Teaching and Learning
jstemwedel | July 29, 2010At Uncertain Principles, Chad opines that "research methods" look different on the science-y side of campus than they do for his colleagues in the humanities and social sciences:
When the college revised the general education requirements a few years ago, one of the new courses created had as one of its key goals to teach students the difference between primary and secondary sources. Which, again, left me feeling like it didn't really fit our program-- as far as I'm concerned, the "primary source" in physics is the universe. If you did the experiment yourself, then your data constitute a…
jstemwedel | July 20, 2010Today Americans for Medical Progress has announced two recipients for academic year 2010-2011 of the Michael D. Hayre Fellowship in Public Outreach, designed to inspire and motivate the next generation of research advocates. This year, I'm especially wowed by their project.
From the AMP press release:
Two Ph.D. candidates in neuroscience have been selected by Americans for Medical Progress as the 2010-11 Michael D. Hayre Fellows in Public Outreach.  Elizabeth Burnett and Scott Dobrin are in the Neuroscience Program at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North…
jstemwedel | July 9, 2010Regular readers will recall that this is not the first time the Free-Ride family has discussed skepticism and trust.
Dr. Free-Ride: You two are both exploring the internet more lately, and you know that one of the things people use the internet for is to sell you stuff, right?
Younger offspring: Yeah.
Elder offspring: Yeah.
Dr. Free-Ride: So how do you tell if the people selling you stuff are telling the truth about what they're selling?
Elder offspring: Rave reviews about the item.
Dr. Free-Ride: Rave reviews about the item from whom?
Elder offspring: From ... people who bought the item.
Dr…
jstemwedel | July 1, 2010I've just gotten back from a conference, and I was blaming the travel and time zones for the fact that I feel like this:
However, from the looks of things, it seems there is some kind of zombie epidemic on ScienceBlogs today. (I suppose this means I need to talk to the IT guys about internet security issues, if I got zombified through my browsing. Assuming they're still taking help tickets from zombies. I wonder if being a zombie with tenure makes a difference ...)
Anyway, in the meantime I thought it might be useful to break out the workplace safety talk for new students. While I can't…
jstemwedel | June 29, 2010One of the most interesting sessions at the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting was a panel of men and women who participated in the IGERT program as students and are now working in a variety of different careers. The point of the panel was to hear about the ways that they felt their experiences as IGERT trainees prepared them for their current positions, as well as to identify aspects of their current jobs where more preparation might have been helpful.
The session was moderated by Judy Giordan (President and Co-Founder, Visions in Education, Inc.). The IGERT alums who participated in the…
jstemwedel | June 25, 2010The funding situation in the California State University system being what it is (scary-bad), departments at my fair university are also scrambling to adjust to a shift in the logic governing resource distribution. It used to be that resources followed enrollments -- that the more students you could pack into your classes, the more money your department would be given to educate students.
Now, in the era of enrollment caps (because the state can't put up its share of the cost for as many students as it used to), it's looking like resources will be driven by how many majors a department can…
jstemwedel | June 24, 2010As mentioned in an earlier post, I was recently part of a panel on Digital Science at the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting in Washington, D.C. The meeting itself brought together PIs, trainees, and project coordinators who are involved in a stunning array of interdisciplinary research programs. Since the IGERT program embraces mottos like "get out of the silos" and "think outside the box", my sense is that the Digital Science panel was meant to offer up some new-ish tools for accomplishing tasks that scientists might want to accomplish.
The panelists included Jean-Claude Bradley, who spoke…
jstemwedel | June 17, 2010Chad has posted an interesting discussion of a study of students' academic performance and how it is correlated to their evaluations of the faculty teaching them. The study in question is Carrell, S., & West, J. (2010). Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors Journal of Political Economy, 118 (3), 409-432 (DOI 10.1086/653808) . Go read Chad's post for a detailed discussion of the methodology of the study, since it will likely answer your questions about my quick overview here. After the overview, I'm going to offer a few more thoughts…
jstemwedel | June 11, 2010About three weeks ago, I was in Washington, D.C. for the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting. I was invited to speak on a panel on Digital Science (with co-panelists Chris Impey, Moshe Pritzker, and Jean-Claude Bradley, who blogged about it), and later in the meeting I helped to facilitate some discussions of ethics case studies.
I'll have more to say about our panel in the next post, but first I wanted to share some broad observations about the meeting.
IGERT stands for "Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship", and the program is described thusly:
IGERT is the National Science…
jstemwedel | June 4, 2010Even though I got my grades filed last Friday (hours before the midnight deadline), this week I kept encountering colleagues for whom the grading drama Would. Not. End. As you might imagine, this led to some discussions about what one should do when the grade-filing deadline approaches and you are still waiting for students to cough up the work that needs grading.
I'd like to tell you that this is a rare occurrence. Sadly, it is not. Before we get into speculation about why students may be failing to deliver the deliverables, a quick poll on your preferred professorial response:
Final…
jstemwedel | May 14, 2010Since finals are nearly upon us here (and since I'm not quite ready to face the next stack of papers that needs grading), I got to wondering how other academics feel about when the final exam ought to be written and why.
