 minutes for a quiz and 2 hours for an exam.

General education courses - Intro Astronomy and Physics of Sound, Music and Hearing

In the gen ed courses I do not use screencasts. The only homework that the students are required to do is the classroom reflections. Astronomy is not a lab course, so there are no lab reports, but they do have to do a semester-long astronomy journal project. In the acoustics class, students design and build their own musical instrument.  I'm pretty happy with those parts of the grading process.

But the exams are something else. Again, I have typically given "traditional" type exams where all students work independently. I typically supply equations for these classes.

There is a pattern that is starting to emerge over the last few semesters in astronomy. The first part of the pattern is that on the first exam the class average is somewhere in the mid-60% to mid-70% range. For many students it is shockingly low. However, in the 10-ish years I've been teaching the class, the average on the first exam has never strayed far from this mark.  Typically we have a discussion of how now they know how the exam will be structured (even though we discussed it thoroughly beforehand) and that they should think carefully about what changes they need to make in preparing for the next exam. I've also been weighting the first exam less than later exams in recent years to try to alleviate concern that their grade is sunk after one poor exam. The next part of the pattern is that on the second exam (out of three midterm exams) the class average goes down. Significantly down. In most semesters before the last 3, the class average would rise to right below about 80%.  More recently, the average has declined to the low 60% range. 

Frustrated by this pattern, I offered to allow group exams in astronomy on the third midterm.  Working together, the students were able to significantly bring up their scores, although implementing the group exam brings in its own set of challenges in terms of how I score it fairly.

What am I really trying to encourage?

There are some maxims that are sort of swirling around in my head whenever I think about what I'm going to do next semester. One is the saying about how students don't really respond to what you want them to do (or what's best for them) but they will respond to what they are graded on. I guess I can't really think of the exact saying right now, but I think a lot about how to incentivize the intrinsic motivation to pursue deep learning without having to provide the extrinsic motivation of points towards a grade.

The other related thought that I can't quite decide how to address is the idea that if I want to encourage a type of behavior or thinking, then it SHOULD be a part of the grade somehow.

So for example, last semester in astronomy we used the lecture tutorials by the CAPER team as purely formative assessments. Students were told they would not be graded on them, so they should work together and feel free to make mistakes on them that we would correct in class.  My class never fully bought into the idea taking the tutorials seriously as a way of being actively engaged in the class. Even after the first exam had 80% of the questions based directly on the lecture tutorials, and the students themselves recognized how much of the exam was based on the tutorials they did not believe that collaborating with others on the tutorials was necessary.

And why should they have? I was not going to be rewarding them for working with others as a part of their grade, after all. I think that perhaps if group exams were a part of the course from the start, they would have reason to work with others in the class from the beginning.

But, what about the general physics course?  I believe Eric Mazur's Harvard course has some form of open-book, open-note policy on quizzes and exams. Others have used group exams in these courses.  What am I trying to encourage?  I think I am trying to encourage students to work together collaboratively, but am I grading that way?  Should I be? Isn't part of the course figuring out how to take quizzes and exams by yourself?

The real reason I need to figure this out

I have a conference that is going to take me away from school the last week of the semester before finals. I am not happy with this schedule, but there is not much I can do about it right now. What I'd like to do if possible is eliminate in-class exams. Since I typically give three mid-term exams, that effectively gives me back all my time I would be missing at the end of the semester…although it's really never the same. But if I give take-home exams, for example, how should they be structured? Do I explicitly forbid collaboration and trust the students? That seems to go against the classroom dynamic that I would like to foster of students working together. Do I explicitly encourage students to group up and work on it?  That would seem to disadvantage students who have busy work and home schedules and cannot easily pop back and forth to campus.

The one idea I've had is to give the exams as take-home exams and allow for students to group up if they want. But instead of them handing in the exam, have them make screencasts for each problem on the exam. That way, I hear each student explain it in their own words, just like the homework. I just don't know if I can grade that many screencasts in a reasonable amount of time.

TL;DR

How can I improve the way I assess and evaluate students next term? How closely does the grading policy align with my philosophy on learning and what can I do to improve that?

School year 2012-13 reflections

I had my annual review with my dean yesterday.  It went well, and although I don't have much to say about the review specifically, it was a time to reflect on things that went well and not so well in class this past year.

