Motivation and Meaning

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Beth Thornburg

impact of feedbackThe Maguire Center has for many years sponsored the Conference on the Professions: an event bringing together legal, theological, and medical professionals to discuss important issues of the day.  Their keynote speaker this year was behavioral economist/psychologist Dan Ariely, known for his research into the ways in which meaning provides motivation.  After the conference, I looked at one of Ariely’s TED Talks, this one called “What makes us feel good about our work?”

One of his experimental findings has some implications for faculty members wishing to motivate their students.  Imagine a student assignment, and different degrees of feedback to the student.  In the experiment, subjects were given a piece of paper with letters on it and asked to circle all of the places where the same letter occurred twice in a row.  In one version, the tester receives the student answers, looks at them, makes a noncommittal sound, and places the student paper on a pile (acknowledged).  In the second version, the tester receives the paper, neither looks at it nor makes a sound, and puts it in the pile (ignored).  In the third version, the tester takes the student paper and places it directly in the shredder (shredded).

The results had both good and bad news for those who want to motivate others.  The bad news:  ignoring the performance of students is almost as de-motivating as destroying it in front of their eyes.  Turns out failure to acknowledge work makes the work far less meaningful, and decreases future motivation.  The good news: modest, informal acknowledgment dramatically increases students’ motivation.  The left-hand yellow bar in the graphic at the beginning of this blog post shows how many more times the subjects would repeat a task (each time for less money) when their work was acknowledged as opposed to when it was ignored (middle column) or shredded (right column).

At this time of year, we are focusing on final exams:  labor-intensive, formal assessment of our students’ work.  But this is a good reminder for the future that we can encourage greater student motivation to do the assigned work by building in occasions for more informal, low stakes feedback throughout our courses.

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Teaching and Tenure

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Meghan Ryan

As the high cost of university education has come under scrutiny in our fragile economic climate, significant attention has been devoted to the value of tenure. In my small corner of academia, the American Bar Association—the accrediting body for law schools—is considering abolishing tenure requirements. The attack on tenure is a much broader phenomenon, though.

Much of the criticism of tenure seems to be that it provides job security to lazy professors—those who don’t bother to conduct research, those who don’t care about and don’t invest time in good teaching, and those who don’t do either. For example, a recent Harvard Business Review article explains that, “despite a technological revolution,” “[a]cademic teaching techniques remain calcified.” “Professors’ reluctance to use technology to revamp the way they teach is understandable,” the article continues, because “tenured professors, of course, don’t have to.” Another critic argues: “The best way to improve the quality of education . . . is to get professors to focus more on teaching. And to do that we need to ditch the tenure system and start evaluating professors on the basis of their teaching ability, without any guarantee that they will keep their jobs if they don’t continue to measure up over the years.” These seem to be the common choruses of tenure critics.

One of the most common responses to these critics is that tenure is necessary for academic freedom in scholarship. For example, one scholar has explained that “tenure allows a professor the ability to speak up about issues on which he or she is an expert” and also “allows a professor to purse [sic] research regardless of its political or controversial nature.” Another scholar has stated that, “[w]ithout the freedom granted by tenure, the conditions necessary for creativity will be threatened,” and “data and experience suggest that the overwhelming majority of faculty members at our best universities and colleges are highly self-motivated individuals who strive to produce new, important discoveries, and to write books that will redefine their fields well after they receive tenure.”

Academic freedom, though, is also salient to teaching. As the American Association of University Professors has stated, “[a]cademic freedom is essential to” the common good, which “depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.” “Academic freedom . . . applies to both teaching and research. Freedom in research is fundamental to the advancement of truth. Academic freedom in its teaching aspect is fundamental for the protection of the rights of the teacher in teaching and of the student to freedom in learning.” Although defenders of tenure often focus on tenure’s importance to scholarship, tenure remains important to teaching as well. There are nontraditional approaches to teaching that could potentially benefit students but that might be unpopular with students (and thus lead to lower student evaluation scores) or that might be questioned by colleagues more comfortable with traditional teaching techniques. Take “flipping the classroom,” for example. Many teaching experts laud the advantages of this teaching method, but some anecdotal evidence suggests that students sometimes don’t appreciate this approach with which they are unfamiliar. I’ve been advised not to experiment too much with various teaching techniques until I have job security, i.e., tenure. My guess is that if tenure protections are abolished, some professors may feel less free to experiment with teaching techniques that could very well benefit students. And without the freedom to experiment and innovate, student learning and student experiences could suffer. Thus, in defending the importance of tenure, supporters of tenure ought to consider how tenure advances teaching and student learning in addition to scholarship. Policy decisionmakers, too, should consider the role that tenure plays in faculty approaches to teaching.

