Thoughts on the Fauxpology
Posted: October 14, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, community, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, feedback, higher education, identity, in the student's head, learning, reflection, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools Leave a commentWe’ve had some major unpleasantness in the Australian political sphere recently and, while I won’t bore you with the details, a radio announcer has felt it necessary to apologise for a particularly unpleasant comment that he made about the Prime Minster, and the recent death of her father. It was not, I must say, either the most heartfelt or actually apologetic apology that has ever been delivered and the Prime Minster, who quite rightly has better things to do, has chosen not to take this man’s personal phone call for an apology. And, of course, neither should she feel that she has to. Let me state this in plain terms: the offender does not gain the right to demand the way in which an apology is presented, if they wish to proffer an apology. However, let me cut to the chase (for once) and say that an apology without a genuine sense that you have done something wrong, for which an apology is deserved and that will change your behaviour in future, is worthless.
In this case, the broadcaster has previously apologised for remarks, including that the legally elected and sitting Prime Minister of Australia be put in a ‘chaff’ bag and thrown out to sea. However, his apology for the chaff bag comment may have to be scrutinised, in light of what happened at the dinner function at which he made further deliberately offensive and unsubstantiable claims. At this event he, in between scurrilous remarks, signed a jacket made out of, you guessed it, chaff bags. Therefore, at least in the chaff bag case, it would appear that his previously apology was without conviction and possible not heartfelt: hence, worthless. He did not feel genuine regret or change his behaviour. In fact, if anything, he was now extending his behaviour and disrespect by aligning his signature with a physical representation of his statements.
When public figures mouth the words of regret, yet do not change or feel regret, we are in the territory of what has been neologised as the fauxpology. (Wikipedia refers to this as the Non-apology apology, if it has the form of an apology but does not actually express the expected contrition.) Let me give you some example words (not from said broadcaster I hasten to add):
“My recent comments may have offended some people and, if they did, then I wish to apologise.”
You are not sorry for the action, but you are sorry only because someone has taken offence, or your actions have been uncovered. Ultimately, the idea here is to say ‘sorry’ in such a way that it appears that you have sought, and may be granted, forgiveness without having to actually express responsibility. Of course, if you aren’t responsible for the problem and can move this to being the problem of the people that you’ve offended, then why should you change your behaviour at all? The example above is an “If apology”, where you are only apologising on a conditional basis. Other fine examples include such delightful phrases as “Mistakes were made” because, of course, one is studiously avoiding saying who made the mistakes.
The major problem with the fauxpology is that it is effectively a waste of time. Without a genuine desire to actually avoid the problematic behaviour, the only thing that may change is that the offender is more careful not to get caught. What bothers me from an educational sense is how pervasive these unpleasant non-apologies are.
I have too many students who feel that some sort of fauxpology, where they are sorry that an action has occurred but it is mysteriously not connected to them, is going to make things all better. I’m pretty sure that they haven’t learned it from me because I try to be honest in my apologies and then change things so that it doesn’t happen again. Am I always up to that standard? I’m probably pretty close and I strive to be better at it – but then again, I strive not to be a schmuck and sometimes that doesn’t work either. This separation of responsibility from outcome is a dangerous disconnection. It is most definitely someone’s responsibility if work didn’t get handed in on time and, while there are obvious exceptions and the spirit of charitable interpretation is still alive and well, a genuine recognition of whose responsibility it is leads one towards self-regulation far better than thinking of the work as something that is associated by accidental proximity rather than deliberate production.
I’m lucky in that I rarely expect my students to do anything where they feel they should be contrite (although there are examples, including being rude or disrespectful to their peers, although I wouldn’t push them all the way to guilt on that) but apologising for something as a recognition that whatever it was is both undesirable and now something to be avoided is essential, when you are actually at fault. But it has to be genuine or there is no point. I loathe being lied to so a false apology, especially when immediately backed up by recidivism, is a great disappointment to me.
My students are responsible for their work. I am responsible for their programs, assessment, and ensuring that they can achieve what is required in a fair and equitable environment. If I get it wrong, then I have to admit it and change behaviour. Same for the students. If something has gone wrong, then we need to work out who was responsible because we can then work out who needs to change things so it doesn’t happen again. This isn’t about ascribing punishment or blame, it’s about making things work better. The false apology, like foolish punishment, is easy but useless. As an example. I cannot think of a more useless punishment than writing lines on a blackboard, especially as the simple mechanics of this action lends itself to a deconstruction of the sentence into a form where the meaning is lost by the fifth time you’ve written “I will not challenge the ontological underpinnings of reality” but have really written “I I I I I I …” “will will wll wll wl wl” and getting steadily more squiggly. But this is useless because it is not really tied to the original offence (whatever it happens to be – talking in class, making fart sounds, shuffling the desk) and it has no teaching value at all. This punishment is the equivalent of the fauxpology in many ways: it looks like it’s doing something but not only does it not achieve its aims, it actually works against positive alternatives by providing an easy out.
I’m very disappointed by the public figures who recite these empty phrases, because the community and my students learn their empty words and think “If they can get away with it, so can I” and, ultimately, my students can’t. It’s a waste of their very valuable time and, at some stage, may lead to problems for the vast majority when someone demands more than a fauxpology and there is no real character substance to provide.
Workshop report: ALTC Workshop “Assessing student learning against the Engineering Accreditation Competency Standards: A practical approach. Part 2.
