A Puzzling Thought
Posted: September 19, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, card shouting, collaboration, curriculum, design, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, feedback, higher education, in the student's head, measurement, principles of design, reflection, resources, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking 4 CommentsToday I presented one of my favourite puzzles, the Monty Hall problem, to a group of Year 10 high school students. Probability is a very challenging area to teach because we humans seem to be so very, very bad at grasping it intuitively. I’ve written before about Card Shouting, where we appear to train cards to give us better results by yelling at them, and it becomes all too clear that many people have instinctive models of how the world work that are neither robust nor transferable. This wouldn’t be a problem except that:
- it makes it harder to understand science,
- the real models become hard to believe because they’re counter-intuttitve, and
- casinos make a lot of money out of people who don’t understand probability.
Monty Hall is simple. There are three doors and behind one is a great prize. You pick a door but it doesn’t get opened. The host, who knows where the prize is, opens one of the doors that you didn’t pick but the door that he/she opens is always going to be empty. So the host, in full knowledge, opens a known empty door, but it has to be one that you didn’t pick. You then have a choice to switch to the door that you didn’t pick and that hasn’t been opened, or you can stay with your original pick.
Based on a game show, Monty Hall was the name of the presenter.
Now let’s fast forward to the fact that you should always switch because you have a 2/3 chance of getting the prize if you do (no, not 50/50) so switching is the winning strategy. Going into today, what I expected was:
- Initially, most students would want to stay with their original choice, having decided that there was no benefit to switching or that it was a 50/50 deal so it didn’t make any sense.
- At least one student would actively reject the idea.
- With discussion and demonstration, I could get students thinking about this problem in the right way.
The correct mental framework for Monty Hall is essential. What are the chances, with 1 prize behind 3 doors, that you picked the right door initially. It’s 1/3, right? So the chances that you didn’t pick the correct door is 2/3. Now, if you just swapped randomly, there’d be no advantage but this is where you have to understand the problem. There are 2 doors that you didn’t pick and, by elimination, these 2 doors contain the prize 2/3 of the time. The host knows where the prize is so the host will never open a door and show you the prize, the host just removes a worthless door. Now you have two sets of doors – the one you picked (correct 1/3 of the time) and the remaining door from the unpicked pair (correct 2/3 of the time). So, given that there’s only one remaining door to pick in the unpicked pair, by switching you increase your chances of winning from 1/3 to 2/3.
Don’t believe me? Here’s an on-line simulator that you can run (Ignore what it says about Internet Explorer, it tends to run on most things.)
Still don’t believe me? Here’s some Processing code that you can run locally and see the rates converge to the expected results of 1/3 for staying and 2/3 for switching.
This is a challenging and counter-intuitive result, until you actually understand what’s happening, and this clearly illustrates one of those situations where you can ask students to plug numbers into equations for probability but, when you actually ask them to reason mathematically, you suddenly discover that they don’t have the correct mental models to explain what is going on. So how did I approach it?
Well, I used Peer Instruction techniques to get the class to think about the problem and then vote on it. As expected, about 60% of the class were stayers. Then I asked them to discuss this with a switcher and to try and convince each other of the rightness of their actions. Then I asked them to vote again.
No significant change. Dang.
So I wheeled out the on-line simulator to demonstrate it working and to ensure that everyone really understood the problem. Then I showed the Processing simulation showing the numbers converging as expected. Then I pulled out the big guns: the 100 door example. In this case, you select from 100 doors and Monty eliminates 98 (empty) doors that you didn’t choose.
Suddenly, when faced with the 100 doors, many students became switchers. (Not surprising.) I then pointed out that the two problems (3 doors and 100 doors) had reduced to the same problem, except that the remaining doors were the only door left standing from 2 and 99 doors respectively. And, suddenly, on the repeated vote, everyone’s a switcher. (I then ran the code on the 100 door example and had to apologise because the 99% ‘switch’ trace is so close to the top that it’s hard to see.)
Why didn’t the discussion phase change people’s minds? I think it’s because of the group itself, a junior group with very little vocabulary of probability. it would have been hard for the to articulate the reasons for change beyond much ‘gut feeling’ despite the obvious mathematical ability present. So, expecting this, I confirmed that they were understanding the correct problem by showing demonstration and extended simulation, which provided conflicting evidence to their previously held belief. Getting people to think about the 100 door model, which is a quite deliberate manipulation of the fact that 1/100 vs 99/100 is a far more convincing decision factor than 1/3 vs 2/3, allowed them to identify a situation where switching makes sense, validating what I presented in the demonstrations.
