My two recent posts on teaching seem to have stirred up more discussion than I first expected. Opinions are still mixed between those who favor an approach that relies more heavily on actively teaching material and those who favor pushing the students to learn for themselves. I'm still not certain which approach is better, but with today's quiz results, I have discovered one thing for certain: sometimes lots of students getting a question wrong just means that lots of students weren't paying attention.
Prior to giving the students a quiz on genetics, I reviewed some of the key concepts that we had covered in the genetics lab. One of the things that I specifically discussed in the review was human blood typing. I told them that the A and B bloodtypes were produced by different alleles of the same gene. I told them that this means, "If one of the parents has type-AB blood, none of their children will have type-O blood." That is, as closely as I can recall, a direct quote.
Less than five minutes later, I gave them the quiz. Question 2 on the quiz was, "Mom has bloodtype AB+. Can she have a child with type-O blood." Looking at the quizzes, it appears that about a quarter of the class managed to get that question wrong. It is possible, I suppose, that my teaching abilities are somehow to blame, but I really don't think that's the case. It's also possible that I bored them to the point that they could no longer pay attention - that's going to be the first thing my family would guess - but that's not all that likely either - I spent something like 4 minutes on the pre-quiz review, and none of my teaching evals from the last two semesters has had that as a complaint. I think it's a lot more likely that a quarter of the students just weren't paying attention.
This doesn't mean that I like that, and I'm still going to work harder to try to get people's attention, but I think I'm going to be a bit more realistic about where I set the bar for myself - particularly when I'm dealing with non-majors who don't want to be there.
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I have had the same experience and I know colleagues who say the same thing.
Just before an exam, I always ask if there is anything that the students are not clear about and want explaining one more time. I will give the answer to any question even if I know it is on the exam. Students still answer wrongly, even after being given the answer five minutes before taking the exam.
Another of my exam frustrations (which might be related), especially with multi-choice quizzes and short answers questions, is that students try to take exams as quickly as possible. They never check their answers. I even tried making them stay in the room for twenty minutes after the beginning of the exam, but it did not seem encourage them to check their answers.
Once a student missed a question and also did not cross check numbers on the answer sheet with the questions. All the rest of his answers were then off on the computer-graded answer sheet.
I would argue, and I will : ) that different approaches will work best for students who are at different points in their college career. The approach should be more towards active teaching with freshmen and sophomore science students. But as students become more skilled at learning - or as some might put - the game of going to college, it's okay to expect them to do more and be more independent.
In your first post, though, you mentioned that the course was: Zoology 101 labs (Intro to Zoology for nonmajors).
There is a good chance that with non-science majors, that they will never take another science course ever again. You have a different kind of responsibilty with non-majors, both towards these students and towards your profession. It is important to have these students finish your class with a good attitude towards science and a good attitude towards the people who practice it.
Consequently, I would be more likely to take on the persona of a used car salesmen than to adopt the "look it up yourself" kind of approach that you described in the first post.
Over the course of 10 years of teaching, I've learned to rely on the following metric. The first time you say something, 50% of the students will hear you. The second time you say the same thing, 50% of the ignorant 50% will hear you for the first time and so on. Good teachers master the ability to efficiently repeat material, but in slightly different ways. This way, more students eventually hear you but you won't bore those who heard you the first time.
Ah ... making them stay around. "I know when I'm done!" snarked the worst student last time around. She was done, too ... she just wasn't passing.
Sandra said,
I know you're not trying to imply that looking up definitions is something only a science major should be able to do, but that's very much how it reads given the context of the original post. Independent learning isn't (shouldn't?) be something only scientists do, and there's no better time to start than university, even in your first course (the link is a comment I made just a few hours ago on the old post). The earlier we start teaching students to think and learn for themselves the better, and not just in science.
Gotta disagree with the tone of this post.
IMHO, if a business student learns NOTHING of actual biology, but has a solid grasp of the scientific method, how knowledge is gained and changed, the actual definition of science, peer review, etc. -- society and that student would be much better for it.
His ability to recite the ATP pathway or knowledge of the CREB cycle is almost useless in comparison.
Hi Dan,
I'm not sure what your argument is. Of *course* people should learn things about the scientific method, peer review, etc, and the major part of peer review is independently judging a body of work critically, which is exactly what I'm advocating. You often can't look it up in a textbook when you're doing science, so you have to gather as much data as you can about a topic and make informed opinions about things. What's wrong with asking that we start teaching this idea in a first year class?
Philip:
You're right. I didn't really mean to imply that non-science majors shouldn't be expected to look up definitions. I do think they should look up definitions. But, as I explained in a different post I don't think it stops there. If an instructor wants students to know the material, they have a responsibility to perform some kind of an assessment to make sure that students have understood the definition and are using it correctly.
In my comment above, I was referring to the subtext in the first post, where Mike stated:
I've read other posts by Mike and I'm sure this is not the message that he intended to send, but If I were a student, I would have interpreted that statement as "he doesn't care about us and won't help" and under my breath (fairly or not), I would have been saying "jerk." I know I felt that way about plenty of my professors.
In this case, I think a better approach would have been to have the students look up the definitions - and then, in the following week - have the students share their definitions. This would have helped Mike figure out if his students were on track and he would have had an opportunity to correct misimpressions.
Hi Sandra,
You're leaving off the very part of Mike's first post that makes your argument very (to me) weak! To finish it, Mike ended with
I parse this as "look them up yourself, get in touch with me if you're not comfortable with the definitions, because you *will* be required to know them.' I don't see that as being a jerk at all. I agree that there may have been a better way to teach the material, but I don't think it was too much to ask.
A bit unrelated, but try asking the same question (or a variant of the question) on a future quiz. Part of a good education is learning how to learn, and a big part of that is learning from one's mistakes. Paraphrasing Wooden, failing to learn is learning to fail.