Posted: October 13, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: community, curriculum, education, educational problem, educational research, Generation Why, higher education, in the student's head, jeff froyd, learning, learning outcome, measurement, reflection, research, resources, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, wageeh boles, workload Leave a commentContinuing on from yesterday’s post, I was discussing the workshop that I went to and what I’d learned from it. I finished on the point that assessment of learning occurs when Lecturers:
- Use evidence of student learning
- to make judgements on student achievement
- against goals and standards
but we have so many other questions to ask at this stage. What were our initial learning objectives? What were we trying to achieve? The learning outcome is effectively a contract between educator and student so we plan to achieve them, but how they fit in the context of our accreditation and overall requirements? One of the things stressed in the workshop was that we need a range of assessment tasks to achieve our objectives:
- We need a wide variety
- These should be open-entry where students can begin the tasks from a range of previous learning levels and we cater for different learning preferences and interests
- They should be open-ended, where we don’t railroad the students towards a looming and monolithic single right answer, and multiple pathways or products are possible
- We should be building students’ capabilities by building on the standards
- Finally, we should provide space for student ownership and decision making.
Effectively, we need to be able to get to the solution in a variety of ways. If we straitjacket students into a fixed solution we risk stifling their ability to actually learn and, as I’ve mentioned before, we risk enforcing compliance to a doctrine rather than developing knowledgeable self-regulated learners. If we design these activities properly then we should find the result reduces student complaints about fairness or incorrect assumptions about their preparation. However, these sorts of changes take time and, a point so important that I’ll give it its own line:
You can’t expect to change all of your assessment in one semester!
The advice from Wageeh and Jeff was to focus on an aspect, monitor it, make your change, assess it, reflect and then extend what you’ve learned to other aspects. I like this because, of course, it sounds a lot like a methodical scientific approach to me. Because it is. As to which assessment methods you should choose, the presenters recognised that working out how to make a positive change to your assessment can be hard so they suggested generating a set of alternative approaches and then picking one. They then introduced Prus and Johnson’s 1994 paper “A critical review of Student Assessment Options” which provide twelve different assessment methods and their drawbacks and advantages. One of the best things about this paper is that there is no ‘must’ or ‘right’, there is always ‘plus’ and ‘minus’.
Want to mine archival data to look at student performance? As I’ve discussed before, archival data gives you detailed knowledge but at a time when it’s too late to do anything for that student or a particular cohort in that class. Archival data analysis is, however, a fantastic tool for checking to see if your prerequisites are set correctly. Does their grade in this course correlate with grades in the prereqs? Jeff mentioned a student where the students should have depended upon Physics and Maths but, while their Physics mark correlated with their final Statics mark, Mathematics didn’t. (A study at Baldwin-Wallace presented at SIGCSE 2012 asked the more general question: what are the actual dependencies if we carry out a Bayesian Network Analysis. I’m still meaning to do this for our courses as well.)
Other approaches, such as Surveys, are quick and immediate but are all perceptual. Asking a student how they did on a quiz should never be used as their actual mark! The availability of time will change the methods you choose. If you have a really big group then you can statistically sample to get an indication but this starts to make your design and tolerance for possible error very important.
Jeff stressed that, in all of this assessment, it was essential to never give students an opportunity to gain marks in areas that are not the core focus. (Regular readers know that this is one of my design and operational mantras, as it encourages bad behaviour, by which I mean incorrect optimisation.)
There were so many other things covered in this workshop and, sadly, we only had three hours. I suggested that the next time it was run that they allow more time because I believe I could happily have spent a day going through this. And I would still have had questions.
We discussed the issue of subjectivity and objectivity and the distinction between setting and assessment. Any way that I set a multiple choice quiz is going to be subjective, because I will choose the questions based on my perception of the course and assessment requirements, but it is scored completely objectively.
We also discussed data collection as well because there are so many options here. When will we collect the data? If we collect continuously, can we analyse and react continuously? What changes are we making in response? This is another important point:
If you collect data in order to determine which changes are to be made, tie your changes to your data driven reasons!
There’s little point in saying “We collected all student submission data for three years and then we went to multiple choice questions” unless you can provide a reason from the data, which will both validate your effort in collection and give you a better basis for change. When do I need data to see if someone is clearing the bar? If they’re not, what needs to be fixed? What do I, as a lecturer, need to collect during the process to see what needs to be fixed, rather than the data we collect at the end to determine if they’ve met the bar.
How do I, as a student, determine if I’m making progress along the way? Can I put all of the summative data onto one point? Can I evaluate everything on a two-hour final exam?
WHILE I’m teaching the course, are the students making progress, do they need something else, how do I (and should I) collect data throughout the course. A lot of what we actually collect is driven by the mechanisms that we already have. We need to work out what we actually require and this means that we may need to work beyond the systems that we have.
Again, a very enjoyable workshop! It’s always nice to be able to talk to people and get some really useful suggestions for improvement.
Workshop report: ALTC Workshop “Assessing student learning against the Engineering Accreditation Competency Standards: A practical approach”
Posted: October 12, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: assessment, community, curriculum, education, educational problem, educational research, feedback, Generation Why, higher education, jeff froyd, learning, principles of design, reflection, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, time banking, tools, universal principles of design, wageeh boles Leave a commentI was fortunate to be able to attend a 3 hour workshop today presented by Professor Wageeh Boles, Queensland University of Technology, and Professor Jeffrey (Jeff) Froyd, Texas A&M, on how we could assess student learning against the accreditation competency standards in Engineering. I’ve seen Wageeh present before in his capacity as an Australian Learning and Teaching Council ALTC National Teaching Fellowship and greatly enjoyed it, so I was looking forward to today. (Note: the ALTC has been replaced with the Office for Learning and Teaching, OLT, but a number of schemes are still labelled under the old title. Fortunately, I speak acronym.)
Both Wageeh and Jeff spoke at length about why we were undertaking assessment and we started by looking at the big picture: University graduate capabilities and the Engineers Australia accreditation criteria. Like it or not, we live in a world where people expect our students to be able to achieve well-defined things and be able to demonstrate certain skills. To focus on the course, unit, teaching and learning objectives and assessment alone, without framing this in the national and University expectations is to risk not producing the students that are expected or desired. Ultimately if the high level and local requirements aren’t linked then they should be because otherwise we’re probably not pursuing the right objectives. (Is it too soon to mention pedagogical luck again?)