In these cases, I like to mull for a while to work out what I have and haven’t learned from this. I believe that the students had a lot of fun in the puzzle section and that most of them got what happened in Monty Hall, but I’d really like to come back to them in a year or two and see what they actually took away from today’s example.
More on Computer Science Education as a fundamentally challenging topic.
Posted: September 18, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, community, curriculum, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, feedback, higher education, reflection, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, threshold concepts, universal principles of design, vygotsky, workload Leave a comment“Homo sum, humani a me nihil alienum puto (I am a [human], nothing human is foreign to me)” , Terence, 163BC
While this is a majestic sentiment, we are constantly confronted by how many foreign ideas and concepts there are in our lives. In the educational field, Meyer and Land have identified threshold concepts as a set of concepts that are transformative once understood but troublesome and alien before they are comprehended. The existence of these, often counter-intuitive, concepts give the lie to Terence’s quote as it appears that certain concepts will be extremely foreign and hard to communicate or comprehend until we understand them. (I’ve discussed this before in my write-up of the ICER Keynote.)
“Terry” to his friends.
Reading across the fields of education, educational psychology and Computer Science education research, it rapidly becomes apparent that some ideas have been described repeatedly over decades, but have gained little traction. Dewey’s disgust at the prison-like school classroom was recorded in 1938, yet you can walk onto any campus in the world and find the same “cells”, arrayed in ranks. The lecture is still the dominant communication form in many institutions, despite research support for the far greater efficacy of different approaches. For example, the benefits of social constructivism, including the zone of proximal development, are well known and extensively studied, yet even where group work is employed, it is not necessarily designed or facilitated to provide the most effective outcomes. The majority of course design and implementation shows little influence of any of the research conducted in the last 20 years, let alone the cognitive development stages of Piaget, the reliance upon authority found in Perry or even the existence of threshold concepts themselves. Why?
From a personal perspective, I was almost completely ignorant of the theoretical underpinnings of educational practice until very recently and I still rate myself as a rank novice in the area. I write here to be informed, not to be seen as an expert, and I learn from thinking and writing about what I’m doing. I am also now heavily involved in a research group that focuses on this so I have the peer support and time to start learning in the fascinating area of Computer Science Education. Many people, however, do not, and it is easy to see why one would not confront or even question the orthodoxy when one is unaware of any other truth.
Of course, as we all know, it is far harder to see that anything needs fixing when, instead of considering that our approach may be wrong, we identify our students as the weak link in the chain. It’s easy to do and, because we are often not scrupulously scientific in our recollection of events (because we are human), our anecdotal evidence dominates our experience. “Good” students pass, “bad” students fail. If we then define a bad student as “someone who fails”, we have a neat (if circular) definition that shields us from any thoughts on changing what we do.
When I found out how much I had to learn, I initially felt very guilty about some of the crimes that I had perpetrated against my students in my ignorance. I had bribed them with marks, punished them for minor transgressions with no real basis, talked at them for 50 minutes and assumed that any who did not recall my words just weren’t paying attention. At the same time, I carried out my own tasks with no bribery, negotiated my own deadlines and conditions, and checked my mail whenever possible in any meetings in which I felt bored. The realisation that, even through ignorance and human frailty, you have let your students down is not a good feeling, especially when you realise that you have been a hypocrite.
I lament the active procrastinator, who does everything except the right work and thus fails anyway with a confused look on their face, and I feel a great sympathy for the caring educator who, through lack of exposure or training, has no idea that what they are doing is not the best thing for their students. This is especially true when the educators have been heavily acculturated by their elders and superiors, at a vulnerable developmental time, and now not only have to question their orthodoxy, they must challenge their mentors and friends.