What I've come up with are things that I'm going to try in order to build on what has been going well and correct things that are not going so well:

1. I'm going to completely change how I assign what I call "Reading Reviews". This is probably going to be my biggest change next year, and I plan to have a separate post on this topic soon.
   
2. Lab report first drafts are going to be due the next class period we meet after the lab has been completed. Part of the point of a science course should be to model good scientific processes. I am terrible at quickly writing up scientific work that I do. But, if I want my students to start forming good habits, then we need them to write up what they do in lab as quickly as possible. That way there is less time for the memory of what was done in lab to fade. I will continue to use the policy of allowing as many rewrites as needed to get full credit on the lab.
   
   I saw that Joss posted about his concerns about lab report revisions on twitter today:
   

   I love using revise until correct but spend too much time worrying about Ss shooting themselves in the foot without constant deadlines
   — Joss Ives (@jossives) June 25, 2013

   That's a concern I have, too, but ultimately the responsibility is on the student to meet the expectations put forth in the syllabus.
   
3. I give a lot of short quizzes the first part of the semester, hopefully to encourage preparation for exams. I am planning to grade the quizzes in class as soon as they are done. We use a studio physics classroom, which makes for long class periods (at least 2 hours), and since I see my role as a facilitator of the learning environment rather than a lecturer, I will need to have mostly self-directed tasks for the class to work on for the 20ish minutes it will take to score all the quizzes.  My goal is to have the immediate feedback encourage the students to come to class better prepared for quizzes and exams. Even though I'm not using standards-based grading specifically, I am striving towards keeping the spirit of SBG. (Excellent post by Frank Noschese.)
   
4. Based on what I learned at the New Faculty Experience, I will be trying to make more frequent reflections.  I started doing this late in the year using Evernote.  Part of my problem with doing it regularly was that I had a tight schedule last semester. In the Fall I won't have that issue.

If I could identify a few things that went really well this year, I would say that in the Spring term especially, I used a lot of the TIPERs activities with whiteboards fairly effectively.  I do think I need to better introduce how the class needs to share their whiteboard work with each other.  Also, although we were able to do more labs (and more effectively, I think) I have some plans to better introduce some of the skills I expect them to use throughout the term.

I'm really happy with how the last year turned out.  I am looking forward to the Fall, but really happy to have the Summer to prepare for it.

Think Like a Physicist - Introduction

The first time I ever taught an introductory physics course from top to bottom was as a last-minute summer replacement hire at small liberal arts college.  The schedule was intense: four hours a day every morning and two hours of lab 2-3 afternoons a week. I know I wasn’t the best classroom instructor, but we had a pretty decent lab and the students who took the class and worked hard did make it through, and most importantly they did learn some physics.

One issue that came up, though, about ⅔ of the way through the summer was that the students confessed that they hated the quizzes and exams I gave them, not because they were terribly hard, but because they felt like they could never guess what I (their instructor) was actually thinking when I wrote the question. At first I felt like my worst fears had been realized: that I had wrote confusing and impossibly hard problems. But after talking with them, I came to realize that the level of the questions had been appropriate, it was just that they were trapped in a way of thinking which led them to believe that if they could figure out what I was thinking, they would be able to figure out the answer to the questions.

My response was that the only thing I was thinking was that if they applied the physics principles which we had discussed in class, no student would have any trouble answering the questions.  Clearly, all of the students would breeze through the summer, all of them would earn an A for the course. Of course I was wrong.

I spent much the rest of the course trying to persuade the class that they did not need to be mind readers in order to do well. I’m not sure how many of them actually believed me, but the experienced had a profound effect on my teaching. Ever since then, I’ve tried to do my best to make the physics concepts the central focus of all the classes I teach. It has been a hope of mine that no student would waste any precious study time trying to divine what is going on inside my head.

But, as I looked back at that experience during the summer I first taught physics, I’ve been starting to wonder if maybe there was a lesson that I missed myself. What if the students weren’t so much trying to read my mind, but instead they were trying to think like me? Isn’t that what I wanted? The difference may be subtle, but important, I think. When students are trying to read my mind, they are looking at a problem or question and trying to guess what the professor WANTS them to say. When students are looking at a physics situation and trying to think like their physics professor, they are trying to apply the thought processes and analysis skills of a physicist.