We then discussed three types of assessment:
- Assessment FOR Learning: Which is for teachers and allows them to determine the next steps in advancing learning.
- Assessment AS Learning: Which is for students and allows them to monitor and reflect upon their own progress (effectively formative).
- Assessment OF Learning: Which is used to assess what the students have learned and is most often characterised as summative learning.
But, after being asked about the formative/summative approach, this was recast into a decision making framework. We carry out assessment of all kinds to allow people to make better decisions and the people, in this situation, are Educators and Students. When we see the results of the summative assessment we, as teachers, can then ask “What decisions do we need to make for this class?” to improve the levels of knowledge demonstrated in the summative. When the students see the result of formative assessment, we then have the question “What decisions do students need to make” to improve their own understanding. The final aspect, Assessment FOR Learning, is going to cover those areas of assessment that help both educators and students to make better decisions by making changes to the overall course in response to what we’re seeing.
This is a powerful concept as it identifies assessment in terms of responsible groups: this assessment involves one group, the other or both and this is why you need to think about the results. (As an aside, this is why I strongly subscribe to the idea that formative assessment should never have an extrinsic motivating aspect, like empty or easy submission marks, because it stops the student focussing on the feedback, which will help their decisions, and makes it look summative, which suddenly starts to look like the educator’s problem.)
One point that came out repeatedly was that our assessment methods should be varied. If your entire assessment is based on a single exam, of one type of question, at the end of the semester then you really only have a single point of data. Anyone who has ever drawn a line on a graph knows that a single point tells you nothing about the shape of the line and, ultimately, the more points that yo can plot accurately, the more you can work out what is actually happening. However, varying assessment methods doesn’t mean replicating or proxying the exam, it means providing different assessment types, varying questions, changing assessment over time. (Yes, this was stressed: changing assessment from offering to offering is important and is much a part of varying assessment as any other component.)
All delightful music to my ears, which was just was well as we all worked very hard, talking, discussing and sharing ideas throughout the groups. We had a range of people who were mostly from within the Faculty and, while it was a small group and full of the usual faces, we all worked well, had an open discussion and there were some first-timers who obviously learned a lot.
What I found great about this was that it was very strongly practical. We worked on our own courses, looked for points for improvement and I took away four points of improvement that I’m currently working on: a fantastic result for a three-hour investment. Our students don’t need to just have done assessment that makes it look like they know their stuff, they have to actually know their stuff and be confident with it. Job ready. Able to stand up and demonstrate their skills. Ready for reality.
As was discussed in the workshop, assessment of learning occurs when Lecturers:
- Use evidence of student learning
- to make judgements on student achievement
- against goals and standards
And this identifies some of our key problems. We often gather all of the evidence, whether it’s final grades or Student Evaluations, at a point when the students have left, or are just about to leave, the course. How can we change this course for that student? We are always working one step in the past. Even if we do have the data, do we have the time and the knowledge to make the right judgement? If so, is it defensible, fair and meeting the standards that we should be meeting? We can’t apply standards from 20 years ago because that’s what we’re used to. The future, in Australia, is death by educational acronyms (AQF, TEQSA, EA, ACS, OLT…) but these are the standards by which we are accredited and these are the yardsticks by which our students will be judged. If we want to change those then, sure, we can argue this at the Government level but until then, these have to be taken into account, along with all of our discipline, faculty and University requirements.
I think that this will probably spill over in a second post but, in short, if you get a chance to see Wageeh and Jeff on the road with this workshop then, please, set aside the time to go and leave time for a chat afterwards. This is one of the most rewarding and useful activities that I’ve done this year – and I’ve had a very good year for thinking about CS Education.
Offering a Way Forward: Saying “No” Constructively
Posted: October 11, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, education, educational problem, feedback, Generation Why, higher education, in the student's head, learning, reflection, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, work/life balance Leave a commentI was a shockingly bad undergraduate student. I am rather ashamed of this, in hindsight, because it could have been the most dreadful squandering of the opportunities that had been made available to me. Fortunately, intervention at a later time allowed me to recover from this mis-step and I arrived at the lofty heights that you know now: a semi-anonymous blogger with logorrhoea, employed as a low level academic at a good University. 🙂
One of the experiences that sticks in my mind, and I believe I’ve mentioned it before, was a point when I was refused supplementary examination for a course. It was, to be honest, completely reasonable that my request was refused as I had achieved the lofty score of zero for that examination and, although I was sick on the day, I had done no work at all during that term. There is no argument that my request was anything other than a small part in my continuing quest to scrape by and do as little as possible. However, what I will address is what happened next.
Nothing.
I was in an academic’s office, I had scored zero on the exam and I had not done any work. If someone showed up in my office under those conditions, I’d at least ask “Why?” Ok, sure, you’re not getting a supp from me, because I’m not a soft touch by any stretch of the imagination, but I can’t help feeling that I’m just not doing my job unless I work out what has gone on and whether I need to step in or refer you to someone else. This probably explains why I’m so prone to jumping up and down when people talk about bad students, as if this is a permanent and immutable condition, because while I completely accept that some students (a small group) will resist all efforts to bring them into a culture, I strongly believe that it is far more likely that little effort has been spent to try and recover these students in the first place.
Was the academic right to refuse my application? Yes, no argument, but the methodology sucked. No follow-up. No identification of problems. Did I learn from this? No, I didn’t. I distanced myself from the mark because I had expended no effort – this may sound familiar from my discussion of pedagogical luck from yesterday. The same self-destructive patterns played out until someone (a big group of someones actually) took enough interest in me to make me explain what I was doing, make me realise what I was doing and show me the way forward. (And, for the record, thank you to all my friends and my wife, Katrina, but I’d like to specifically note Cathy and Andrew, where poor Cathy had to basically help me focus while I tried to learn what being a real student was about. And thanks to KJM for suggesting that I start doing the new degree in the first place.)