Posted in Course Design, Pedagogical Theory, Teaching Evaluations, Teaching Methods | Leave a comment

Is the Tide Turning on MOOCs (and Other Online Courses)?

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Meghan Ryan

Is the tide turning on MOOCs (massive open online courses)? An April 29th Chronicle of Higher Education article explains how, earlier this month, Amherst College turned down an ordinarily coveted invitation to join edX:

Amherst’s rejection of edX, decided by a faculty vote, could mark a new chapter for MOOCs—one in which colleges revert to their default modes of deliberations and caution. “I think we’re at the early stages of that honeymoon period coming to an end,” says Richard Garrett, vice president and principal analyst of the consulting company Eduventures.

Then on April 30th, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Duke University has recently announced that “there will be no credit-bearing online courses at Duke in the near future”:

The university’s Arts & Sciences Council, the governing arm of the undergraduate faculty, voted down a proposal to join a consortium of top colleges offering for-credit online courses through 2U, a company that specializes in real-time, small-format online education.

Perhaps in tension with this decision, Duke still offers MOOCs through Coursera.

Could it be that MOOCs and other online courses are just a passing fad? Or will Amherst College and Duke turn out to be either outliers or just slow adopters? MOOCs can offer the potential benefit of providing education even to those who cannot pay high tuition rates, but can participating universities afford this investment, and can universities that do not participate survive? Should credit be offered for students participating in MOOCs? If not, how should potential employers view MOOC enrollment? These are just some of the questions still swirling, and it’s probably still too early to determine the full panoply of advantages and disadvantages offered by MOOCs and other online courses.

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Teaching critical thinking: how, when, where.

Posted on April 14, 2013 by Thomas Mayo

Interesting post from the Scientific American‘s blog. Here’s an excerpt:

A democracy relies on an electorate of critical thinkers. Yet formal education, which is driven by test taking, is increasingly failing to require students to ask the kind of questions that lead to informed decisions. . . .

Informal learning environments tolerate failure better than schools. Perhaps many teachers have too little time to allow students to form and pursue their own questions and too much ground to cover in the curriculum and for standardized tests. But people must acquire this skill somewhere. Our society depends on them being able to make critical decisions, about their own medical treatment, say, or what we must do about global energy needs and demands. For that, we have a robust informal learning system that eschews grades, takes all comers, and is available even on holidays 

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Should pre-med requirements be reformed?

Posted on April 14, 2013 by Thomas Mayo

thecreation-webThis is the title of Aaron Carroll’s April 11 blog post over at The Washington Monthly, which coincidentally appears at the same time as a Perspective piece by David Muller in the April 10 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine: “Reforming Premedical Education — Out with the Old, in with the New.” Muller writes that it is time to abandon medicine’s fixation on pre-med’s Four Horsemen: biology, chemistry, organic chemistry, and physics.  He continues:

Recent years have seen many calls for enhancing, overhauling, or abolishing the traditional premed requirements. Critics argue that the pace of scientific discovery and its clinical application have outstripped the requirements; that information technology has made memorizing vast amounts of content unnecessary; that the requirements lack clinical, scientific, and social relevance; that they’re used to cull the herd of talented aspiring physicians; that they disadvantage minority and female students; that they crowd out studies of bioethics, social justice, and health policy; and that rigidly structured premedical and medical school curricula hinder students from becoming self-directed lifelong learners. Furthermore, the current model has perpetuated “premed syndrome,” a culture of aggressive competition for grades that conflicts with the precepts of medical professionalism: academic and intellectual rigor, creative thinking, collaboration, and social conscience.