That is exactly what I want from my students.  I want them to think like a physicist.

Adopting the "growth" mindset

I just finished reading Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck.  It has changed a lot about how I think about learning and personal growth in my life (both professionally and otherwise). I'm trying to implement the idea of having a "growth" mindset in all I do for my classes and my research.  It's hard work, but I guess that's part of the point.

If there was only one thing I could implement in my classes from the book, it would be the following passage from chapter 3:

How teachers put a growth mindset into practice is the topic of a later chapter, but here's a preview of how Marva Collins, the renowned teacher, did it. On the first day of class, she approached Freddie, a left-back second grader, who wanted no part of school. "Come on, peach," she said to him, cupping his face in her hands, "we have work to do. You can't just sit in a street and grown smart....I promise, you are going to do, and you are going to produce. I am not going to let you fail."

Robert Talbert recently asked about the responsibilities of students and instructors in college. I don't know if I have a set answer to his question, but I do believe that if students are willing to put in the effort to do the work that I ask them to do in my class, then it is my responsibility to provide whatever assistance they need to be successful in learning the content in my class.

You've seen the videos that Vi Hart has been producing featuring what she calls doodle games related to various topics in math, right?  They made the rounds of the science and physics blogs towards the end of last year and beginning of this year.

Here's one of the most popular videos, in case you haven't seen it:



I don't want to sound too critical of what this woman has produced.  In fact, I really like her series of videos. (Plus, she makes homemade musical instruments. How cool is that?)

But, here's what you might not know about Vi Hart: her father is George Hart, a former professor at Stony Brook University, a sculptor, and the first director of the soon-to-open Museum of Mathematics.

What that means to me is that Vi grew up in an environment where curiosity about mathematics was nurtured and developed. It also indicates to me that she has been working for a long time to develop her talents. Those last two points are not criticisms, they are merely observations. 

I do take issue with her underlying commentary on the state of math education (and really, school in general) which is that classes are boring and taught by incompetent teachers, and that students would get more out of class by not paying attention and just playing some doodle games. I'm not even sure I disagree with her (completely) on those points, either. What I disagree with is the notion that anyone learns anything from watching her videos. She talks too fast for most people to be able to maintain comprehension all the way through the video and there are many terms which are unfamiliar to non-mathematicians which fly by as the video is playing.

I wanted to better understand what the doodle games were all about, so the first thing I did was I tried creating some doodles on my own.  (If her only goal in these videos is to get people to try out the doodles, then maybe they are working better than I give her credit for.) I was able to follow the first two doodle games in the above video, but I wasn't able to get the shading right on the third doodle game. More frustrating to me was that I couldn't really understand the importance of the doodles. In the video she mentioned knot theory and weaving but I could never quite catch what it was she was actually saying about all of that.

I went looking for a transcript of the video, but I couldn't find one. So, I sat down at my computer and banged out a transcript myself. I learned a few things by doing that. One, I learned that one of the figures she mentioned in the video is called a Ouroboros. I had no idea what she was talking about when I had watched the video, but by piecing together the transcript I was able to get the correct spelling and look it up online.

After I had the transcript complete, I started looking into all the topics she mentioned in the video. My digging eventually turned into this post at metafilter which was well received by the community over there. In finding the links which went into the post, I was able to dig a little into topics like knot theory and topology which I had previously known next to nothing about. I definitely appreciate that the video brought these ideas to my attention so that I would be inspired to learn more about them.

The thing is, though, it took a lot of my time to read up on those topics. I was constructing the metafilter post for over 2 weeks, working an hour or two every night in my free time. I learned a lot because I put in the effort to do so. I'm willing to bet that Vi Hart has put in thousands of hours of study to cultivate her passion and talent for math. It seems a little disingenuous to me, then, that she puts together videos with the attitude of "classes are boring" and "students don't need to pay attention". For a lot of students, classes are their only chance to engage with topics such as math or science. Most people aren't fortunate enough to have a parent who is a professional scientist or mathematician. It might not appeal to adults who feel they suffered through boring classes in their school years, but how many more kids could she encourage to engage more in their classes if her videos said something like: "Hey, ask your teacher in class about this. If you show interest in it, your teachers will likely respond to that interest!"