The reason that this is back in my mind is that our Summer Research Scholarships are being advertised at the moment, where students come and work on a research project for 6 weeks over Summer with a small stipend. Competition for these scholarships is surprisingly fierce and I am lucky enough to be offering some interesting projects, both in networking and education research, that people find attractive. Most of the students who have applied for my support have had a level of interest and academic achievement that I can easily support them in what is a highly competitive environment (University ranking systems, not mine, I hasten to add). However, one of the applicants was not all that competitive, so I had to say that I really couldn’t support them in their application. Yet. But here are some ways to be ready for this next year. What was the problem for this year? How are you going at the moment? Ok, keep working on this and I look forward to seeing you come back to me next year, but here’s another suggestion.
The way of saying “No” is important, and I believe that this student can reach the required level, they’re just not there yet. So we discussed how they could improve their overall eligibility, including coming up with their own ideas to fit in with their thoughts on research, so that when they come back next year, they come back not only more eligible but with a strong idea of what they want to do with us. I expect to see this student back next year because I’ve done similar things before and, more often than not, the student comes back: purposeful, more focused and much, much more ready to undertake the kind of projects involved. I have already loosely allocated some resources in case the student does what I’ve suggested for improvement in the shorter term. Next time, I hope that I’m in a position where I must support this student’s application but I can only claim to have helped here if I’ve taken the time to think about what is going on and how I might be able to help.
In the spirit of charity, I must confess that I have no idea if the lecturer, who didn’t ask me about what I was up to, was just having a bad day or if my performance was so poor that he just decided that I was one of the small number who wasn’t ever going to come good. You can’t judge someone on a single event or interaction and it would be ridiculous to not admit to the human failing of the ‘bad day’. However, my overall experience, as a bad student, was that I was not worth wasting time on. I was not worth the risk. And, yet, no-one ever asked me if there was a reason for it or why I was doing it, or if there was something that I needed help with.
I’m happy to say that I believe that a culture like that is now, rightly, judged and found wanting. That people are far more likely to ask why and suggest how or who to see next. But it’s not universal. We may not always achieve universality, people are people and bad days are bad days, but the first step, for me, is looking at how we say “No.”
Moral Luck and Voluntary Action: Is There a Corresponding Pedagogical Luck?
Posted: October 10, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, blogging, community, curriculum, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, higher education, in the student's head, reflection, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, universal principles of design Leave a commentMoral luck (sometimes described as moral accident) describes a situation where someone is assigned moral blame or praise for something happening, even though the person was either not in control of what was happening or could not affect its consequences. There are many examples, including the traffic accident scenario described in the Moral Luck link, and there are several different classifications of moral luck but let me focus on one: the situation where you either take no positive steps to address a situation, or actively take negative steps, yet the outcome is still positive. To a consequentialist, this is a beneficial outcome and constitutes an example of Resultant Moral Luck. One of the most extreme examples is that you randomly stick your foot out, hoping to trip someone in the street, and accidentally bring down a criminal being pursued by the police. The outcome is good, you are possibly a hero, but any assignation of a moral intention to your actions is deeply flawed: you weren’t in control of the situation, you did not intend the outcome and, in fact, you had hoped to cause harm. The voluntary action that you took was in no way intended to cause this outcome. Yet, you are a hero.
When we look at methods and practices of teaching, it quickly becomes apparent that there are many different approaches and, upon doing some reading, that these have different utilities and efficacies. Your choice of pedagogy is rarely a one-size-fits-all approach and, especially if your institution takes a relatively traditional approach, we have to start to wonder exactly which part of the evolutionary selection stage we are in. Have we, by chance and/or design, arrived at an elegant and efficient design years ago that cannot be improved upon by recent findings or are we ripe for new development, new directions and entirely different ways of teaching?
I would argue that, if we are not taking steps to confirm where we are in the developmental timeline or we are not taking steps to examine what we do with the intention of improving, then we are wandering in an area that we could call pedagogical luck, where any positive teaching outcomes that may arise cannot be attributed to our voluntary actions and intentions. Are we in the territory that Feynman was referring to when he quoted Gibbon:
“The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous”?
The notion of pedagogical luck, much like moral luck, raises questions of responsibility and accountability. It also explains how we can misattribute blame, because we risk not having a clear ethical framework that can ascribe intention, action and outcome in a meaningful way. In moral luck two people can speed through the same red light, yet only one causes an accident because a child runs into an intersection and the other one may receive a fine for running the light. The outcomes could almost not be any more starkly different: in one a human is injured or killed, the other is a purely administrative outcome. We certainly will attribute more blame to the first driver than the second, despite the fact that both had no desire to kill, nor did they act any differently – the reason that this is resultant is because this is just the way things turned out.
If an academic works with a class and, as it happens, everyone passes, then we would usually assume some intention and voluntary action was involved on the part of that academic. The outcome, for the students and the academic, are both beneficial. It is… unlikely… that said academic would then walk around stating “I’m amazed that they all passed – I barely even showed up to class and I didn’t revise the notes.” However, where someone has done nothing (or has not taken a voluntary action to cause change) and all of the students fail, we can expect (with a reasonable certainty) that the usual statements of blame shifting may start to occur: the students were stupid, lazy, unprepared, insufficiently attentive, the material was pitched at the right level but the students didn’t work hard enough, et cetera. “I have kept the course the same, it is obviously the students who are at fault.” Of course, it’s easy to see why if we have not taken any active steps to change anything – why should we be held responsible for an action that has had either neutral or positive outcomes in the past? Why should we judge the killer-driver any more harshly than the red-light-runner? The outcome is a matter of luck.