Muller doesn’t say that entering medical students shouldn’t take science courses. For the past 25 years his medical school (Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine) has run a Humanities and Medicine “early assurance” admissions program for humanities majors. The students must take some “clinically relevant” science courses the summer before their senior year and some basic science the summer before entering medical school, but that’s about it. Oh, and these students don’t have to take the MCAT, either. By most metrics, the humanities do as well as the science majors, and the program is being expanded next year so that half of the entering class can have any major under the sun. There are various other requirements, and the school will provide enhanced guidance and advising functions for these nontraditional students. The payoff, they hope, will be to

dramatically expand the educational, cultural, and socioeconomic diversity of entering classes and our health care workforce. By eliminating MCAT use, outdated requirements, and “premed syndrome,” we aim to select students on the basis of a more holistic review of their accomplishments, seeking those who risk taking academically challenging courses; are more self-directed than traditional medical students; pursue more scientifically, clinically, and socially relevant courses; and pursue independent scholarship.

Who knows how quickly these kinds of changes will be adopted by other medical schools and most especially by the Association of American Medical Colleges? It will be interesting to see if we are at the beginning of a revolution in medical education that will rival that of Abraham Flexner’s revolution a century ago. If we are, SMU will need to radically rethink and revise the way it prepares its pre-meds for medical school and ultimately medical practice.

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First: Scantron. Now: Automated essay graders. What’s next?

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Thomas Mayo

edxFrom the April 4 New York Times:

Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book and getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the “send” button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program.

And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that the system would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve your grade.

EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.

There is, of course, a backlash:

a group of educators who last month began circulating a petition opposing automated assessment software. The group, which calls itself Professionals Against Machine Scoring of Student Essays in High-Stakes Assessment [actually, it appears they call themselves Human Readers], has collected nearly 2,000 signatures, including some from luminaries like Noam Chomsky.

“Let’s face the realities of automatic essay scoring,” the group’s statement reads in part. “Computers cannot ‘read.’ They cannot measure the essentials of effective written communication: accuracy, reasoning, adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical stance, convincing argument, meaningful organization, clarity, and veracity, among others.”

And, lest you think the opposition group consists of a bunch of cranky old Luddites, it includes — in addition to Prof. Chomsky — Les Perlman, “a retired director of writing and a current researcher at M.I.T.”

As much as I would like to think there is a software-based alternative to slogging through hundreds of essay answers at the end of each semester, doesn’t it seem just a little incredible?

One of PAMSSESHA’s objections is the lack of statistical evidence based upon a comparison of computer grading versus that of human graders. Until there are studies that validate this technology (preferably from independent third-parties), this strikes me as a leap too far. Indeed, although Wikipedia (I know, I know) states there are plenty of studies that show automated grading programs outperform human graders, there’s an impressive pile of research attached to the PAMSSESHA petition that negates that claim.

More, I am sure, later . . . .

Posted in Assessment, Critical Thinking, Technology, Writing | 1 Comment

Faculty Play Dates

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Barbara Whitehead

Don’t get me wronPreschoolers-enjoy-play-structure-2012g, there’s a lot of learning and work occurring in Faculty Learning Communities. But, like preschool play groups, FLCs also provide a safe and structured environment focused on a shared interest, for learning, interaction, and enjoyment among peers. The value of intermingling with like-minded colleagues may seem superfluous. Why would faculty, safe and snug in their departmental silos, need structured encounters for exchanging ideas and enjoying camaraderie?  Surely happenstance at the departmental water-cooler, coffee maker, or hallway serves this purpose, right?

Maybe not. I first learned about the dysfunctional-family dynamic fostered by the tenure system in some academic departments when I was a grad student selecting a committee. I couldn’t ask Dr. X to serve with Dr. Y because they didn’t speak to one another. Today, I see the strain of maintaining “perfection” on the faces of faculty members, especially the pre-tenured. They must be “outstanding in either teaching or research” and “of high quality” in the other area.  And when we’re discussing workshop topics for CTE events, I frequently suggest that presenters share something that didn’t work and how they overcame a classroom disaster—I don’t recall anyone volunteering. We may encourage our students to take risks, but our internal culture is commonly risk-adverse.