Scholarship in Computer Science learning and teaching illuminates one’s teaching practice. Discovering tools, theories and methodologies that can explain the actions of our students is of great importance to the lecturer and transforms the way that one thinks about learning and teaching. But transformative and highly illuminative mechanisms often come at a substantial cost in terms of the learning curve and we believe that this explains why there is a great deal of resistance from those members of the community who have not yet embraced the scholarship of learning and teaching. Combine this with a culture where you may be telling esteemed and valued colleagues that they have been practising poorly for decades and the resistance becomes even more understandable. We must address the fact that resistance to acceptance in the field may stem from effects that we would carefully address in our students (their ongoing problems with threshold concepts) but that we expect our colleagues to just accept these alien, challenging and unsettling ideas merely because we are right.
The burden of proof does not, I believe, lie with us. We have 70 years of studies in education and over 100 years of study in work practices to establish the rightness of our view. However, I wonder how we can approach our colleagues who continue to question these strange, counter-inutitive and frightening new ideas and help them to understand and eventually adopt these new concepts?
Howdy, Partner
Posted: September 17, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, collaboration, community, curriculum, design, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, feedback, Generation Why, higher education, in the student's head, measurement, principles of design, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, time banking Leave a comment
I am giving a talk on Friday about the partnership relationship between teacher and student and, in my opinion, why we often accidentally attack this through a less-than-optimal approach to assessment and deadlines. I’ve spoken before about how an arbitrary deadline that is convenient for administrative reasons is effectively pedagogically and ethically indefensible. For all that we disparage our students, if we do, for focusing on marks and sometimes resorting to cheating rather than focusing on educational goals, we leave ourselves open to valid accusations of hypocrisy if we have the same ‘ends justify the means’ approach to setting deadlines.
Consistency and authenticity are vital if we are going to build solid relationships, but let me go further. We’re not just building a relationship, we’re building an expectation of continuity over time. If students know that their interests are being considered, that what we are teaching is necessary and that we will always try to deal with them fairly, they are far more likely to invest the effort that we wish them to invest and develop the knowledge. More importantly, a good relationship is resilient, in that the occasional hiccup doesn’t destroy the whole thing. If we have been consistent and fair, and forces beyond our control affect something that we’ve tried to do, my experience is that students tolerate it quite well. If, however, you have been arbitrary, unprepared, inconsistent and indifferent, then you will (fairly or not) be blamed for anything else that goes wrong.
We cannot apply one rule to ourselves and a different one to our students and expect them to take us seriously. If you accept no work if it’s over 1 second late and keep showing up to lectures late and unprepared, then your students have every right to roll their eyes and not take you seriously. This doesn’t excuse them if they cheat, however, but you have certainly not laid the groundwork for a solid partnership. Why partnership? Because the students in higher education should graduate as your professional peers, even if they are not yet your peers in academia. I do not teach in the school system and I do not have to deal with developmental stages of the child (although I’m up to my armpits in neo-Piagetian development in the knowledge areas, of course).
We return to the scaffolding argument again. Much as I should be able to remove the supports for their coding and writing development over their degree, I should also be able to remove the supports for their professional skills, team-based activities and deadlines because, in a few short months, they will be out in the work force and they will need these skills! If I take a strictly hierarchical approach where a student is innately subordinate to me, I do not prepare them for a number of their work experiences and I risk limiting their development. If I combine my expertise and my oversight requirements with a notion of partnership, then I can work with the student for some things and prepare the student for a realistic workplace. Yes, there are rules and genuine deadlines but the majority experience in the professional workplace relies upon autonomy and self-regulation, if we are to get useful and creative output from these new graduates.
If I demand compliance, I may achieve it, but we are more than well aware that extrinsic motivating factors stifle creativity and it is only at those jobs where almost no cognitive function is required that the carrot and the stick show any impact. Partnership requires me to explain what I want and why I need it – why it’s useful. This, in turn, requires me to actually know this and to have designed a course where I can give a genuine answer that illustrates these points!
“Because I said so,” is the last resort of the tired parent and it shouldn’t be the backbone of an entire deadline methodology. Yes, there are deadlines and they are important but this does not mean that every single requirement falls into the same category or should be treated in the same way. By being honest about this, by allowing for exchange at the peer-level where possible and appropriate, and by trying to be consistent about the application of necessary rules to both parties, rather than applying them arbitrarily, we actually are making our students work harder but for a more personal benefit. It is easy to react to blind authority and be resentful, to excuse bad behaviour because you’re attending a ‘bad course’. It is much harder for the student to come up with comfortable false rationalisations when they have a more equal say, when they are informed in advance as to what is and what is not important, and when the deadlines are set by necessity rather than fiat.
