Ever wonder why students don't read your carefully-chosen course materials and instead look for other sources of information on the web?

I peronally have always found this habit annoying. A recent (albeit informal) study published in the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests students have good reasons for treating the web as their textbook. Most notably, students surfing the web may be looking for the same information in their textbooks, but in a format that is more understandable to them.

This strikes me as an area ripe for further inquiry. I mean, who hasn't looked for another source of information when a given source doesn't make sense?

Comments?   

 

 

 

Undergraduates get a lot of bad press these days. I guess that has always been true, but sometimes the laments about the "millennial generation" seem especially loud. So I found it a useful counterbalance to serve as a judge for this year's Undergraduate Exhibition.

Picture the scene yesterday in the HUB-Robeson Center's Alumni Hall: Dozens and dozens of research posters produced by Penn State undergraduates, with representation from the arts and humanities, engineering, health and life sciences, physical sciences, social and behavioral sciences, and course-based projects. I was a judge for social and behavioral sciences and got a chance to talk with some extremely smart and articulate undergraduates.

Strolling around afterward, I enjoyed seeing the variety inherent in the research -- everything from posters on biosynthesis of Thiostrepton A to analysis of a poet's oeuvre to an examination of ways that infants' crawling behaviors affect their communicative development.

It was a humbling and inspiring way to spend an hour.

Over the last 8-10 months, a handful of folks from the Schreyer Institute, Teaching and Learning with Technology and the Office of Institutional Planning and Assessment discussed and researched the topic of learning analytics. If you never heard the term learning analytics before, the easiest way to explain it is by looking at companies like Netflix and Amazon. These companies leverage your personal renting or buying habits to compare you to hundreds (or thousands) of similar users to provide you with recommendations on what to rent or purchase next. Learning analytics is the application of these same practices, but in support of education. Specifically, learning analytics is:

Lynn Sorenson, a leader in instructional development circles, recently shared some resources about final exams--one for students and one for faculty--from the BYU Center for Teaching & Learning.  They were developed by Michael C. Johnson and Scott Schaefermeyer and their teams.

Let us know what you think.

     How Do You Have a Successful Finals Week?
       http://ctl-dev.byu.edu/learning-tips/how-do-you-have-successful-finals-week

   Final Exam Options for Faculty
       http://ctl-dev.byu.edu/teaching-tips/final-exam-experience

I always believe that students learn when they are willing to learn and to take the responsibility of learning. However, it does not mean that the role of the instructor is not important. I think instructors still play an important role in students' journey of learning. Instead of training students to be passive learners, instructors build an environment where students are eager to learn actively, facilitate students to think and explore, and create opportunities for students to transfer what they learned in class to real life situations.

Here are two articles on key principles and strategies of active learning from Faculty Focus written by Maryellen Weimer. You may want to take a look at these principles and strategies and see if any of them fit in your teaching style and your students' learning needs.

The articles are here:

Five Key Principles of Active Learning

http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/five-key-principles-of-active-learning/

Active-Learning Ideas for Large Classes: Simple to Complex

http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-teaching-strategies/active-learning-ideas-for-large-classes-simple-to-complex/

While preparing Community in the Classroom this past week, Andrew Porter and I discussed the question:

How do we keep our students from feeling isolated in class?

Our first answer, in simple terms, was: Get-To-Know-Each-Other.

A classroom where students feel like they are known enables them to feel like they belong.  Belonging breeds motivation, risk-taking.  Motivation and risk-taking generate learning, and learning is our goal.  But...

....getting to know each other involves getting closer to personal than can feel comfortable.

In order to help our students down this road, answering low-risk and entertaining questions at some point during class can help to break the proverbial ice over the semester.  No matter the size of your class, these questions can get conversation going between pairs, rows, sections, everybody.  10 minutes of getting to know each other may seem like a lot, but can lead to much richer learning over the long-term.

Below I've included 35 get-to-know-you-with-minimal-risk questions compiled and contributed to us by Heather Holleman, lecturer in English. Enjoy!