This is highly undesirable behaviour so how can we avoid the issues involved in depending upon pedagogical luck? I’m tempted to delve into virtue ethics here and argue that, of all places, that if you can’t find a virtuous seeker of knowledge in a University then perhaps we should all go back to a simple agrarian existence and wait to die of some horrifically mutated bovine disease that we no longer have the wit or wisdom to cure. However, I suspect that we don’t need to all be virtuous, all the time, to adopt a simple maxim that commits us to seeking improvement in our learning and teaching, or to confirming that our approaches are still valid. Where possible, such endeavours should be public and shared widely, so that our lessons can be learned elsewhere. Yes, we’ve wandered fairly heavily into Kant because I’m effectively arguing good will as a stand-alone virtue, regardless of what is achieved. In the absence of a guarantee of virtuous people, and we all have bad days, then perhaps it is a commitment to scholarship, review and reflection that can allow us to take that fresh approach to pedagogical development and implementation that will cause us to be less susceptible to blame shifting where it is inappropriate and less likely to form cargo-cultish ideas as to why certain courses are succeeding or failing.
It is a simple idea: claiming beneficial outcomes as caused by us when we have done nothing is questionable, ethically, especially when we refuse to accept negative outcomes under the same scenario. By identifying that pedagogical luck is possible and readily identifiable in certain practices around the world, we clearly identify the need to avoid the situations where it can dominate.
Brief Stats Update: I appear to have written two more books
Posted: October 9, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, community, education, feedback, higher education, measurement, MIKE, reflection, SWEDE, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, work/life balance, workload 2 CommentsOn May 6th, I congratulated Mark Guzdial on his 1000th post and I noted that I had written 102,136 words, an average of 676 words per post, with 151 posts over 126 days. I commented that, at that rate, I could expect to produce about 180,000 more words by the end of the year, for a total of about 280,000. So, to summarise, my average posting level was at rate of 1.2 posts per day, and 676 words per post.
Today, I reanalysed the blog to see how I was going. This post will be published on Tuesday the 9th, my time, and the analysis here does not include itself. So, up until all activity on Monday the 8th, Central Australian Daylight Saving Time, here are the stats.
Total word count: 273,639. Total number of posts: 343. Number of words per post: 798. Number of posts per day: 1.23. I will reach my end of year projected word count in about 9 days.
I knew that I had been writing longer posts, you may remember that I’ve deliberately tried to keep the posts to around 1,000 where possible, but it’s obvious that I’m just not that capable of writing a short post! In the long term, I’d expect this to approach 1,000 words/post because of my goal to limit myself to that, with the occasional overshoot. I’m surprised by the consistency in number of posts per day. The previous average was a smidgen under 1.2 but I wanted to clarify that there has been a minor increase. Given that my goal was not to necessarily hit exactly 1/day but to set aside time to think about learning and teaching every day, I’m happy with that.
The word count, however, is terrifying. One of the reasons that I wanted to talk about this is to identify how much work something like this is, not to either over inflate myself or to put you off, but to help anyone out there who is considering such a venture. Let me explain some things first.
- I have been typing in one form or another since 1977. I was exposed to computers early on and, while I’ve never been trained to touch type, I have that nasty hybrid version where I don’t use all of my fingers but still don’t have to look at the keyboard.
- I can sustain a typing speed of about 2,500 words/hour for fiction for quite a long time. That includes the aspects of creativity required, not dictation or transcription. It is very tiring, however, and too much of it makes me amusingly incoherent.
- I do not have any problems with repetitive strain injury and I have a couple of excellent working spaces with fast computers and big screens.
- I love to write.
So, I’m starting from a good basis and, let me stress, I love to write. Now let me tell you about the problems that this project has revealed.
- I produce two kinds of posts: research focused and the more anecdotal. Anecdotal posts can be written up quickly but the moment any research, pre-reading or reformulation is required, it will take me about an hour or two to get a post together. So that cute high speed production drops to about 500-1000 words/hour.
- Research posts are the result of hours of reading and quite a lot of associated thought. My best posts start from a set of papers that I read, I then mull on it for a few days and finally it all comes together. I often ask someone else to look at the work to see how it sits in the queue.
- I’m always better when I don’t have to produce something for tomorrow. When the post queue is dry, I don’t have the time to read in detail or mull so I have to either pull a previous draft from the queue and see if I can fix it (and I’ve pretty much run out of those) or I have to come up with an idea now and write it now. All too often, these end up being relatively empty opinion pieces.
- If you are already tired, writing can be very tiring and you lose a lot of the fiero and inspiration from writing a good post.
I have probably spent, by all of these figures and time estimates, somewhere around 274 hours on this project. That’s just under 7 working weeks at 40 hours/week. No wonder I feel tired sometimes!
I am already, as you know, looking to change the posting frequency next year because I wish to focus on the quality of my work rather than the volume of my output. I still plan to have that hour or so put aside every day to contemplate and carry out research on learning and teaching but it will no longer be tied to an associated posting deadline. My original plan had an output requirement to force me to carry out the work. Unsurprisingly, oh brave new world that has such extrinsic motivating factors in it, I have become focused on the post, rather than the underlying research. My word count indicates that I am writing but, once this year is over, the review that I carry out will be to make sure that every word written from that point on is both valuable and necessary. My satisfaction in the contribution and utility of those posts I do make will replace any other quantitative measures of output.