I think a lot of people miss one of the key aspects of fixing assessment: we’re not trying to give students an easier ride, we’re trying to get them to do better work. Better work usually requires more effort but this additional effort is now directed along the lines that should develop better knowledge. Partnership is not some way for students to negotiate their way out of submissions, it’s a way that, among other things, allows me to get students to recognise how much work they actually have to do in order to achieve useful things.
If I can’t answer the question “Why do my students have to do this?” when I ask it of myself, I should immediately revisit the activity and learning design to fix things so that I either have an answer or I have a brand new piece of work for them to do.
De Profundis – or de-profounding?
Posted: September 16, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, collaboration, community, curriculum, design, education, educational problem, ethics, feedback, Generation Why, higher education, in the student's head, oscar wilde, principles of design, reflection, resources, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking Leave a comment“It is common to assume that we are dealing with a highly intelligent book when we cease to understand it.” (de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy, p157)
The notion of a lack of comprehension being a fundamental and innate fault of the reader, rather than the writer, is a mistake made, in many different and yet equally irritating ways, throughout the higher educational sector. A high pass rate may be seen as indicative of an easy course or a weak marker. A high failure rate may be attributed to the innate difficulty of the work or the inferior stuff of which the students are made. As I have written before, under such a presumption, I could fail all of my students and strut around, the smartest man in my University, for none have been able to understand the depths and subtlety of my area of knowledge.
Yet, if the real reason is that I have brought my students to a point where their abilities fail them and, either through ignorance or design, I do not strive to address this honestly and openly, then it doesn’t matter how many of them ultimately pass – I will be the biggest failure in the class. I know a great number of very interesting and intelligent educators but, were you to ask me if any of them could teach, I would have to answer that I did not know, unless I had actually seen them do so. For all of our pressure on students to contain the innate ability to persevere, to understand our discipline or to be (sorry, Ray) natural programmers, the notion that teaching itself might not be something that everyone is capable of is sometimes regarded as a great heresy. (The notion or insistence that developing as a teacher may require scholarship and, help us all, practise, is apostasy – our heresy leading us into exile.) Teaching revolves around imparting knowledge efficiently and effectively so that students may learn. The cornerstone of this activity is successful and continuing communication. Wisdom may be wisdom but it rapidly becomes hard to locate or learn from when it is swaddled in enough unnecessary baggage.
I have been, mostly thanks to the re-issue of cheap Penguins, undertaking a great deal of reading recently and I have revisited Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, de Botton and Wilde. The books that are the most influential upon me remain those books that, while profound, maintain their accessibility. Let me illustrate this with an example. For those who do not know what De Profundis means, it is a biblical reference to Psalm 130, appropriated by the ever humble Oscar Wilde as the title of his autobiographical letter to his former lover, from the prison in which he was housed because of that love.
But what it means is “From the depths”. In the original psalm, the first line is:
De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine;
From the depths, I have cried out to you, O Lord;
And in this reading, we see the measure of Wilde’s despair. Having been sentenced to hard labour, and having had his ability to write confiscated, his ability to read curtailed, and his reputation in tatters, he cries out from the depths to his Bosie, Lord Douglas.
De profundis [clamavi ad te, Bosie;]
If you have the context for this, then this immediately prepares you for the letter but, as it is, the number of people who are reading Wilde is shrinking, let alone the number of people who are reading a Latin Bible. Does this title still assist in the framing of the work, through its heavy dependence upon the anguish captured in Psalm 130, or is it time to retitle it “From the depths, I have cried out to you!” to capture both the translation and the sense. The message, the emotion and the hard-earned wisdom contained in the letter are still valuable but are we hurting the ability of people to discover and enjoy it by continuing to use a form of expression that may harm understanding?
Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, Folio 70r – De Profundis the Musée Condé, Chantilly. (Another form of expression of this Psalm.)
Now, don’t worry, I’m not planning to rewrite Wilde but this raises a point in terms of the occasionally unhappy union of the language of profundity and the wisdom that it seeks to impart. You will note the irony that I am using a heavily structured, formal English, to write this and that there is very little use of slang here. This is deliberate because I am trying to be precise while still being evocative and, at the same time, illustrating that accurate use of more ornate language can obscure one’s point. (Let me rephrase that. The unnecessary use of long words and complex grammar gets in the way of understanding.)
