Yet, in one of my courses, I ALWAYS get comments about how there is too. much. reading., or how my course is the toughest version offered. This one is general ed, so lots of sections and everyone takes it. They are freshmen, so they are also living together and can easily compare notes. These kinds of complaints are the humblebrag of academia, of course, so I don't listen. This course, however, also has one of the highest grade distributions in the university - the various merry bands of freshpersons apparently picking up the A grades that drop from their rainbow unicorn proffies.
It does make me wonder what the heck my colleagues are doing. We have cross-section alignment meetings regularly, and I don't usually say much, but I am thinking I should pass this tool along...
Thoughts, fair miserians?
- Dr. Amelia
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteYour colleagues are using the teaching techniques that the American Astronomical Society, American Association for Physics Teachers, and similar organizations have for many years been trying to shove down our throats. Nowadays they call it “student-centered instruction” or “discovery teaching,” although Eric Mazur calls it “Peer Instruction.” It’s notoriously slow: it’s not unusual for me to have to cover material left over from someone else’s course. A good discussion of this is by Jeanne S. Chall, in The Academic Challenge: What Really Works in the Classroom (2000).
ReplyDeleteI have since quite literally my first day of teaching grappled with complaints that I'm "too hard" and am "bombarding us." Rarely, a mature student will comment, "I wish I'd been pushed!" I can count those, from 18 years of teaching, on the fingers of one hand. I have also from the beginning had to struggle with proponents of edu-tainment: woe to you if one becomes your department chair or dean.
General-ed is pretty bad, all right, but teaching upper-level courses in astrophysics, a field notorious for its difficulty and poor job prospects, often makes me genuinely curious: Just what exactly do these people WANT from me? If I were to just give them all the ‘A’s they so obviously want, it’s not going to make them knowledgeable in astrophysics, and this sure won’t help them get jobs doing it.
And you know that the REAL pisser is here? It’s that, in spite of all this, I STILL need to write 80% of my physics M.S. students’ theses!
I do a lot of "peer instruction" in my intro physics courses and in my survey of astronomy courses and I still get tons of complaints about how hard my class is and that I'm asking them to do too much. Because even though I use a lot of the "student centered" techniques, I still expect them to read a lot outside of class and to do a lot of practice/homework problems and I still manage to cover close to 90% of what my more traditional colleagues cover, with comparable scores for my students on common exams, including the material that I explicitly didn't cover in class (but still expected them to do the reading/problems for).
DeleteI don't think it matters all that much what we actually do in class. If we hold students to a high-ish standard and expect them to actually complete the work, they will complain that it is too much or too hard.
In my on-going rooting around in the "active learning" world the one thing that has been consistently helpful (as opposed to working some cohorts and not other or some topics and not others) is reading quizzes AKA the "pop quizzes" that haunted my primary and secondary education.
DeleteOnce or twice a week a five minute, very basic, multiple choice quiz on the assigned reading does wonders to encourage that students actually paw through the book from time to time. It also gives the hard working, but not particularly brainy type (who do just fine multiple choice quizzes focused on the first to layers of Bloom's taxonomy) a buffer against my exams which are heavy on application and analysis tasks.
As a side effect they also encourage timely arrival, because there are no make-ups if you miss the quiz.
Sorry, but I have seen first-hand, from when I was still a disciple of Eric Mazur, but neither paper reading quizzes nor a JITT system I developed and programmed from scratch myself will help. The is because my students simply will not do their reading assignments, no matter what the carrot or the stick. It sure must be nice to be at a university more selective than mine. Grading paper reading quizzes takes an extra 8 hours per week per section of 100 students, by the way: I know that first hand, too.
DeleteIf they're multiple-choice, you can use scantrons, or even require students to complete them on the LMS *before* they come to class (with the quiz ceasing to function when class begins). There are limits to what such quizzes can ask, of course (and even short-answer can indeed take a very long time to grade), but the multiple-choice quizzes do seem to do some good, if only in persuading students to use some of their limited prep time on the class that has the reading quizzes (there's also, of course, a certain arms-race quality to the whole thing; the more any of us gives graded homework, quizzes, etc., etc., the more all of us do, because otherwise students will, sensible enough, prioritize the graded work, and blow off the work that has fewer discernible consequences, at least until an exam rolls around.)
DeleteI've also managed to create some short-answer pre-class "reading quizzes" that were more like a guided series of reading notes, and that didn't take *too* long to grade (at least not if you grade on the basis of "there are at least x words in the box and they appear to be germane to the question and don't seem to be plagiarized" -- i.e. credit/no credit), but that may be more specific to lit classes (though it might also work for primary-source reading in history, and perhaps some secondary-source reading as well).
DeleteAnd it will all be for nothing, since my students simply cannot be induced to read, no matter what the carrot or the staple gun. But then of course, 32nd impressions can be misleading. Thanks also for committing me personally to the expense of bringing Scanteons every week: my dept sure won't pay for them, and expecting students to remember to do it will result in a wail that I didn't tell them, just as what happens every time I have ever tried anything unusual.
