Surely, I can’t believe that I would have thought…

Posted: September 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Anyone with students has become used to what I shall (extremely loosely) refer to as the argument of lazy denial, where a student uses one of the following in a sentence, when discussing a technical issue:

  • Surely…
  • I can’t believe…
  • I would have thought…

Now, used rhetorically, where you place a deliberately short-term doubt in someone’s mind and then follow it up with the facts, there is no real problem with most of these. My problem is when a student uses this in order to dismiss an idea, based on an isolated opinion or a very limited understanding of the issues. As I joked recently on someone’s Facebook, I’ve told my students that starting any technical discussion question with “Surely…” is an indication that further research has to take place.

Yes, yes, I’m making a point and enough of my students know about it to occasionally rib me with its deliberate usage but this just emphasises that they’re thinking about things. It’s very easy to infer a comfortable denial to a situation based on limited experience. This could be covered as being a hasty generalisation, jumping to conclusions, appeal to incredulity or wishful thinking, but it’s really an excuse to express disbelief without having to provide any evidence other than “Nahhhh.” And, ultimately, because very little work is being done here, I’m just going to call it lazy denial.

My intention is not, of course, to stop people speaking naturally but it’s to help my students think about framing an argument, which requires knowing enough about the area to be able to construct, and respond to, an argument. Research usually consists of knowing enough to know what you don’t know, which can usually be explained far more succinctly than saying “Surely, someone would have carried out action <x>”. There are legitimate ways to express this sentiment, after you’ve done the reading. “I’ve looked through all of the literature I can find and it appears that no-one appears to have tried <x>.”

(Regrettably, as in all things scientific, not finding something doesn’t prove its non-existence. As exhaustive literature searches are becoming harder and harder with the growth of the data corpus, we have to be very circumspect about how we make statements such as “no-one has done this” because it is more than a little embarrassing when someone stands up at the end of your talk and says “Urm, we did”.)

Once we’ve gone looking and discussed the area, we’re all looking at the same problem in the same way. Rather than making sweeping statements that are, to be honest, often a little condescending because you’re speaking as if your opinion is so blindingly obvious that it must have been tried, we can really appreciate the discovery of  a hole in the recorded knowledge: a place where we can make a contribution.

This is not to say that everything is this formal and there have been many fine semi-research discussions carried out that have used these terms but, when we’re sitting around trying to work towards a solution or my students are trying to work out their research direction, this starts to become important.

I suppose this reveals more about me than it does about my students…

A Puzzling Thought

Posted: September 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Today 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:

  1. it makes it harder to understand science,
  2. the real models become hard to believe because they’re counter-intuttitve, and
  3. 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 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 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 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 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 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 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!

The Narrative Hunger: Stories That Meet a Need

Posted: September 15, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I have been involved in on-line communities for over 20 years now and, apparently, people are rarely surprised when they meet me. “Oh, you talk just like you type.” is the effective statement and I’m quite happy with this. While some people adopt completely different personae on-line, for a range of reasons, I seem to be the same. It then comes as little surprise that I am as much of storyteller in person as I am online. I love facts, revel in truth, but I greatly enjoying putting them together into a narrative that conveys the information in a way that is neither dry nor dull. (This is not to say that the absence of a story guarantees that things must be dry and dull but, without a focus on those elements of narrative that appeal to common human experience, we always risk this outcome.)

One of Katrina’s recent posts referred to the use of story telling in education. As she says, this can be contentious because:

stories can be used to entertain students, to have them enjoy your lectures, but are not necessarily educational.

The shibboleth of questionable educational research is often a vaguely assembled study, supported by the conjecture that the “students loved it”, and it is very easy to see how story telling could fall into this. However, we as humans are fascinated by stories. We understand the common forms even where we have not read Greek drama or “The Hero With a Thousand Faces”. We know when stories ring true and when they fall flat. Searching the mental engines of our species for the sweet spots that resonate across all of us is one way to convey knowledge in a more effective and memorable way. Starting from this focus, we must then observe our due diligence in making sure that our story framework contains a worthy payload.

Not all stories are of the same value.

I love story telling and I try to weave together a narrative in most of my lectures, even down to leaving in sections where deliberate and tangential diversion becomes part of the teaching, to allow me to contrast a point or illuminate it further by stripping it of its formal context and placing it elsewhere. After all, an elephant next to elephants is hardly memorable but an elephant in a green suit, as King of a country, tends to stick in the mind.