CTE launched two Faculty Learning Communities last fall, in part to provide a safe haven for professional growth and vulnerability. I’ve had no doubt about the valuable contributions that each of these FLCs is making to pedagogy at SMU. But I wondered about the personal-enrichment experiences of the FLC participants. Here are some responses from the FLC on writing:

I thoroughly enjoy finding out about common concerns—and creative ways to address those issues—with faculty across campus. . . . I look forward to going each time we meet! –Paige Ware

It has been one of the best experiences I have had at SMU! . . . It might be luck that our group was perfect for me – there was a lot of knowledge about a subject I knew little about! –José Lage

I think my biggest response so far is how can our disciplines be so different yet we struggle with so many of the same issues with respect to students and writing assignments. –Sheri Kunovich

I’m happy to share that one of my favorite takeaways from the FLC has been to learn how my colleagues are using technology to facilitate writing/editing assignments at the individual and group level. –Sandy Duhé

From the technology FLC:

I found out who is knowledgeable on campus about how these technologies work, if I should become brave enough to use some of them. This is helpful because I will know who to ask. –Lynne Stokes

. . . being on the committee was a spur for me to follow up on doing some tech-based things I had considered but not carried out. – Mark Kerins

Of course I get some good ideas for my courses from the FLC, but I think the most valuable thing I gain from the FLC experience is meeting with other faculty on campus and learning from them how they handle different classroom situations, address new challenges, and their experiences with different learning/teaching techniques.  It really is enjoyable to discuss teaching (using technology or otherwise) with a group of faculty who are passionate and engaged. –Paul Krueger

We’ve had a meeting or two where we basically threw out the agenda because we got started on a different technology-related topic.  So it’s been spontaneous at times.  Also, it’s just been good to touch base with faculty and staff across the various schools to see how they’re using technology in their particular fields.  This type of interaction has really given me some new ideas I want to try out. I think our group members actually like each other.  To me, it’s really been a positive experience. –David Son

I have enjoyed the opportunity to work with and learn from faculty I might not otherwise have the opportunity to meet. It is exciting to talk about how we can do our work better! –Barbara Morganfield

 

Posted in Active Learning, CTE, Inspiration, Interdisciplinary Teaching, Learning Communities, Technology, Uncategorized, Writing | 1 Comment

It’s Not Just the Students Who Multitask

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Beth Thornburg

StudentMultitaskingI started reading the Chronicle piece entitled “You’re Distracted.  This Professor Can Help” feeling very smug and superior.  Those foolish students — why do they not realize that their constant response to electronic devices is counterproductive (and it is).  Checking Facebook in class, texting while researching, checking that funny cat video when slightly bored . . . none of this is conducive to the kind of focus that leads to deep learning.  And so I was wishing that SMU had a course like the one described, “Information and Contemplation” that uses meditation and other tools to help students become more mindful of the ways in which they flit from medium to medium.  (The professor and his colleagues did an experiment establishing the impact of meditation on productivity in the workplace, too.)

And then I started reading about some of the class assignments:  take 15 minutes and do nothing but focus on your email.  Don’t open your browser.  Don’t look at text messages. Don’t Google anything.  Deal with it thoughtfully, and then be done.  Or this one:  use Camtasia to capture what’s going on on your computer screen.  How many windows do you have open? What are you doing with them?  What does your face look like (it captures your webcam, too) when you hear an incoming email ding? (expectant? anxious?).  I watched the video embedded in the article and wondered what my own screen would look like. The electronic crack of stimulation can work as powerfully on us as on our students, and just as they will not learn efficiently while constantly switching tasks, I’m afraid my use of time is less productive as I bounce among stimuli.

The academic life is a high pressured one, and it can feel like the competing pressures of scholarship and teaching hardly leave time to brush your teeth.  How much faster and more thoughtfully would I be able to prepare to teach class if I don’t constantly interrupt myself? How much more research or writing could I get done if I am not repeatedly switching from my Word document to immediately check that incoming email, or catching up with professional gossip on law blogs?  So I’m going to try ratcheting down the beeping stimuli and try to do one thing at a time . . . well, mostly.  Anyone care to join me?

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Do I need to make classroom attendance more important?

Posted on March 14, 2013 by David Son

In a previous blog posting, I outlined my use of a tablet PC in the classroom. One of the ways I use the tablet is to screencast my lecture, recording both the visual output (my notes and PowerPoint) and my voice. Students who miss a lecture can catch up, or students who are struggling with a tough topic can simply fast forward in the recording to review the topic again.

In my previous experiences with screencasting, I noted very little dropoff in class attendance. However, this spring is different. I teach organic chemistry to around 100 students. As the semester has progressed, I have observed a gradual decrease in classroom attendance accompanied by an increase in viewings of the lecture screencasts. Part of the decrease in attendance could be due to the 8AM start time (for a TTh class that also means a class that lasts 1 hour and 20 minutes). But could that be the only reason? I have also observed that this class is performing better than previous classes. What does that mean?

