Teaching and Learning
jstemwedel | May 30, 2007In the May 18th issue of Science, there's a nice review by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg [1] of the literature from developmental psychology that bears on the question of why adults in the U.S. are stubbornly resistant to certain scientific ideas.
Regular readers will guess that part of my interest in this research is connected to my habit of trying to engage my kids in conversations about science. Understanding what will make those conversations productive, in both the short-term and the long-term, would be really useful. Also, I should disclose that I'm pals with Deena (and with…
jstemwedel | May 29, 2007Having finished grading (yea, having submitted the final grades themselves), I attempt to resurface from my cave.
It's really rather bright out here!
Anyway, as you will have deduced from my last post, there was a commencement-sized break in my grading activities on Saturday. The commencement speaker, Google senior vice president of global sales and business development Omid Kordestani, gave a nice address to the grads and their guests, so I'm reporting on his big points here.
Kordestani couched his remarks in terms of a set of "Aha!" moments he has had in his own life, and the lessons he…
jstemwedel | May 23, 2007Because I am engaged in a struggle with mass quantities of grading, I'm reviving a post from the vault to tide you over. I have added some new details in square brackets, and as always, I welcome your insight here.
I just got back [in Octiber of 2005] from talking with an outside evaluator about the federally funded training grant project at my university that tries to get more of our students to graduate school in science. The evaluator is here not at the behest of the funding agency, but rather at the request of the science professor here who oversees the program. Because, you know, he…
jstemwedel | May 18, 2007Ann Althouse asks why schools should bother having kids read fiction:
And why does reading even need to be a separate subject from history in school? Give them history texts and teach reading from them. Science books too. Leave the storybooks for pleasure reading outside of school. They will be easier reading, and with well-developed reading skills, kids should feel pleasure curling up with a novel at home. But even if they don't, why should any kind of a premium be placed on an interest in reading novels? It's not tied to economic success in life and needn't be inculcated any more than an…
jstemwedel | May 17, 2007I hope you've noticed that Seed has sent a team to blog the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair currently raging in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
I love science fairs. I've judged them (and recruited others to judge them). At our county fair, I'm always sucked right into the science-fair-type exhibits entered by kids in the Young California exhibit hall.
And of course, as a kid, I did projects for our school science fair.
Actually, it was officially a "curriculum fair" rather than a science fair. Why? Was science too scary an area even for the fifth and sixth grade teachers to…
jstemwedel | May 17, 2007Someone forgot to tell our department photocopier that finals started today; rather than being a vengeful photocopier toying with the pitiful mortals in its thrall, it was a happy photocopier that photocopied my final exams beautifully. And since I wasn't clearing any cryptic paper jams, my mind wandered into the question of how others approach final exams:
Multiple choice, essay, something in between, or a combination of question formats?
Scantron forms? Blue books? (If so, do the students have to buy them or does the prof provide them?)
In-class or take-home?
Open book or closed book?…
jstemwedel | May 15, 2007Today is our last day of classes before final exams, and it's looking like this semester is notably different from the nine semesters that came before it:
As well as I can ascertain, none of my students have committed plagiarism in any of their assignments for me!
Yes, that should be the normal state of affairs, but we are painfully aware of the gap between "is" and "ought", are we not? Some semesters, I've had to deal with multiple plagiarists. This term, no cheating-related paperwork for me.
Thank you, students, for restoring some of my faith in humanity. Be sure to eat healthy food, get…
jstemwedel | May 12, 2007In part I of the interview, my mother described what it was like to be propelled by her dream of being an astronomer from being at home with four children to being in an undergraduate physics classroom and finding a serious mentor.
Part II: Out of the comfort zone and into the graduate program:
Were you encouraged by the folks at Rutgers-Newark with whom you were taking physics coursework to move on to graduate work?
As I was nearing the point of exhausting the undergraduate physics curriculum, and with no graduate physics program offered on that campus, my professors all encouraged me to…
jstemwedel | May 12, 2007In honor of Mother's Day, I want to celebrate the ways that mothers have blazed trails, knocked down barriers, and challenged expectations of what their daughters' lives can be.