When Her Majesty the Queen told the Commonwealth of her terrible year, her words were:
“1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an Annus Horribilis.”
and I have difficulty thinking of a more complicated way of saying “1992 was a bad year” than to combine a complicated grammatical construction with a Latin term that is not going to be on the lips of the people who are listening to the speech. Let me try: “Looking back on 1992, it has been, in the words of one of my friends, a terrible year.” Same content. Same level of imparted knowledge. Much less getting in the way. (The professional tip here is to never use the letters “a”, “n”, “s” and “u” in one short word unless you are absolutely sure of your audience. “What did she say about… nahhh” is not the response you want from your loyal subjects.) [And there goes the Knighthood.]
I love language. I love reading. I am very lucky that, having had a very broad and classically based education, I can read just about anything and not be intimidated or confused by the language forms – providing that the author is writing in one of the languages that I read, of course! To assume that everyone is like me or, worse, to judge people on their ability because they find long and unfamiliar words confusing, or have never had the opportunity to use these skills before, is to leap towards the same problem outlined in the quote at the top. If we seek to label people unintelligent when they have not yet been exposed to something that is familiar to us, then this is just as bad as lauding someone’s intelligence because you don’t understand what they’re talking about.
If my students need to know something then I have to either ensure that they already do so, by clearly stating my need and being aware of the educational preparation in my locale, or I have to teach it to them in forms that they can understand and that will allow them to succeed. I may love language, classical works and big words, but I am paid to teach the students of 2012 to become the graduates, achievers and academics of the future. I have to understand, respect and incorporate their context, while also meeting the pedagogical and knowledge requirements of the courses that I teach.
No-one said it was going to be easy!
ICER 2012 Day 3 Research Paper Session 5
Posted: September 15, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, community, education, educational research, ethics, Generation Why, higher education, icer, icer 2012, icer2012, in the student's head, learning, negative perceptions, teaching, teaching approaches, tools, universal principles of design Leave a commentThe last of the research paper sessions and, dear reader, I am sure that you are as glad as I that we are here. Reading about an interesting conference that you didn’t attend is a bit like receiving a message from a friend talking about how he kissed the person that you always loved from afar. Thanks for the information but I would rather have been there myself.
This session opened with “Toward a Validated Computing Attitudes Survey” (Allison Elliott Tew, Brian Dorn and Oliver Schneider), where the problems with negative perceptions of the field and hostile classroom environments, combined with people thinking that they would be no good at CS, conspire to prevent students coming in to, or selecting, our discipline. The Computing Attitudes Survey was built, with major modification, from the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS, pronounced C-LASS). To adapt the original survey, some material was just copied across with a word change (computer science replacing physics), some terminology was changed (algorithm for formula) and some discipline specific statements were added. Having established an expert opinion basis for the discipline specific content, students can now see how much they agree with the experts.
There is, as always, the rip of contentious issues. “You have to know maths to be able to program” was a three-way split within the expert group as to who agreed, disagreed or was neutral. What was interesting, and what I’ll be looking at in future, is the evidence of self-defeating thought in many answers (no, not questions. The questions weren’t self-defeatist but the answers often were.) What was also interesting is that attitudes seem to get worse in the CLASS instrument after you take the course!
Confidence, as simple as “I think I can do this”, plays a fundamental part in determining how students will act. Given the incredibly difficult decisions that a student faces when selecting their degree or concentration, it is no surprise that anyone who thinks “Computing is too hard for me” or “Computing is no use to me” will choose to do something else.
The authors are looking for volunteers where they can run these trials again so, after you’ve read their paper, if you’re interested, you should probably e-mail them.
“A Statewide Survey on Computing Education Pathways and Influences: Factors in Broadening Participation in Computing” (Mark Guzdial, Barbara Ericson, Tom McKlin and Shelly Engelman)
The final research paper in the conference dealt with the final evaluation of the Georgia Computes! initiative, which had run from October 2006 to August of this year. This multi-year project cannot be contained in my nervous babbling but I can talk about the instrument that was presented. Having run summer camps, weekend workshops, competitions, teacher workshops, a teachers’ lending library, first year engagement and seeded first-year summer camps (whew!), the question was: What had been the impact of Georgia Computes! ? What factors influence undergrad enrolment into intro CS courses?