1.  What is the most interesting course you have ever taken in school?

2.  What is your favorite quotation?

3.  What is one item you might keep forever?

4.  What were you known for in high school?  Did you have any nicknames?

5.  If you could have witnessed any event in sports history, what would it be?

6.  What is something you consider beautiful?

7.  What was your first CD or song you played over and over again?

8.  What accomplishment are you most proud of?

9.  If you could be an apprentice to any person, living or deceased, from whom would you want to learn?

10.  What are three things that make you happy?

11.  What's one movie you think everyone should see?  What's a movie you think nobody should see?

12.  Who inspires you?

13.  What's one thing you want to do before you die?

14.  Get in groups of three people.  What's the most bizarre thing you have in common?

15.  Whenever you are having a bad day, what is the best thing you can do to help cheer yourself up?

16.  Have you ever experienced something unexplainable or supernatural?

17.  What was your best Halloween costume?

18.  You can choose the question you want to ask the class.

19.  What was the last thing you Googled?

20.  What YouTube video do you watch over and over?

21.  What's the kindest act you've ever witnessed?

22.  Tell us one thing you know you do well (a talent?) and one thing you know you don't.

23.  What is your favorite way to procrastinate?

24.  What is your favorite home-cooked meal?

25.  What was your favorite childhood toy?

26.  What do you do other than study?  What clubs are you involved in?

27.  What was your first job?

28.  Any brushes with fame?

29.  What's the story behind your name?

30.  Do you believe in anything that most people might not believe in?

31.  I wish everyone would___________________

32.  What's the best sound effect you can make?

33.  What's the funniest thing you did as a kid that people still talk about today?

34.  What was the last thing you bought on eBay?

35.  Tell us something quirky about you. 

 

This posting is prompted by a recent comment from a faculty member expressing concern about the decreased response rates seen with Online SRTEs.  A number of faculty over the past year have also communicated that they've heard that the Schreyer Institute says the response rates for SRTEs have not decreased.  This is incorrect.

Instead, what we have communicated is that
a) the response rate decrease was expected, but
b) that average ratings have held steady. 

Our research has shown that the response rates have decreased between 20-25%.  We fully expected a decrease because the assessment has moved out of the classroom, so students were no longer a "captive audience."  In fact, the decrease we have experienced at Penn State is smaller than we expected and much smaller than other institutions have experienced.  The average response rates by college and campus are posted online (see http://www.srte.psu.edu/OnlineReports/) and all are above 50%. 

The reports above also show that the average scores have held steady.  At the request of the University Faculty Senate's Committee on Faculty Affairs and the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, we have been monitoring the SRTE results. Other than overall decrease in response rates, we have found no patterns that can be attributed to the online SRTEs.  In other words, we see no evidence that faculty have been 'harmed' by the decreased response rates.  Vice Provost Blannie Bowen has indicated that unless we see a significant negative impact on faculty, we will continue with the online administration of the SRTEs. 

We have requested that campus and college administrators communicate to faculty review committees and academic unit heads that response rate decreases not be over-interepreted or attributed to the actions of any individual faculty members.  

If a faculty member believes that their results are the exception to the trend, i.e. that their average scores have decreased solely because of the online administration, that should be communicated to her/his academic unit head.  The University Faculty Senate's Statement of Practices for the Evaluation of Teaching Effectiveness for Promotion and Tenure states that "If there is some reason to explain the results or the absence of results in a particular case, the appropriate academic administrator shall make a note to that effect in the dossier" (see p. 3, section I.A.11.a.2).

Please remember that the paper SRTEs had more than 20 years to become embedded in student culture.  We need to give the online SRTEs some time too.  We are still in the transition phase where many of our current students experienced paper SRTEs and now are having to do them online.  It will be a few years before all students have only submitted SRTEs online.  Institutions that have been administering student ratings online for far longer than we have indicate that the response rates do rebound.

The Schreyer Institute is currently gathering information from faculty who have response rates of 70% or higher (see http://www.srte.psu.edu/ResponseRate/) and we will continue to add to this site.  The faculty included in this project come from a wide variety of colleges, campuses, and disciplines. The faculty teach courses with enrollments from 30-493.  We deliberately excluded graduate and upper-level majors courses in which it might be easier to get higher response rates. 