So, a quick poll:
When do you finish writing your final exam?online survey
A relevant question, I suppose, is whether what you think is the best time to write the exam from a pedagogical standpoint corresponds to when you actually get it written (owing to your other responsibilities, the unidirectional flow of time, and so forth). Lurking in here are also some worries…
jstemwedel | May 14, 2010The Free-Ride offspring are pretty sure what I do for a living is grade papers. But seeing as how they're both students, I thought I'd ask what the view of things is like on the other side of the red pen.
Dr. Free-Ride: When you come in and find me working on the weekend, what am I usually working on?
Younger offspring: Grading?
Dr. Free-Ride: Yeah. I know that you do a lot of homework and assignments.
Younger offspring: Mmm-hmm.
Dr. Free-Ride: And your teacher grades them.
Younger offspring: No! We correct them together.
Dr. Free-Ride: You correct it all together?
Younger offspring: Yeah…
jstemwedel | May 12, 2010Yeah, still grading here. Yesterday I returned mass quantities of graded papers (with a free paperclip for every student!) and have another assignment to grade today ... just in time for two more assignments which come due tomorrow. And then, the final exam!
Ever the optimist, this morning in the shower I wondered how things would turn out if the Rapture were to happen while I'm in the midst of all this grading. It's the kind of hypothetical that demands a poll:
If the Rapture happens before grades are due:online survey
This hypothetical also gave me an earworm, which I shall now share…
jstemwedel | April 28, 2010Yesterday in my "Ethics in Science" class, we were discussing mentoring. Near the end of the class meeting, I noted that scientists in training have a resource nowadays that just wasn't available during my misspent scientific youth (back in the last millennium): the blogosphere.
What does the blogosphere have to do with mentoring?
For one thing, it can give you a glimpse of the lives of people who are working out how how to become grown-up scientists, or how to combine a scientific career with a life outside of that career. The wide array of scientists at different career stages working out…
jstemwedel | April 27, 2010As we creep toward the end of the spring semester, I noticed a story at Inside Higher Ed about a commencement address gone wrong:
Connecticut College is having a painful examination of last year's student speech.
The student newspaper, The College Voice, revealed that the student speaker's talk featured considerable material that came from a 2008 commencement address at Duke University by the author Barbara Kingsolver -- a talk that turns up on some lists of the best commencement talks ever. While the college has known about the plagiarism for months, the incident was not revealed until this…
jstemwedel | April 20, 2010I think I've mentioned once or twice that the California State University system (of which my fair campus is a part) has been experiencing a bit of a budget crisis.
Well, while there may be glimmers of hope for a recovery in the rest of the economy, we seem to be on the cusp of things getting much, much worse.
In the coming academic year, we won't be using furloughs to try to save money. Instead, beyond employing laying of lots of lecturers (who, because they are classified as "temporary" employees, despite the fact that many of them have taught here for decades, aren't counted as being laid…
jstemwedel | April 12, 2010A reader sends the following query:
I've only recently begun teaching in a big state university, maybe tier C in the field I'm in. I'm in a quandary as to how to manage pressure to pass students who are under performing. The first semester, I had to lower the passing to a basically ridiculous level and the college still inquired why so many failed (10 %). Now, I'm again feeling pressure to pass students who do not deserve to pass. I'm getting very disillusioned by this type of practice. Grade inflation seems to be so common that I even have students who think that a 60 is a B. I'm…
jstemwedel | March 31, 2010
Especially in student papers, plagiarism is an issue that it seems just won't go away. However, instructors cannot just give up and permit plagiarism without giving up most of their pedagogical goals and ideals. As tempting a behavior as this may be (at least to some students, if not to all), it is our duty to smack it down.
Is there any effective way to deliver a preemptive smackdown to student plagiarists? That's the question posed by a piece of research, "Is There an Effective Approach to Deterring Students from Plagiarizing?" by Lidija Bilic-Zulle, Josip Azman, Vedran Frkovic, and…
jstemwedel | March 16, 2010There's a recent paper on blogs as a channel of scientific communication that has been making the rounds. Other bloggers have discussed the paper and its methodology in some detail (including but not limited to Bora and DrugMonkey and Dr. Isis), so I'm not going to do that. Rather, I want to pull back and "get meta" with the blogospheric discussion of the paper, and especially the suggestion that it might be out of bounds for science bloggers (some of whom write the blogs that provided the data for the paper in question) to mount such a vigorous critique of a paper that was, as it turns…
jstemwedel | March 11, 2010Why is it that it's not until you're right in the middle of a class discussion, one where lots of people are actively engaged, asking good questions and raising important issues, and where you know that you are working against the clock to get all the contributions in, that you discover ...
... that the white board, where you have been tracking key points in the discussion (and which you need to erase to collect the new points that people are raising now), will no longer release the dry erase marker with a dry cloth?
And, at that point, in the absence of a water bottle, what alternative is…