But, more importantly, it would be great to remind students that learning takes work. You don't become an expert on graph theory just because you've watched a four minute video on doodles. This is something I know, but I have to constantly remind myself of anyway. If I really wanted to make the third doodle game work, I could do it, but I would have to put in the effort and time to be able to do it. Vi Hart's videos not only miss the opportunity to encourage students to think that way, they might be inadvertently sending students the exact opposite message.

Random links

My browser tabs are over-cluttered with stuff I've been thinking about for awhile.  I need to clear them out so I can focus on other ideas.  Here's what I've been meaning to write about, in no particular order:


Back in October (!) I came across this commentary on the documentary "Waiting for Superman". The meat of the article is in this quote:

Where did you think great teachers come from? That they spring fully formed from the head of Zeus? Just about everybody who’s an accomplished teacher used to be an ineffective teacher, and as the maker of a documentary about first year teachers, I’m totally confused that you don’t seem to understand this. If you want to talk about great teachers, but don’t have anything to say about the conditions under which teachers become great, you are at a different stadium than where the game is happening.
(Hint, by the way: in order to become great, teachers need to make and then learn from their mistakes. What kind of environment fosters making and learning from your mistakes? Fear that you will lose your job over your kids’ test scores? Or maybe transparent, non-defensive collegiality? Okay, good job on that one, now the followup: what kind of education policies are going to create the environment that fosters growth?)

I couldn't agree with that more.  Not because I think I'm a great teacher, but because I think I'm still making and learning from my mistakes. He also linked to another criticism of the film where the main complaint was the confusion on what it means to create an environment where learning happens in a classroom.

Here's a snarky comic strip on what to do to encourage students to read their textbooks. I agree with the premise (that reading the textbook is important) but I'm not sure I completely agree with the message.

Are we teaching students to think like scientists? (Preprint)

Bill Nye talks to Popular Mechanics about teaching evolution in schools, but I was struck by this:

So we want to excite a new generation of kids—every generation—about the passion, beauty and joy—the PB&J—of science.

Passion, beauty and joy are often forgotten in teaching science.  I suppose I'm guilty of it many times, too. Plus, cool acronym!

Here's a guide to what seminar speakers are really saying that was recently posted over at Science. I'm really thrilled that the colloquium speakers we get in our department are usually really good and interesting to listen to.

A well-known astronomy textbook author (and his wife? Not sure.) had a jokey letter to the editor published in the New York Times. Thankfully, it was really brief.

There's an article in last month's American Journal of Physics that explores what was discussed in over 300 conversations students had while doing clicker questions in an intro astronomy class.  I haven't (yet) read that article, but Stephanie Chasteen at The Active Class had a great summary of the article.  Makes me think about what I could be doing better with the clickers.

And the last link for today comes from the president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics who wrote an article with the provocative title: "Endless Algebra - the Deadly Pathway from High School Mathematics to College Mathematics".

Do what I do, not what I say

One of the things that I decided to do based on recent classes I've taught is to try to reinforce the importance of students reading the material before coming to class.  To that end, I decided to implement reading quizzes due every morning that class meets.  But I also want to have walked in my students shoes as much as possible, so I have decided to read every section that I've assigned to them and take notes like I want them to be doing.

It may seem obvious to do this for every class, and certainly when I've taught the upper level courses I read and re-read (and sometimes re-re-read) all the sections we cover.  But for introductory classes I find that to prepare I generally need only skim over the chapter to see what topics are being presented and in what order.  Then, I have enough to worry about with prepping demonstrations, clicker questions, homework problems, in-class tutorials and anything else I can think of to help cover the topic in an active-learning classroom to have a lot of time to actually read the whole chapter.  Starting early, though I hope to get far enough ahead that I can finish all the reading assignments before the end of the quarter.

The reading quizzes are going to have two questions which will be the same each time, and then one or two additional questions which will be unique for each quiz.  The questions which repeat are: "What are two important concepts that you learned from the reading?" and "What are two concepts from the reading which you struggled to understand?"

I plan to use these questions to guide my note-taking as I read the book.