There were many questions and results presented but I’d like to focus on the top four reasons given, from survey, as to why students weren’t going to undertake a CS Major or Minor:
- I don’t want to do the type of work
- Little interest in the subject matter
- Don’t enjoy Computing Courses
- Don’t have confidence that I would succeed.
Looking at those points, after a state-wide and highly successful campaign over 6 years has finished, it is very, very sobering for me. What these students are saying is that they cannot see the field as attractive, interesting, enjoyable or that they are capable. But these are all aspects that we can work on, although some of these will require a lot of work.
Two further things that Barb said really struck me. Firstly, that if you take into account encouragement and ability, that men will tend to be satisfied and continue on if they receive either or both – the factors are not separable for men – but that women and minorities need encouragement in order to feel satisfied and to convince them to keep going. Secondly, when it comes to giving encouragement, male professors are just as effective as female professors in terms of giving encouragement to women.
As a male lecturer, who is very, very clearly aware of the demographic disgrace that is the under-representation of women in CS, this first fact gives me a partial strategy to increase retention (and reinforces a believe I have held anecdotally for some time) but the second fact gives me the agency to assist in this process, as well as greater hope for a steadily increasing female cohort over time.
Overall, a very positive note on which to finish the session papers!
Our Influence: Prejudice As Predictor
Posted: September 14, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, community, education, educational problem, educational research, higher education, in the student's head, learning, measurement, principles of design, reflection, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking Leave a comment
If you want to see Raymond Lister get upset, tell him that students fall into two categories: those who can program and those who can’t. If you’ve been reading much (anything) of what I’ve been writing recently, you’ll realise that I’ve been talking about things like cognitive development, self-regulation, dependence on authority, all of which have one thing in common in that students can be at different stages when they reach us. There is no guarantee that students will be self-reliant, cognitively mature and completely capable of making reasoned decisions at the most independent level.
There was a question raised several times during the conference and it’s the antithesis of the infamous “double hump conjecture”, that students divide into two groups naturally and irrevocably because of some innate characteristic. The question is “Do our students demonstrate their proficiency because of what we do or in spite of what we do?” If the innate characteristic conjecture is correct, and this is a frequently raised folk pedagogy, then our role has no real bearing on whether a student will learn to program or not.
If we accept that students come to us at different stages in their development, and that these development stages will completely influence their ability to learn and form mental models, then the innate characteristic hypothesis withers and dies almost immediately. A student who does not have their abilities ready to display can no more demonstrate their ability to program than a three-year old child can write Shakespeare – they are not yet ready to be able to learn, assemble, reassemble or demonstrate the requisite concepts and related skills.
However, a prejudicial perspective that students who cannot demonstrate the requisite ability are innately and permanently lacking that skill will, unpleasantly, viciously and unnecessarily, cause that particular future to lock in. Of course a derisive attitude to these ‘stupid’ or ‘slow’ students will make them withdraw or undermine their confidence! As I will note from the conference, confidence and support have a crucial impact on students. Undermining a student’s confidence is worse than not teaching them at all. Walking in with the mental model that separates the world into programmers and non-programmers forces that model into being.
Since I’ve entered the area of educational research, I’ve been exposed to things that I can separate into the following categories:
- Fascinating knowledge and new views of the world, based on solid research and valid experience.
- Nonsense
- Damned nonsense
- Rank stupidity
Where most of the latter come from other educators who react, our of fear or ignorance, to the lessons from educational research with disbelief, derision and resentment. “I don’t care what you say, or what that paper says, you’re wrong” says the voice of “experience”.
There is no doubt that genuine and thoughtful experience is, has been, and will always be a strong and necessary sibling to the educational and psychological theory that is the foundation of educational research. However, shallow experience can often be built up into something that it is not, when it is combined with fallacious thinking, cherry picking, confirmation bias and any other permutation of fear, resentment and inertia. The influence of folk pedagogies, lessons claimed from tea room mutterings and the projection of a comfortable non-reality that mysteriously never requires the proponent to ever expend any additional effort or change what they do, is a malign shadow over the illumination of good learning and teaching practice.
The best educators explain their successes with solid theory, strive to find a solution to the problems that lead to failure, and listen to all sources in order to construct a better practice and experience for their students. I hope, one day, to achieve this level- but I do know that doubting everything new is not the path forward for me.