You threw out some information that you expected them to know and understand for a quiz five minutes later??
First, if they didn't understand a concept before they came into the class, I wouldn't expect them to figure it out in the next four minutes before an exam. Second, most people don't listen, and they probably weren't listening to you. I bet most of the kids were studying their notes, checking their cellphones, or repeating stuff in their heads that they were supposed to remember for the exam.
If you really want to know how they missed your tip, why don't you ask them what was going on in their heads?
It wasn't like that was the first time that I'd taught that material. Actually, it was more like the third time in three consecutive weeks. This particular time, it just happened that I told them, using basically the same words as the question, less than five minutes prior to handing them the quiz.
"I told them that . . . . I think it's a lot more likely that a quarter of the students just weren't paying attention. "
Perhaps. Or perhaps several of those students have trouble processing and remembering something that they hear, especially if they hear it just one time. I hope you also at least wrote it on a board or overhead for those who really need to see in order to learn.
One more comment on the "look up the definitions yourself" thing: People need to know what it is they're supposed to be learning. If part of your purpose at any time is to teach people how to learn by themselves without a teacher, the students need to know about that goal. It's difficult to be effective in teaching specific information and teaching learning techniques at the same time. Those may need to be taught separately before the student is expected to bring them together in a single undertaking.
You're absolutely right that students have a responsibility to listen and think and study and do whatever else they need to do to learn. The problem I see sometimes is a teacher who thinks that the students' responsibility to use every possible method to learn somehow relieves him/her of the responsibility to use every possible method to teach. You aren't one of those people; you're going to be a great teacher, I think, because you care enough to keep asking yourself how to get better at it. Nobody is ever able to reach every student. But the best teachers never stop trying to.
I personally think the 'let the student's learn for themselves' approach is really teacher laziness in disguise. Who needs college if the teachers aren't going to teach?
I'll say the same thing here I always say when the subject of teaching methods comes up: Different methods for different students!
I myself am extremely autditorium-oriented. Put me in an auditorium with an even semi-comptent speaker giving a talk, and I'll get more bang for my time than with a book at home.
Other people I know prefer to read the material at home. Some people need to have stuff repeated for them many times, some people fall mentally asleep and miss half the talk if you start with a recap.
I think the key is to ensure that there are multiple different venues: Make sure the course material is good, so readers can use it productively. Make sure there are pen and paper exercises, so that those who learn with their hands rather than their eyes can do that. Make sure that there are good talks so those who learn that way get an oppertunity to do so.
When giving a talk, make sure to use the blackboard a lot - it gives coherence to a talk, and ensures that the students can jump back a sentence or two and catch up with the logic if they miss something.
I have a serious bias against overheads and PowerPoint, but that is presumably because I'm in Physics. In a dicipline where the theoretical side is math-heavy, the blackboard is usually infinitely superior to overheads for two reasons:
First, it ensures that the speaker doesn't rush through the equations since he actually has to physically write them on the blackboard. And second, if you have a half-decent auditorium, there's room for more equations on the blackboard than on any single overhead - meaning that the students can go farther back in the logic, and that's always a good thing.
Now, I can see why a course in - say - molecular biology could benefit from having some of the more hairy macromolecules on overheads - if for no other reason, then because it takes a looong time to draw some of the more - ah - esoteric molecules.
On the subject of spoon-feeding, it's a Goddamn university! Students are supposed to think for themselves!
OK, the first half-year or so, you'll need to hold their hands, while they get their feet under them. But I maintain that this can in fact be done without the overt spoon-feeding that you get from textbooks such as Young and Friedman's University Physics, and over the course of the first year, the hand-holding should gradually decrease.
And after the first year, my inclination is that spoon-feeding should be utterly off the table.
- JS
If it's only that one section, then what is different about that section?
1. This quiz might just be an extreme point of a purely gaussian distribution. Were they just off on this particular quiz, or does this class typically screw around more than the other sections?
2. Sometimes when you teach multiple sections of the same class, you say something to one section a little differently than you did to the others: omitted words or sentences (or ideas), different wording, etc. Are you *sure* you said that to this section?
3. Are a significant number of them members of a particular greek society or sports team?
4. Maybe it's the time of day (after lunch).
I taught CS as an undergrad and grad student. They called us TAs, but we didn't "assist" anyone. We taught the damned classes.
In general I believe in making everything as simple as possible. I believe that there is enough that is naturally difficult or complex in most subjects that there's no need to make them artificially difficult. That is, students should be spoon-fed, particularly in the first year or two.
Gradually, though, the exercises should become more complicated. This can happen in quite natural ways. In engineering, for example, in the beginning years one is typically told to solve certain problem. "This is the problem. Solve it." As the student progresses in the program, she must increasingly develop the skills required to figure out what the actual problem is.
This is a very powerful teaching technique, but I have only seen it done very well by a very few professors. Most of them do it abysmally. Prof. Denning at GMU is someone who uses it brilliantly. When he gives a homework problem, you can bet your behind you'll be spending about 30-60 minutes just trying to figure out what the actual problem is, by which time you will have developed a clear understanding of a path to solution.
Most profs who do this, though, are extremely lousy. They don't do their OWN homework. They don't give you the necessary pointers, they actually do nothing but generate unnecessary confusion and angst. You get an A and think, "So what? I've learned little worth knowing. And almost nothing worth that effort."
A person who decides to be a teacher has to make a decision about what his mission is. Some of them consider their mission to be filtering or sorting. Others think their mission is to produce researchers. For some of them, it's an ego trip and for some a way to get money easier than working in industry. Some of us, however, thought that our job was nothing more lofty than to communicate an understanding of the subject material to those who had an honest desire to learn it and had payed us (indirectly) for the privilege.