The power of the narrative is that it involves the reader or listener in the story. A well-constructed narrative leads the reader to wonder about what is going to happen next and this is model formation. Very few of us read in a way where the story unfolds with us completely distant from it – in fact, maintaining distance from a story is a sign of a poor narrative. When the right story is told, or the right person is telling it, you are on the edge of your seat, hungry to know more. When it is told poorly, then you stifle a yawn and smile politely, discreetly peering at your watch as you attempt to work out the time at which you can escape.

Of course, this highlights the value of narrative for us in teaching but it also reinforces that requirement that it be more than an assemblage of rambling anecdotes, it must be a constructed narration that weaves through points in a recognisable way and giving us the ability to conjecture on its direction. O. Henry endings, the classic twist endings, make no sense unless you have constructed a mental model that can be shaken by the revelations of the last paragraphs. Harry Potter book 7 makes even less sense unless one has a model of the world in which the events of the book can be situated.

As always, this stresses the importance of educational design, where each story, each fact, each activity, is woven into the greater whole with a defined purpose and in full knowledge of how it will be used. There is nothing more distracting than someone who rambles during a lecture about things that not only seem irrelevant, but are irrelevant. Whereas a musing on something that, on first glance, appears irrelevant can lead to exploration of the narrative by students. Suddenly, they are within a Choose Your Own Adventure book and trying to work out where each step will take them.

Stories are an excellent way to link knowledge and problems. They excite, engage and educate, when used correctly. We are all hungry for stories: we are players within our own stories, observers of those of the people around us and, eventually, will form part of the greater narrative by the deeds for which we are written up in the records to come. It makes sense to use this deep and very human aspect of our intellect to try and assist with the transfer of knowledge.

ICER 2012 Research Paper Session 1

Posted: September 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

It would not be over-stating the situation to say that every paper presented at ICER led to some interesting discussion and, in some cases, some more… directed discussion than others. This session started off with a paper entitled “Threshold Concepts and Threshold Skills in Computing” (Kate Sanders, Jonas Boustedt, Anna Eckerdal, Robert McCartney, Jan Erik Moström Lynda Thomas and Carol Zander), on whether threshold skills, as distinct from threshold concepts, existed and, if they did, what their characteristics would be. Threshold skills were described as transformative, integrative, troublesome knowledge, semi-irreversible (in that they’re never really lost), and requiring practice to keep current. The discussion that followed raised a lot of questions, including whether you could learn a skill by talking about it or asking someone – skill transfer questions versus environment. The consensus, as I judged it from the discussion, was that threshold skills didn’t follow from threshold concepts but there was a very rapid and high-level discussion that I didn’t quite follow, so any of the participants should feel free to leap in here!

The next talk was “On the reliability of Classifying Programming Tasks Using a Neo-Piagetian Theory of Cognitive Development” (Richard Gluga, Raymond Lister, Judy Kay, Sabina Kleitman and Donna Teague), where Ray raised and extended a number of the points that he had originally shared with us in the workshop on Sunday. Ray described the talk as being a bit “Neo-Piagetian theory for dummies” (for which I am eternally grateful)  and was seeking to address the question as to where students are actually operating when we ask them to undertake tasks that require a reasonable to high level of intellectual development.

Ray raised the three bad programming habits he’d discussed earlier:

  1. Permutation programming (where students just try small things randomly and iteratively in the hope that they will finally get the right solution – this is incredibly troublesome if the many small changes take you further away from the solution )
  2. Shotgun debugging (where a bug causes the student to put things in with no systematic approach and potentially fixing things by accident)
  3. Voodoo coding/Cargo cult coding (where code is added by ritual rather than by understanding)

These approaches show one very important thing: the student doesn’t understand what they’re doing. Why is this? Using a Neo-Piagetian framework we consider the student as moving through the same cognitive development stages that they did as a child (Piagetian) but that this transitional approach applies to new and significant knowledge frameworks, such as learning to program. Until they reach the concrete operational stage of their development, they will be applying poor or inconsistent models – logically inadequate models to use the terminology of the area (assuming that they’ve reached the pre-operational stage). Once a student has made the next step in their development, they will reach the concrete operational stage, characterised (among other things, but these were the ones that Ray mentioned) by:

  1. Transitivity: being able to recognise how things are organised if you can impose an order upon them.
  2. Reversibility: that we can reverse changes that we can impose.
  3. Conservation: realising that the numbers of things stay the same no matter how we organise them.