I am pleased to say that the knowledge and joy of this (to me) new field far outstrips most of the other things that I have seen but I cannot stress any more how important it is that we choose our perspectives carefully. We, as educators, have disproportionally high influence: large shadows and big feet. Reading further into this discipline illustrates that we must very carefully consider the way that we think, the way that our students think and the capability that we actually have in the students for reasoning and knowledge accumulation before we make any rash or prejudicial statements about the innate capabilities of that most mythical of entities: the standard student.
ICER 2012 Research Paper Session 2
Posted: September 13, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, collaboration, community, community sharing resources, education, educational research, higher education, icer, icer 2012, icer2012, teaching, teaching approaches, tools 3 CommentsOk, true confession time. My (and Katrina’s) paper was in this session and I’ll write this up separately. So this session consisted of “Adapting Disciplinary Commons Model: Lessons and Results from Georgia” (Brianna Morrison, Lijun Ni and Mark Guzdial) and… another paper. 🙂
- To document and share knowledge about student learning in CS classrooms
- To establish practices for the scholarship of teaching by making it public, peer-reviewed and amenable for public use. (portfolio model)
- Creating community
- Sharing resources and knowledge of how things are taught in other contexts.
- Supporting student recruitment within the high school environment.
More MOOCs! (Still writing up ICER, sorry!)
Posted: September 12, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, community, curriculum, education, educational research, higher education, measurement, moocs, teaching, teaching approaches, tools Leave a commentThe Gates Foundation is offering grants for MOOCs in Introductory Classes. I mentioned in an earlier post that if we can show that MOOCs work, then generally available and cheap teaching delivery is a fantastically transformative technology. You can read the press release but it’s obvious that this has some key research questions in it, much as we’ve all been raising:
The foundation wants to know, for instance, which students benefit most from MOOC’s (sic) and which kinds of courses translate best to that format.
Yes! If these courses do work then for whom do they work and which courses? There’s little doubt that the Gates have been doing some amazing things with their money and this looks promising – of course, now I have to find out if my University has been invited to join and, if so, how I can get involved. (Of course, if they haven’t, then it’s time to put on my dancing trousers and try to remedy that situation.)
However, money plus research questions is a good direction to go in.
Post 300 – 2012, the Year of the Plague
Posted: September 9, 2012 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: 300, advocacy, authenticity, community, education, ethics, higher education, measurement, teaching approaches, vaccination Leave a commentAs it turns out, this is post 300 and I’m going to use it to make a far more opinionated point than usual. I’m currently in Auckland, New Zealand, and there is a warning up on the wall about a severe outbreak of measles. This is one of the most outrageously stupid signs to see on a wall, anywhere, given that we have had a solid vaccine since 1971 and, despite ill-informed and unscientific studies that try to contradict this, the overall impact of the MMR vaccine is overwhelmingly positive. There is no reasonable excuse for the outbreak of an infectious, dangerous disease 40 years after the development of a reliable (and overwhelmingly safe) vaccine.
Is this really what we want?
My fear is that, rather than celebrating the elimination of measles and polio (under 200 cases this year so far according to the records I’ve seen) in the same way that we eradicated smallpox, we will be seeing more and more of these signs identifying outbreaks of eradicable and controllable diseases, because ignorance is holding sway.
Be in no doubt, if we keep going down this path, the risk increases rapidly that a disease will finish us off because we will not have the correct mental framing and scientific support to quickly respond to a lethal outbreak or mutation. The risk we take is that, one day, our cities lie empty with signs like this up all over the place, doors sealed with crosses on them, a quiet end to a considerable civilisation. All attributable to a rejection of solid scientific evidence and the triumph of ignorance. We have survived massive outbreaks before, even those with high lethality, but we have been, for want of a better word, lucky. We live in much denser environments and are far more connected than we were before. I can step around the world in a day and, with every step, a disease can follow my footsteps.
One of my students recently plotted 2009 Flu cases relative to air routes. While disease used to rely upon true geographical contiguity, we now connect the world with the false adjacency of the air route. Outbreaks in isolated parts of the world map beautifully to the air hubs and their importance and utilisation: more people, higher disease.