DeleteBoy, Frod, I feel your pain. I think you've said stuff like this before: "I STILL need to write 80% of my physics M.S. students’ theses!" I believe you have tenure, so why not just flunk them wholesale? I'm at a lowly CC and routinely bomb half of my classes. Every semester, it's like the Verdon, the Battle of the Somme, phucking Gettysburg. My last year as a teacher begins this Aug., and I WILL NOT SUBMIT!
DeleteI explained this in The comments for several posts over the past couple weeks, but briefly, these are the only research students I get. I'd have to flunk them all, which doesn't help me, since zero science would get done. So, 20% being greater than 0%, I get by, noting that what we do does help my students in their future careers mainly as K-14 science teachers. Mind you, I do get cases so inept I do have no choice but to flunk them: such as the one who flat-our refused to do readings because he didn't want it to affect his ideas, and when asked during his viva what was the cause of solar activity, answered, "It's like volcanoes..."
Delete"You know, dude, it's like volcanoes, you know?"
Deleterofl
We're all in the same boat.
DeleteSigh. My students won't do the reading, and then get extremely angry when their reading quizzes come back with failing grades. The questions are very basic "Who is character X," and "how does this end?"
DeleteOccasionally I will get one who just makes stuff up, though, and it can be pretty wild, along the order of "this is the character who gets eaten by lions" in response to "who is Santa Claus."
Where I am, many faculty really don't want to read more deliverables so they don't assign much. In some cases, they don't cover much material because it keeps the customers (my dean's word for them, not mine) happy. Give them little work, high grades and they'll give their proffies high evals and everyone wins!
ReplyDeleteThe other thing is that I doubt students will say a given course is less than average for amount of work. It's like Lake Wobegon, where everyone is above average. And those of us (betcha this applies to anyone who's a regular on this blog) who really do ask for more sometimes get whacked for it on our evals.
It strikes me as an excellent start for a conversation, and I think you should pass it on, perhaps with a somewhat-disingenuous introduction such as "I'm sure we all get complaints from our students that we're assigning too much reading from time to time; maybe we could have a conversation about the reading loads in our class, and how we guide students through the process? This article looks like a good resource in itself, and also has an extensive bibliography." And then you could focus a meeting, or part of a meeting, or a semester-long reading group, or whatever, on the subject.
ReplyDeleteI do think the article is very good, and appreciate the periodic "this probably isn't realistic" comments about assumptions. One issue is multitasking. We know our students are doing it (or attempting to do it), and we know it (from both research and, most likely, our own experience), that it harms both speed and comprehension.
Another issue is related: both reading and writing require some fallow time after the activity for the unconscious to work on the task. As an undergraduate, I tended to write my papers the night before (in fact, I wrote pretty much the entire draft of my undergraduate thesis on Thursday nights/early Friday mornings, because I met with my advisor on Fridays. I then had a full draft to revise for a month or so, which worked out well.), but/and I had some of my most productive thoughts when I got up from my desk (usually because the shops were about the close) and took a walk to buy coffee or ice cream or some other snack. We know that many extremely prolific authors have what would sound to many "efficiency experts" like slackers' schedules: 3 or 4 or 5 hours of intense work, usually in the morning, and a substantial part of the rest of the day spent in walking, or gardening, or some other sort of physical activity that leaves the mind free to wander.
Obviously, none (or at least less) of this kind of productive mental activity happens if you stop reading only to turn immediately to your phone (to catch up with friends -- though I suspect that may be a useful consolidating activity for extroverts, especially if there's at least occasional mention of the substance of school work; I can't draw on personal experience to figure out how all this works for extroverts, because I emphatically am not one -- or, probably more distracting, to consumer other sorts of content or catch Pokemon or whatever (though I've also heard some arguments for video games as the sort of activity that keeps some areas of the brain occupied while allowing the unconscious to work away in the background)).
And finally, there's the ongoing issue of how many hours students actually have to spend on out-of-class work, given the demands of paid work necessary to meet basic living expenses and minimize loans. While I realize there are still some college students who are mostly free from these pressures (and probably some whole schools where they're less prevalent; international students who aren't allowed to work for pay are another exception, though many of them are struggling with language issues, and that struggle can consume a lot of time), I'm pretty sure this is a factor for the majority of US college students. Given the current state of the economy, and the ongoing conversation about the danger of student loans, it's entirely understandable that students consider it responsible to spend as much time working for pay as they can manage. But that means that they never really transition from the high school mindset in which the great majority of hours not actually spent in the classroom are available for other activities (paid and/or unpaid extracurricular). That strikes me as a structural problem, and one that we can't entirely solve by telling them that they need to set 2-3 hours per class hour for prep (mind you, I still say that, especially when it comes to online classes, but I'm under no illusion that it happens). It's also at least a partial excuse/justification for teachers (and I count myself among them, though still somewhat on the fence; I don't see a way to do without substantial prep) who move at least some of the activities we once expected students to do outside of class into the classroom.