My experience in this can be summarised quite simply. Setting a posting schedule that is too restrictive risks you putting the emphasis on the wrong component, where setting aside a regular time to study and contemplate the issues that lead to a good post is a far wiser investment. If you want to write this much, then it cannot be too much of a chore and, honestly, loving writing is almost essential, I feel. Fortunately, I have more than enough to keep the post queue going to the end of the year, as I’m working on a number of papers and ideas that will naturally end up here but I feel that I have, very much, achieved what I originally set to to do. I now deeply value the scholarship of learning and teaching and have learned enough to know that I have a great deal more to learn.
From a personal perspective, I believe that all of the words written have been valuable to me but, from next year, I have to make sure that the words I write are equally valuable to other people.
I’ll finish with something amusing. Someone asked me the other day how many words I’d written and, off the top of my head, I said “about 140,000” and thought that I was possibly over-claiming. The fact that I was under claiming by almost a factor of two never would have occurred to me, nor the fact that I had written more words than can be found in Order of the Phoenix. While I may wish to reclaim my reading time once this is over, for any fiction publishers reading this, I will have some free time next year! 🙂
The Earth Goes Around the Sun or the Sun Goes Around the Earth: Your Reaction Reflects Your Investment
Posted: October 8, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, collaboration, community, design, education, educational problem, educational research, heliocentricity, in the student's head, reflection, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, threshold concepts, tools Leave a commentThere is a rather good new BBC version of Sherlock Holmes, called Sherlock because nobody likes confusion, where Holmes is played by Benedict Cumberbatch. One of the key points about Holmes’ focus is that it comes at a very definite cost. At one point, Cumberbatch’s Holmes is being lightly mocked because he was unaware that the Earth goes around the Sun. He is completely unfazed by this (he may have known it but he deleted it) because it’s not important to him. This extract is from the episode “The Great Game”:
Sherlock Holmes: Listen: [gets up and points to his head] This is my hard-drive, and it only makes sense to put things in there that are useful. Really useful. Ordinary people fill their heads with all kinds of rubbish, and that makes it hard to get at the stuff that matters! Do you see?
John Watson: [brief silence; looks at Sherlock incredulously] But it’s the solar system!
Sherlock Holmes: [extremely irritated by now] Oh, hell! What does that matter?! So we go around the sun! If we went around the moon or round and round the garden like a teddy bear, it wouldn’t make any difference! All that matters to me is the work!
Sherlock’s (self-described) sociopathy and his focus on his work make heliocentricity an irrelevant detail. But this clearly indicates his level of investment in his work. All the versions of Sherlock have extensive catalogues of tobacco types, a detailed knowledge of chemistry and an unerring eye for detail. If someone had walked up to him and said “Captain Ross smokes Greenseas tobacco” and they were wrong then Sherlock’s agitation (and derision) would be directed at them: worse if he had depended upon this fact to draw a conclusion.
We are all well aware that such indifference to whether Sun or Earth occupies the centre of the Solar System has not always been received so sanguinely. As it turns out, while there is widespread acceptance of the fact of heliocentricity, there is still considerable opposition in some quarters and, in the absence of scientific education, it is easy to see why people would naturally assume by simple (unaided) observation that the Sun is circling us, rather than the reverse. You have to accept a number of things before heliocentricity moves from being a sound mathematical model for calculation (as Cardinal Bellarmine did when discussing it with Galileo, because it so well explains things hypothetically) to the acceptance of it as the model of what actually occurs (as it makes the associated passages of scripture much harder to deal with). And the challenge of accepting this often lies in the degree to which that acceptance will change your world.
Your reaction reflects your investment.
Sherlock didn’t care either way. His world was not shaken by which orbited what because it was not a key plank of his being, nor did it force him to revise anything that he cared about. Cardinal Bellarmine, in discussions with Galileo, had a much greater investment, acting as he was on behalf of the Church and, one can only assume, firm in his belief in scripture while retaining his sensibilities to be able work in science (Bellarmine was a Jesuit and worked predominantly in theology). As he is quoted:
If there were a real proof that the Sun is in the center of the universe, that the Earth is in the third sphere, and that the Sun does not go round the Earth but the Earth round the Sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and we should rather have to say that we did not understand them than declare an opinion false which has been proved to be true. But I do not think there is any such proof since none has been shown to me.
It’s easy to think that these battles are over but, of course, as we deal with one challenging issue, another arises. This battle is not actually over. The 2006 General Social Survey showed that 18.3% of those people surveyed thought that the Sun went around the Earth, and 8% didn’t know. (0.1% refused. I think I’ve read his webpage.) (If you’re interested, all of the GSS data and its questions are available here. I hope to run the more recent figures to see how this has trended but I’ve run out of time this week.) That’s a survey run in 2006 in the US.
Why do nearly a quarter of the US population (or why did, given that this is 2006) not know about the Earth going around the Sun? As an educator, I have to look at this because if it’s because nobody told them, then, boy, do we have some ‘splaining to do. If it’s because they deleted it like Sherlock, then we have some seriously focused people or a lot of self-deleting sociopaths. (This is also not that likely a conjecture.) If it’s because someone told them that believing this meant that they had to spit in the face of one god or another, then we are seeing the same old combat between reaction and investment. There are a number of other correlations on this that, fortunately, indicate that this might be down to poor education, as knowledge of heliocentricity appears to correlate with the number of words that people got correct in the vocabulary test. Also, the number of people who didn’t accept heliocentricity decreased with increasing education. (Yes, that can also be skewed culturally as well but the large-representation major religions embrace education.)
So, and it’s a weird straw to clutch at and I need to dig more, it doesn’t appear that heliocentricity is, in the majority of cases, being rejected because of a strong investment in an antithetical stance, it’s just a lack of education or retention of that information. So, maybe we can put this one down, give more money to science teachers and move on.