In coding terms, these can be interpreted in several ways but the conservation idea is crucial to programming because understanding this frees the student from having to write the same code for the same algorithm every time. Grasping that conversation exists, and understanding it, means that you can alter the code without changing the algorithm that it implements – while achieving some other desirable result such as speeding the code up or moving to a different paradigm.

Ray’s paper discussed the fact that a vast number of our students are still pre-operational for most of first and second year, which changes the way that we actually try to teach coding. If a student can’t understand what we’re talking about or has to resort to magical thinking to solve problem, then we’ve not really achieved our goals. If we do start classifying the programming tasks that we ask students to achieve by the developmental stages that we’re expecting, we may be able to match task to ability, making everyone happy(er).

The final paper in the session was “Social Sensitivity Correlations with the Effectiveness of team Process Performance: An Empirical Study”, (Luisa Bender (presenting), Gursimra Walia, Krishna Kambhampaty, Travis Nygard and Kendall Nygard), which discussed the impact of socially sensitive team members in programming teams. (Social sensitivity is the ability to correctly understand the feelings and the viewpoints of other people.)

The “soft skills” are essential to teamwork process and a successful team enhances learning outcomes. Bad teams hinder team formation and progress, and things go downhill from there. From Wooley et al’s study of nearly 700 participants, the collective intelligence of the team stems from how well the team works rather than the individual intelligence of the participants. The group whose members were more socially sensitive had a higher group intelligence.

Just to emphasise that point: a team of smart people may not be as effective as a team as a team of people who can understand the feelings and perspectives of each other. (This may explain a lot!)

Social sensitivity is a good predictor of team performance and the effectiveness of team-oriented processes, as well as the satisfaction of the team members. However, it is also apparent that we in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) have lower social sensitivity readings (supporting Baron-Cohen’s assertion – no, not that one) than some other areas. Future work in this area is looking at the impact of a single high or low socially sensitive person in a group, a study that will be of great interest to anyone who is running teams made up on randomly assigned students. How can we construct these groups for the best results for the students?

More MOOCs! (Still writing up ICER, sorry!)

Posted: September 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The 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.

ICER 2012 Day 1 Keynote: How Are We Thinking?

Posted: September 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

We started off today with a keynote address from Ed Meyer, from University of Queensland, on the Threshold Concepts Framework (Also Pedagogy, and Student Learning). I am, regrettably, not as conversant with threshold concepts as I should be, so I’ll try not to embarrass myself too badly. Threshold concepts are central to the mastery of a given subject and are characterised by some key features (Meyer and Land):

  1. Grasping a threshold concept is transformative because it changes the way that we think about something. These concepts become part of who we are.
  2. Once you’ve learned the concept, you are very unlikely to forget it – it is irreversible.
  3. This new concept allows you to make new connections and allows you to link together things that you previously didn’t realise were linked.
  4. This new concept has boundaries – they have an area over which they apply. You need to be able to question within the area to work out where it applies. (Ultimately, this may identify areas between schools of thought in an area.)
  5. Threshold concepts are ‘troublesome knowledge’. This knowledge can be counter-intuitive, even alien and will make no sense to people until they grasp the new concept. This is one of the key problems with discussing these concepts with people – they will wish to apply their intuitive understanding and fighting this tendency may take some considerable effort.

Meyer then discussed how we see with new eyes after we integrate these concepts. It can be argued that concepts such as these give us a new way of seeing that, because of inter-individual differences, students will experience in varying degrees as transformative, integrative, and (look out) provocative and troublesome. For this final one, a student experiences this in many ways: the world doesn’t work as I think it should! I feel lost! Helpless! Angry! Why are you doing this to me?

How do you introduce a student to one of these troublesome concepts and, more importantly, how can you describe what you are going to talk about when the concept itself is alien: what do you put in the course description given that you know that the student is not yet ready to assimilate the concept?

Meyer raised a really good point: how do we get someone to think inside the discipline? Do they understand the concept? Yes. Does this mean that they think along the right lines? Maybe, maybe not. If I don’t think like a Computer Scientist, I may not understand why a CS person sees a certain issue as a problem. We have plenty of evidence that people who haven’t dealt with the threshold concepts in CS Education find it alien to contemplate that the lecture is not the be-all and end-all of teaching – their resistance and reliance upon folk pedagogies is evidence of this wrestling with troublesome knowledge.

A great deal to think about from this talk, especially in dealing with key aspects of CS Ed as the threshold concept that is causing many of our non-educational research oriented colleagues so much trouble, as well as our students.

 

And more on the Harvard Scandal: Scandal? Apparently it’s not?

Posted: September 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’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.

 

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