So, in short, it’s not just the way that we control the controllable diseases that is important, it is accepting that the lower risk of vaccination is justifiable in the light of the much greater risk of infection and pandemic. This fights the human tendency to completely misunderstand probability, our susceptibility to fallacious thinking, and our desperate desire to do no harm to our children. I get this but we have to be a little bit smarter or we are putting ourselves at a much higher risk – regrettably, this is a future risk so temporal discounting gets thrown into the mix to make it ever harder for people to make a good decision.
Here’s what the Smallpox Wikipedia page says: “Smallpox was an infectious disease unique to humans” (emphasis mine). This is one of the most amazing things that we have achieved. Let’s do it again!
I talk a lot about education, in terms of my thoughts on learning and teaching, but we must never forget why we educate. It’s to enlighten, to inform, to allow us to direct our considerable resources to solving the considerable problems that beset us. It’s helping people to make good decisions. It’s being aware of why people find it so hard to accept scientific evidence: because they’re scared, because someone lied to them, because no-one has gone to the trouble to actually try and explain it to them properly. Ignorance of a subject is the state that we occupy before we become informed and knowledgable. It’s not a permanent state!
That sign made me angry. But it underlined the importance of what it is that we do.
And more on the Harvard Scandal: Scandal? Apparently it’s not?
Posted: September 7, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, blogging, community, curriculum, education, educational research, ethics, higher education, in the student's head, plagiarism, reflection, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches Leave a commentI’ve just read a Salon article regarding the Harvard cheating issue. Apparently, according to Farhad Manjoo, these students should be “celebrated for collaborating“.
Note that word? It’s the one that I picked on in the Crimson article and the reason that I did so is that it’s a very mild word, and a very positive one at that. However, this article, while acknowledging that the students were prevented from any such sharing, Manjoo then asks, to me somewhat disingenuously, “What’s the point of prohibiting these students from working together?”
Urm, well, for most of the course, they don’t. At the end of the course, when they want to see how much each individual knows, they attempt to test them individually. That’s not an unusual pattern.
Manjoo’s interpretation of the other articles goes well beyond anything else that I’ve seen, including putting all of the plagiarism claims together as group work and tutor consultation. I can’t speak to this as I don’t have his sources but, given that this was explicitly forbidden anyway, he’s making an empty argument. It doesn’t matter how you slice it, if students worked together, they did something that they weren’t supposed to do. However Manjoo argues that their actions are justified, I’m not sure that this argument is.
The author obviously disagrees with the nature of the open book test and, to my reading, has no real idea of what he’s talking about. Sentences like “But if you want to determine how well students think, why force them to think alone?” are almost completely self-defeating. It also ignores the need to build knowledge in a way that functions when the group isn’t there. We don’t use social constructivism in the assumption that we will always be travelling in packs, we do it to assist the construction of knowledge inside the individual by leveraging the advantages of the social structure. To evaluate how well it has happened, and to isolate group effects so that we can see the individual performing, we use rules such as Harvard clearly defined to set these boundaries.
Manjoo waxes rhetorical in this essay. “Rather than punishing these students, shouldn’t we be praising them for solving these problems the only way they could? ” Well, no, I think that we shouldn’t. There were many ways that, if they thought this approach was unreasonable or unfair, they could have legitimately protested. I note that half the class managed to not (apparently, as far as the number suspected) cheat during this test – what do we say about these people? Are these people worthy of double-plus-praise for somehow transcending the impossible test, or are they fools for not collaborating?
I’m not sure why these articles are providing so much padding for these students, if they have actually done nothing wrong (I hasten to add that they are merely suspected at the moment but if they are to be martyrs then let us assume a bleak outcome). At least, unlike the writers in the Crimson, Manjoo is a Cornell alumnus so he has some distance. I do note that he has a book called “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” which, according to the reviews, is about the media establishing views of reality that aren’t necessarily the facts so he’s aware of the impact that his words have on how people will see this issue. He is also writing in a column with, among its bylines, “The Conventional Wisdom Debunked”, so it’s not surprising that this article is written this way.
Manjoo has created (another) Harvard bogeyman: scared of collaboration, unfair to students, and out of step with reality. However, his argument is ultimately a series of misdirections and Manjoo’s opinion that don’t address the core issue: if these students worked with each other, they shouldn’t have. Until he accepts that this, and that this is not a legitimate course, I’m not sure that his arguments have much weight with me.
Nick Falkner 