But let me get to the meat of my real argument here, which is that a suitably alien or counter-intuitive proposition will be met with hostility, derision and rejection. When things matter, for whatever reason, we take them more seriously. When we take things so seriously that they shape how we live, consciously or not, then there is a problem when those underpinnings are challenged. We can make empty statements like “well, I suppose that works in theory” when the theory forces us to accept that we have been wrong, or at least walking on the less righteous path. When someone says to me “well, that’s fine in theory” I know what they are really saying. I’ve heard it before from Cardinal Bellarmine and it has gained no more weight since then. So it’s hard? Our job is hard. Constantly questioning is hard, tiring and often unrewarding. Yet, without it, we would have achieved very, very little.
People of all colours and races are equal? Unthinkable! Against our established texts! Supported by pseudo-science and biased surveys! They appear to be more similar than we thought! But they can’t marry! Wait, they can! They are equal! How can you think that they’re not?!
How many times do we have to go through this? We are playing out the same argument over and over again: when it matters enough (or too much), we resist to the point where we are being stubborn and (often) foolish.
And, that, I believe is where we stand in the middle of all of these revelations of unconscious and systematic bias against women that I referred to in my last post. People who have considered themselves fair and balanced, objective and ethical, now have to question whether they have been operating in error over all these years – if they accept the research published in PNAS and all of the associated areas. Suddenly, positive discrimination hiring policies become obvious as they now allow the hiring of people who appear to be the same, that the evidence now says have most likely been undervalued. This isn’t disadvantaging a man, this is being fair to the best candidate.
When presented with something challenging I find it helpful to switch the focus or the person involved. Would I be so challenged if it were to someone else? If the new revelation concerned these people or those people? How would I feel about if I read it in the paper? Would it matter if someone I trusted said it to me? Where are my human frailties and how I can account for them?
But, of course, as an educator, I have to think about how to frame my challenging and heretical information so that I don’t cause a spontaneous rejection that will prevent further discussion. I have to provide an atmosphere that exemplifies good practice, a world where people eventually wonder why this part of the world seems to be better, fairer and more reasonable than that part of the world. Then, with any luck, they take their questioning and new thinking to another place and we seed better things.
Let the Denial Begin
Posted: October 7, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, community, education, educational problem, educational research, equality, ethics, higher education, in the student's head, measurement, principles of design, resources, STEM, stereotype threat, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, women in computing 5 CommentsIt is an awful fact that women are very underrepresented in my discipline, Computer Science, and as an aggregate across my faculty, which includes Engineering and Mathematics (so we’re the Technology, Engineering and Mathematics of STEM). I have heard almost every tired and discredited excuse for why this is the case but what has always angered me is the sheer weight of resistance to any research that (a) clearly demonstrates that bias exists to explain why this occurs, (b) identifies how performance can be manipulated through preconceptions and (c) requires people to consider that we are all more similar than current representation would indicate.
Yes, if I were to look around and say “Women are not going to graduate in large numbers because I see so few of them” then I would be accurate and yet, at the same time, completely missing the point. If I were to turn that around and ask “Why are so few women coming in to my degree?” then I have a useful question and, from various branches of research, the more rocks we turn over, the more we seem to find bias (conscious or otherwise) in both industry and academia that discourages women from participation in STEM.
A paper was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS, to its friends), entitled “Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students”. (PNAS has an open access option but the key graphs and content are also covered in a Scientific American blog article.) The study was simple. Take a job application for a lab manager position. Assign a name where half of the names are a recognisably male name, the other half are female. (The names John and Jennifer were chosen for this purpose as they had been pre-tested to be equivalent in terms of likability and recogniseability.) Get people to rate the application, including aspects like degree of mentoring offered and salary.
Let me summarise that: the name John or Jennifer is assigned to the same application materials. What we would expect, if there is no bias, is that we would see a similar ranking and equivalent salary offering. (All figures from the original paper, via the SciAm link.)
Oh. It appears that the mere presence of a woman’s name somehow altered reality so that an objective assessment of ability was warped through some sort of … I give up. Humour has escaped me. The name change has resulted in a systematic and significant downgrading of perceived ability. Let me get the next graph out of the way which is the salary offer.
And, equally mysteriously, having the name John is worth over $3,500 more than having the name Jennifer.
I should leap to note that it was both male and female scientists making this classification – which starts to lead us away from outright misogyny and towards ingrained and subtler prejudices. Did people resort to explicitly sexist reasoning to downgrade the candidates? No, they used sound reasoning to argue against the applicant’s competency. Except, of course, we draw back the curtain and suddenly reveal that our sound reasoning works one way when the applicant is a man, another if they are a woman.
Before you think “Oh, they must have targeted a given field, age group or gone after people who do or don’t have tenure”, the field, age and tenure status of the rating professors had no significant effect. This bias is pervasive among faculty, field, age, gender and status. The report also looked at mentoring and, regardless of the rater’s gender, they offered less mentoring to women.
Let’s be blunt. Study after study shows that if there are any gender differences at all, they are so small as to not even vaguely explain what we see in the representation of female students in certain fields and completely fails to explain their reduced progress in later life. However, the bias and stereotypes that people are operating under do not so much predict what will happen as shape what will happen. We are now aware of effects such as Stereotype Threat (Wiki link) that allows us to structure important situations in someone’s life so that the framing of the activity leaves them in a position where they reinforce the negative stereotype because of higher anxiety, relative to a non-stereotyped group. As an example, look at Osborne, Linking Stereotype Threat and Anxiety, where you can actually reduce the performance of girls on a maths test through reminding them that they are girls and that girls tend to do worse on test than boys. Osborne then compared this with a group where the difference was identified but a far more positive statement was made (the participants were told that despite the difference, there were situations where girls performed as well or better). The first scenario (girls do worse) was a high Stereotype Threat scenario (high ST), the second is low ST. Here’s the graph from Wikipedia that is a redrawing of the one in the paper that shows the results.
