Links for 2012-01-10

It's a common complaint: Students don't read the book before class. It's probably equally true in the humanities, but my main experience is in the sciences. Science textbooks are dense, full of extraneous diagrams and pictures, and it's a real challenge for an introductory student to muddle their way through all that information to try to extract useful information from it. So most don't bother -- they go to class to see what content the professor thinks is important, and then use the textbook to help them to do the homework and guide their exam studying. But this constrains us to use class in content-delivery mode: If students don't know the first thing about Newton's Laws, then how can we do anything in class other than tell them about Newton's Laws?

How do we present the pre-reading assignment as something the students WANT to do? Here's a chain of reasoning, developed through conversations with my more-experienced colleagues. It's addressed to the students, so "you" means "you, the student sitting there in class today. Yes, you."

In order for any test to be considered valid, you need to include a control. Something in which you already know whether or not the variable being tested is present. In the case of these burgers, that means testing a McDonald's burger against a burger that is absolutely known not to contain anything but beef. The only way to do this, of course, is to cook it myself from natural beef ground at home. I decided to design a series of tests in order to ascertain the likeliness of each one of these separate scenarios