On the first day of class, I tell the students I’m screencasting the lectures, but I also tell them that viewing the recordings should not be a substitute for actual classroom attendance. Why not? For one thing, during the lecture they can ask questions. Furthermore, the recordings won’t pick up the laser pointer I liberally use during my lectures. But is that it? If there are no other advantages to coming to class, then why bother dragging yourself out of bed to attend an 8AM class if you can just watch the recording later? Students can always visit during my office hours to ask any questions they might have, and they can figure out from the recordings what I might be pointing at with my laser pointer.

One possible conclusion is that I have simply become the dreaded “content deliverer.” If my students are generally doing well and learning what I think they should be learning in organic chemistry, then even though my lectures are just content delivery, I’m doing my job. There’s no reason to come to class. Is that a bad thing? In chemistry, we teach our students “the facts,” leaving little room for discussion or debate. As a result, I would argue that many of our classes (and classes in other sciences I would imagine) are more or less content delivery.

Maybe I need to give my students a better reason to attend class. But do I really need to do this if the students are in fact learning what they should? Does attending SMU mean you will get something beyond simple content delivery? What if I’m really good at content delivery and teaching the facts? In all of my classes, there are always some students who do poorly. Does that mean there’s some special in-class technique out there I should be implementing that can help those students? Should I feel obligated to do more in class than what I’m doing already?

Posted in Teaching Methods, Technology | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Why the University is Still Relevant in the Age of Wikipedia

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Kristina Booker

Last Friday’s excellent symposium, “Higher-Ed in the Crosshairs,” examined some of the most relevant issues facing our community.  What is the value of a university education?  How does the university confront changes in technology and the demands of an evolving twenty-first century work force?  How can university teaching respond dynamically to the ways modern students communicate, process information, and learn?

For me, the most striking of these questions had to do with arguments for our continued relevance in a digital world.  It reminded me of a recent conversation with a young family member who has chosen not to attend college.  ”Why should I spend thousands of dollars on a college degree,” he asked me, “when I can learn anything I want to know on the Internet for free?”

I’ll confess, even as a graduate student a year away from a Ph.D. and (hopefully, some day) a university teaching position, this question gave me pause.  I’m sure we’ve all heard a variant of this argument, but here’s the thing: this time, it was coming from someone who is an ideal candidate for university education.  He is intellectually curious, reads voraciously, finds great pleasure in mastering something new, and already thinks critically about the world he confronts on a daily basis.  He obviously views the university’s mission as we do: not as mere vocational training, but as an immersion in ideas and modes of thinking that prepare you for membership in professional and civic communities.  He just doesn’t see this immersion as the exclusive property of higher education.  If this kid doesn’t want to go to college, I thought, we’re doomed.

So, you can imagine my relief and delight when this exact issue came up on Friday.  The answer to this objection, eloquently provided by Marc Christensen, Dean of the Lyle School of Engineering, is–wait for it–good teaching: “The value of an educational experience is maximized with a sage and pupil working together, grappling with the material and practicing their craft.  The connected experience of teachers and students engaging together is what education is all about.”

I realized while listening to Dean Christensen that I can only talk about the value of my own undergraduate and postgraduate education in terms of the ‘sages’ who have taken me as their ‘pupil.’  As an English major, I could have read all those books by myself over the last ten years, but I would never have learned how to grapple with them without the mentorship of my professors.  That is the value that I want to add to my students’ college experience.  As Christensen said in perhaps the most-tweeted moment of the entire day, “At SMU we should never choose to compete in the marginal value of content delivery; we simply cannot win that game.  We will never be the deep discount big box purveyor of pedagogy.  Instead we must focus on the high value experience our constituents demand.  That is what we can be truly great at, and it is what most of us went into teaching to do: engaged learning in the classroom.”

Of course, this leaves my young friend’s point about cost unaddressed–and his point is a good one.  We should continue to do what we can to ensure that the sage-and-pupil experience isn’t the privilege of the few.  What this argument about engaged teaching does demonstrate, however, is that we can point to something other than earning potential as the return on a student’s investment.  If we could reframe the conversation about higher ed in these terms, the university wouldn’t need to justify its existence.  If we could consistently create this kind of value, our students would justify it for us.

 

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