What this project indicates is what we've always known--that faculty are the most important determinant of students' participation.  In short, students make the effort to submit ratings when they feel that "someone is listening."  The faculty with the highest response rates communicate that they value students' views, that they take suggestions for improvement seriously, and they tell their students changes made as a result of students' feedback.  Some faculty do this by talking about the SRTEs, others never mention SRTEs, but instead gather student feedback throughout the semester, which creates a culture of feedback among the students.  None of these faculty discuss the fact that SRTEs are required for P&T and reappointment.

Yesterday in the Course in College Teaching we introduced some classroom managment situations. It sounded like a lot of people could relate to them. In the spirit of continuing the conversation and sharing ideas, here are a few of the scenarios. Do any of these sound familiar to you? What would you do? Or what have you done in situations like these?

1) One of your students came late to the first few classes, interrupts your lecture loudly, doesn't let others get a chance to answer questions and habitually forgets to turn off his cell phone. Most annoyingly, during class, he walks out of the classroom [across the front], and saunters back.

2) You are teaching in a computer classroom. Even though you are not using the technology at the moment, students are busily typing away. The clacking is making it difficult for some students to actually hear the material.

3) You are teaching a small lecture-type class and students regularly arrive 10 minutes late. In addition, others leave 10-15 minutes early. In a 55-minute class it feels like the comings and goings never end.

Mary Ellen Weimer had an interesting blog post in Faculty Focus last week. In her post, Challenging the Notion of Learning Styles, she shared some of the recent research that suggests that regardless of the match between mode of instruction and a student's learning style, performance is the same. Those of us in Educational Psychology have long discounted the notion of learning styles (e.g., including elaborated models of intelligence such as Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences Theory) as having insufficient data to support its assertions.

So what does this mean for instructors? Should we test our students on the first day of class to learn what is their preferred learning style then proceed to twist and contort our every lesson so as to accommodate the visual, the kinesthetic, the auditory, and the every-other-style learner? Certainly not. Should instructors simply teach as they wish, since attending to students' reported learning styles apparently doesn't make a difference? Not recommended either. The fact is, it's not so simple.

Perhaps the answer is in moderation and mix. In Mary Ellen's summary of the research, she reminds us that, while students may not differ in their learning styles, the students are, nonetheless, different. It seems to me that it's on the basis of differences that do exist and that do matter that we should consider modifying our instruction. We should alter our instructional approaches when doing so would make a difference for students with different levels of prior knowledge, interest, or  ability (the research, Reiner and Willingham_2010.pdf, says these matter).

Unless we base our pedagogical decisions on characteristics such as these, we risk making our lectures more visual but failing to attend to gaps in prior knowledge. We risk creating elaborate hands-on projects while failing to recognize important disparities in aptitude across the class. We risk altering our instruction in ways that are not comfortable to us and still not successfully motivating the learners in our classes.

Crystal Ramsay and I are collaborating with Assistant Professor Michael Tews in the School of Hospitality Management.  Michael, an energetic and enthusiastic professor, is questioning the impact of fun on students' learning. While at first glance, this may seem like a trivial topic or perhaps one that is best left to the gaming enthusiasts, I'm finding it a perplexing issue. We have begun by looking deeper at how fun is defined in higher education and we are exploring how to measure it.

As a preliminary step, the three of us each asked a group of students to think about a professor they've had in college and to describe three things that he/she did to make the class fun. The class of aerospace students I queried provided a range of responses with hands-on learning, humor, and relating topics to everyday life topping their lists. They also shared some that got me thinking. For example, several mentioned that they found it fun when a professor starts class with a fact trivia or an airplane of the day. Doing something like that gains their attention as suggested by Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction. One student noted, "The professor was a likeable person who wants to teach" and that made me wonder why we have professors in our classrooms who don't want to teach. Several of the students listed they found it fun to be able to set their own learning goals with one student stating it this way, "Classes where the teacher lets you learn the way you want to learn."  One professor has one a day a week for "gripe day" so that students can voice their agitations with the class or life in general.  Doing so leads to a release of anxiety and with the professor's coaxing; students get to figure out possible solutions as well as sometimes see the silliness of their dilemmas. 

I find it very telling to listen to students and I'm looking forward to hearing more as we make progress with this study. In the meantime, I am going to get back to the fun of thinking about teaching and learning.