When we're young, we don't always appreciate how important our parents (or other adults in our circle) can be as role models. Part of this, I think, is that a kid's world is smaller in some important ways. What you know of the world you know through school, through friends, through cartoons, and through your family. Lots of aspects of the wider world don't really pop up in your consciousness until you have to…
jstemwedel | May 11, 2007It has recently transpired that I will be teaching (and before that, designing and constructing) a brand new ethics module in the large introduction to engineering class at my university that all the freshman who are majoring in any of the multitude of engineering disciplines must take. I'm jazzed, of course, that the College of Engineering thinks that it's worth cultivating in their students the idea that ethics is an integral part of being a good engineer (and a good engineering student), so much so that they are devoting two weeks in the fifteen week term to this. And, I want to do a…
jstemwedel | May 8, 2007Since many of you were kind enough to suggest questions to ask of Margaret Spellings at SJSU's Founders Day "The Future of Higher Education" panel last Friday, I thought I should report back on that session.
First, the bad (but utterly predictable) news: while Margaret Spellings gave the keynote address, she didn't stick around for the panel discussion afterwards -- so she wasn't there for the question and answer period. However, the panel of experts certainly had something to say about the Spellings Commission report on higher education.
It was striking, as CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed…
jstemwedel | May 1, 2007We just hit the point in the semester where my "Ethics in Science" class discusses the novel Cantor's Dilemma by Carl Djerassi. For those who inhabit the world of scientific research -- and for those who don't but are hungry for an insight to how human relationships and scientific activities are entwined -- it's a nice little novel. (Indeed, I've discussed it already in a couple other posts.)
What I'm going to discuss in this post is a situation that's pretty much at the end of Cantor's Dilemma, a situation where my view of what was most likely to happen after the last page (in Novel-land,…
jstemwedel | April 30, 2007Jake, Chad, and Rob have posted about a newly published study about the benefits of research experiences for undergraduates. The quick version is that involvement in research (at least in science/technology/engineering/mathematics disciplines) seems to boost the student's enthusiasm for the subject and confidence, not to mention nearly doubling the chances that the student will pursue a Ph.D.
I'm going to chime in with some observations of my own:
1. Making knowledge is different from learning knowledge.
One of the important things undergraduate research can do is give a student insight to…
jstemwedel | April 30, 2007This Friday, as part of my university's sesquicentennial celebration, there's going to be a two hour session on "The Future of Higher Education". The keynote speaker will be Margaret Spellings, the U.S. Secrtetary of Education. There will also be a "panel discussion with national experts", after which they will entertain questions from the audience.
So, what questions about the future of higher education would you like me to ask?
In case you're stuck for ideas, here's a potential prompt: Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education has been hailed as a way to bring No Child Left…
jstemwedel | April 24, 2007The April 16 issue of Chemical & Engineering News has an interesting article about homeschooling families looking for chemistry curricula. (You need an individual or institutional subscription to view the article; it might be worth checking with your local library.)
I'm far from an expert on homeschooling (as we're availing ourselves of the public schools), but I'm fascinated by the ways some of the families featured in the article are piecing together what they need for their kids.
Why families choose to homeschool is an interesting question. From the article,
One common reason [to…
jstemwedel | April 18, 2007I 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?
If so, what kinds of adaptations have you been able to implement?
What kinds of disabilities have provided the biggest challenge from the point of view of coming up with a good adaptation?
Are there instances in which your efforts to…
jstemwedel | April 12, 2007I'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.
There are the normal-distribution folks, who think grades ought to convey how you are doing relative to the other people taking the class. The average grade is a C, no matter whether that average corresponds to demonstrating coompetence on 40% of the content or 90% of the content. The grade you get is dependent on how many…
jstemwedel | April 10, 2007After 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…
jstemwedel | April 9, 2007The responses 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…
jstemwedel | April 9, 2007Over 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…