DeleteI have a high schooler as well, and that mindset of having all time free after classes doesn't seem to be the norm here at all. I live in a kind of area quite similar to that from which our students come and there is a pressure regarding college admissions bordering on paranoia (MOST of it unfounded), and the high schoolers are regularly up until the wee hours doing homework and projects and studying for the SAT and the like.
DeleteThat's why this is so curious to me: If I get the merry band in the first semester, I can get away with being the mean prof. who requires hard work. Most of my students have been threatened throughout high school with how difficult college will be, so they, grumpily, do the work. After that first semester, though, they are broken - bitter (or as they say, salty) and resentful. Then it is tough to get work out of them at all, especially if the course does not have an application to a future job that is readily apparent to a 19-year-old. I realize that mileage varies greatly with context, but where I am it is attitude, not time. Perhaps this should be a different post, for it must be us who break them.
I think it does vary by context. The community in which I grew up (and in which I still go to church -- so, my 2nd most frequent opportunity for interacting with teenagers/young adults) is much as you describe. However, relatively few of those teenagers end up at the university where I teach, which is <10 miles away, but draws mostly from quite different communities.
DeleteI've seen more of what you describe when I occasionally teach a 200-level core lit class. That probably suggests that my perspective is also shaped by usually teaching mostly juniors, many of them STEM majors. Both factors weed out some of the resistant-to-work students, so what I have left is mostly those who actually do the work without too much complaint, and those who don't do the work (often also without too much complaint) because they're overwhelmed by outside factors.
I have the feeling that institutions of higher ed, like other American institutions, are increasingly segregated, not so much by race/ethnicity directly, but by class/family background (including educational background). That makes for very different experiences.
Thought-provoking, but also reassuring. Thanks, Dr. Amelia!
ReplyDeleteAnd here's a piece (linking back to some other pieces) on a somewhat-related subject: flipped classrooms and the expectations about outside-the-classroom work they entail and whether that only works for "elite" students: http://www.thismess.net/2016/07/class-and-flipped-classroom.html.
ReplyDeleteApologies for not working this up into my own thoughtful post, as Amelia and Frankie have done. I'm scrambling to keep up with students who are trying to complete a required course in too little time, with too many other things on their plates (and who are mostly rising to the challenge, which means I have to, too, which is all basically good news, if exhausting for all involved).
This is a great resource, Amelia. I came out the same as you, about 4.76 hours (less than the 6-9 hours per week required by our credit-hour rule; who knew I was such a big softie?). I would pass the link along. It's not actually prescribing what anyone should do (although be prepared for your most sanctimonious Cool Profs to use it as an excuse to proclaim that they don't need to use some impersonal tool to tell them how they're teaching because Nobody Knows and Loves the Students as Much as They Do.)
ReplyDeleteThe calculator is very interesting, but alas it's not appropriate for my field.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I really struggle with is how much homework to assign.
The simple fact is the more problems the students really think about and work on the more they will learn and the better off they will be. But as the article notes, they are facing time constraints and not just from their pressing desire to socialize, so I've tried various strategies.
* Assigning a largeish number of problems (really barely enough to exercise all the concepts in the chapter) with a range of difficulties results in complaints from everyone that there is too much homework and in practice they crib off one another and the internet for every problem in front of them (well, I suspect some of them are going to do that even if I assign only two easy problems from each chapter, but they're not my concern).
* Assigning a small to middling number of mixed difficulty problem (a survey that hits every concept and every tool once, but without a lot of repetition) results in complaints that they can't figure out how to make the leap from the easy ones to the hard one (or that the hard ones are too hard).
* Assigning a small to middling number of relatively easy problems generates few complaints about the homework, but predictably leaves them even more unprepared for the exams than other cases.
* Assigning a small number of the hardest problem from each chapter with a list of easier precursor problems for each has worked for my most dedicated and conscientious upper-division, in-major students, but their slacker peers aren't working those problems themselves, and often aren't even spending any time looking at the precursors. And I haven't even tried it with my service classes.
And in every case some fraction of the class gets to the exams totally unprepared to deal with quite simple applications of the principles in the covered chapters unless it follows exactly the pattern of a problem we did on the board in class. My efforts to explain that this subject can not be mastered as a cookbook for a finite number of problem types falls on deaf ears. I suspect that many of the students have never learned any other approach. That's been the motivation behind my attempts to introduce difficult multi-step problems as group exercises this semester. They need other models than for wending a path through a group of connected concept to produce a solution in more than two steps; they need to see their peers do some of that and to be part of it.
So I seem caught on the horns of a dilemma: to little homework and they don't get enough practice, too much and they—well—cheat themselves of the practice by finding finished solutions somewhere and copying them down. And their definition of "too much" starts before we get beyond the fact of "too little".
So err on the side of too much, see what happens, and adjust accordingly.
ReplyDeleteThe "Course Workload Estimator" kind of reminds me of the Dead Poets Society scene about "measuring a poem's greatness."
ReplyDelete