The effect of Stereotype Threat (ST) on math test scores for girls and boys. Data from Osborne (2007) (via Wikipedia)
That is the impact of an explicit stereotype in action – suddenly, when framed fairly and without an explicit stereotype or implicit bias, we see that people are far more similar than we thought. If anything, we have partially inverted the stereotype.
To return to my first paragraph, I said:
what has always angered me is the sheer weight of resistance to any research that (a) clearly demonstrates that bias exists to explain why this occurs, (b) identifies how performance can be manipulated through preconceptions and (c) requires people to consider that we are all more similar than current representation would indicate.
The PNAS paper, among others, clearly shows that the biasses exist. A simple name change is enough, as long as it’s a woman’s name. The demonstrated existence of stereotype threat shows us how performance can be manipulated through preconception. (And it’s important to note that stereotype threat is as powerful against minorities as woman – anyone who is part of a stereotype can be manipulated through their own increased or reduced anxiety.) So let me finally discuss the consideration of all of this and the title of this post.
I am expecting to get at least one person howling me down. Someone who will tear apart all of this because this cannot, possibly, under any circumstances be true. Someone who will start talking about our “African ancestors” to start arguing the Savanna-distribution of roles, as if our hominid predecessors ever had to apply to be a lab manager anywhere. Most of you, I hope, will read this and know all of this far too well. Some of you will reflect on this and, like me, examine yourself very carefully to find out if you have been using this bias or if you have been framing things, while trying to help, in a way that really didn’t help at all.
Some of you, who are my students, will read this and will see that research that you have done is reflected in these figures. Yes, we treat women differently and we appear, in these circumstances, to treat them less well. This does not, under any circumstances, mean that we have to accept this or, in any way, respect this as an established tradition or a desirable status quo. But the detection of an insidious and pervasive bias, that spans a community, shows us how hard my point (c) actually is.
We must first accept that there is a problem. There is a problem. Denying it will achieve nothing. Arguing minutiae will achieve nothing. We have to change the way that we react and be honest with ourselves that, sometimes, our treasured objectivity is actually nothing of the kind.
Bad Writing, Bad Future?
Posted: October 5, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, community, curriculum, design, education, educational problem, educational research, in the student's head, measurement, principles of design, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, universal principles of design Leave a commentI was recently reading an article on New Dorp public high school on Staten Island. New Dorp had, until recently, a low graduation rate that was among the bottom 2,000 across the United States. (If you’re wondering, there were 98,817 public schools in the US in 2009-10, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 65,840 being secondary. So New Dorp was in the bottom 2% across all schools and bottom 3% of secondary.) New Dorp’s primary intake is from poor and working-class families and, in 2006, 82% of the freshmen entered the school with a reading level lower than the required grade.
However, it was bad writing that was ultimately identified as the main obstacle to success: students couldn’t turn their thoughts into readable essays. Because this appeared to be the primary difference between successful and unsuccessful students, Deirdre DeAngelis (the principal) and the faculty decided that writing would become a focus. If nothing else, New Dorp’s students would learn to write well.
And, apparently, it has paid off. Pass rates are up, repeating rates have dropped, scores are higher than any previous class. Pre-college enrolments are up but, interestingly, the demographic makeup has remained the same and graduations rates have leapt from 63% to a projected 80% this Spring. (Yes, I know, projected data. I’ll try to check this again after it’s happened.)
The article, which I encourage you to read, goes on to discuss why this change of focus was so important. There was resistance – the usual response of “We’re doing our job, but the students aren’t smart enough (or are too lazy)” from certain groups of educators. Yet, students responded with increased participation and high attendance, rewarding efforts and silencing critics. What was interesting is that analysis of why students couldn’t write indicated that most could decipher the underlying texts and could comprehend sentences but had major deficiencies in the use of key parts of speech. Simple speeches were fine but compound sentences and sentences with dependent clauses were hard to decipher and very difficult to write. How can you use ‘although’ correctly when you don’t know what it means?
As understanding of speech grew, so did reading comprehension. Classroom discussion encouraged students to listen, think and speak more precisely, giving them something to repeat in their writing.
It’s an interesting article and I’m re-reading it at the moment to see exactly what I can extract for my own students and where I have to read to verify and expand upon the ideas. From a personal perspective, however, I think of one of the best reminders of what it is like to be a student who is confused or intimidated by writing.
I go to Hong Kong.
If you’ve been to Hong Kong, you’ll know that there is a vast amount of signage, some in Chinese characters and some in English, but there is really far more Chinese neon and it is all over the landscape. I can read some Chinese (duck, soup, daily yum cha, restaurant, men, exit – you get the gist) and I understand some Chinese so I can get a feeling for some of what is happening. But I have no grasp of any subtlety. I cannot create a sentence or write a character reliably. I am a very good communicator in my own language but in Chinese I sound ridiculous. I scrawl characters that good natured colleagues interpret very generously but it is the scribbling of a child.
In Hong Kong, unless I am speaking English, I appear illiterate. It is easy to say “Well, don’t feel bad, why would you have learned Cantonese in Australia” but let’s remember that when looking at the students of New Dorp. Why would anyone have encouraged them in creative writing, written expression and the development of sophisticated literary argument when a large percentage of their parents have English as a second language, effectively reduced access to schooling and, most likely, a very tight time budget to spend with their children due to overwork and job crowding?
A student who can’t write effectively, if we haven’t actually really tried to teach them how to write, is no more stupid or lazy than I am when I don’t try to learn all of Cantonese before going to Hong Kong. We have both been denied an opportunity. I am lucky in that I can choose when I go to Hong Kong. A student who can’t write has a much harder road because their future will be brighter and better if they can write, as evidenced by the increased success rates at New Dorp.
I look forward to seeing what New Dorp gets up to in the future and I take my hat off to them for this approach.
Nick Falkner 